Arrows of the Chace, vol. 2/2
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Title: Arrows of the Chace, vol. 2/2
Author: John Ruskin
Release date: January 18, 2015 [eBook #48015]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ARROWS OF THE CHACE, VOL. 2/2 ***
THE COMPLETE WORKS
OF
JOHN RUSKIN
VOLUME XXIII
ARROWS OF THE CHACE
VOLUMES I-II
ARROWS OF THE CHACE
BEING
A COLLECTION OF
SCATTERED LETTERS
PUBLISHED CHIEFLY IN THE DAILY NEWSPAPERS
1840-1880
VOLUME II.
LETTERS ON POLITICS, ECONOMY, AND
MISCELLANEOUS MATTERS
"I NEVER WROTE A LETTER IN MY LIFE WHICH ALL THE WORLD ARE NOT WELCOME
TO READ IF THEY WILL."
_Fors Clavigera_, Letter 59, 1875.
CONTENTS OF VOLUME II.
PAGE
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF THE LETTERS CONTAINED IN VOL. II. x
LETTERS ON POLITICS AND WAR:
The Italian Question. 1859.
Three letters: June 6 3
June 15 8
August 1 13
The Foreign Policy of England. 1863 15
The Position of Denmark. 1864 17
The Jamaica Insurrection. 1865 20
The Franco-Prussian War. 1870.
Two letters: October 6 22
October 7 25
Modern Warfare. 1876 29
LETTERS ON POLITICAL ECONOMY:
The Depreciation of Gold. 1863 37
The Law of Supply and Demand. 1864.
Three letters: October 26 39
October 29 40
November 2 43
Mr. Ruskin and Professor Hodgson. 1873.
Two letters: November 8 44
November 15 46
Strikes _v._ Arbitration. 1865 48
Work and Wages. 1865.
Five letters: April 20 50
April 22 52
April 29 54
May 4 59
May 20 62
The Standard of Wages. 1867 65
How the Rich spend their Money. 1873.
Three letters: January 23 66
January 28 67
January 30 68
Commercial Morality. 1875 70
The Definition of Wealth. 1875 71
The Principles of Property. 1877 71
On Co-operation. 1879-80.
Two letters: August, 1879 73
April 12, 1880 73
MISCELLANEOUS LETTERS:
I. THE MANAGEMENT OF RAILWAYS.
Is England Big Enough? 1868 79
The Ownership of Railways. 1868 81
Railway Economy. 1868 83
Our Railway System. 1865 88
Railway Safety. 1870 89
II. SERVANTS AND HOUSES.
Domestic Servants--Mastership. 1865 93
Domestic Servants--Experience. 1865 95
Domestic Servants--Sonship and Slavery. 1865 96
Modern Houses. 1865 104
III. ROMAN INUNDATIONS.
A King's First Duty. 1871 111
A Nation's Defences. 1871 113
The Waters of Comfort. 1871 115
The Streams of Italy. 1871 116
The Streets of London. 1871 119
IV. EDUCATION FOR RICH AND POOR.
True Education. 1868 123
The Value of Lectures. 1874 124
The Cradle of Art. 1876 125
St. George's Museum. 1875 126
The Morality of Field Sports. 1870 127
Drunkenness and Crime. 1871 129
Madness and Crime. 1872 130
Employment for the Destitute Poor and Criminal Classes. 1868 131
Notes on the General Principles of Employment for the
Destitute and Criminal Classes (a Pamphlet). 1868 132
Blindness and Sight. 1879 139
The Eagle's Nest. 1879 140
Politics in Youth. 1879 141
"Act, Act in the Living Present." 1873 141
"Laborare est Orare." 1874 142
A Pagan Message. 1878 143
The Foundations of Chivalry. 1877-8.
Five letters: February 8, 1877 143
February 10, 1877 145
February 11, 1877 146
February 12, 1877 147
July 3, 1878 148
V. WOMEN: THEIR WORK AND THEIR DRESS
Woman's Work. 1873 153
Female Franchise. 1870 154
Proverbs on Right Dress. 1862 154
Sad-colored Costumes. 1870 156
Oak Silkworms. 1862 158
VI. LITERARY CRITICISM.
The Publication of Books. 1875 163
A Mistaken Review. 1875 165
The Position of Critics. 1875 167
Coventry Patmore's "Faithful for Ever." 1860 168
"The Queen of the Air." 1871 171
The Animals of Scripture: a Review. 1856 172
"Limner" and Illumination. 1854 174
Notes on a Word in Shakespeare. 1878.
Two letters: September 176
September 29 177
"The Merchant of Venice." 1880 179
Recitations. 1880 186
APPENDIX.
Letter to W. C. Bennett, LL.D. 1852 183
Letter to Thomas Guthrie, D.D. 1853 184
The Sale of Mr. Windus' Pictures. 1859 185
At the Play. 1867 185
An Object of Charity. 1868 186
Excuses from Correspondence. 1868 186
Letter to the Author of a Review. 1872 187
An Oxford Protest. 1874 188
Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Lowe. 1877 189
The Bibliography of Ruskin. 1878.
Two letters: September 30 190
October 23 190
The Society of the Rose. 1879 191
* * * * *
Letter to W. H. Harrison. 1865 192
Dramatic Reform. 1880. (Two letters) 193
The Lord Rectorship of Glasgow University. 1880. (Five
letters) 195
EPILOGUE 201
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF THE LETTERS CONTAINED IN BOTH VOLUMES 204
INDEX 213
NOTE TO THE SECOND VOLUME.
_The letters relating to Mr. Ruskin's candidature for the Lord
Rectorship of Glasgow University were published when this volume was
almost out of the printer's hands. They have however been included,
by Mr. Ruskin's wish, and will be found at the end of this volume,
where a letter to the late Mr. W. H. Harrison, which has just been
brought to my notice, and two very recent letters on Dramatic Reform,
have, at the cost of some delay, been also added._--[ED.]
_November_ 15, 1880.
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF THE LETTERS CONTAINED IN THE SECOND VOLUME.
NOTE.--_In the second and third columns the bracketed words and
figures are more or less certainly conjectured; whilst those
unbracketed give the actual_ _dating of the letters._
TITLE OF LETTER. |WHERE |WHEN |WHERE AND WHEN |PAGE.|
|WRITTEN. |WRITTEN. |FIRST PUBLISHED. | |
| | | | |
LETTER TO W. C. |Herne Hill, |December |"Testimonials of | 183|
BENNETT, LL.D. |Dulwich |28th, 1852 |W. C. Bennett," | |
| | |1871 | |
| | | | |
LETTER TO DR. |[Edinburgh] |Saturday, |"Memoir of | 184|
GUTHRIE | |26th [Nov. |Thomas Guthrie, | |
| |?] 1853 |D.D.," (1875) | |
| | | | |
LETTER TO W. H. |[Herne Hill |1853] |_The Autographic | 192|
HARRISON | | |Mirror_, Dec. | |
| | |23, 1865 | |
| | | | |
"LIMNER" AND |[Denmark |December |_The Builder_, | 174|
ILLUMINATION |Hill |3, 1854] |Dec. 9, 1854 | |
| | | | |
THE ANIMALS OF |[Denmark |January, |_The Morning | 172|
SCRIPTURE: A REVIEW |Hill |1855] |Chronicle_, Jan. | |
| | |20, 1855 | |
| | | | |
THE SALE OF MR. |Denmark Hill|March 28 |_The Times_, | 185|
WINDUS' PICTURES | |[1859] |March 29, 1859 | |
| | | | |
THE ITALIAN QUESTION|Berlin |June 6, |_The Scotsman_, | 3|
| |1859 |July 20, 1859 | |
| | | | |
" " |Berlin |June 15 |" July 23, 1859 | 8|
| |[1859] | | |
| | | | |
" " |Schaffhausen|August 1, |" Aug. 6, 1859 | 13|
| |1859 | | |
| | | | |
COVENTRY PATMORE'S |Denmark Hill|[October |_The Critic_, | 168|
"FAITHFUL FOR EVER" | |21, 1860] |Oct. 27, 1860 | |
| | | | |
PROVERBS ON RIGHT |Geneva |October |_The Monthly | 154|
DRESS | |20th, 1862 |Packet_, Nov. | |
| | |1863 | |
| | | | |
OAK SILKWORMS |Geneva |October |_The Times_, | 158|
| |20th [1862]|Oct. 24, 1862 | |
| | | | |
THE DEPRECIATION OF |Chamounix |October 2 |_The Times_, | 37|
GOLD | |[1863] |Oct. 8, 1863 | |
| | | | |
THE FOREIGN POLICY |Zurich |October |_The Liverpool | 15|
OF ENGLAND | |25th, 1863 |Albion_, Nov. 2, | |
| | |1863 | |
| | | | |
THE POSITION OF |Denmark Hill|July 6 |_The Morning | 17|
DENMARK | |[1864] |Post_, July 7, | |
| | |1864 | |
| | | | |
THE LAW OF SUPPLY |Denmark Hill|October 26 |_The Daily | 39|
AND DEMAND | |[1864] |Telegraph_, Oct. | |
| | |28, 1864 | |
| | | | |
" " " |Denmark Hill|October 29 |" " Oct. 31, 1864| 40|
| |[1864] | | |
| | | | |
" " " |Denmark Hill|November 2 |" " Nov. 3, 1864 | 43|
| |[1864] | | |
| | | | |
STRIKES _V._ |[Denmark |Easter |_The Pall Mall | 48|
ARBITRATION |Hill] |Monday, |Gazette_, April | |
| |1865 |18, 1865 | |
| | | | |
WORK AND WAGES |Denmark Hill|Thursday, |" " April 21, | 50|
| |April 20 |1865 | |
| |[1865] | | |
| | | | |
" " |Denmark Hill|Saturday, |" " April 25, | 52|
| |April 22, |1865 | |
| |1865 | | |
| | | | |
" " |[Denmark |Saturday, |" " May 2, 1865 | 54|
|Hill] |29th | | |
| |April, 1865| | |
| | | | |
" " |Denmark Hill|May 4 |" " May 9, 1865 | 59|
| |[1865] | | |
| | | | |
" " |[Denmark |May 20, |" " May 22, 1865 | 62|
|Hill] |1865 | | |
| | | | |
DOMESTIC |Denmark Hill|September |_The Daily | 93|
SERVANTS--MASTERSHIP| |2 [1865] |Telegraph_, | |
| | |September 5, 1865| |
| | | | |
" " EXPERIENCE |Denmark Hill|September |" " September 7, | 95|
| |6 [1865] |1865 | |
| | | | |
" " SONSHIP AND |Denmark Hill|September |" " September | 96|
SLAVERY | |16, 1865] |18, 1865 | |
| | | | |
MODERN HOUSES |Denmark Hill|October 16 |" " October 17, | 104|
| |[1865] |1865 | |
| | | | |
OUR RAILWAY SYSTEM |Denmark Hill|December 7 |" " December 8, | 88|
| |[1865] |1865 | |
| | | | |
THE JAMAICA |Denmark Hill|December |" " December 20, | 20|
INSURRECTION | |19 [1865] |1865 | |
| | | | |
AT THE PLAY |Denmark Hill|February |_The Pall Mall | 185|
| |28, 1867 |Gazette_, March | |
| | |1, 1867 | |
| | | | |
THE STANDARD OF |Denmark Hill|April 30, |" " May 1, 1867 | 65|
WAGES | |1867 | | |
| | | | |
AN OBJECT OF CHARITY|Denmark |January |_The Daily | 186|
|Hill, S. |21, 1868 |Telegraph_, | |
| | |January 22, 1868 | |
| | | | |
TRUE EDUCATION |Denmark |January |_The Pall Mall | 123|
|Hill, S. |31, 1868 |Gazette_, | |
| | |January 31, 1868 | |
| | | | |
EXCUSE FROM |Denmark |2d |Circular printed | 186|
CORRESPONDENCE |Hill, S. |February, |by Mr. Ruskin, | |
| |1868 |1868 | |
| | | | |
IS ENGLAND BIG |Denmark Hill|July 30 |_The Daily | 79|
ENOUGH? | |[1868] |Telegraph_, July | |
| | |31, 1868 | |
| | | | |
THE OWNERSHIP OF |Denmark Hill|August 5 |" " August 6, | 81|
RAILWAYS | |[1868] |1868 | |
| | | | |
RAILWAY ECONOMY |Denmark Hill|August 9 |" " August 10, | 83|
| |[1868] |1868 | |
| | | | |
EMPLOYMENT FOR THE |Denmark |December |" " December 26, | 131|
DESTITUTE POOR, ETC.|Hill, S.E. |24 [1868] |1868 | |
| | | | |
NOTES ON THE |[Denmark |Autumn, |Pamphlet | 132|
DESTITUTE CLASSES, |Hill] |1868] |for private | |
ETC. | | |circulation, 1868| |
| | | | |
THE MORALITY OF |Denmark Hill|January 14 |_The Daily | 127|
FIELD SPORTS | |[1870] |Telegraph_, | |
| | |January 15, 1870 | |
| | | | |
FEMALE FRANCHISE |Venice |29th May, |Date and place | 154|
| |1870 |of publication | |
| | |unknown | |
| | | | |
THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN |Denmark |October 6 |_The Daily | 22|
WAR |Hill, S.E. |[1870] |Telegraph_, Oct. | |
| | |7, 1870 | |
| | | | |
" " " |[Denmark |October 7 |" " Oct. 8, 1870 | 25|
|Hill, S.E.] |[1870] | | |
| | | | |
SAD-COLORED COSTUMES|Denmark |14th |_Macmillan's | 156|
|Hill, S.E. |October, |Magazine_, Nov. | |
| |1870 |1870 | |
| | | | |
RAILWAY SAFETY |Denmark Hill|November |_The Daily | 89|
| |29, 1870 |Telegraph_, Nov. | |
| | |30, 1870 | |
| | | | |
A KING'S FIRST DUTY |[Denmark |January 10 |" " January 12, | 111|
|Hill] |[1871] |1871 | |
| | | | |
A NATION'S DEFENCES |Denmark Hill|January |_The Pall Mall | 113|
| |19, 1871 |Gazette_, Jan. | |
| | |19, 1871 | |
| | | | |
THE WATERS OF |Oxford |February 3 |_The Daily | 115|
COMFORT | |[1871] |Telegraph_, Feb. | |
| | |4, 1871 | |
| | | | |
THE STREAMS OF ITALY|Oxford |February 3 |" " Feb. 7, 1871 | 116|
| |[1871] | | |
| | | | |
WOMAN'S SPHERE |[Oxford |February |" " Feb. 21, 1871| 154|
(EXTRACT) | |19, 1871] | | _n._|
| | | | |
THE "QUEEN OF THE |[Denmark |May 18, |_The Asiatic_, | 171|
AIR" |Hill] |1871 |May 23, 1871 | |
| | | | |
DRUNKENNESS AND |Denmark Hill|December 9 |_The Daily | 129|
CRIME | |[1871] |Telegraph_, Dec. | |
| | |11, 1871 | |
| | | | |
THE STREETS OF |[Denmark |December |_The Pall Mall | 119|
LONDON |Hill] |27, 1871 |Gazette_, Dec. | |
| | |28, 1871 | |
| | | | |
MADNESS AND CRIME |Oxford |November 2 |" " Nov. 4, 1872 | 130|
| |[1872] | | |
| | | | |
LETTER TO THE |Oxford |Wednesday, |_Liverpool | 187|
AUTHOR OF A REVIEW | |Oct. 30 |Weekly Albion_, | |
| |[1872] |Nov. 9, 1872 | |
| | | | |
"ACT, ACT IN THE |Oxford |Christmas |New Year's | 141|
LIVING PRESENT" | |Eve, '72 |Address, etc., | |
| | |1873 | |
| | | | |
HOW THE RICH SPEND |Brantwood, |January 23 |_The Pall Mall | 66|
THEIR MONEY |Coniston |[1873] |Gazette_, Jan. | |
| | |24, 1873 | |
| | | | |
" " " |[Brantwood, |January 28 |" " Jan. 29, 1873| 67|
|Coniston] |[1873] | | |
| | | | |
" " " |Brantwood, |King |" " Jan. 31, 1873| 68|
|Coniston |Charles | | |
| |the | | |
| |Martyr, | | |
| |1873 | | |
| | | | |
WOMAN'S WORK |[ ] |[May, 1873]|_L'Espérance | 153|
| | |Genève_, May 8, | |
| | |1873 | |
| | | | |
MR. RUSKIN AND |Oxford |November |_The Scotsman_, | 44|
PROFESSOR HODGSON | |8, 1873 |November 10, 1873| |
| | | | |
" " " |Oxford |November |" November 18, | 46|
| |15, 1873 |1873 | |
| | | | |
"LABORARE EST ORARE"|Oxford |December, |New Year's | 142|
| |1873 |Address, etc., | |
| | |1874 | |
| | | | |
THE VALUE OF |Rome |26th May, |_The Glasgow | 124|
LECTURES | |1874 |Herald_, June 5, | |
| | |1874 | |
| | | | |
AN OXFORD PROTEST |[Oxford |October |_The Globe_, | 188|
| |29, 1874 |Oct. 29, 1874 | |
| | | | |
A MISTAKEN REVIEW |Brantwood |January 10 |_The Pall Mall | 165|
| |[1875] |Gazette_, | |
| | |January 11, 1875 | |
| | | | |
THE POSITION OF |Brantwood |January 18 |" " January 19, | 167|
CRITICS | |[1875] |1875 | |
| | | | |
COMMERCIAL MORALITY |[Herne Hill |February, |Date and place | 70|
| |1875] |of publication | |
| | |unknown | |
| | | | |
THE PUBLICATION OF |Oxford |June 6, |_The World_, | 163|
BOOKS | |1875 |June 9, 1875 | |
| | | | |
ST. GEORGE'S MUSEUM |Brantwood, |[September,|_Sheffield Daily | 126|
|Coniston |1875] |Telegraph_, | |
| | |Sept. 6, 1875 | |
| | | | |
THE DEFINITION OF |Oxford |9th |_The Monetary | 71|
WEALTH | |November, |Gazette_, Nov. | |
| |1875 |13, 1875 | |
| | | | |
THE CRADLE OF ART! |[Oxford] |18th |Date and place | 125|
| |February, |of publication | |
| |1876 |unknown | |
| | | | |
MODERN WARFARE |[Brantwood] |June, 1876 |_Fraser's | 29|
| | |Magazine_, July, | |
| | |1876 | |
| | | | |
THE FOUNDATIONS OF |Venice |February |"The Science of | 143|
CHIVALRY | |8th, 1877 |Life" (second | |
| | |edit.), 1878 | |
| | | | |
" " " |Venice |February |" " (first | 145|
| |10th [1877]|edition), 1877 | |
| | | | |
" " " |Venice |11th |" " " " 1877 | 146|
