It was wholly forbidden to the clergy and sometimes to the laity. Many
have been the sermons, of the fiercest character, delivered against it
by the Bishops of the Catholic and Anglican Churches. John Wesley told
his followers “to die sooner than put anything in pawn or borrow or lend
on usury.” His rule on the subject was, however, explained later on by
himself as being against “unlawful interest”; upon which Ruskin remarks:
“Doubtless his disciples know what rate of interest is lawful, and what
not; and also by what law it was made so; and always pause with pious
accuracy at the decimal point whereat the excellence of an investment
begins to make it criminal.” Nevertheless, Wesley was right.
Turning to the Greek world we find usury condemned by Solon and
Lycurgus, Plato and Aristotle (“money sterile by nature”); and a Roman
voice comes from Cato. From Arabia is heard the word of Mohammed. And,
of great Englishmen, we find Lord Bacon, and perhaps Shakespeare,
teaching the same. Concerning these it is to be noted, that being before
the days of joint company ownership, their testimony was solely against
private money-lending; and the one authority, John Wesley, who lived in
the early days of modern business, was not against interest as such in
his later years. Nor again, did these authorities attack Rent, which
Ruskin is consistent in also reprobating. The landowning aristocracy,
we shall remember, are to be the recipients instead of a Government
annuity, as wages for their work of governing their inferiors. Amongst
an agricultural, noncommercial people, the usurer is a sinister figure.
This must have been the case in Palestine, and in agricultural England.
To-day he is the curse of India, whose cultivators are enslaved by the
money-lenders under English law. In short, we may conclude that it
requires a fair field and genuine commercial habits to make interest a
public benefit.
The change from the earlier to the later John Wesley is most
significant. It represents the change to modern business on a large
scale, which occurred during his lifetime. It is noticeable that since
his time the attack on Interest has ceased, but for Ruskin, among
religious teachers. As a counsel of ultimate perfection in a communist
State, of course, Interest would be abolished; but most Socialists admit
that it is an essential part of the institution of private property, and
must stand or fall with it.
There may yet be great revolutions in our sense of duty. We may come to
extend kindness to animals to the extraordinary length of not eating
them. That excessive toil and numbing poverty should exist around us,
may some day become a reproach to us, as we feed on the roses and lie on
the lilies of life, which are often provided for us by the said
labourers. By the time, then, that we come to love our neighbours as
ourselves, we shall probably not be anxious to take advantage of our
position of being a little beforehand with the world, of having money to
lend; and may even sink the time advantage thereby at our disposal; and
not take interest. But we shall be different then; and so will the world
we live in. It is a kind of altruism which absolutely needs a fit
environment. If the cessation of income from investments belongs to the
Christianity which is to come, before this faith shall have been
realized we shall have pooled our property into a common store, and the
question of private investment will have fallen to the ground. Only
among the Doukhobors has this kind of Christianity yet notably realized
itself, and great is their well-being. But we must go on like Ruskin and
take our Interest for the present.
