work, and the money spent in doing it, have filled Europe with misery
which fifty years will not efface, had they been set at the same cost to
do good instead of evil, and to save life instead of destroying it,
might by this 10th January, 1871, have embanked every dangerous stream
at the roots of the Rhine, the Rhone, and the Po, and left to Germany,
to France and to Italy, an inheritance of blessing for centuries to
come--they and their families living all the while in brightest
happiness and peace. And now! Let the Red Prince look to it: red
inundation bears also its fruit in time.”[112]
He calls War “the moral organization of massacre, and the mechanical
reduplication of ruin.”[113] “All the cruellest wars inflicted, all the
basest luxuries grasped by the idle classes, are thus paid for by the
poor a hundred times over” (in interest on debt).[114]
Thus Ruskin is to be found among the Peace advocates--uttering indeed
the characteristic refrain of Christianity, and saying emphatically in
_Fors_, in so many words, that we are not to avenge injuries. Yet he was
altogether out of sympathy with the ordinary channels of such advocacy.
Liberalism he loathed, democracy he utterly disbelieved in, John Bright
was the object of his occasional angry or contemptuous reference;
anything that savoured of Manchester was condemned as tainted with
political economy; the British aristocrats, the present ones, not ones
selected on new principles of excellence, but even the ones we have,
were to be the leaders of a regenerated England, and fathers of the
Fatherland. Liberty was a red rag to him; he preferred the servitude of
the shepherd dog to the freedom of the buzzing gnat:--and so he
experienced the awkwardness felt by those who, having on some issue
joined the party of reaction, have yet within them their old reforming
zeal: for in reality Ruskin was an enlightened Socialist philanthropist.
For these reasons I fear that his peace influence has been very much
neutralized and wasted; and therefore I have had peculiar pleasure in
bringing it out in this chapter.
All these extracts make it clear that the writer’s hatred of modern war
waged by multitudes of conscript or other soldiers, machine guns, and
chemical explosives, was a constant horror to him; and that his
sentimental admiration for the feudal and Greek chivalry was an academic
and otiose emotion, figuring appropriately as a propitiatory exordium to
the young warriors of Woolwich, but otherwise not an influential part of
his thoughts.
Nevertheless Ruskin was a devotee of the nobler type of imperialism. He
lived before the sordidness of “Empire,” and its taproot in High
Commerce and Finance, had become as plain as they are to-day; and before
the series of wars of Empire-building had culminated in the struggle for
power in the Near East, power whose pursuit formed the principal motive
for the Great World War. The Inaugural Lecture at Oxford is the central
expression of this imperialism, in its concluding paragraphs. There are
kindred passages in _The Crown of Wild Olive_.[115] _A Knight’s Faith_,
the Life of Sir Herbert Edwardes of the Punjab, is written in the
noblest imperialist vein. In this, though not in his economic teaching
in general, Ruskin falls under the sentimental glamour of popular
phrases, and loses touch with reality.
_CHAPTER IX_
_MACHINERY_
Ruskin, as we have seen, was both a Conservative and a constructive
Socialist. He hated the industrial developments which he saw around
him--that which was called progress he saw to be full of evil, and he
wanted to undo it. That made him a Conservative. But he had his own line
of development, which was an idealized feudalism. What is there for us
to learn now from either of these teachings, the negative Conservative
cry against steam power and railways and bicycles, the positive advance
towards Guild Socialism?
The pastoral happiness of peasant life Ruskin thought he found in
Bavaria, in Savoy, in Tuscany. He never really lived among the
peasantry, nor was he, the shy visitor to the best hotels, with his
courier and his portfolio, accustomed to familiar intercourse,
particularly on money matters, with the worthy sons and daughters of
toil whose industrious and quiet lives he admired. Neither in England,
Scotland, Ireland, nor the Continent can the “merrie England” ideal of
peasant life ever have existed.
In Switzerland or France, where there have been since the Revolution no
feudal landlords, it had a good chance; and also among the “statesmen”
of Cumberland and Westmorland while they survived. The Canton Bern is
to-day to the tourist’s eye a happy and prosperous land, and the other
Protestant cantons resemble it. But we know most about our own northern
“statesmen”; the Swiss or French small proprietor’s life must have been
much the same as theirs. It was a hard, narrow life, absorbed in “money
grubbing,” which was in their case no fault but a chief virtue, being
necessary to survival. If a statesman was of a large and genial nature,
the public-house was his common resort; and most of the stocks of
statesmen came to grief by the recklessness or misfortunes of one
generation. The estate was first mortgaged and then foreclosed and sold.