| |February | | |
| |[1877] | | |
| | | | |
" " " |Venice |12th |" " " " 1877 | 147|
| |February, | | |
| |'77] | | |
| | | | |
MR. RUSKIN AND MR. |Brantwood, |August 24 |_The Standard_, | 189|
LOWE |Coniston |[1877] |August 28, 1877 | |
| | | | |
THE PRINCIPLES OF |[Brantwood] |10th |_The Socialist_, | 71|
PROPERTY | |October, |November, 1887 | |
| |1877 | | |
| | | | |
A PAGAN MESSAGE |Herne Hill, |19th |New Year's | 143|
|London, S. |December, |Address, etc., | |
|E. |1877 |1878 | |
| | | | |
DESPAIR (EXTRACT) |[Oxford |February, |_The Times_, | 124|
| |1878] |February 12, 1878| _n._|
| | | | |
THE FOUNDATIONS OF |Malham |July 3d, |"The Science of | 148|
CHIVALRY | |1878 |Life" (second | |
| | |edit.), 1878 | |
| | | | |
NOTES ON A WORD IN |Brantwood |[September,|New Shakspere | 176|
SHAKESPEARE | |1878] |Soc. Trans. | |
| | |1878-9 | |
| | | | |
" " " |Edinburgh |29th |" " " " | 177|
| |September, | | |
| |1878 | | |
| | | | |
THE BIBLIOGRAPHY OF |Brantwood, |September |"Bibliography | 190|
RUSKIN |Coniston |30, 1878 |of Dickens" | |
| | |(advt.), 1880 | |
| | | | |
" " " |Brantwood, |October |" " " " | 190|
|Coniston |23, 1878 | | |
| | | | |
THE SOCIETY OF THE |[Brantwood |Early in |Report of | 191|
ROSE | |1879] |Ruskin Soc., | |
| | |Manchester, 1880 | |
| | | | |
BLINDNESS AND SIGHT |Brantwood, |18th July, |_The Y. M. A. | 139|
|Coniston |1879 |Magazine_, | |
| | |Sept., 1879 | |
| | | | |
"THE EAGLE'S NEST" |Brantwood, |August |" " October, 1879| 140|
|Coniston |17th, 1879 | | |
| | | | |
ON COÖPERATION. I. |Brantwood, |[August, |_The Christian | 73|
|Coniston |1879] |Life_, December | |
| | |20, 1879 | |
| | | | |
POLITICS IN YOUTH |Sheffield |October |_The Y. M. A. | 141|
| |19th, 1879 |Magazine_, Nov., | |
| | |1879 | |
| | | | |
THE MERCHANT OF |[Herne |6th |_The Theatre_, | 179|
VENICE (EXTRACT) |Hill, S. E.]|February, |March, 1880 | |
| |1880 | | |
| | | | |
RECITATIONS |Sheffield |16th |Circular printed | 180|
| |February, |by Mr. R. T. | |
| |1880 |Webling | |
| | | | |
EXCUSE FROM |[Brantwood] |March, 1880|List of Mr. | 186|
CORRESPONDENCE | | |Ruskin's | _n._|
| | |Writings, Mar., | |
| | |1880 | |
| | | | |
ON COÖPERATION. II. |Brantwood, |April |_The Daily | 73|
|Coniston |12th, 1880 |News_, June 19, | |
| | |1880 | |
| | | | |
THE GLASGOW LORD |Brantwood, |10th June, |_The Glasgow | 195|
RECTORSHIP |Coniston |1880 |Herald_, Oct. 7, | |
| | |1880 | |
| | | | |
" " " |[Brantwood] |10th June, |" " Oct. 7, 1880 | 195|
| |1880 | | |
| | | | |
" " " |[Brantwood] |24th June, |" " Oct. 7, 1880 | 196|
| |1880 | | |
| | | | |
" " " |Brantwood, |[July, |" " Oct. 12, 1880| 196|
|Coniston |1880] | | |
| | | | |
DRAMATIC REFORM. I. |Brantwood |July 30th, |_Journal of | 193|
| |1880 |Dramatic | |
| | |Reform_, Nov., | |
| | |1880 | |
| | | | |
THE GLASGOW LORD |Rouen |28th |_The Glasgow | 197|
RECTORSHIP | |September, |Herald_, Oct. 7, | |
| |1880 |1880 | |
| | | | |
DRAMATIC REFORM. II.|Amiens |October |_Journal of | 193|
| |12th, 1880 |Dramatic | |
| | |Reform_, Nov., | |
| | |1880 | |
LETTERS ON POLITICS AND WAR.
THE ITALIAN QUESTION. 1859.
(Three letters: June 6, June 15, and August 1.)
THE FOREIGN POLICY OF ENGLAND. 1863.
THE POSITION OF DENMARK. 1864.
THE JAMAICA INSURRECTION. 1865.
THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR. 1870.
(Two letters: October 6 and 7.)
MODERN WARFARE. 1876.
ARROWS OF THE CHACE.
LETTERS ON POLITICS AND WAR.
[From "The Scotsman," July 20, 1859.]
_THE ITALIAN QUESTION._[1]
BERLIN, _June_ 6, 1859.
I have been thinking of sending a few lines about what I have seen of
Austrians and Italians; but every time I took my pen and turned from my
own work about clouds and leafage to think for a few minutes concerning
political clouds and thickets, I sank into a state of amazement which
reduced me to helpless silence. I will try and send you an incoherent
line to-day; for the smallest endeavor at coherence will bring me into
that atmosphere of astonishment again, in which I find no expression.
You northern Protestant people are always overrating the value of
Protestantism as such. Your poetical clergymen make sentimental tours
in the Vaudois country, as if there were no worthy people in the Alps
but the Vaudois. Did the enlightened Edinburgh evangelicals never take
any interest in the freedom of the Swiss, nor hear of such people
as Winkelried or Tell? Not but that there is some chance of Tell
disappearing one of these days under acutest historical investigation.
Still, he, or somebody else, verily got Switzerland rid of much evil,
and made it capable of much good; and if you examine the influence of
the battles of Morgarten and Sempach on European history, you will find
they were good and true pieces of God's work.[2] Do people suppose
they were done by Protestants? Switzerland owes all that she is--all
that she is ever likely to be--to her stout and stern Roman Catholics,
faithful to their faith to this day--they, and the Tyrolese, about the
truest Roman Catholics in Christendom and certainly among its worthiest
people, though they laid your Zuingli and a good deal of ranting
Protestantism which Zuingli in vain tried to make either rational or
charitable, dead together on the green meadows of Cappel, and though
the Tyrolese marksmen at this moment are following up their rifle
practice to good purpose, and with good will, with your Vaudois hearts
for targets.
The amazement atmosphere keeps floating with its edges about me,
though I write on as fast as I can in hopes of keeping out of it. You
Scotch, and we English!! to keep up the miserable hypocrisy of calling
ourselves Protestants! And here have been two of the most powerful
protests (sealed with quite as much blood as is usually needed for such
documents) that ever were made against the Papacy--one in 1848,[3]
and one now--twenty thousand men or thereabouts lying, at this time
being, in the form of torn flesh and shattered bones, among the rice
marshes of the Novarrese, and not one jot of our precious Protestant
blood gone to the signature. Not so much as one noble flush of it,
that I can see, on our clay cheeks, besmirched, as they are, with
sweat and smoke; but all for gold, and out of chimneys. Of sweat for
bread that perishes not, or of the old Sinai smoke for honor of God's
law, and revelation thereof--no drop nor shadow. Not so much as a
coroner's inquest on those dead bodies in the rice fields--dead men
who must have been murdered by somebody. If a drunken man falls in a
ditch, you will have your Dogberry and Verges talk over him by way
of doing justice; but your twenty thousand--not drunken, but honest,
respectable, well-meaning, and serviceable men--are made rice manure
of, and you think it is all right. We Protestants indeed! The Italians
are Protestants, and in a measure the French--nay, even the Austrians
(at all events those conical-hatted mountaineers), according to their
understanding of the matter. What we are, Moloch or Mammon, or the
Protestant devil make up of both, perhaps knows.
Do not think I dislike the Austrians. I have great respect and
affection for them, and I have seen more of them in familiar
intercourse than most Englishmen. One of my best friends in Venice
in the winter of 1849-50 was the Artillery officer who had directed
the fire on the side of Mestre in 1848. I have never known a nobler
person. Brave, kind, and gay--as gentle as a lamb, as playful as a
kitten--knightly in courtesy and in all tones of thought--ready at any
instant to lay down his life for his country or his Emperor. He was
by no means a rare instance either of gentleness or of virtue among
the men whom the Liberal portion of our English press represent as
only tyrants and barbarians. Radetzky himself was one of the kindest
of men--his habitual expression was one of overflowing _bonhommie_,
or of fatherly regard for the welfare of all around him. All who knew
him loved him. In little things his kindness was almost ludicrous. I
saw him at Verona run out of his own supper-room and return with a
plate of soup in his hand, the waiters (his youngest aides-de-camp) not
serving his lady guests fast enough to please him; yet they were nimble
enough, as I knew in a race with two of them among the fire-flies
by the Mincio, only the evening before. For a long time I regarded
the Austrians as the only protection of Italy from utter dissolution
(such as that which, I see to-day, it is reported that the Tuscan army
has fallen into, left for five weeks to itself), and I should have
looked upon them as such still, if the Sardinian Government had not
shown itself fit to take their place. And the moment that any Italian
Government was able to take their place, the Austrians necessarily
became an obstacle to Italian progress, for all their virtues are
incomprehensible to the Italians, and useless to them. Unselfish
individually, the Austrians are nationally entirely selfish, and in
this consists, so far as it is truly alleged against them, their
barbarism. These men of whom I have been speaking would have given, any
of them, life and fortune unhesitatingly, at their Emperor's bidding,
but their magnanimity was precisely that of the Highlander or the
Indian, incognizant of any principle of action but that of devotion to
his chief or nation. All abstract grounds of conscience, all universal
and human hopes, were inconceivable by them. Such men are at present
capable of no feeling towards Italy but scorn; their power was like
a bituminous cerecloth wrapping her corpse--it saved her from the
rottenness of revolution; but it must be unwound, if the time has come
for her resurrection.
I do not know if that time has come, or can come. Italy's true
oppression is all her own. Spain is oppressed by the Spaniard, not by
the Austrian. Greece needs but to be saved from the Greeks. No French
Emperor, however mighty his arm or sound his faith, can give Italy
freedom.
"A gift of that which is not to be given
By all the associate powers of earth and heaven."
But the time is come at least to bid her be free, if she has the power
of freedom. It is not England, certainly, who should forbid her. I
believe that is what it will come to, however--not so much because we
are afraid of Napoleon, as because we are jealous of him. But of him
and us I have something more to say than there is time for to-night.
These good, stupid, affectionate, faithful Germans, too (grand fellows
under arms; I never imagined so magnificent a soldiery as 15,000 of
them which I made a shift to see, through sand clouds, march past the
Prince Frederick William[4] on Saturday morning last). But to hear them
fretting and foaming at the French getting into Milan!--they having
absolutely no other idea on all this complicated business than that
French are fighting Germans! Wrong or right, why or wherefore, matters
not a jot to them. French are fighting Germans--somehow, somewhere,
for some reason--and beer and Vaterland are in peril, and the English
in fault, as we are assuredly, but not on that side, for I believe
it to be quite true which a French friend, high in position, says in
a letter this morning--"If the English had not sympathized with the
Austrians there would have been no war." By way of keeping up the
character of incoherence to which I have vowed myself, I may tell you
that before that French letter came, I received another from a very
sagacious Scotch friend (belonging, as I suppose most Scotch people do,
to the class of persons who call themselves "religious"), containing
this marvellous enunciation of moral principle, to be acted upon in
difficult circumstances, "Mind your own business." It is a serviceable
principle enough for men of the world, but a surprising one in the
mouth of a person who professes to be a Bible obeyer. For, as far as
I remember the tone of that obsolete book, "our own" is precisely the
last business which it ever tells us to mind. It tells us often to mind
God's business, often to mind other people's business; our own, in any
eager or earnest way, not at all. "What thy hand findeth to do." Yes;
but in God's fields, not ours. One can imagine the wiser fishermen
of the Galilean lake objecting to Peter and Andrew that they were
not minding their business, much more the commercial friends of Levi
speaking with gentle pity of him about the receipt of Custom. "A bad
man of business always--see what has come of it--quite mad at last."
And my astonishing friend went on to say that this was to be our
principle of action "where the path was not quite clear"--as if any
path ever _was_ clear till you got to the end of it, or saw it a long
way off; as if all human possibility of path was not among clouds and
brambles--often cold, always thorny--misty with roses occasionally, or
dim with dew, often also with shadow of Death--misty, more particularly
in England just now, with shadow of that commercially and otherwise
valuable smoke before spoken of.
However, if the path is not to be seen, it may be felt, or at least
tumbled off, without any particular difficulty. This latter course of
proceeding is our probablest, of course.--But I can't write any more
to-night. I am, etc.,
J. RUSKIN.
_Note_ to p. 6.--The lines quoted are from Wordsworth's "Poems
dedicated to National Independence and Liberty," Part II.,
Sonnet i. The second line should read, "By all the blended
powers of earth and heaven."
FOOTNOTES:
[1] This and the two following letters deal, it will be seen, with "the
Italian question" in 1859, when the peace of Europe was disturbed by
the combined action of France and Sardinia against Austria in the cause
of Italian independence. Of these three letters the first was written
two days after the defeat of the Austrians at Magenta, followed by the
entrance into Milan of the French, and the second a few days before the
similar victory of the French and Sardinian armies at Solferino.