The real trouble is not in the interest, but in the great fortunes. That
an upper limit for wealth would be a blessing to the rich, and a solid
gain to the nation at large, has long been my conviction. Ruskin says it
is also his “long fixed conviction that one of the most important
conditions of a healthful system of social economy, would be the
restraint of the properties and incomes of the upper classes within
certain fixed limits. The temptation to use every energy in the
accumulation of wealth being thus removed, another and a higher ideal of
the duties of advanced life would be necessarily created in the national
mind. By withdrawal of those who had attained the prescribed limits of
wealth from commercial competition, earlier worldly success, and earlier
marriage, with all its beneficent moral results, would become possible
to the young; while the older men of active intellect, whose sagacity is
now lost or warped in the furtherance of their own meanest interest,
would be induced unselfishly to occupy themselves in the superintendence
of public institutions or furtherance of public advantage. And out of
this class it would be found natural and prudent always to choose the
members of the legislative body of the Commons; and to attach to the
order also some peculiar honours, in the possession of which such
complacency would be felt as would more than replace the unworthy
satisfaction of being supposed richer than others, which to many men is
the principal charm of their wealth. And although no law of this purport
would ever be imposed on themselves by the actual upper classes, there
is no hindrance to its being gradually brought into force from beneath,
without any violent or impatient proceedings.”[97]
As a type of Ruskin’s satirical humour in controversy we will indulge
ourselves with an extract from his argument with the late Bishop of
Manchester on usury. Ruskin publicly challenged Dr. Fraser to the
encounter. The Bishop had somewhat sensibly remarked that religious
sanctions ought not to be imposed in cases which they never originally
contemplated, referring to Leviticus on usury. Ruskin replies:
“I do not know whether by the phrase, presently after used by your
Lordship, ‘religious sanctions,’ I am to understand the Law of God which
David loved and Christ fulfilled, or whether the splendour, the
commercial prosperity, and the familiar acquaintance with all the
secrets of science and treasures of art, which we admire in the City of
Manchester, must in your Lordship’s view be considered as ‘cases’ which
the intelligence of the Divine Lawgiver could not have originally
contemplated. Without attempting to disguise the narrowness of the
horizon grasped by the glance of the Lord from Sinai, nor the
inconvenience of the commandments which Christ has directed those who
love Him to keep, am I too troublesome or too exigent in asking from one
of those whom the Holy Ghost has made our overseers, at least a distinct
chart of the Old World as contemplated by the Almighty, and a clear
definition of even the inappropriate tenor of the orders of Christ; if
only that the modern scientific Churchman may triumph more securely in
the circumference of his heavenly vision, and accept more gratefully the
glorious liberty of the free thinking children of God?”
_CHAPTER VII_
_WAR_
The fact that War is the commonest and the most pernicious way of using
large masses of capital leads us naturally from Usury to War. Ruskin
connects the subject with Capitalism thus:[98]
“Capitalists, when they do not know what to do with their money,
persuade the peasants, in various countries, that the said peasants want
guns to shoot each other with. The peasants accordingly borrow guns, out
of the manufacture of which the capitalists get a percentage, and men of
science much amusement and credit. Then the peasants shoot a certain
number of each other, until they get tired; and burn each other’s homes
down, in various places. Then they put the guns back into towers,
arsenals, etc. in ornamental patterns (and the victorious party put also
some ragged flags in churches). And then the capitalists tax both
annually, ever afterwards, to pay interest on the loan of the guns and
gunpowder.”
The horrors of the Franco-German war of 1871, relatively small as they
now appear, were a nightmare to him, and cloud the first volume of
_Fors_, which records his current thoughts in that year.
His most prominent utterance is his lecture on “War” delivered to the
students at the Engineering College at Woolwich in 1865 and printed in
_The Crown of Wild Olive_. It appears, throughout, to be in praise of
war. But we shall see that great deductions are to be made. Nevertheless
it begins appallingly enough by stating that all fine arts have been
founded in war, and can only be practised by warlike nations. He gives
as instances, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. The instances are all fallacious,
particularly those of the peace-loving people in the Nile Valley, and
the very inartistic Romans. Nor is there any proof that war either
caused or aided the artistic faculty of the Greeks. How can there be?
The characteristic warrior city--Sparta--was as inartistic as Woolwich.
He goes a step further to please his audience of young warrior-students
by the strange assertion that “war is the foundation of all the high
virtues and faculties of men”: and that, in History, we find coupled
together “peace and sensuality, peace and selfishness--peace and death.”
“I found that all the great nations learned their truth of word and
strength of thought in war: that they were nourished in war, and wasted
by peace; taught by war and deceived by peace; trained by war, and
betrayed by peace; in a word that they were born in war, and expired in
peace.”[99]
Such is the rash and partial generalization of the rhetorician, based on
this much of historic truth that the early years of a nation’s life have
often been occupied in conflict for safety or empire, and its later,
more peaceful and more prosperous years are marked sometimes by the
weakening influences of wealth, and end in decay. But it is hard,
indeed, impossible I venture to say, to show that the motives or the
methods of war are not, from beginning to end, retrograde and barbaric,
a harking back to the life of the beast; and not the source of any of
these good things named.