A succession of steady cultivators, careful of the pence, hardly ever
succeeded in making a family well to do or even comfortable, with
reserves to meet disaster. I speak here of my own forbears. The holdings
were too small. They worked all day and every day, in all weathers,
lived and slept in quarters not conducive to delicate sensitiveness of
feeling. A big attic, separated by a curtain into two, was the sleeping
place of the children and servants, if there were any.[116] Books,
education, travel, were denied them. On a lower level is the life of the
peasants of the Rhone Valley, in dirt and hopelessness and overwork. It
makes for degradation. But where feudal landlords exist, as they do in
most places, the case is worse. The condition of the peasantry of
Eastern Europe has been brought before us since the War in the daily
papers so vividly that none can miss it. The system has broken down in
revolution. It appears to an astonished English public, that the mass of
the people have lived under local tyranny and very near the margin of
maintenance, in Russia and her border states, in Roumania, Poland,
Hungary, Prussia, and in the Balkan lands. This is what we find before
industrial development comes in. There is no need to dwell on the
squalor, on the diseases, on the recurring famines, on the contempt of
the proud. It transpires that the peasants to whom the land has now come
by revolution, are described as so covetous, narrow and selfish--their
trade their politics--that Socialists and idealists are baffled by
them. They will starve a city like Buda-Pesth or Petrograd, when their
supplies are abundant. They do not seem capable at present of a national
or international consciousness, nor of any true democracy larger than
the village.
In England, too, the rustic life which the Industrial Revolution
overthrew, was, in the landlord counties, servile and suffering. The
wages and the politics of the South of England until recent times are
survivals of the system.[117]
We are bound to conclude that to this system we ought not to recur. With
all their faults and disadvantages the people of the industrial
districts are the most educated, the most independent, the most virile.
Numerous economic writers have destroyed, like a sentimental mirage, our
view of the old English village, with its homely comfort and peaceful
independence. We think more now of its toils, its diseases, its infant
mortality, its lost Commons.
It was natural for Ruskin, with his love of white thatched cottages and
leafy lanes bordered by neglected wasteful hedges full of wild
flowers--with his wealthy upbringing, and ignorance of the value of
money and of the direness of most people’s need of it, it was natural
and inevitable that he should loathe the dreadful new mining
villages--rows of cheap insanitary brick houses--and the belching smoke
of the colliery chimney. He preferred Coniston to Barrow. But there is
no practical guidance in that revolt, except indeed the revolt itself;
and that was a message to his time, and is still a message to ours.
There is nothing particularly elevating about farm work, in spite of
Corydon and other shepherds described by the town bred makers of
fantasies. Sheep are the most unpleasant creatures to look after, the
dirtiest and the stupidest. Their scab, fluke, ticks and footrot need
much attention. Apart from their diseases, the scene of the shepherd’s
happy labours will be in winter a turnip field, the crop being eaten off
by sheep. The dirt and squalor of the dung and the animals and the
turnips, the cold and damp, the sleet and the mud and the smells--these
things are not good subjects for poetry. The farmer’s calling is to make
his living out of the death of his animals, and out of their sufferings
when alive, their castration and imprisonment, and their labour. He
measures them by a purely economic test. It is not for us who live on
meat and milk, butter and cheese, and the products of the pig-sty, to
blame farmers for this. They do it for us. But it is not particularly
“improving”; it approaches the calling of the butcher, which is equally
necessary. Why the world is thus built is not, luckily for me, the
subject of this book.
The rest of the labours of the farm are a struggle with the earth--with
weeds and with weather. It is all primitive and built into the bone and
marrow of the race; but it is not more moralizing, nor more romantic, in
practice than working at looms or ledgers. The labourer does not go to
the land as to a leisurely summer home. Hitherto, no way has been found
in England for inducing young people to stay in the villages. We ought
to try to succeed in this. If we do it will be in a new kind of village,
and it will be effected by cheap and rapid transit, and by widely
scattering the ownership or holding of land. Then Ruskin’s aims will be
realized, but not by the only methods he could see in his day. In fact,
railways and domestic machinery would be essential.