[2] Few readers need be reminded of the position of Tell in the list of
Swiss patriots (_pace_ the "acutest historical investigation," which
puts him in the list of mythical personages) in the early part of the
fourteenth century; of Arnold von Winkelried who met the heroic death,
by which he secured his country's freedom, at Sempach in 1386; or of
Ulrich Zuingli, the Swiss Protestant leader of his time, who fell at
Cappel, in the war of the Reformed against the Romish cantons, in 1531.
At the battle of Morgarten, in 1315, twenty thousand Austrians were
defeated by no more than thirteen hundred Swiss, with such valor that
the name of the victors' canton was thereupon extended to the whole
country, thenceforth called Switzerland.
It may be further noted that Arnold of Sempach is, with Leonidas,
Curtius, and Sir Richard Grenville, named amongst the types of "the
divinest of sacrifices, that of the patriot for his country," in Mr.
Ruskin's Preface, "Bibliotheca Pastorum," Vol. i. p. xxxiii.
[3] The year of the Lombard insurrection, when Radetzky, the Austrian
field-marshal, defeated the insurgents at Custozza near Verona.
Radetzky died in 1858.
[4] The Prince Frederick William, now Emperor of Germany (having
succeeded his brother Frederick William IV. in January, 1861), was at
the date of this letter Regent of Prussia, and Commander-in-chief of
the Prussian forces.
[From the "Scotsman," July 23, 1859.]
_THE ITALIAN QUESTION._
BERLIN, _June_ 15.
You would have had this second letter sooner, had I not lost myself,
after despatching the first, in farther consideration of the theory
of Non-Intervention, or minding one's own business. What, in logical
terms, _is_ the theory? If one sees a costermonger wringing his
donkey's tail, is it proper to "intervene"? and if one sees an Emperor
or a System wringing a nation's neck, is it improper to intervene? Or
is the Intervention allowable only in the case of hides, not of souls?
for even so, I think you might find among modern Italians many quite as
deserving of intervention as the donkey. Or is interference allowable
when one person does one wrong to another person, but not when two
persons do two wrongs to two, or three to three, or a multitude to
a multitude; and is there any algebraic work on these square and
cube roots of morality wherein I may find how many coadjutors or
commissions any given crooked requires to make it straight? Or is it a
geographical question; and may one advisably interfere at Berwick but
not at Haddington? Or is there any graduated scale of intervention,
practicable according to the longitude? I see my way less clearly,
because the illustrations of the theory of Non-intervention are
as obscure as its statement. The French are at present happy and
prosperous; content with their ruler and themselves; their trade
increasing, and their science and art advancing; their feelings towards
other nations becoming every day more just. Under which circumstances
we English non-interventionalists consider it our duty to use every
means in our power of making the ruler suspected by the nation, and the
nation unmanageable by the ruler. We call both all manner of names;
exhaust every term of impertinence and every method of disturbance; and
do our best, in indirect and underhand ways, to bring about revolution,
assassination, or any other close of the existing system likely to be
satisfactory to Royals[5] in general. This is your non-intervention
when a nation is prosperous.
On the other hand, the Italian nation is unhappy and unprosperous;
its trade annihilated, its arts and sciences retrograde, its nerve
and moral sense prostrated together; it is capable only of calling to
you for help, and you will not help it. The man you have been calling
names, with his unruly colonels, undertakes to help it, and Christian
England, with secret hope that, in order to satisfy her spite against
the unruly colonels, the French army may be beaten, and the Papacy
fully established over the whole of Italy--Christian England, I say,
with this spiteful jealousy for one of her motives, and a dim, stupid,
short-sighted, sluggish horror of interruption of business for the
other, takes, declaratively and ostensibly, this highly Christian
position. "Let who will prosper or perish, die or live--let what will
be declared or believed--let whatsoever iniquity be done, whatsoever
tyranny be triumphant, how many soever of faithful or fiery soldiery
be laid in new embankments of dead bodies along those old embankments
of Mincio and Brenta; yet will we English drive our looms, cast up our
accounts, and bet on the Derby, in peace and gladness; our business
is only therewith; for us there is no book of fate, only ledgers and
betting-books; for us there is no call to meddle in far-away business.
See ye to it. We wash our hands of it in that sea-foam of ours; surely
the English Channel is better than Abana and Pharpar, or than the
silver basin which Pilate made use of, and our soap is of the best
almond-cake."
I hear the Derby was great this year.[6] I wonder, sometimes, whether
anybody has ever calculated, in England, how much taxation the nation
pays annually for the maintenance of that great national institution.
Observe--what I say of the spirit in which the English bear themselves
at present, is founded on what I myself have seen and heard, not on
what I read in journals. I read them little at home--here I hardly see
them. I have no doubt that in the Liberal papers one might find much
mouthing about liberty, as in the Conservative much about order, it
being neither liberty nor order which is wanted, but Justice. You may
have Freedom of all Abomination, and Order of all Iniquity--if you
look for Forms instead of Facts. Look for the facts first--the doing
of justice howsoever and by whatsoever forms or informalities. And the
forms will come--shapely enough, and sightly enough, afterwards. Yet,
perhaps, not till long afterwards. Earnest as I am for the freedom
of Italy, no one can hope less from it, for many a year to come.
Even those Vaudois, whom you Presbyterians admire so much, have made
as yet no great show of fruit out of their religious freedom. I went
up from Turin to Torre di Lucerna to look at them last year. I have
seldom slept in a dirtier inn, seldom seen peasants' cottages so ill
built, and never yet in my life saw anywhere paths so full of nettles.
The faces of the people are interesting, and their voices sweet,
except in howlings on Sunday evening, which they performed to a very
disquieting extent in the street till about half-past ten, waking me
afterwards between twelve and one with another "catch," and a dance
through the village of the liveliest character. Protestantism is apt
sometimes to take a gayer character abroad than with us. Geneva has
an especially disreputable look on Sunday evenings, and at Hanover I
see the shops are as wide open on Sunday as Saturday; here, however,
in Berlin, they shut up as close as you do at Edinburgh. I think
the thing that annoyed me most at La Tour, however, was the intense
sectarianism of the Protestant dogs. I can make friends generally,
fast enough, with any canine or feline creature; but I could make
nothing of those evangelical brutes, and there was as much snarling and
yelping that afternoon before I got past the farmhouses to the open
hill-side, as in any of your Free Church discussions. It contrasted
very painfully with the behavior of such Roman Catholic dogs as I
happen to know--St. Bernard's and others--who make it their business
to entertain strangers. But the hill-side was worth reaching--for
though that Lucerna valley is one of the least interesting I ever saw
in the Alps, there is a craggy ridge on the north of it which commands
a notable view. In about an hour and a half's walking you may get up
to the top of a green, saddle-shaped hill, which separates the Lucerna
valley from that of Angrogna; if then, turning to the left (westward),
you take the steepest way you can find up the hill, another couple of
hours will bring you to a cone of stones which the shepherds have built
on the ridge, and there you may see all the historical sites of the
valley of Angrogna as in a map--and as much of Monte Viso and Piedmont
as clouds will let you. I wish I could draw you a map of Piedmont
as I saw it that afternoon. The air was half full of white cumulus
clouds, lying nearly level about fifteen hundred feet under the ridge;
and through every gap of them a piece of Piedmont with a city or two.
Turin, twenty-eight miles away as the bird flies, shows through one
cloud-opening like a handful of golden sand in a pool of blue sea.
I've no time to write any more to-day, for I've been to Charlottenburg,
out of love for Queen Louise.[7] I can't see a good painting of her
anywhere, and they show her tomb by blue light, like the nun scene in
_Robert le Diable_. A German woman's face, if beautiful at all, is
exquisitely beautiful; but it depends mainly on the thoughtfulness of
the eyes, and the bright hair. It rarely depends much upon the nose,
which has perhaps a tendency to be--if anything--a little too broadish
and flattish--perhaps one might even say in some cases, knobbish. (The
Hartz mountains, I see, looking at them from Brunswick, have similar
tendencies, less excusably and more decidedly.) So when the eyes are
closed--and for the soft hair one has only furrowed marble--and the
nose to its natural disadvantages adds that of being seen under blue
light, the general effect is disappointing.
Frederick the Great's celebrated statue is at the least ten yards too
high[8] from the ground to be of any use; one sees nothing but the
edges of the cloak he never wore, the soles of his boots, and, in a
redundant manner, his horse's tail. Under which vertically is his
Apotheosis. In which process he sits upon the back of an eagle, and
waves a palm, with appearance of satisfaction to himself, and it is to
be hoped no danger of any damage to three stars in the neighborhood.
Kiss's Amazon makes a good grotesque for the side of the Museum steps;
it was seen to disadvantage in London. The interior of the gallery is
very beautiful in many ways; and Holbein's portrait of George Gyzen is
worth coming all the way from England to see only ten minutes. I never
saw so noble a piece of work of its kind in my life.
Believe me, etc.,
J. RUSKIN.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] A misprint for "Rogues." See next letter, p. 13.
[6] "Magnificent weather and excellent sport made the great people's
meeting pass off with great _éclat_." ("Annual Register" for 1859, p.
73.) The race was won by Sir J. Hawley's Musjid.
[7] The mother of the present Emperor, whose treatment by Napoleon
I., and whose own admirable qualities, have won for her the tender
and affectionate memory of her people. She died in 1810. Her tomb at
Charlottenburg is the work of the German sculptor, Christian Rauch.
[8] The full height of this statue (also the work of Rauch) is,
inclusive of the pedestal, somewhat over forty-two feet from the
ground. One of the bas-relief tablets which flank the pedestal
represents the Apotheosis of the monarch. The visitor to Berlin may
recall August Kiss's bronze group, representing the combat of an
Amazon with a tiger, on the right side of the Old Museum steps; and
Holbein's portrait of George Gyzen, a merchant of London, is No. 586 in
the picture galleries of the Museum. It is described by Mr. Ruskin in
his article on "Sir Joshua and Holbein" in the _Cornhill Magazine_ of
March, 1860, and also in Wornum's "Life and Works of Holbein," p. 260
(London, 1867).
[From "The Scotsman," August 6, 1859.]
_THE ITALIAN QUESTION._
SCHAFFHAUSEN, _August_ 1, 1859.
_Letter to the Editor_ (_of "The Scotsman"_).
SIR: I have just received the number of the _Scotsman_ containing my
second letter from Berlin, in which there is rather an awkward misprint
of "royals" for "rogues," which must have puzzled some of your readers,
no less than the general tone of the letter, written as it was for
publication at another time, and as one of a series begun in another
journal. I am obliged by the admission of the letter into your columns;
and I should have been glad to continue in those columns the series I
intended, had not the refusal of this letter by the _Witness_[9] shown
me the liability to misapprehension under which I should be writing.
I had thought that, seeing for these twenty years I have been more or
less conversant with Italy and the Italians, a few familiar letters
written to a personal friend, at such times as I could win from my
own work, might not have been uninteresting to Scottish readers, even
though my opinions might occasionally differ sharply from theirs, or
be expressed in such rough way as strong opinions must be, when one
has no time to polish them into more pleasing presentability. The
refusal of the letter by the _Witness_ showed me that this was not
so; and as I have no leisure to take up the subject methodically, I
must leave what I have written in its present imperfect form. It is
indeed not mainly a question of time, which I would spend gladly,
though to handle the subject of the present state of Italy with any
completeness would involve a total abandonment of other work for some
weeks. But I feel too deeply in this matter to allow myself to think of
it continuously. To me, the state of the modern political mind, which
hangs the slaughter of twenty thousand men, and the destinies of twenty
myriads of human souls, on the trick that transforms a Ministry, or the
chances of an enlarged or diminished interest in trade, is something
so horrible that I find no utterance wherewith to characterize it--nor
any courage wherewith to face the continued thought of it, unless I
had clear expectation of doing good by the effort--expectation which
the mere existence of the fact forbids. I leave therefore the words I
have written to such work as they may; hoping, indeed, nothing from
any words; thankful, if a few people here and there understand and
sympathize in the feelings with which they were written; and thankful,
if none so sympathize, that I am able at least to claim some share in
the sadness, though not in the triumph, of the words of Farinata--
"Fu' io sol colà, dove sofferto
Fu per ciascun di torre via Fiorenza,
Colui che la difese a viso aperto."[10]
I am, etc., J. RUSKIN.
FOOTNOTES:
[9] After a careful and repeated search in the columns of the
_Witness_, I am still unable to certainly explain these allusions. It
seems, however, that the two preceding letters had been sent to the
_Witness_, which printed the first and refused to print the second.
The _Scotsman_ printed both under the titles of "Mr. Ruskin on the
Italian Question," and "Mr. Ruskin on Foreign Politics," whilst it
distinguished this third letter by the additional heading of "Letter
to the Editor." It may be conjectured, therefore, that the first two
letters were reprinted by the _Scotsman_ from another paper, and that,
in receiving the number of the _Scotsman_ containing the second, Mr.
Ruskin did not know that it had reprinted the first also. As to the
"series begun in another journal," it is, I think, clear that it had
not been long continued, as the letter dated "June 15," sent to and
refused by it, is spoken of as "the second letter," so that that dated
"June 6" must have been the first, as this was unquestionably the last
of the series.
[10]
"But singly there I stood, when, by consent
Of all, Florence had to the ground been razed,
The one who openly forbade the deed."
CARY'S DANTE--"L'Inferno," x. II. 90-93.
Farinata degli Uberti was a noble Florentine, and the leader of the
Ghibelline faction, when they obtained a signal victory over the
Guelfi at Montaperto, near the river Arbia. Machiavelli calls him "a
man of exalted soul, and great military talents" (Hist. of Florence,
Bk. ii). Subsequently, when it was proposed that, in order to maintain
the ascendency of the Ghibelline faction in Tuscany, Florence should
be destroyed, Farinata alone of all the Council opposed the measure,
declaring that he had endured every hardship with no other view than
that of being able to pass his days in his own country. (See Cary's
notes to Canto x.)
[From "The Liverpool Albion," November 2, 1863.]
_THE FOREIGN POLICY OF ENGLAND._[11]
ZURICH, _Oct. 25th_, 1863.
SIR: I beg to acknowledge your favor of the 20th of October. My health
does not now admit of my taking part frequently in public business;
yet I should have held it a duty to accept the invitation of the
directors of the Liverpool Institute, but that, for the time being, my
temper is at fault, as well as my health; and I am wholly unable to
go on with any of my proper work, owing to the horror and shame with
which I regard the political position taken, or rather sunk into, by
England in her foreign relations--especially in the affairs of Italy
and Poland.[12] What these matters have to do with Art may not at
first be clear, but I can perhaps make it so by a short similitude.
Suppose I had been engaged by an English gentleman to give lectures on
Art to his son. Matters at first go smoothly, and I am diligent in my
definitions of line and color, until, one Sunday morning at breakfast
time, a ticket-of-leave man takes a fancy to murder a girl in the road
leading round the lawn, before the house-windows. My patron, hearing
the screams, puts down his paper, adjusts his spectacles, slowly
apprehends what is going on, and rings the bells for his smallest
footman. "John, take my card and compliments to that gentleman outside
the hedge, and tell him that his proceedings are abnormal, and, I may
add, to me personally--offensive. Had that road passed through my
property, I should have felt it my duty to interfere." John takes the
card, and returns with it; the ticket-of-leave man finishes his work at
his leisure; but, the screams ceasing as he fills the girl's mouth with
clay, the English gentleman returns to his muffins, and congratulates
himself on having "kept out of that mess." Presently afterwards he
sends for me to know if I shall be ready to lecture on Monday. I am
somewhat nervous, and answer--I fear rudely--"Sir, your son is a good
lad; I hope he will grow to be a man--but, for the present, I cannot
teach him anything. I should like, indeed, to teach _you_ something,
but have no words for the lesson." Which indeed I have not. If I say
any words on such matters, people ask me, "Would I have the country
go to war? do I know how dreadful a thing war is?" Yes, truly, I know
it. I like war as ill as most people--so ill, that I would not spend
twenty millions a year in making machines for it, neither my holidays
and pocket money in playing at it; yet I would have the country go to
war, with haste, in a good quarrel; and, which is perhaps eccentric in
me, rather in another's quarrel than in her own. We say of ourselves
complacently that we will not go to war for an idea; but the phrase
interpreted means only, that we will go to war for a bale of goods,
but not for justice nor for mercy; and I would ask you to favor me so
far as to read this letter to the students at your meeting, and say
to them that I heartily wish them well; but for the present I am too
sad to be of any service to them; that our wars in China and Japan[13]
are not likely to furnish good subjects for historical pictures; that
"ideas" happen, unfortunately, to be, in Art, the principal things; and
that a country which will not fight for its ideas is not likely to have
anything worth painting.