But now comes the antidote; after such an exordium, what manner of peace
address might he not give to those Woolwich men and they listen?
First he excepts from his approval “the rage of a barbarian wolf flock,”
and the “habitual restlessness or rapine of mountaineers,” and “the
occasional struggle of a strong, peaceful nation for its life"--a
strange exception that--and the “contest of merely ambitious nations for
extent of power"--a wide exception that. It leaves him three kinds of
beneficial war: war for exercise or play, out of mere high spirits and
unused energies of the upper classes--war for aggression against
surrounding evil--and wars for defence of noble institutions and pure
households.
I. As to wars for pastime, we find that they are to be fought somewhat
in the manner of duels or tournaments by the officers; by the idle young
men who are too proud for peaceful business, and whose arms and legs
want play. There is to be no gathering of peasants to fire into one
another; and Carlyle on the thirty peasants from Dumdrudge is helpfully
quoted, from _Sartor Resartus_. The man who could quote that to Woolwich
students could do most things with an audience. We next have a little
paragraph thrown in on Arbitration. “Grant,” he says sarcastically,
“that no law of reason can be understood by nations; no law of justice
submitted to by them; and that, while questions of a few acres and of
petty cash, can be determined by truth and equity, the questions which
are to issue in the perishing or saving of Kingdoms can be determined
only by the truth of the sword, and the equity of the rifle.”[100] I
doubt if any one has ever had the ear of that audience of thoughtless
aspiring soldier students to an Arbitration argument, before or since.
He proceeds to wash his hands wholly of modern war.
“If you have to take masses of men from all industrial employment,--to
feed them by the labour of others,--to provide them with destructive
machines varied daily in national rivalship of inventive cost; if you
have to ravage the country which you attack--to destroy, for a score of
future years, its roads, its woods, its cities and its harbours; and if,
finally, having brought masses of men, counted by hundreds of thousands,
face to face, you tear those masses to pieces with jagged shot, and
leave the living creatures, countlessly beyond all help of surgery, to
starve and parch, through days of torture, down into clots of clay--what
book of accounts shall record the cost of your work--what book of
judgment sentence the guilt of it?”[101]
Methinks it sounds not unlike a Peace Address.
II. We pass next to wars of aggression against evil--and the lecturer
spends powerful pages on the selfishness and faithlessness of ambitious
warlike kings; on the common degradation of the idea of power; and on
the need for concentrating all our energies on home reforms. We are
warned against supposing that a big nation is a strong one, bade to aim
at union of hearts rather. “Only that nation gains true territory which
gains itself.” “A nation,” he proceeds, “does not strengthen itself by
seizing dominion over races whom it cannot benefit.” “Whatever apparent
increase of majesty and of wealth may have accrued to us from the
possession of India, whether these prove to us ultimately power or
weakness, depends wholly on the degree in which our influence on the
native race shall be benevolent and exalting.”[102]
He nevertheless believes that the rule of England is for the good of the
subject races, is a national duty and a piece of self-sacrifice and
world service, the English white man’s burden. He has an eloquent
passage on this subject in his Inaugural Lecture at Oxford, beginning
“Reign or die.” His hostility to the Manchester School comes out in his
characteristic style. “I tell you that the principle of
non-intervention, as now preached among us, is as selfish and cruel as
the worst frenzy of conquest, and differs from it only by being not only
malignant, but dastardly.” “Within these last ten years, we English
have, as a knightly nation, lost our spurs: we have fought where we
should not have fought, for gain; and we have been passive, where we
should not have been passive, for fear.”[103] I am indeed much afraid
that this, spoken in 1865, has generally been the case throughout our
history.
III. As to wars for defence: Ruskin principally devotes himself to
attacking the essential slavery of military obedience: he will have no
mercenary standing armies, only unprofessional citizen armies for
defence.