Division of Labour goes with the factory system. It was early hailed as
one of the great economies obtained by production on a large scale. It
was found that by constantly keeping a man or a child to one
occupation, an extraordinary degree of sure accuracy and readiness was
obtained. Without the necessity for thinking, and so without risk of
thinking wrong, the nimble fingers repeated hour by hour their appointed
trick, the practised eye ever followed the same mechanism and stopped it
at the same point, the same tool in the same place was ready to the same
hand. Physiologically we believe that all this means that there is
established a rut for the tracks of the brain wheels, a habitual nervous
connection between certain sensory centres and certain motor centres,
without the need for every piece of news to be transmitted by the
sensory centre to the central thinking apparatus in the cerebrum, and a
corresponding order sent down from the central control to the motor
centre.
When we learn to write, the fashion and shape of every _a_, _b_ and _c_
have to be thought over; the hands learn painfully to follow an order
sent down from the central thinking power in the cerebrum, sent down on
information derived through the sensory centres behind the eye, of the
shape of the copy. But in ordinary life we could copy pages of
manuscript and talk and think about something else the whole time.
There is a direct line of nerve flow between the reading apparatus
behind the eye and the writing apparatus behind the hand; and thought is
not required. We have become so far automatic; we have created a
convenient writing machine within us, which works for us and leaves us
free to do other things.
So that if we spend our nine hours a day at working a printing machine,
or stitching leather or silk, or boring holes, or driving in nails, or
sharpening a tool’s edge, or wrapping boxes, or counting or piecing
threads, we are really doing the work of a machine. We do not think: to
think would interfere with the sure regularity of our work.
Now the growth of this division of labour has been quite irresistible.
Its advantages have been such that no manufacturer or nation of
manufacturers could stand without it. The social organism has become
more complex, and with that the differentiation of function has become
more marked. It is a necessary accompaniment of an elaborate social
state; and whether it tends or not to the welfare of the individual it
greatly extends the productive power of the industrial organism, and so
strengthens the organism itself viewed as industrial simply. Thus the
highly differentiated organism has survived, though it may have
sacrificed the individual worker, regarded as a human being. Is there,
therefore, any means whereby we can modify the work of the monotonous
mechanical labourer so as to give him some pleasure in it, and afford
exercise to his other faculties besides that one called out by the
single narrow function he has learnt to repeat day after day? If we can
give scope for his higher faculties, his judgment, his invention, his
knowledge, we shall be avoiding the present waste by which faculties
which might aid production in better ways are wasted on routine.
The greatest cure hitherto found is inherent in the system itself. For
when the work is such that it is done by a human machine, the step is
not far distant when a machine will be actually invented, with a surer
grip of the material, a readier tool for piercing, a straighter edge for
cutting. This process is going on in every department of manufacture.
Boards are planed, picture frames carved, table legs made, mouldings cut
by machinery. Watches and sewing machines are made of interchangeable
parts, each the product of a machine. The only limit to the taking over
of every manufacture by machines seems to be that a large output is
necessary to make it pay to invent and manufacture and sell costly
machines. So great have been the triumphs of many-fingered machinery
that we are not inclined to limit them. Thus, most of the monotonous,
and most of the physically laborious work is done by the man of steel.
For every textile operative in the country rather more than one horse
power is provided by steam; which is equal to the strength of ten adult
men. Self-feeding furnaces are similarly saving of human flesh and
eyesight. Thus our manual workers have largely become makers and minders
of machines. To help to make a machine, to watch and repair it, and take
care of it--even to understand it and to feed it, is a not unworthy form
of labour. To care for a complex machine requires intelligence and a
wide-awake sense of responsibility. It is much better, at any rate, than
hand-loom weaving was, or than nail-making by hand, or match-box-making
is. Even so mechanical a task as working a sewing machine, poor as it
is, may be a trifle less soul-destroying than working with a needle at
plain sewing all day. And though minding looms is monotonous, yet they
turn out so much more cloth per operative, that the evil of monotony of
which we speak is probably a very small percentage per yard produced,
of what it was when weaving was done in the weavers’ cottages by hand.
It is therefore in extending machinery for all articles which have no
individual artistic value that we shall get rid of most of the lower and
more degrading forms of labour--machinery for ploughing, sowing,
reaping, binding, thrashing, dairying, laundry work, baking, cooking,
cutting straight and smoothing clean, grinding and polishing, and for
the processes of printing. These are true friends of man.
It is to be noted that every increase of the gross output which
machinery enables man to produce, increases the demand for the more
skilled portions of the work, for those which require judgment and
character. The multiplication of the printing output of the country has
increased the number of writers, of reporters, of proof-readers, of
overlookers, and of men who can tastefully arrange a title page. It has
also multiplied the demand for men who can draw, can photograph, or can
reproduce illustrations. Similarly the “hands” who work the machines on
a farm are fewer but are probably more intelligent than the agricultural
labourer in a backward country.