I have the honor to be, Sir, your faithful servant,
J. RUSKIN.
The Secretary of the Liverpool Institute.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] This letter was written in answer to a request that Mr. Ruskin
would come and preside at the distribution of prizes among the students
in the Science and Art Department of the Liverpool Institute, on
Saturday, Oct. 31, 1863. It was subsequently read on the occasion of
distribution, in accordance with the wish expressed towards the end of
the letter.
[12] See the preceding and the following letter. This one was, it will
be seen, written in the year of the last great struggle of Poland
against Russia.
[13] A The expedition of the English and French against China was begun
in the August of 1860; the war in Japan in the summer of 1863.
[From "The Morning Post," July 7, 1864.]
_THE POSITION OF DENMARK._
_To the Editor of_ "_The Morning Post_."
SIR: Will you allow me, in fewest words, to say how deeply I concur in
all that is said in that noble letter of Lord Townshend's published
in your columns this morning--except only in its last sentence, "It
is time to protest."[14] Alas! if protests were of any use, men with
hearts and lips would have protested enough by this time. But they
are of none, and can be of none. What true words are worth any man's
utterance, while it is possible for such debates as last Monday's to
be, and two English gentlemen can stand up before the English Commons
to quote Virgil at each other, and round sentences, and show their
fineness of wrist in their pretty little venomous carte and tierce of
personality, while, even as they speak, the everlasting silence is
wrapping the brave massacred Danes?[15] I do not know, never shall
know, how this is possible. If a cannon shot carried off their usher's
head, nay, carried off but his rod's head, at their room door, they
would not round their sentences, I fancy, in asking where the shot
came from; but because these infinite masses of advancing slaughter
are a few hundred miles distant from them, they can speak their stage
speeches out in content. Mr. Gladstone must go to places, it seems,
before he can feel! Let him go to Alsen, as he went to Naples,[16]
and quote Virgil to the Prussian army. The English mind, judging by
your leaders, seems divided between the German-cannon nuisance and the
Savoyard street-organ nuisance; but was there ever hurdy-gurdy like
this dissonance of eternal talk?[17] The Savoyard at least grinds his
handle one way, but these classical discords on the double pipe, like
Mr. Kinglake's two tunes--past and present[18]--on Savoy and Denmark,
need stricter police interference, it seems to me! The cession of
Savoy was the peaceful present of a few crags, goats, and goatherds by
one king to another; it was also fair pay for fair work, and, in the
profoundest sense, no business of ours. Whereupon Mr. Kinglake mewed
like a moonstruck cat going to be made a mummy of for Bubastis. But we
saw the noble Circassian nation murdered, and never uttered word for
them. We saw the noble Polish nation sent to pine in ice, and never
struck blow for them. Now the nation of our future Queen calls to us
for help in its last agony, and we round sentences and turn our backs.
Sir, I have no words for these things, because I have no hope. It is
not these squeaking puppets who play before us whom we have to accuse;
it is not by cutting the strings of them that we can redeem our deadly
error.
We English, as a nation, know not, and care not to know, a single broad
or basic principle of human justice. We have only our instincts to
guide us. We will hit anybody again who hits us. We will take care of
our own families and our own pockets; and we are characterized in our
present phase of enlightenment mainly by rage in speculation, lavish
expenditure on suspicion or panic, generosity whereon generosity is
useless, anxiety for the souls of savages, regardlessness of those
of civilized nations, enthusiasm for liberation of blacks, apathy
to enslavement of whites, proper horror of regicide, polite respect
for populicide, sympathy with those whom we can no longer serve, and
reverence for the dead, whom we have ourselves delivered to death.
I am, Sir, your faithful servant,
J. RUSKIN.
DENMARK HILL, _July_ 6.
FOOTNOTES:
[14] Lord Townsend's letter was upon "The Circassian Exodus," and
pointed out that a committee appointed in 1862 with the object of
aiding the tribes of the Caucasus against Russia had failed in
obtaining subscriptions, whilst that of 1864, for relieving the
sufferers when resistance had become impossible, was more successful.
"The few bestowed their sympathy upon the struggle for life; the many
reserved theirs for the agonies of death.... To which side, I would
ask, do reason and justice incline?" After commenting on the "tardy
consolation for an evil which we have neglected to avert," and after
remarking that "in the national point of view the case of Poland is an
exact counterpart to that of Circassia," the letter thus concluded:
"Against such a state of things it is surely time for all who feel as I
do to protest."
[15] The debate (July 4, 1864) was upon the Danish question and
the policy of the Government, and took place just after the end
of a temporary armistice and the resumption of hostilities by the
bombardment of Alsen, in the Dano-Prussian war. Alsen was taken two
days after the publication of this letter. The "two English gentlemen"
were Mr. D'Israeli and Mr. Gladstone (at this time Chancellor of the
Exchequer), the latter of whom had quoted the lines from the sixth
Æneid (ll. 489-491):
"At Danaum proceres Agamemnoniæque phalanges
Ut vidêre virum fulgentiaque arma per umbras
Ingenti trepidare metu."
[16] In 1850, when, being at Naples, Mr. Gladstone interested himself
deeply in the cause and miserable condition of the political prisoners,
and subsequently addressed two letters on the subject to Lord Aberdeen
(see "Letters to Lord Aberdeen on the prisoners of the Neapolitan
Government:" Murray, 1851).
[17] The _Morning Post_ of July 6 contained amongst its leaders one on
Denmark and Germany, and another on London street-organs, the nuisance
of which had been recently brought before the House of Commons by Mr.
M. T. Bass (M.P. for Derby).
[18] Mr. Alexander William Kinglake, M.P. for Bridgewater. He spoke at
the above-mentioned debate, and had also taken strong interest and part
in the cession of Savoy to France by Sardinia in 1860.
[From "The Daily Telegraph," December 20, 1865.]
_THE JAMAICA INSURRECTION._[19]
_To the Editor of "The Daily Telegraph."_
SIR: Will you allow me, in this informal manner, to express what I
should have wished to express by signature of the memorial you publish
to-day from Huddersfield[20] respecting the Jamaica insurrection,
and to thank you for your excellent article of the 15th December on
the same subject. I am compelled to make this request, because I see
my friend Mr. Thomas Hughes has been abetting the Radical movement
against Governor Eyre; and as I employed what little influence I have
with the London workmen to aid the return of Mr. Hughes for Lambeth,
I may perhaps be thought to concur with him in every line of action
he may see fit subsequently to adopt. Permit me, then, once for all,
through your widely-read columns, to say that I did what I could
towards the return both of Mr. J. S. Mill and of Mr. Hughes,[21] not
because I held with them in all their opinions, or even in the main
principle of their opinions, but because I knew they had a principle
of opinions; that they were honest, thoughtful, and benevolent men;
and far worthier to be in Parliament (even though it might be in
opposition to many causes I had at heart) than any other candidates I
knew. They are my opponents in many things, though I thought better of
them both than that they would countenance this fatuous outcry against
Governor Eyre. But in most directions of thought and action they
are for Liberty, and I am for Lordship; they are Mob's men and I am
a King's man. Yes, sir, I am one of those almost forgotten creatures
who shrivel under your daily scorn; I am a "Conservative," and hope
forever to be a Conservative in the deepest sense--a Re-former, not a
De-former. Not that I like slavery, or object to the emancipation of
any kind or number of blacks in due place and time. But I understand
something more by "slavery" than either Mr. J. S. Mill or Mr. Hughes;
and believe that white emancipation not only ought to precede, but must
by law of all fate precede, black emancipation. I much dislike the
slavery, to man, of an African laborer, with a spade on his shoulder;
but I more dislike the slavery, to the devil, of a Calabrian robber
with a gun on his shoulder. I dislike the American serf-economy, which
separates, occasionally, man and wife; but I more dislike the English
serf-economy, which prevents men from being able to have wives at all.
I dislike the slavery which obliges women (if it does) to carry their
children over frozen rivers; but I more dislike the slavery which makes
them throw their children into wells. I would willingly hinder the
selling of girls on the Gold Coast; but primarily, if I might, would
hinder the selling of them in Mayfair. And, finally, while I regret
the need that may exist among savages in a distant island for their
governor to do his work sharply and suddenly on them, I far more regret
the need among men of race and capacity for the work of governors when
they have no governor to give it them. Of all dishonorable and impious
captivities of this age, the darkest was that of England to Russia, by
which she was compelled to refuse to give Greece a King when Greece
besought one from her, and to permit that there should be set on the
Acropolis throne no Governor Eyre, nor anything like him, but such
a shadow of King as the black fates cast upon a nation for a curse,
saying, "Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child!"[22]
Let the men who would now deserve well of England reserve their
impeachments, or turn them from those among us who have saved colonies
to those who have destroyed nations.
I am, Sir, yours, etc.,
J. RUSKIN.[23]
DENMARK HILL, _Dec._ 19.
FOOTNOTES:
[19] The outcry against Governor Eyre for the course he took in
suppressing the negro insurrection at Morant Bay, Jamaica, in 1865, is
still within the memory of the general public. Mr. Ruskin attended and
spoke at the meetings of the Eyre Defence Fund, to which Mr. Carlyle
(see note at the end of this letter) gave his warm support. Amongst
those who most strongly deprecated the course taken by Governor Eyre
were, as this letter implies, Mr. John Stuart Mill (Chairman of the
Jamaica Committee) and Mr. Thomas Hughes.
[20] Signed by 273 persons resident in and near Huddersfield. (_Daily
Telegraph_, December 19, 1865.)
[21] Mr. Mill had been recently returned for Westminster, and Mr.
Hughes for Lambeth.
[22] The present king of Greece was only eighteen years of age when,
after the protocol of England, Russia, and France on the preceding day,
he accepted, June 6, 1863, the crown of Greece.
[23] It is of interest to remark that Mr. Carlyle, in a letter to Mr.
Hamilton Hume, Hon. Sec. of the "Eyre Defence Fund" (published in
the _Daily Telegraph_ of September 12, 1866), expressed himself as
follows: "The clamor raised against Governor Eyre appears to me to
be disgraceful to the good sense of England; ... penalty and clamor
are not the things this Governor merits from any of us, but honor and
thanks, and wise imitation.... The whole weight of my conviction and
good wishes is with you." Mr. Carlyle was, with Sir Roderick Murchison,
one of the two vice-presidents of the Defence Committee. (See "The
History of the Jamaica Case," by G. W. Finlason: London, 1869, p. 369.)
[From "The Daily Telegraph," October 7, 1870.]
_THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR._
_To the Editor of "The Daily Telegraph."_
SIR: My friends ask me why I speak no word about this war,
supposing--like vain friends as they are--that I might have some poor
influence of intercession for filigree-work, French clocks, and other
tender articles of vertu, felt at this moment to be in grave danger.
But, in the first place, I know that the just Fates will reward no
intercession, either for human life or chinaware, until their will
has been accomplished upon all of us. In the second, I know also that
the German armies will spare what they can, and think they ought,
without taking advice of me. In the third, I have said long ago--no one
listening--the best I had to say on these matters.
But, after your notice to-day of the escape of M. Edouard Frère,[24]
whose gentle power I was, I believe, the first to recognize publicly in
England, it is possible that some of your readers may care to look back
at what I wrote of modern war four years ago, and to know the aspect it
takes to me, now that it has come to pass.
If you will reprint these few following sentences for me from the
"Crown of Wild Olive,"[25] I shall be able to-morrow to put what I
would add to them briefly enough to claim little space in your columns:
If you have to take away masses of men from all industrial
employment--to feed them by the labor of others--to move them, and
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 harbors; 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 fragments of 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?
That, I say, is _modern_ war--scientific war--chemical and mechanical
war--worse even than the savage's poisoned arrow. And yet you will tell
me, perhaps, that any other war than this is impossible now. It may be
so; the progress of science cannot, perhaps, be otherwise registered
than by new facilities of destruction; and the brotherly love of our
enlarging Christianity be only proved by multiplication of murder.
But the wonder has always been great to me that heroism has never been
supposed consistent with the practice of supplying people with food,
or clothes, but only with that of quartering one's self upon them for
food, and stripping them of their clothes. Spoiling of armor is an
heroic deed in all ages; but the selling of clothes, old or new, has
never taken any color of magnanimity. Yet one does not see why feeding
the hungry and clothing the naked should ever become base businesses
even when engaged in on a large scale. If one could contrive to attach
the notion of conquest to _them_ anyhow? so that, supposing there were
anywhere an obstinate race, who refused to be comforted, one might
take some pride in giving them compulsory comfort, and, as it were,
"occupying a country" with one's gifts, instead of one's armies? If
one could only consider it as much a victory to get a barren field
sown as to get an eared field stripped; and contend who should build
villages, instead of who should "carry" them? Are not all forms of
heroism conceivable in doing these serviceable deeds? You doubt who
is strongest? It might be ascertained by push of spade as well as
push of sword. Who is wisest? There are witty things to be thought of
in planning other business than campaigns. Who is bravest? There are
always the elements to fight with, stronger than men; and nearly as
merciless.
And, then, observe farther, this true power, the power of saving,
depends neither on multitude of men, nor on extent of territory. We
are continually assuming that nations become strong according to their
numbers. They indeed become so, if those numbers can be made of one
mind. But how are you sure you can stay them in one mind, and keep them
from having north and south minds? Grant them unanimous, how know you
they will be unanimous in right? If they are unanimous in wrong, the
more they are, essentially the weaker they are. Or, suppose that they
can neither be of one mind, nor of two minds, but can only be of _no_
mind? Suppose they are a mere helpless mob, tottering into precipitant
catastrophe, like a wagon-load of stones when the wheel comes off?
Dangerous enough for their neighbors certainly, but not "powerful."
Neither does strength depend on extent of territory, any more than
upon number of population. Take up your masses, put the cluster of
the British Isles beside the mass of South America, and then consider
whether any race of men need consider how much ground they stand upon.
The strength is in the men, and in their unity and virtue, not in
their standing-room. A little group of wise hearts is better than a
wilderness full of fools; and only that nation gains true territory
which gains itself.
I am, Sir, your faithful servant,
J. RUSKIN.
DENMARK HILL, S.E., _Oct._ 6.
FOOTNOTES:
[24] M. Edouard Frère and Mdlle. Rosa Bonheur were allowed to leave
Paris and pass the lines of the Prussian army after the blockade of
the French capital had been begun. For Mr. Ruskin's early recognition
of M. Frère's power, see the "Academy Notes," No. II. (1856), p. 47,
where some "cottage studies" are spoken of as "quite unequalled in
sincerity and truth of conception, though somewhat dimly painted;"--No.
III. (1857), p. 58, where his pictures are said to "unite the depth of
Wordsworth, the grace of Reynolds, and the holiness of Angelico;"--and
No. IV. (1858), p. 33, where this last expression of praise is
emphasized and at some length explained.
[25] See for the first two paragraphs of extracts following pp. 170,
171 of the original, and §§ 102-3 of the 1873 edition of the "Crown of
Wild Olive;" for the third paragraph, pp. 116-118, and § 74; and for
the last two paragraphs, pp. 186, 187, and §§ 113, 114, respectively,
of those two editions.
[From "The Daily Telegraph," October 8, 1870.]
_THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR._
_To the Editor of "The Daily Telegraph."_
SIR: As I am always blamed if I approach my subject on any but its
picturesque side, it is well for me that in to-day's _Times_ I find
it announced that at Strasburg the Picture Gallery--with the pictures
in it?--the Library--with the books in it?--and the Theatre, with
certainly two hundred persons in it, have been burnt to the ground
under an auxiliary cannonade, the flames at night being "a tempting
target." It is true that in your columns I find the consolatory news
that the Parisians are repairing those losses by casting a bronze
Strasburg;[26] but if, as a poor art professor, I may venture an
opinion, I would fain suggest to them that if their own picture
gallery, with the pictures and bits of marble in it--Venus of Melos
and the like--and their own Library--Royal, Impériale, Nationale, or
whatever they now call it--should presently become tempting targets
also by the light of their own flames, the casting of a bronze Paris,
in even the most imposing of attitudes, will scarcely redeem their
loss, were it but to the admiring eyes of Paris herself.