So he ends with fatherly counsel to his hearers to be industrious and
serious minded, not to bet, to be pure and honourable, and reverent
towards all women; and the ladies present he exhorts to wear black
whenever there is war, that so, by their influence, there may be no more
wars.
There you have a summary of the famous lecture on War in the _Crown of
Wild Olive_, which has weakened Ruskin’s influence with many of his
friends, and done undoubted harm. But I call it on the whole a peace
address given by a man who combined with his hatred of violence and ruin
a certain attachment to picturesque mediævalism. The wars of Arthur or
Roland were his ideal. He recognized the heroism and self-abandonment of
such soldiers as he had read about all his life in Homer and Scott. But
our modern wars include everything he hated; they are wars for trade and
for gain, sordid and financial in origin and sordid and financial in
results.
Ruskin explains his attitude quite clearly in the Appendix to the _Crown
of Wild Olive_, at the beginning of his notes on the Political Economy
of the Kings of Prussia.
“I am often accused of inconsistency; but believe myself defensible
against the charge with respect to what I have said on nearly every
subject except that of war. It is impossible for me to write
consistently of war, for the groups of facts I have gathered about it
lead me to two precisely opposite conclusions.
“When I find this the case, in other matters, I am silent, till I can
choose my conclusion: but, with respect to war, I am forced to speak, by
the necessities of the time; and forced to act, one way or another. The
conviction on which I act is, that it causes an incalculable amount of
avoidable human suffering and that it ought to cease among Christian
nations; and if therefore any of my boy-friends desire to be soldiers, I
try my utmost to bring them into what I conceive to be a better mind.
But, on the other hand, I know certainly that the most beautiful
characters yet developed among men have been formed in war--that all
great nations have been warrior nations--and that the only kinds of
peace which we are likely to get in the present age are ruinous alike to
the intellect and the heart.
“The last lecture in this volume, addressed to young soldiers, had for
its object to strengthen their trust in the virtue of their profession.
It is inconsistent with itself, in its closing appeal to women, praying
them to use their influence to bring wars to an end. And I have been
hindered from completing my long intended notes on the economy of the
Kings of Prussia by continually increasing doubt how far the machinery
and discipline of war, under which they learned the art of government,
was essential for such lesson; and what the honesty and sagacity of the
Friedrich who so nobly repaired his ruined Prussia, might have done for
the happiness of his Prussia, unruined.
“How far, in the future, it may be possible for men to gain the strength
necessary for kingship without either fronting death, or inflicting it,
seems to me not at present determinable. The historical facts are that,
broadly speaking, none but soldiers, or persons with a soldierly
faculty, have ever yet shown themselves fit to be kings; and that no
other men are so gentle, so just, or so clear-sighted. Wordsworth’s
character of the Happy Warrior cannot be reached in the height of it but
by a warrior; nay, so much is it beyond common strength that I had
supposed the entire meaning of it to be metaphorical, until one of the
best soldiers of England[104] himself read me the poem, and taught me,
what I might have known, had I enough watched his own life, that it was
entirely literal.”
By extending his soldierly qualification to “persons with a soldierly
faculty,” he gives the case away. For that can only mean the faculty of
courage, organization and command. These qualities a peaceful ruler
like William Penn possessed in striking measure. The whole passage is
the record of a swaying contest between sentiment and conviction;
between the glamour of the glowing haze of distant tradition and actual
facts, only too closely pressing upon mankind to-day.
Truly the question of the effect of war on character is vital. I had
written here, in pre-war days, some observations upon it; but they seem
to me now faint and platitudinous. We have had since then such
widespread experience of the play of character faced with the dread
calamity of the world-war, that it is too complicated to treat briefly.
We are all saddened and wearied. So I leave it to the experience of the
millions who know more about it from their own experience than I do.
We need not wait for war to harden our fibre and stiffen our backs.
Surely this can be done without wholesale demoralization and
destruction. Are there not national evils to be fought? privations to be
endured here in fighting vice, ugliness and disease, or in voluntarily
participating in poverty? There is courage needed to stand against
public opinion and to lead it, to sacrifice wealth and social repute if
required. These things are what we must turn to for the exercise of the
courage and unselfishness of the soldier. We want more strenuous
asceticism of a form not so essentially unreasonable and destructive as
war.