It will be observed that this inquiry has left untouched and
unaffected--
1. The skilled artistic crafts where a sense of the beautiful and a
special value in human thought goes to each article.
2. The mass of unskilled and unspecialized labour at the bottom of the
social ladder which division of labour and machine production leave
largely untouched.
To the cleansing, quieting, moralizing of machinery, then, not to its
extinction or supersession, social reformers should apply themselves. To
the compulsory consumption of smoke, to sanitary factories and
workshops, to the substitution of gas or electricity for steam, we must
look with hope.
Therefore, out of the industrial hurly-burly, we must look forward, not
back--accept the industrialization of the world which marked the
nineteenth century, and go on to find a home for humanity in it. It is a
world phenomenon, and it is the result of one thing, the exploitation of
coal.
It is in the abuse of this very coal, on which all manufacturing and
transport depends, that the most obvious wrong has been done to
humanity. The first condition of human happiness to-day is to be found
in the abolition or sufficient abatement of smoke, so keeping our skins
and clothes clean.
This is all on Ruskin’s lines; very central to the preservation of all
he loved. How pervasive was this enemy he did not fully see fifty years
ago. He noted the deterioration of climate in England, during his
lifetime, in two lectures on _The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth
Century_. They were much derided at the time; and they contain curious
passages in which the lack of light, the restless ugly clouds, the
choppy breezes, the cold gloomy summers, were put down to the wrath of
heaven for the sins of the people. They had in fact one simple
explanation--Smoke. A man of Ruskin’s power of perception, constantly
admiring beauty of landscape, could hardly have been wrong in his
impression, fortified by his diaries, that there had been a change for
the worse in the air and skies during his lifetime. The production of
manufacturing smoke over a third (say) of England covered that period.
Over all our coal fields solid particles embarrassed the air currents,
and darkened the sky, and the oily products adhered stickily to the
clouds and to the rain. The weather was, in truth, nature’s punishment
for the haste, the greed, the popular carelessness, which tolerated the
factory and furnace chimneys, and the ill-regulated firesides of
thirty-five millions of people in the British Isles.[118]
Coal ought not to be burnt raw, any more than meat should be eaten raw.
It should be made into gas, coke, tar and sulphate of ammonia--and all
of it be used. A smokeless domestic fuel made of half coked coal could
be made in all gas works, and should be used everywhere, to economize
our now costly coal. Electric power stations, smokelessly operated,
would save much wasteful private production of power. More rigid and
conscientious smoke inspection, abandoned as unpatriotic on a short view
during the war, should be restored. The law should be amended and its
loopholes fastened up.[119] There are many beautiful inventions ready to
be used to make an end of this most gratuitous of our evils, which
renders life in the industrial districts dark, dirty and ugly to the
best and cleanest of the workpeople. Most municipalities in England
impose an extra rate on those who use gas and electricity by taking
money for the rates from those departments.
We condemn the town cottage housewife to ceaseless toil, with her dirty
doorstep and window sills, her kitchen floor, her children who play in
the street, and her intolerably swollen laundry. The glorious light of
the country summer is never seen through the smoke haze of the
industrial districts. Look down any long straight town street on any
day, and note the limit of visibility. Fogs are often caused and always
aggravated and prolonged by smoke--and after every long fog the death
rate from lung diseases goes steeply up. Among the many signs of
government incompetence, of narrow popular apathy, and lack of a true
political sense, the present riotous licence of the makers of smoke is
conspicuous. And the reform is all on Ruskin’s lines.
After dirt, drink. They are not unconnected; for the dull grey street,
the worried wife, the ill-tempered children, all tend to tempt a man to
the cosy blaze of the bar-room, and to the excitement of a shilling on
the next race. Men and women will make life interesting somehow, and if
they are denied the sound pleasures appropriate to their natures they
will find others.[120]
We will now hear the Prophet on our machine civilization. The passages
are in the famous chapter on _The Nature of Gothic_ in the Second Volume
of _The Stones of Venice_ §§ XI, XII, XIII and others. These passages
are among Ruskin’s earliest social writing. He was led from the
examination of the characters of Byzantine, Gothic and Renaissance
architecture, to inquire into the character of their builders; and so
was led from Art to Man as the subject matter of his life-work. This is
an important transition passage, written about 1850, ten years before
the decisive year when he became an economist always and an Art
Professor at intervals.