There is yet another letter in the _Times_[27] of more importance than
the one from Strasburg. It is headed, "The Difficulties of Neutrality,"
dated Bonn, and anticipates part of what I was going to say; for the
rest, the lessons of the war, as I read them, are briefly these.
As to its cause, neither the French nation nor their Emperor brought on
war by any present will of their own. Neither of them were capable of a
will at all--far less of executing it. The nation has since declared,
by submission, with acclaim, to a change of Government which for the
time renders all political treaty with it practically impossible,
that during the last twenty years it has been deceived or subdued
into obedience to a man for whom it had no respect, and who had no
hereditary claim to the throne. What "will" or responsibility of action
can be expected from a nation which confesses this of itself? On the
other hand, the Emperor, be his motives never so selfish, could only
have hoped to save his dynasty by compliance with the passions of a
populace which he knew would overthrow it in the first hour of their
mortification. It is in these vain passions and the falsehoods on
which they have fed that we must look for the deep roots of all this
misery. Since the days of the First Empire, no cottage in France has
been without its Napoleonic picture and legend, fostering one and the
same faith in the heart of every peasant boy, that there is no glory
but in battle; and since the founding of the Second Empire no street
of any city has risen into its foolish magnificence without collateral
proclamation that there was no pleasure but in vice.
Then, secondly, for the actual question of the war: it is a simple
and testing struggle between pure Republicanism on the one side,
expressed in the most exquisite, finished, and exemplary anarchy, yet
achieved under--earth--and one of the truest Monarchies and schools of
honor and obedience yet organized under heaven. And the secret of its
strength, we have to note, is essentially pacific; for all the wars
of the Great Friedrich would have passed away resultless--as great
wars usually do--had it not been for this pregnant fact at the end
of them: "All his artillery horses are parted into plough-teams, and
given to those who otherwise can get none" (Carlyle, vol. vi., first
edition, p. 350)--that 21st book on the repair of Prussia being of
extant literature the most important piece for us to read and digest
in these days of "raising the poor without gifts"--never asking who
first let them fall--and of turning workmen out of dockyards, without
any consciousness that, of all the stores in the yard, the men were
exactly the most precious. You expressed, Sir, in your article on the
loss of the Captain,[28] a feeling common, I suppose, for once, to
all of us, that the principal loss was not the iron of the ship, but
the five hundred men in her. Perhaps, had she been of gold instead of
iron plate, public mourning might have inclined itself to the side
of the metal. But how if the whole British public should be itself
at this instant afloat in a captain-less Captain, built of somewhat
dirty yet substantial gold, and in extremest peril of turning bottom
upwards? Which will be the end, indeed, unless the said public quickly
perceive that their hope must be, not in docks nor ships, but in men.
They, and they only, are our guarantee for territory. Prussia herself
seems as simple as the rest of us in her talk of "guarantees." Alsace
and Lorraine, if dishonestly come by, may be honestly retaken; but if
for "guarantee," why these only? Why not Burgundy and Anjou--Auvergne
and the Limousin? Let France lose what she may, if she can but find a
Charles and Roland among her children, she will recover her empire,
though she had been beaten back to the Brêche; and if she find them
not, Germany has all the guarantee she needs in her own name, and in
her own right hand.
Let her look to it, now, that her fame be not sullied. She is pressing
her victory too far--dangerously far, as uselessly. The Nemesis
of battle may indeed be near her; greater glory she cannot win by
the taking of Paris, nor the overrunning of provinces--she only
prolongs suffering, redoubles death, extends loss, incalculable and
irremediable. But let her now give unconditional armistice, and offer
terms that France can accept with honor, and she will bear such rank
among the nations as never yet shone on Christian history.
For us, we ought to help France now, if we ever did anything, but
of course there remains for us only neutrality--selling of coke,
and silence (if we have grace enough left to keep it). I have only
broken mine to say that I am ashamed to speak as being one of a nation
regardless of its honor alike in trade and policy; poor, yet not
careful to keep even the treasure of probity--and rich, without being
able to afford itself the luxury of courage.
I am, Sir, your faithful servant,
J. RUSKIN.
_Oct._ 7.
FOOTNOTES:
[26] The _Daily Telegraph_ of Oct. 7 contained amongst its Paris news
that of the decision of the Government of National Defence to cast a
statue of the city of Strasburg in bronze, in memory of its "heroic
resistance to the enemy during a murderous siege of fifty days."
[27] This letter was signed "W. C. P.," who, after stating himself to
be an English resident in Germany, proceeded to lament the changed
position of England in the opinion of foreign nations, and especially
in that of the Germans, who no longer spoke of her, as formerly, "with
affectionate admiration or even envious respect." "And I must confess,"
concluded the letter, "that I find it difficult to answer them; for it
seems to me that we have already good reason to say, in reference to
the present struggle, 'All is lost save money.'"--_Times_, October 7,
1870.
[28] The turret ship "Captain" foundered off Cape Finisterre on
September 7, 1870. For the articles alluded to, see the _Daily
Telegraph_ of September 12 and following days.
[From "Fraser's Magazine," July, 1876, pp. 121-123.]
_MODERN WARFARE._
_To the Editor of "Fraser's Magazine."_
SIR: The article on modern warfare in your last June number[29]
contains statements of so great importance to public interest, that
I do not hesitate to ask you to spare me space for a question or two
respecting it, which by answering, your contributor may make the facts
he has brought forward more valuable for practical issues.
The statistics[30] given in the second column of page 695, on which
P. S. C. rests his "incontestable" conclusion that "battles are less
sanguinary than they were," are incomplete in this vital respect,
that they furnish us only with the proportion, and not with the total
number, of combatants slain. A barricade fight between a mob of rioters
a thousand strong, and a battery of artillery, in which fifty reformers
get shot, is not "less sanguinary" than a street quarrel between three
topers, of whom one gets knocked on the head with a pewter pot: though
no more than the twentieth part of the forces on one side fall in the
first case, and a third of the total forces engaged, in the second. Nor
could it be proved by the exhibition of these proportions of loss, that
the substitution of explosive shells, as offensive weapons, for pewter
pots, rendered wounds less painful, or war more humane.
Now, the practical difference between ancient and modern war, as
carried on by civilized nations, is, broadly, of this kind. Formerly,
the persons who had quarrelled settled their differences by the
strength of their own arms, at the head of their retainers, with
comparatively inexpensive weapons such as they could conveniently
wield; weapons which they had paid for out of their own pockets, and
with which they struck only the people they meant to strike: while,
nowadays, persons who quarrel fight at a distance, with mechanical
apparatus, for the manufacture of which they have taxed the public,
and which will kill anybody who happens to be in the way; gathering
at the same time, to put into the way of them, as large a quantity of
senseless and innocent mob as can be beguiled, or compelled, to the
slaughter. So that, in the words of your contributor, "Modern armies
are not now small fractions of the population whence they are drawn;
they represent--in fact are--whole nations in arms." I have only to
correct this somewhat vague and rhetorical statement by pointing out
that the persons in arms, led out for mutual destruction, are by no
means "the whole nation" on either side, but only the individuals of it
who are able-bodied, honest, and brave, selected to be shot, from among
its invalids, rogues, and cowards.
The deficiencies in your contributor's evidence as to the totality of
loss do not, however, invalidate his conclusion that, out of given
numbers engaged, the mitrailleuse kills fewer than the musket.[31]
It is, nevertheless, a very startling conclusion, and one not to be
accepted without closer examination of the statistics on which it is
based. I will, therefore, tabulate them in a simpler form, which the
eye can catch easily, omitting only one or two instances which add
nothing to the force of the evidence.
In the six under-named battles of bygone times, there fell, according
to your contributor's estimate, out of the total combatants--
At Austerlitz ⅐
Jena ⅙
Waterloo ⅕
Marengo ¼
Salamanca ⅓
Eylau 1/2½
while in the under-named five recent battles the proportion of loss was--
At Königgratz 1/15
Gravelotte 1/12
Solferino 1/11
Worth 1/11
Sedan 1/10
Now, there is a very important difference in the character of the
battles named in these two lists. Every one of the first six was
decisive, and both sides knew that it must be so when the engagement
began, and did their best to win. But Königgratz was only decisive
by sudden and appalling demonstration of the power of a new weapon.
Solferino was only half fought, and not followed up because the French
Emperor had exhausted his _corps d'élite_ at Magenta, and could not
(or, at least, so it is reported) depend on his troops of the line.
Worth was an experiment; Sedan a discouraged ruin; Gravelotte was, I
believe, well contested, but I do not know on what extent of the line,
and we have no real evidence as to the power of modern mechanics for
death, until the proportions are calculated, not from the numbers
engaged, but from those under fire for equal times. Now, in all the
upper list of battles, probably every man of both armies was under
fire, and some of the regiments under fire for half the day; while
in the lower list of battles, only fragments of the line were hotly
engaged, and the dispute on any point reaching its intensity would be
ended in half an hour.
That the close of contest is so rapid may indeed be one of the
conditions of improvement in our military system alleged by your
correspondent; and the statistics he has brought forward do indeed
clearly prove one of two things--either that modern weapons do not
kill, or that modern soldiers do not fight as effectually as in
old times. I do not know if this is thought a desirable change in
military circles; but I, as a poor civilian, beg to express my strong
objection to being taxed six times over what I used to be, either for
the equipment of soldiers who rarely fight, or the manufacture of
weapons which rarely kill. It may be perfectly true that our last
cruise on the Baltic was "less sanguinary" than that which concluded
in Copenhagen. But we shook hands with the Danes after fighting
them, and the differences between us were ended: while our expensive
contemplation of the defences of Cronstadt leaves us still in daily
dread of an inspection by the Russian of those of Calcutta.
It is true that the ingenuity of our inventors is far from being
exhausted, and that in a few years more we may be able to destroy a
regiment round a corner and bombard a fleet over the horizon; but I
believe the effective result of these crowning scientific successes
will only be to confirm the at present partial impression on the minds
of military and naval officers, that their duty is rather to take
care of their weapons than to use them. "England will expect" of her
generals and admirals to maintain a dignified moral position as far as
possible out of the enemy's sight: and in a perfectly scientific era
of seamanship we shall see two adverse fleets affected by a constant
law of mutual repulsion at distances of two or three hundred miles;
while in either squadron, an occasional collision between the leading
ships, or inexplicable foundering of the last improved ones, will make
these prudential manœuvres on the whole as destructive of the force,
and about ten times more costly to the pocket, of the nation, than the
ancient, and, perhaps, more honorable tactics of poorly-armed pugnacity.
There is, however, one point touched upon in P. S. C.'s letter, to
me the most interesting of all, with respect to which the data for
accurate comparison of our former and present systems are especially
desirable, though it never seems to have occurred to your correspondent
to collect them--the estimates, namely, of the relative destruction of
civil property.
Of wilful destruction, I most thankfully acknowledge the cessation
in Christian warfare; and in the great change between the day of
the sack of Magdeburg and that of the march into Paris, recognize
a true sign of the approach of the reign of national peace. But of
inevitable destruction--of loss inflicted on the peasant by the merely
imperative requirements and operations of contending armies--it
will materially hasten the advent of such peace, if we ascertain the
increasing pressure during our nominally mollified and merciful war.
The agricultural losses sustained by France in one year are estimated
by your correspondent at one hundred and seventy millions of pounds.
Let him add to this sum the agricultural loss necessitated in the
same year throughout Germany, through the withdrawal of capital from
productive industry, for the maintenance of her armies; and of labor
from it by their composition; and, for third item, add the total
cost of weapons, horses, and ammunition on both sides; and let him
then inform us whether the cost, thus summed, of a year's actual war
between two European States, is supposed by military authorities to
be fairly representative of that which the settlement of political
dispute between any two such Powers, with modern instruments of battle,
will on an average, in future, involve. If so, I will only venture
further to suggest that the nations minded thus to try their quarrel
should at least raise the stakes for their match before they make
the ring, instead of drawing bills for them upon futurity. For that
the money-lenders whose pockets are filled, while everybody else's
are emptied, by recent military finance, should occultly exercise
irresistible influence, not only on the development of our--according
to your contributor--daily more harmless armaments, but also on the
deliberation of Cabinets, and passions of the populace, is inevitable
under present circumstances; and the exercise of such influence,
however advantageous to contractors and projectors, can scarcely be
held consistent either with the honor of a Senate or the safety of a
State.
I am, Sir,
Your faithful servant,
J. RUSKIN.
P.S.--I wish I could get a broad approximate estimate of the
expenditure in money, and loss of men by France and Prussia in the
respective years of Jena and Sedan, and by France and Austria in the
respective years of Arcola and Solferino.
FOOTNOTES:
[29] "Remarks on Modern Warfare." By a Military Officer. The article
was signed "P. S. C."
[30] See the tables given in this letter (pp. 30 and 31).
[31] "The proportion of killed and wounded," wrote P. S. C., "was far
greater with the old-fashioned weapons than it is at the present day."
LETTERS ON POLITICAL ECONOMY.
THE DEPRECIATION OF GOLD. 1863.
THE LAW OF SUPPLY AND DEMAND. 1864.
(Three letters: October 26 and 29, and November 2.)
MR. RUSKIN AND PROFESSOR HODGSON. 1873.
(Two letters: November 8 and 15.)
STRIKES _v._ ARBITRATION. 1865.
WORK AND WAGES. 1865.
(Five letters: April 20, 22, and 29, and May 4 and 20.)
THE STANDARD OF WAGES. 1867.
HOW THE RICH SPEND THEIR MONEY. 1873.
(Three letters: January 23, 28, and 30.)
COMMERCIAL MORALITY. 1875.
THE DEFINITION OF WEALTH. 1875.
THE PRINCIPLES OF PROPERTY. 1877.
ON COÖPERATION. (Two letters.) 1879-80.
LETTERS ON POLITICAL ECONOMY.
[From "The Times," October 8, 1863.]
_THE DEPRECIATION OF GOLD._
_To the Editor of "The Times."_
SIR: Being out of the way of my letters, I did not, till now, see your
excellent article of the 23d September on the depreciation of gold.[32]
Will you allow me, thus late, a very few words in confirmation of your
statement of the insufficiency of the evidence hitherto offered on that
subject?
The market value of "a pound" depends less on the supply of gold than
on the extravagance or economy of the persons holding documentary
currency (that is to say, claim to goods). Suppose, for instance, that
I hold stock to the value of £500 a year;--if I live on a hundred a
year, and lay by four hundred, I (for the time) keep down the prices of
all goods to the distributed amount of £400 a year, or, in other words,
neutralize the effect on the market of 400 pounds in gold imported
annually from Australia. If, instead of laying by this sum in paper, I
choose to throw it into bullion (whether gold-plate or coin does not
matter), I not only keep down the price of goods, but raise the price
of gold as a commodity, and neutralize 800 pounds' worth of imported
gold. But if I annually spend my entire 500 (unproductively) I annually
raise the price of goods by that amount, and neutralize a correspondent
diminution in the supply of gold. If I spend my 500 productively,
that is to say, so as to produce as much as, or more than I consume, I
either leave the market as I find it, or by the excess of production
increase the value of gold.
Similarly, whatever I lay by will, as it is ultimately spent by my
successors, productively or unproductively, in that degree (_cœteris
paribus_) increase or lower the value of gold. These agencies of daily
economy have so much more power over the market than the supply from
the mine that no statistics of which we are yet in possession are (at
least in their existing form) sufficient to prove the dependence of
any given phenomena of the market on the rate of metallic supply. The
destruction of property in the American war and our European amusements
in the manufacture of monster guns and steel "backings" lower the
value of money far more surely and fatally than an increased supply
of bullion, for the latter may very possibly excite parallel force of
productive industry.
But the lowered value of money is often (and this is a very curious
case of economical back current) indicated, not so much by a rise in
the price of goods, as by a fall in that of labor. The household lives
as comfortably as it did on a hundred a year, but the master has to
work half as hard again to get it. This increase of toil is to an
active nation often a kind of play; men go into it as into a violent
game; fathers of families die quicker, and the gates of orphan asylums
are choked with applicants; distress and crime spread and fester
through a thousand silent channels; but there is no commercial or
elementary convulsion; no chasm opens into the abyss through the London
clay; no gilded victim is asked of the Guards; the Stock-Exchange falls
into no hysterics; and the old lady of Threadneedle Street does not so
much as ask for "My fan, Peter."