It would entirely overload this chapter to give any idea of the vigour
and number of the passages in _Fors_ which storm against
war:--“storming” is generally the method, varied, as usual with this
master of fancy and emotion, with stinging sarcasm and mocking raillery.
The burden of his plea throughout is that “the game of our nobles and
the gain of our usurers” is war.[105]
“When you have got the Devil well under foot in Sheffield, you may begin
to stop him from persuading my Lords of the Admiralty that they want a
new grant, etc., etc., to make his machines with.... The fiend sees that
he can blind you, through your lust for drink, into quietly allowing
yourselves to pay fifty millions a year, that the rich may make their
machines of blood, and play at shedding blood.”[106]
“In this contest (of poor and rich) assuredly, the victory cannot be by
violence; every conquest under the Prince of War retards the standards
of the Prince of Peace.”[107]
He quotes[108] from the _Daily Telegraph_ the following from its
description of the capture of Paris: “Each demolished house has its own
legend of sorrow, of pain, and horror; each vacant doorway speaks to the
eye, and almost to the ear, of hasty flight, as armies of fire came--of
weeping women and trembling children running away in awful fear,
abandoning the home that saw their birth, the old house they loved--of
startled men seizing quickly under each arm their most valued goods, and
rushing, heavily laden, after their wives and babes, leaving to hostile
hands the task of burning all the rest. When evening falls, the wretched
outcasts, worn with fatigue and tears, reach Versailles, St. Germain, or
some other place outside the range of fire, and there they beg for bread
and shelter, homeless, foodless, broken with despair. And this,
remember, has been the fate of something like a hundred thousand people
during the last four months. Versailles alone has about fifteen thousand
such fugitives to keep alive, all ruined, all hopeless, all vaguely
asking the grim future what still worse fate it may have in store for
them.”
The following passage is interesting, however feeble it may appear in
view of our recent developments of war:--
“We fight inelegantly as well as expensively, with machines instead of
bow and spear; we kill about a thousand now to the score then, in
settling any quarrel--(Agincourt was won with the loss of less than a
hundred men; only 25,000 English altogether were engaged at Creçy; and
12,000, some say only 8,000, at Poictiers); we kill with far ghastlier
wounds, crashing bones and flesh together; we leave our wounded
necessarily for days and nights in heaps on the fields of battle; we
pillage districts twenty times as large, and with completer destruction
of more valuable property; and with a destruction as irreparable as it
is complete; for if the French or English burnt a church one day, they
could build a prettier one the next; but the modern Prussians couldn’t
even build so much as an imitation of one; we rob on credit, by
requisition, with ingenious mercantile prolongations of claim; and we
improve contention of arms with contention of tongues, and are able to
multiply the rancour of cowardice, and mischief of lying, in universal
and permanent print; and so we lose our tempers as well as our money,
and become indecent in behaviour as in raggedness.”[109]
“The first reason for all wars and for the necessity of national
defences, is that the majority of persons, high and low, in all European
nations, are Thieves, and in their hearts, greedy of their neighbours’
goods, land, and fame. But besides being Thieves they are also fools,
and have never yet been able to understand that if Cornishmen want
pippins cheap, they must not ravage Devonshire--that the prosperity of
their neighbours is in the end, their own also; and the poverty of their
neighbours, by the communism of God, becomes in the end, their own.”
“And the guilty Thieves of Europe, the real sources of all deadly war in
it, are the Capitalists--that is to say, people who live by percentages
on the labour of others, instead of by fair wages for their own.”[110]
“There is no physical crime at this day, so far beyond pardon--so
without parallel in its untempted guilt, as the making of war-machinery,
and invention of mischievous substance. Two nations may go mad, and
fight like harlots--God have mercy on them:--you, who hand them carving
knives off the table, for leave to pick up a dropped sixpence, what
mercy is there for you?”[111]