I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
J. RUSKIN.
CHAMOUNIX, _Oct._ 2.
FOOTNOTES:
[32] See one of the leading articles in _The Times_ of Sept. 23, 1863,
upon the then panic as to the depreciation of gold, excited by the
considerable fresh discoveries of the precious metal in California and
Australia.
[From "The Daily Telegraph," October 28, 1864.]
_THE LAW OF SUPPLY AND DEMAND._
_To the Editor of "The Daily Telegraph."_
SIR: In your valuable article of to-day on the strike of the colliers,
while you lay down the true and just law[33] respecting all such
combinations, you take your stand, in the outset, on a maxim of
political economy, which, however trite, stands yet--if I am not
deceived--in need of much examination and qualification. "Labor," you
say, like every other vendible commodity, "depends for its value on
the relation of supply to demand." But, Sir, might it not be asked by
any simple and practical person, who had heard this assertion for the
first time--as I hope all practical persons will some day hear it for
the last time--"Yes; but what does demand depend upon, and what does
supply depend upon?" If, for instance, all death-beds came to resemble
that so forcibly depicted in your next following article, and, in
consequence, the demand for gin were unlimitedly increased towards the
close of human life,[34] would this demand necessitate, or indicate,
a relative increase in the "value" of gin as a necessary article of
national wealth, and liquid foundation of national prosperity? Or might
we not advisably make some steady and generally understood distinction
between the terms "value" and "price," and determine at once whether
there be, or be not, such a thing as intrinsic "value" or goodness in
some things, and as intrinsic un-value or badness in other things; and
as value extrinsic, or according to use, in all things? and whether a
demand for intrinsically good things, and a corresponding knowledge
of their use, be not conditions likely, on the whole, to tend towards
national wealth? and whether a demand for intrinsically bad things,
and relative experience in their use, be not conditions likely to lead
to quite the reverse of national wealth, in exact proportion to the
facility of the supply of the said bad things? I should be entirely
grateful to you, Sir, or to any of your correspondents, if you or they
would answer these short questions clearly for me.
I am, Sir, yours, etc.,
J. RUSKIN.[35]
DENMARK HILL, _Oct._ 26.
FOOTNOTES:
[33] The strike was amongst the South Staffordshire colliers: the law
laid down in the article that of free trade.
[34] Upon the then recent and miserable death of an Irish gentleman,
who had been an habitual hard-drinker.
[35] To this letter an answer (_Daily Telegraph_, October 29) was
attempted by "Economist," writing from "Lloyds, Oct. 28," stating that
"Value in political economy means exchangeable value, not intrinsic
value." The rest of his letter is given in Mr. Ruskin's reply to it.
[From "The Daily Telegraph," October 31, 1864.]
_THE LAW OF SUPPLY AND DEMAND._
_To the Editor of "The Daily Telegraph."_
SIR: I am grateful to your correspondent "Economist" for trying his
hand on me, and will be a docile pupil; but I hope his hand is not
quite untried hitherto, for it would waste your space, and my time,
and your readers' patience, if he taught me what I had afterwards to
unlearn. But I think none of these will be wasted if he answers my
questions clearly; there are, I am sure, many innocent persons who,
like myself, will be glad of the information.
1. He tells me, then, in the outset, "The intrinsic value of
commodities is a question outside political economy."
Is that an axiom for all political economists? and may I put it down
for future reference? I particularly wish to be assured of this.
2. Assuming, for the present, that I may so set it down, and that
exchangeable value is the only subject of politico-economical inquiry,
I proceed to my informant's following statement:
"The" (question) "of intrinsic value belongs to the domain of
philosophy, morals, or statecraft. The intrinsic value of anything
depends on its qualities; the exchangeable value depends on how much
there is of it, and how much people want it."
(This "want" of it never, of course, in anywise depending on its
qualities.)
Μανθανω. Accordingly, in that ancient and rashly-speculative adage,
"Venture a sprat to catch a herring," it is only assumed that people
will always want herrings rather than sprats, and that there will
always be fewer of them. No reference is involved, according to
economists, to the relative sizes of a sprat and herring.
Farther: Were a fashionable doctor to write an essay on sprats,
and increase their display at West-end tables to that extent that
unseasonable sprats became worth a guinea a head, while herrings
remained at the old nursery rate of one and a half for three-halfpence,
would my "recognition" of the value of sprats in paying a guinea for
one enable me to dine off it better than I should off that mysterious
eleven-penny worth of herring? Or to take a more elevated instance.
There is now on my room wall a water-color drawing, which was once
bought for £30, and for which any dealer would to-morrow give me £300.
The drawing is intrinsically worth about one-tenth of what it was when
bought for £30, the sky having faded out of it, and many colors having
changed elsewhere. But men's minds have changed like the colors, and
Lord A. or Sir John B. are now ready to give me £300 instead of £30 for
it.
Now, I want to know what it matters to "Economist," or to the
Economical Society he (as I understand) represents, or to the British
nation generally, whether Lord A. has the bit of colored paper and I
the £300, or Lord A. the £300 and I the bit of paper. The pounds are
there, and the paper is there: what does it nationally matter which of
us have which?
Farther: What does it nationally matter whether Lord A. gives me £30
or £300 on the exchange? (Mind, I do not say it does not matter--I
only want "Economist" to tell me if it does, and how it does.) In one
case my lord has £270 more to spend; in the other I have. What does it
signify which of us has?
Farther: To us, the exchangers, of what use is "Economist's"
information that the rate of exchange depends on the "demand and
supply" of colored paper and pounds? No ghost need come from the grave
to tell us that. But if any economical ghost would tell my lord how to
get more pounds, or me how to get more drawings, it might be to the
purpose.
But yet farther, passing from specialties to generals:
Let the entire property of the nation be enumerated in the several
articles of which it consists--_a_, _b_, _c_, _d_, etc.; we will say
only three, for convenience sake. Then all the national property
consists of _a_ + _b_ + _c_.
I ask, first, what _a_ is worth.
"Economist" answers (suppose) 2 _b_.
I ask, next, what _b_ is worth.
"Economist" answers (suppose) 3 _c_.
I ask, next, what _c_ is worth.
"Economist" answers--_a/b_.
Many thanks. That is certainly Cocker's view of it.
I ask, finally, What is it _all_ worth?
"Economist" answers, 1⅔ _a_, or 3⅓ _b_, or 10 _c_.
Thanks again. But now, intrinsic value not being in "Economist's"
domain, but--if I chance to be a philosopher--in mine, I may any day
discover any given intrinsic value to belong to any one of these
articles.
Suppose I find, for instance, the value of _c_ to be intrinsically
zero, then the entire national property = 10_c_ = intrinsically 0.
Shall I be justified in this conclusion?
3. In relation to the question of strikes, the difficulty, you told
me yourself, Mr. Editor[36] (and doubtless "Economist" will tell me
also), depends simply on supply and demand: that is to say, on an
under-supply of wages and an over-supply of laborers. Profoundest
thanks again; but I, poor blundering, thick-headed collier, feel
disposed further to ask, "On what do this underness and overness of
supply depend?" Have they any remote connection with marriage, or with
improvidence, or with avarice, or with accumulativeness, or any other
human weaknesses out of the ken of political economy? And, whatever
they arise from, how are they to be dealt with? It appears to me, poor
simple collier, that the shortest way of dealing with this "darned"
supply of laborers will be by knocking some of them down, or otherwise
disabling them for the present. Why is this mode of regulating the
supply interdicted to me? and what have Economists to do with the
morality of any proceeding whatever? and, in the name of economy
generally, what else can I do?[37]
I am, Sir, yours, etc.,
J. RUSKIN.
DENMARK HILL, _Oct._ 29. [Monday.]
FOOTNOTES:
[36] See _ante_, p. 39.
[37] "Economist" does not seem to have continued his argument. A
reply to this letter was however attempted by "John Plummer," writing
from Kettering, and dealing with the over-supply of laborers and
under-supply of wages, and Mr. Ruskin's possible views on the matter.
The next letter ended the correspondence.
[From "The Daily Telegraph," November 8, 1864.]
_THE LAW OF SUPPLY AND DEMAND._
_To the Editor of "The Daily Telegraph."_
SIR: Having, unfortunately, occupation enough in my own business for
all hours of the day, I cannot undertake to reply to the general
correspondence which might, in large supply to my limited demand,
propose itself in your columns. If my first respondent, "Economist," or
any other person learned in his science, will give me direct answers
to the direct questions asked in my Monday's letter, I may, with your
permission, follow the points at issue farther; if not, I will trouble
you no more. Your correspondent of to-day, Mr. Plummer, may ascertain
whether I confuse the terms "value" and "price" by reference to the
bottom of the second column in page 787 of "Fraser's Magazine" for
June, 1862. Of my opinions respecting the treatment of the working
classes he knows nothing, and can guess nothing.[38]
I am, Sir, yours, etc.,
J. RUSKIN.
DENMARK HILL, _Nov._ 2.
FOOTNOTES:
[38] In the "Essays on Political Economy," since reprinted as "Munera
Pulveris." See p. 10, § 12 of that book, where the passage is printed
in italics: "The reader must, by anticipation, be warned against
confusing value with cost, or with price. Value is the life-giving
power of anything; cost, the quantity of labor required to produce it;
price, the quantity of labor which its possessor will take in exchange
for it."
[From "The Scotsman," November 10, 1873.]
_MR. RUSKIN AND PROFESSOR HODGSON._
CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, OXFORD,
_Nov. 8th_, 1873.
_To the Editor of "The Scotsman."_
SIR: In your impression of the 6th inst. I find a report of a lecture
delivered by Professor Hodgson in the University of Edinburgh on the
subject of "Supply and Demand," in which the Professor speaks of my
"denunciations" of the principles he had expounded. Permit me, in
a matter respecting which accuracy is of more importance to others
than to myself, to correct the Professor's expression. I have never
"denounced" the principles expounded by the Professor. I have simply
stated that no such principles exist; that no "law of supply and
demand," as expounded by Professor Hodgson and modern economists, ever
did or can exist.
Professor Hodgson, as reported in your columns, states that "demand
regulates supply." He does not appear to entertain the incomparably
more important economical question, "What regulates demand?" But
without pressing upon him that first question of all, I am content
absolutely to contradict and to challenge him before the University of
Edinburgh to maintain his statement that "demand regulates supply," and
together with it (if he has ventured to advance it) the correlative
proposition, "supply regulates demand."
A. Demand does not regulate supply.
For instance--there is at this moment a larger demand for champagne
wine in England and Scotland than there was ten years ago; and a much
more limited supply of champagne wine.
B. Supply does not regulate demand.
For instance--I can name many districts in Scotland where the supply of
pure water is larger than in other namable localities, but where the
inhabitants drink less water and more whiskey than in other namable
localities.
I do not therefore denounce the so-called law of supply and demand,
but I absolutely deny the existence of such law; and I do in the very
strongest terms denounce the assertion of the existence of such a law
before the University of Edinburgh as disgraceful both to its assertor
and to the University, unless immediate steps be taken to define, in
scientific terms, the limitations under which such statement is to be
understood.
I am, etc.,
JOHN RUSKIN.[39]
FOOTNOTES:
[39] To this letter Professor Hodgson replied by one printed in the
_Scotsman_ of November 14.
[From "The Scotsman," November 18, 1873]
_MR. RUSKIN AND PROFESSOR HODGSON._
OXFORD, _November_ 15, 1873.
_To the Editor of "The Scotsman."_
SIR: For Professor Hodgson's "undue encroachments on your space and his
own time," I leave you to answer to your readers, and the Professor to
console his class. To his criticisms on my language and temper I bow,
their defence being irrelevant to the matter in hand. Of his harmless
confusion of the word "correlative" with the word "consequent" I take
no notice; and his promise of a sifting examination of my economic
teaching I anticipate with grateful awe.[40]
But there is one sentence in his letter of real significance, and to
that alone I reply. The Professor ventured (he says) to suggest that
possibly I with others "believe that economists confused existing
demand with wise and beneficial demand, and existing supply with wise
and beneficial supply."
I do believe this. I have written all my books on political economy in
such belief. And the entire gist of them is the assertion that a real
law of relation holds between the non-existent wise demand and the
non-existent beneficial supply, but that no real law of relation holds
between the existent foolish demand and the existent mischievous supply.
That is to say (to follow Professor Hodgson with greater accuracy into
his lunar illustrations), if you ask for the moon, it does not follow
that you will get it; nor is your satisfaction more secure if you ask
for sixpence from a Poor-Law guardian; but if you limit your demand to
an honest penny, and endeavor to turn it by honest work, the divine law
of supply will, in the plurality of cases, answer that rational and
therefore divine demand.
Now, Professor Hodgson's statement, as reported in your columns, was
that "demand regulates supply." If his assertion, in his lecture, was
the qualified one, or that "wise demand regulates beneficial supply,"
your reporter is much to be blamed, the Professor's class profoundly
to be congratulated, and this correspondence is at an end; while I
look forward with deepest interest to the necessary elucidations by
the Professor of the nature of wisdom and benefit; neither of these
ideas having been yet familiar ones in common economical treatises.
But I wrote under the impression that the Professor dealt hitherto,
as it has been the boast of economists to deal, with things existent,
and not theoretical (and assuredly the practical men of this country
expect their children to be instructed by him in the laws which
govern existing things); and it is therefore only in the name of
your practical readers that I challenged him, and to-day repeat my
challenge, in terms from which I trust he will not again attempt
to escape by circumambient criticism of my works,[41] to define,
in scientific terms, the limits under which his general statement
that "supply regulates demand" is to be understood. That is to say,
whether he, as Professor of Political Economy, is about to explain
the relations (A) of rational and satiable demand with beneficial and
benevolently-directly supply; or (B) of irrational and insatiable
demand with mischievous and malevolently-directed supply; or (C) of a
demand of which he cannot explain the character with a supply of which
he cannot predict the consequence?
I am, etc.,
J. RUSKIN.
FOOTNOTES:
[40] "I hereby promise Mr. Ruskin that ere very many months are over he
shall have in print a sifting examination of his economic teaching." I
do not find, however, that Professor Hodgson fulfilled his promise.
[41] Professor Hodgson's letter had quoted, with criticism, several
passages from "Fors Clavigera," "Munera Pulveris," and "Time and Tide."
[From "The Pall Mall Gazette," April 18, 1865.]
_STRIKES v. ARBITRATION._
_To the Editor of "The Pall Mall Gazette."_
SIR: I read your _Gazette_ so attentively that I am always falling into
arrears, and have only to-day arrived at your last week's articles on
strikes, arbitration, etc., which afford me the greatest satisfaction,
but nevertheless embarrass me somewhat. Will you permit me to ask for a
word or two of further elucidation?
I am an entirely selfish person, and having the means of indulging
myself (in moderation), should, I believe, have led a comfortable life,
had it not been for occasional fits and twinges of conscience, to which
I inherit some family predisposition, and from which I suffer great
uneasiness in cloudy weather. Articles like yours of Wednesday,[42] on
the proper attention to one's own interests, are very comforting and
helpful to me; but, as I said, there are yet some points in them I do
not understand.
Of course it is right to arrange all one's business with reference
to one's own interest; but what will the practical difference
be ultimately between such arrangement and the old and simple
conscientious one? In those bygone days, I remember, one endeavored,
with such rough estimate as could be quickly made, to give one's Roland
for one's Oliver; if a man did you a service, you tried in return
to do as much for him; if he broke your head, you broke his, shook
hands, and were both the better for it. Contrariwise, on this modern
principle of self-interest, I understand very well that if a man does
me a service, I am always to do the least I can in return for it; but
I don't see how I am always to get more out of him than he gets out of
me. I dislike any references to abstract justice as much as you do, but
I cannot see my way to keeping this injustice always in my own favor;
and if I cannot, it seems to me the matter may as well be settled at
first, as it must come to be settled at last, in that disagreeably just
way.
Thus, for instance, in producing a piece of iron for the market, one
man digs it, another smelts it, another puddles it, and I sell it. We
get so much between us four; and I suppose your conscientious people
would say that the division of the pay should have some reference to
the hardness of the work, and the time spent in it. It is true that by
encouraging the diggers and puddlers to spend all they get in drink,
and by turning them off as soon as I hear they are laying by money,
it may yet be possible to get them for some time to take less than I
suppose they should have; but I cannot hide from myself that the men
are beginning to understand the game a little themselves; and if they
should, with the help of those confounded--(I beg pardon! I forgot that
one does not print such expressions in Pall Mall)--education-mongers,
learn to be men, and to look after their own business as I do mine,
what am I to do? Even at present I don't feel easy in telling them that
I ought to have more money than they because I know better how to spend
it, for even this involves a distant reference to notions of propriety
and principle which I would gladly avoid. Will you kindly tell me what
is best to be done (or said)?
I am, Sir, your obliged servant,
JOHN RUSKIN.
_Easter Monday_, 1865.
FOOTNOTES:
[42] The articles alluded to were, one upon "Strikes and Arbitration
Courts," in the _Gazette_ of Wednesday, the 12th, and the one on "The
_Times_ on Trade Arbitration," in the _Gazette_ of Thursday, the 13th.
The former dealt with the proposal to decide questions raised by
strikes by reference to courts of arbitration. Amongst the sentences
contained in it, and alluded to by Mr. Ruskin, were the following:
"Phrases about the 'principles of right and justice' are always
suspicious and generally fallacious." "The rate of wages is determined
exclusively by self-interest." "There is no such thing as a 'fair' rate
of wages or a 'just' rate of wages."
[From "The Pall Mall Gazette," April 21, 1865.]
_WORK AND WAGES._
_To the Editor of "The Pall Mall Gazette."_
SIR: I am not usually unready for controversy, but I dislike it in
spring, as I do the east wind (_pace_ Mr. Kingsley), and I both regret
having given occasion to the only dull leader which has yet[43]
appeared in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, and the necessity I am involved in
of dissecting the same, instead of a violet, on which I was about this
morning to begin operations.
But I see, Sir, that you mean fairly, and that you have careful
thinkers and writers on your staff. And I will accept your battle, if
you will fight with short swords, which is clearly your interest, for
such another article would sink the _Gazette_; and mine, for I have no
time to answer speculations on what you writers suppose my opinions may
be, "if we understand" them.
You shall understand them utterly, as I already understand yours. I
will not call yours "fallacies" _à priori_; you shall not call mine so.
I will not tell you of your "unconscious" meanings; you shall not tell
me of mine.[44] But I will ask you the plainest questions, and make
to you the plainest answers my English will admit of, on one point at
a time only, expecting you also to ask or answer as briefly, without
divergence or deprecation. And twenty lines will always contain all I
would say, at any intervals of time you choose.
For example: I said I must "dissect" your leader, meaning that I
should have to take a piece of it, as I would of my flower, and deal
with that first; then with its sequences.
I take this sentence then: "He (Mr. R.) seems to think that apart from
the question of the powers of the parties, there is some such thing
as a just rate of wages. He seems to be under the impression that the
wages ought to be proportioned, not to the supply and demand of labor
and capital, but 'to the hardship of the work and the time spent in
it.'"
Yes, Sir, I am decisively under that impression--as decisively as ever
Greek coin was under _its_ impression. You will beat me out of all
shape, if you can beat me out of this. Will you join issue on it, and
are these following statements clear enough for you, either to accept
or deny, in as positive terms?--
I. A man should in justice be paid for two hours' work twice as much as
for one hour's work, and for _n_ hour's work _n_ times as much, if the
effort be similar and continuous.
II. A man should in justice be paid for difficult or dangerous work
proportionately more than for easy and safe work, supposing the other
conditions of the work similar.
III. (And now look out, for this proposition involves the ultimate
principle of all just wages.) If a man does a given quantity of work
for me, I am bound in justice to do, or procure to be done, a precisely
equal quantity of work for him; and just trade in labor is the exchange
of equivalent quantities of labor of different kinds.
If you pause at this word "equivalent," you shall have definition
of it in my next letter. I am sure you will in fairness insert this
challenge, whether you accept it or decline.
I am, Sir, your obliged servant,
JOHN RUSKIN.[45]
DENMARK HILL, _Thursday, April_ 20.
FOOTNOTES:
[43] The _Gazette_ was at this time of little more than eight weeks'
standing. The dull leader was that in the _Gazette_ of April 19,
entitled "Masters and Men," and dealt entirely with Mr. Ruskin's letter
on strikes. The "_pace_ Mr. Kingsley" alludes, of course, to his "Ode
to the North-East Wind."
[44] The leader had begun by speaking of Mr. Ruskin's previous letter
as "embodying fallacies, pernicious in the highest degree," and
concluded by remarking how "easily and unconsciously he glided into the
true result of his principles."
[45] In reply, the _Gazette_ denied "each of the three propositions to
be true," on grounds shown in the quotations given in the following
letter.
[From "The Pall Mall Gazette," April 26, 1865.]
_WORK AND WAGES._
_To the Editor of "The Pall Mall Gazette."_
SIR: I accept your terms, and reply in the fewest words I can.
I. You "see no injustice in hiring a fly for 2_s._ 6_d._ for the first
hour and 1_s._ 6_d._ for each succeeding one." Nor I either; so far
from it, that I never give a cabman less than a shilling; which I doubt
not is your practice also, and a very proper one. The cabmen make
no objection, and you could not have given a neater instance of the
proportion of payment to labor which you deny. You pay in the first
hour for the various trouble involved in taking the man off his stand,
and for a proportion of the time during which he has waited for the
chance of your custom. That paid, you hire him by the formula which I
state, and you deny.
II. "Danger and difficulty have attractions for some men." They have,
and if, under the influence of those attractions, they choose to make
you a present of their labor, for love (in your own terms,[46] "as you
give a penny to a beggar"), you may accept the gift as the beggar does,
without question of justice. But if they do not choose to give it you,
they have a right to higher payment. My guide may perhaps, for love,
play at climbing Mont Blanc with me; if he will not, he has a right to
be paid more than for climbing the Breven.
III. "Mr. Ruskin can define justice, or any other word, as he chooses."
It is a gracious permission; but suppose justice be something more
than a word! When you derived it _jussum_[47] (falsely, for it is not
derived from _jussum_, but from the root of _jungo_), you forgot, or
ignored, that the Saxons had also a word for it, by which the English
workman still pleads for it; that the Greeks had a word for it, by
which Plato and St. Paul reasoned of it; and that the Powers of Heaven
have, presumably, an idea of it with which it may be well for "our
interests" that your definition, as well as mine, should ultimately
correspond, since their "definitions" are commonly not by a word but a
blow.
But accepting for the nonce your own conception of it as "the
fulfilment of a compulsory agreement" ("the wages" you say "which you
_force_ the men to take, and they can _force_ you to pay"), allow me
to ask your definition of force, or compulsion. As thus: (_Case_ 1.) I
agree with my friend that we will pay a visit to Mr. A. at two in the
morning. My friend agrees with me that he will hold a pistol to Mr.
A.'s head. Under those circumstances, I agree with Mr. A. that I shall
remove his plate without expression of objection on his part. Is this
agreement, in your sense, "_jussum_"? (_Case_ 2.) Mr. B. goes half
through the ice into the canal on a frosty morning. I, on the shore,
agree with Mr. B. that I shall have a hundred pounds for throwing him a
rope. Is this agreement validly "_jussum_"?
The first of these cases expresses in small compass the general nature
of arrangements under compulsory circumstances over which one of the
parties has entire control. The second, that of arrangements made under
circumstances accidentally compulsory, when the capital is in one
party's hands exclusively. For you will observe Mr. B. has no right
whatever to the use of my rope: and that capital (though it would
probably have been only the final result of my operations with respect
to Mr. A.) makes me completely master of the situation with reference
to Mr. B.
I am, Sir, your obliged servant,
JOHN RUSKIN[48]
DENMARK HILL, _Saturday_, _April_ 22, 1865.
FOOTNOTES:
[46] These "terms" were simply that the _Gazette_ should have the right
of determining how much of the proposed controversy was worth its space.
[47] In the article of April 12.
[48] For the _Gazette's_ reply to this, see the notes to the following
letter.
[From "The Pall Mall Gazette," May 2, 1865.]
_WORK AND WAGES._
_To the Editor of "The Pall Mall Gazette."_
SIR: I have not hastened my reply to your last letter, thinking that
your space at present would be otherwise occupied; having also my own
thoughts busied in various directions, such as you may fancy; yet
busied chiefly in a sad wonder, which perhaps you would not fancy. I
mourn for Mr. Lincoln,[49] as man should mourn the fate of man, when it
is sudden and supreme. I hate regicide as I do populicide--deeply, if
frenzied; more deeply, if deliberate. But my wonder is in remembering
the tone of the English people and press respecting this man during
his life; and in comparing it with their sayings of him in his death.
They caricatured and reviled him when his cause was poised in deadly
balance--when their praise would have been grateful to him, and their
help priceless. They now declare his cause to have been just, when
it needs no aid; and his purposes to have been noble, when all human
thoughts of them have become vanity, and will never so much as mix
their murmurs in his ears with the sentence of the Tribunal which has
summoned him to receive a juster praise and tenderer blame than ours.
I have twice (I see) used the word "just" inadvertently, forgetting
that it has no meaning, or may mean (you tell me) quite what we choose;
and that so far as it has a meaning, "the important question is not
whether the action is just." Indeed when I read this curious sentence
in your reply on Tuesday last, "Justice, as we use it, implies merely
the conformity of an action to any rules whatever, good or bad," I
had nearly closed the discussion by telling you that there remained no
ground on which we could meet, for the English workmen, in whose name I
wrote to you, asked, not for conformity with bad rules, but enactment
of good ones. But I will not pounce upon these careless sentences,
which you are forced to write in all haste, and at all disadvantage,
while I have the definitions and results determined through years of
quiet labor, lying ready at my hand. You never meant what you wrote
(when I said I would not tell you of unconscious meanings, I did not
promise not to tell you of unconscious wants of meanings); but it is
for you to tell _me_ what you mean by a bad rule, and what by a good
one. Of the law of the Eternal Lawgiver, it is dictated that "the
commandment is holy, and just, and good." Not merely that it is a law;
but that it is such and such a law. Are these terms senseless to you?
or do you understand by them only that the observance of that law
is generally conducive to our interests? And if so, what _are_ our
interests? Have we ever an interest in _being_ something, as well as in
getting something; may not even all getting be at last summed in being?
is it not the uttermost of interests to be just rather than unjust? Let
us leave catching at phrases, and try to look in each other's faces and
hearts; so define our thoughts; then reason from them. [See below.][50]
Yet, lest you say I evade you in generalities, here is present answer
point by point.
I. "The fare has nothing to do with the labor in preparing the fly for
being hired."--Nor, of course, the price of any article with the labor
expended in preparing it for being sold? This will be a useful note
to the next edition of "Ricardo." [The price depends on the relative
forces of the buyer and the seller. The price asked by the seller no
doubt depends on the labor expended. The price given by the buyer
depends on the degree in which he desires to possess the thing sold,
which has nothing to do with the labor laid out on it.]
The answer to your instances[51] is that all just price involves an
allowance for average necessary, not for unnecessary, labor. The just
price of coals at Newcastle does not involve an allowance for their
carriage to Newcastle. But the just price of a cab at a stand involves
an allowance to the cabman for having stood there. [Why? who is to
determine what is necessary?]
II. "This admits the principle of Bargaining." No, Sir; it only admits
the principle of Begging. If you like to ask your guide to give you
his legs for nothing, or your workman his arms for nothing, or your
shopkeeper his goods for nothing, and they consent, for love, or for
play--you are doubtless both dignified and fortunate; but there is no
question of trade in the matters; only of Alms. [We mean by Alms money
or goods given merely from motives of benevolence, and without return.
In the case supposed the guide goes one mile to please himself, and ten
more for hire, which satisfies him. How does he give Alms? He goes for
less money than he otherwise would require, because _he_ likes the job,
not because his employer likes it. The Alms are thus given by himself
to himself.]
III. It is true that "every one can affix to words any sense he
chooses." But if I pay for a yard of broadcloth, and the shopman cuts
me three-quarters, I shall not put up with my loss more patiently on
being informed that Bishop Butler meant by justice something quite
different from what Bentham meant by it, or that to give for every yard
three-quarters, is the rule of that establishment. [If the word "yard"
were as ambiguous as the word "justice," Mr. Ruskin ought to be much
obliged to the shopman for defining his sense of it, especially if he
gave you full notice before he cut the cloth.]
Further, it is easy to ascertain the uses of words by the best
scholars--[Nothing is more difficult. To ascertain what Locke meant by
an "idea," or Sir W. Hamilton by the word "inconceivable," is no easy
task.]--and well to adopt them, because they are sure to be founded
on the feelings of gentlemen.--[Different gentlemen feel and think in
very different ways. Though we differ from Mr. Ruskin, we hope he will
not deny this.] Thus, when Horace couples his _tenacem propositi_ with
_justum_, he means to assert that the tenacity is only noble which is
justified by uprightness, and shows itself by insuffer-ance of the
_jussa_ "_prava jubentium_" And although Portia does indeed accept your
definition of justice from the lips of Shylock, changing the divine,
"who sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not" into the somewhat less
divine "who sweareth to his neighbor's hurt and changeth not;" and
though she carries out his and your conception of such justice to the
uttermost, the result is not, even in Shylock's view of it, "for the
interest of both parties."
IV. To your two final questions "exhausting" (by no means, my dear
Sir, I assure you) "the points at issue,"[52] I reply in both cases,
"No." And to your plaintive "why should they do so?" while, observe, I
do not admit it to be a monstrous requirement of men that they should
sometimes sacrifice their own interests, I would for the present merely
answer that I have never found my own interests seriously compromised
by my practice, which is, when I cannot get the fair price of a thing,
not to sell it, and when I cannot give the fair price of a thing, not
to buy it. The other day, a dealer in want of money offered me a series
of Hartz minerals for two-thirds of their value. I knew their value,
but did not care to spend the entire sum which would have covered it. I
therefore chose forty specimens out of the seventy, and gave the dealer
what he asked for the whole.
In the example you give, it is _not_ the interest of the guide to take
his fifty francs rather than nothing; because all future travellers,
though they could afford the hundred, would then say, "You went for
fifty; we will give you no more." [Does a man say to a broker, "You
sold stock yesterday at 90; I will pay no more to-day"?] And for me,
if I am not able to pay my hundred francs, I either forego Mont Blanc,
or climb alone; and keep my fifty francs to pay at another time, for a
less service, some man who also would have got nothing otherwise, and
who will be honestly paid by what I give him, for what I ask of him.
I am, Sir, your obliged servant,
JOHN RUSKIN.
SATURDAY, _29th April_, 1865.
FOOTNOTES:
[49] President Lincoln was shot while in his private box at Ford's
Theatre, Washington, on the night of April 14, 1865, and died early the
next morning. His assassin, J. Wilkes Booth, was pursued to Caroline
County, Virginia, where he was fired on by the soldiery and killed. A
letter was found upon him ascribing his conduct to his devotion to the
Southern States.
[50] The bracketed [_sic_] interpolations are the remarks of the
_Gazette_.
[51] One of the instances given by the _Gazette_ on this point was that
a sovereign made of Californian gold will not buy more wool at Sydney
than a sovereign made of Australian gold, although far more labor will
have been expended in bringing it to Sydney.
[52] The _Gazette's_ criticism on the previous letter had concluded
thus:
The following questions exhaust the points at issue between Mr. Ruskin
and ourselves:
Is every man bound to purchase any service or any goods offered him at
a "just" price, he having the money?
If yes, there is an end of private property.
If no, the purchaser must be at liberty to refuse to buy if it suits
his interest to do so. Suppose he does refuse, and thereupon the seller
offers to lower his price, it being his interest to do so, is the
purchaser at liberty to accept that offer?
If yes, the whole principle of bargaining is admitted, and the
"justice" of the price becomes immaterial.
If no, each party of the supposition is compelled by justice to
sacrifice their interest. Why should they do so?
The following is an example: The "just" price of a guide up Mont Blanc
is (suppose) 100 francs. I have only 50 francs to spare. May I without
injustice offer the 50 francs to a guide, who would otherwise get
nothing, and may he without injustice accept my offer? If not, I lose
my excursion, and he loses his opportunity of earning 50 francs. Why
should this be?
In addition to the above interpolations, the _Gazette_ appended a
note to this letter, in which it declared its definition of justice
to be a quotation from memory of Austin's definition adopted by him
from Hobbes, and after referring Mr. Ruskin to Austin for the _moral_
bearings of the question, concluded by summing up its views, which it
doubted if Mr. Ruskin understood, and insisting on the definition of
"justice" as "conformity with any rule whatever, good or bad," and on
that of _good_ rules as "those which promote the general happiness of
those whom they affect." (See the next letter.)
[From "The Pall Mall Gazette," May 9, 1865.]
_WORK AND WAGES._
_To the Editor of "The Pall Mall Gazette."_
SIR: I am under the impression that we are both getting prosy, or,
at all events, that no one will read either my last letter, or your
comments upon it, in the places in which you have so gracefully
introduced them. For which I am sorry, and you, I imagine, are not.
It is true that differences of feeling may exist among gentlemen;
yet I think that gentlemen of all countries agree that it is rude to
interrupt your opponent while he is speaking; for a futile answer gains
no real force by becoming an interjection; and a strong one can abide
its time. I will therefore pray you, in future, if you publish my
letters at all, to practice towards them so much of old English manners
as may yet be found lingering round some old English dinner-tables;
where, though we may be compelled by fashion to turn the room into a
greenhouse, and serve everything cold, the _pièces de résistance_ are
still presented whole, and carved afterwards.
Of course it is open to you to reply that I dislike close argument.
Which little flourish being executed, and if you are well breathed--_en
garde_, if you please.
I. Your original position was that wages (or price) bear _no_ relation
to hardship of work. On that I asked you to join issue. You now admit,
though with apparent reluctance, that "the price asked by the seller,
no doubt, depends on the labor expended."
The price asked by the seller has, I believe, in respectable commercial
houses, and respectable shops, very approximate relation to the price
paid by the buyer. I do not know if you are in the habit of asking,
from your wine-merchant or tailor, reduction of price on the ground
that the sum remitted will be "alms to themselves;" but, having been
myself in somewhat intimate connection with a house of business in the
City,[53] not dishonorably accounted of during the last forty years,
I know enough of their correspondents in every important town in the
United Kingdom to be sure that they will bear me witness that the
difference between the prices asked and the prices taken was always a
very "imaginary" quantity.
But urging this no farther for the present, and marking, for gained
ground, only your admission that "the price asked depends on the
labor expended," will you farther tell me, whether that dependence is
constant, or variable? If constant, under what law; if variable, within
what limits?
II. "The alms are thus given by himself to himself." I never said
they were not. I said it was a question of alms, not of trade. And if
your original leader had only been an exhortation to English workmen
to consider every diminution of their pay, in the picturesque though
perhaps somewhat dim, religious light of alms paid by themselves to
themselves, I never should have troubled you with a letter on the
subject. For, singular enough, Sir, this is not one of the passages of
your letters, however apparently indefensible, which I care to attack.
So far from it, in my own serious writings I have always maintained
that the best work is done, and can only be done, for love.[54] But the
point at issue between us is not whether there _should_ be charity,
but whether there _can_ be trade; not whether men may give away their
labor, but whether, if they do not choose to do so, there is such a
thing as a price for it. And my statement, as opposed to yours, is
briefly this--that for all labor, there is, under given circumstances,
a just price approximately determinable; that every conscious
deflection from this price towards zero is either gift on the part
of the laborer, or theft on the part of the employer; and that all
payment in conscious excess of this price is either theft on the part
of the laborer, or gift on that of the employer.
III. If you wish to substitute the word "moral" for "just" in the above
statement, I am prepared to allow the substitution; only, as you, not
I, introduced this new word, I must pray for your definition of it
first, whether remembered from Mr. Hobbes, or original.
IV. I am sorry you doubt my understanding your views; but, in that
case, it may be well to ask for a word or two of farther elucidation.
"Justice," you say, is "conformity with any rule whatever, good or
bad." And "good rules are rules which promote the general happiness
of those whom they affect." And bad rules are (therefore) rules
which promote the general misery of those whom they affect? Justice,
therefore, may as often as not promote the general misery of those who
practice it? Do you intend this?[55]
Again: "Good rules are rules which promote the general happiness of
those whom they affect." But "the greatest happiness of the greatest
number is best secured by laying down no rule at all" (as to the price
of "labor").
Do you propose this as a sequitur? For if not, it is merely a _petitio
principii_, and a somewhat wide one. Before, therefore, we branch into
poetical questions concerning happiness, we will, with your permission,
and according to my original stipulation, that we should dispute only
of one point at a time, determine the matters already at issue. To
which end, also, I leave without reply some parts of your last letter;
not without a little strain on the ερκος ὀδοντων, for which I think,
Sir, you may give me openly, credit, if not tacitly, thanks.
I am, Sir, your obliged servant,
JOHN RUSKIN.
DENMARK HILL, _May_ 4.
FOOTNOTES:
[53] That of Messrs. Ruskin, Telford Domecq, in which Mr. Ruskin's
father, "who began life as a wine-merchant" ("Fors Clavigera," Letter
10, p. 5, 1871), had been a partner.
[54] See § 41 of "The Crown of Wild Olive," p. 50 of the 1873 edition.
"None of the best head-work in art, literature, or science, is ever
paid for.... It is indeed very clear that God means all thoroughly good
work and talk to be done for nothing."
[55] "Yes. But, generally speaking, rules are beneficial; hence,
generally speaking, justice is a good thing in fact. A state of
society might be imagined in which it would be a hideously bad
thing."--(Foot-note answer of the _Gazette_.)
[From "The Pall Mall Gazette," May 22, 1865.]
_WORK AND WAGES._
_To the Editor of "The Pall Mall Gazette."_
SIR: I have long delayed my reply to your notes on my last letter;
partly being otherwise busy--partly in a pause of surprise and doubt
how low in the elements of ethics we were to descend.
Let me, however, first assure you that I heartily concur in your
opening remarks, and shall be glad to spare useless and avoid
discourteous words. When you said, in your first reply to me, that
my letter embodied fallacies which appeared to you pernicious in the
highest degree, _I_ also "could not consider this sort of language
well judged." When you called one of your own questions an answer, and
declared it to be "simple and perfectly conclusive," I thought the
flourish might have been spared; and for having accused you of writing
carelessly, I must hope your pardon; for the discourtesy, in my mind,
would have been in imagining you to be writing with care.
For instance, I should hold it discourteous to suppose you unaware of
the ordinary distinction between law and equity: yet no consciousness
of such a distinction appears in your articles. I should hold it
discourteous to doubt your acquaintance with the elementary principles
laid down by the great jurists of all nations respecting Divine
and Human law; yet such a doubt forces itself on me if I consider
your replies as deliberate. And I should decline to continue the
discussion with an opponent who could conceive of justice as (under any
circumstances) "an hideously bad thing," if I did not suppose him to
have mistaken the hideousness of justice, in certain phases, to certain
persons, for its ultimate nature and power.
There may be question respecting these inaccuracies of thought; there
can be none respecting the carelessness of expression which causes the
phrases "are" and "ought to be" to alternate in your articles as if
they were alike in meaning.
I have permitted this, that I might see the course of your argument
in your own terms, but it is now needful that the confusion should
cease. That wages _are_ determined by supply and demand is no proof
that under any circumstances they must be--still less that under all
circumstances they ought to be. Permit me, therefore, to know the
sense in which you use the word "ought" in your paragraph lettered
_b_, page 832[56] (second column), and to ask whether the words "due,"
"duty," "devoir," and other such, connected in idea with the first and
third of the "præcepta juris" of Justinian, quoted by Blackstone as a
summary of the whole doctrine of law (_honeste vivere,--alterum non
lædere,--suumque cuique tribuere_), are without meaning to you except
as conditions of agreement?[57] Whether, in fact, there be, in your
view, any _honos_, absolutely; or whether we are to launch out into an
historical investigation of the several kinds of happiness enjoyed in
lives of rapine, of selfish trade, and of unselfish citizenship, and to
decide only upon evidence whether we will live as pirates, as pedlers,
or as gentlemen? If so, while I shall be glad to see you undertake,
independently, so interesting an inquiry, I must reserve my comments on
it until its close.
But if you admit an absolute idea of a "devoir" of one man to another,
and of every honorable man to himself, tell me why you dissent from my
statement of the terms of that debt in the opening of this discussion.
Observe, I asked for no evangelical virtue of returning good for evil:
I asked only for the Sinaitic equity of return in good for good, as
for Sinaitic equity of return in evil for evil. "Eye for eye," "tooth
for tooth"--be it so; but will you thus pray according to the _lex
talionis_ and not according to the _lex gratiæ_? Your debt is on both
sides. Does a man take of your life, you take also of his. Shall he
give you of his life, and will you not give him also of yours? If this
be not your law of duty to him, tell me what other there is, or if you
verily believe there is none.
But you ask of such repayment, "Who shall determine how much?"[58]
I took no notice of the question, irrelevant when you asked it; but
in its broad bearing it is the one imperative question of national
economy. Of old, as at bridge-foot of Florence, men regulated their
revenge by the law of demand and supply, and asked in measureless
anger, "Who shall determine how much?" with economy of blood, such as
we know. That "much" is now, with some approximate equity, determined
at the judgment-seat, but for the other debt, the debt of love, we have
no law but that of the wolf, and the locust, and the "fishes of the
sea, which have no ruler over them." The workmen of England--of the
world, ask for the return--as of wrath, so of reward by law; and for
blood resolutely spent, as for that recklessly shed; for life devoted
through its duration, as for that untimely cast away; they require from
you to determine, in judgment, the equities of "Human Retribution."
I am, Sir, your faithful servant,
J. RUSKIN.[59]
_May_ 20, 1865.
FOOTNOTES:
[56] Viz., "Wages ought to be proportioned to the supply and demand of
labor and capital, and not to the hardship of the work and the time
spent on it."
[57] "Justitia est constans et perpetua voluntas suum cuique
tribuendi ... Jurisprudentia est divinarum atque humanarum rerum
notitia, justi atque injusti scientia." The third precept is given
above. Justinian, "Inst." i. 1-3; and see Blackstone, vol. i. section
2, "Of the Nature of Laws in General."
[58] See _ante_, second interpolation of the _Gazette_, on p. 54.
[59] The discussion was not continued beyond this letter, the _Gazette_
judging any continuance useless, the difference between Mr. Ruskin and
themselves being "one of first principles."
[From "The Pall Mall Gazette," May 1, 1867. Reprinted also, with slight
alterations, in "Time and Tide," App. vii.]
_THE STANDARD OF WAGES._
_To the Editor of "The Pall Mall Gazette."_
SIR: In the course of your yesterday's article on strikes[60] you
have very neatly and tersely expressed the primal fallacy of modern
political economy--to wit, that the value of any piece of labor cannot
be defined; and that "all that can be ascertained is simply whether any
man can be got to do it for a certain sum."
Now, Sir, the "value" of any piece of labor (_I_ should have written
"price," not "value," but it is no matter)--that is to say, the
quantity of food and air which will enable a man to perform it
without eventually losing any of his flesh or nervous energy, is as
absolutely fixed a quantity as the weight of powder necessary to
carry a given ball a given distance. And within limits varying by
exceedingly minor and unimportant circumstances, it is an ascertainable
quantity. I told the public this five years ago, and--under pardon of
your politico-economical contributor, it is not a sentimental, but a
chemical, fact. Let any half-dozen London physicians of recognized
standing state in precise terms the quantity and kind of food, and
space of lodging, they consider approximately necessary for the healthy
life of a laborer in any given manufacture, and the number of hours
he may, without shortening his life, work at such business daily, if
in such manner he be sustained. Let all masters be bound to give their
men a choice between an order for that quantity of food and space
of lodging, or the market wages for that specified number of hours
of work. Proper laws for the maintenance of families would require
further concession; but in the outset, let but this law of wages be
established, and if then we have more strikes, you may denounce them
without one word of remonstrance either from sense or sensibility.
I am, Sir, with sentiments of great respect,
Your faithful servant,
JOHN RUSKIN.
DENMARK HILL, _April_ 30, 1867.
FOOTNOTES:
[60] As regards "strikes," it is of interest to note the following
amendment proposed by Mr. Ruskin at a special meeting of the National
Association for the Promotion of Social Science on the subject, held
in 1868: "That, in the opinion of this meeting, the interests of
workmen and their employers are at present opposed, and can only become
identical when all are equally employed in defined labor and recognized
duty, and all, from the highest to the lowest, are paid fixed salaries,
proportioned to the value of their services and sufficient for their
honorable maintenance in the situations of life properly occupied by
them."--_Daily Telegraph_, July 16, 1868.
[From "The Pall Mall Gazette," January 24, 1873.]
_HOW THE RICH SPEND THEIR MONEY._
_To the Editor of "The Pall Mall Gazette."_
SIR: Here among the hills, I read little, and withstand, sometimes for
a fortnight together, even the attractions of my _Pall Mall Gazette_.
A friend, however, sent me, two days ago, your article signed W. R.
G. on spending of money (January 13),[61] which, as I happened to
have over-eaten myself the day before, and taken perhaps a glass too
much besides of quite priceless port (Quarles Harris, twenty years in
bottle), would have been a great comfort to my mind, showing me that
if I had done some harm to myself, I had at least conferred benefit
upon the poor by these excesses, had I not been left in some painful
doubt, even at the end of W. R. G.'s most intelligent illustrations,
whether I ought not to have exerted myself further in the cause of
humanity, and by the use of some cathartic process, such as appears
to have been without inconvenience practised by the ancients, enabled
myself to eat two dinners instead of one. But I write to you to-day,
because if I were a poor man, instead of a (moderately) rich one, I am
nearly certain that W. R. G.'s paper would suggest to me a question,
which I am sure he will kindly answer in your columns, namely, "These
means of living, which this generous and useful gentleman is so
fortunately disposed to bestow on me--where does he get them himself?"
I am, Sir, your faithful servant,
J. RUSKIN.
BRANTWOOD, CONISTON, _Jan._ 23.
FOOTNOTES:
[61] The article, or rather letter, dealt with a paper on "The Labor
Movement" by Mr. Goldwin Smith in the _Contemporary Review_ of
December, 1872, and especially with the following sentences in it:
"When did wealth rear such enchanted palaces of luxury as it is rearing
in England at the present day? Well do I remember one of those palaces,
the most conspicuous object for miles round. Its lord was, I dare say,
consuming the income of some hundreds of the poor laboring families
around him. The thought that you are spending on yourself annually the
income of six hundred laboring families seems to me as much as a man
with a heart and a brain can bear." W. R. G.'s letter argued that this
"heartless expenditure all goes into the pockets" of the poor families,
who are thus benefited by the selfish luxuries of the lord in his
palace.
[From "The Pall Mall Gazette," January 29, 1873.]
_HOW THE RICH SPEND THEIR MONEY._
_To the Editor of "The Pall Mall Gazette."_
SIR: I am disappointed of my _Gazette_ to-day, and shall be grievously
busy to morrow. I think it better, therefore, to follow up my own
letter, if you will permit me, with a simple and brief statement of the
facts, than to wait till I see your correspondent W. R. G.'s reply, if
he has vouchsafed me one.
These are the facts. The laborious poor produce "the means of life"
by their labor. Rich persons possess themselves by various expedients
of a right to dispense these "means of life," and keeping as much
means as they want of it for themselves, and rather more, dispense the
rest, usually only in return for more labor from the poor, expended
in producing various delights for the rich dispenser. The idea is
now gradually entering poor men's minds, that they may as well keep
in their own hands the right of distributing "the means of life" they
produce; and employ themselves, so far as they need extra occupation,
for their own entertainment or benefit, rather than that of other
people. There is something to be said, nevertheless, in favor of the
present arrangement, but it cannot be defended in disguise; and it is
impossible to do more harm to the cause of order, or the rights of
property, than by endeavors, such as that of your correspondent, to
revive the absurd and, among all vigorous thinkers, long since exploded
notion of the dependence of the poor upon the rich.
I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
J. RUSKIN.
_January_ 28.
[From "The Pall Mall Gazette," January 31, 1873.]
_HOW THE RICH SPEND THEIR MONEY._
_To the Editor of "The Pall Mall Gazette."_
SIR: I have my _Pall Mall Gazette_ of the 28th to-day, and must at
once, with your permission, solemnly deny the insidiosity of my
question, "Where does the rich man get his means of living?" I don't
myself see how a more straightforward question could be put! So
straightforward indeed that I particularly dislike making a martyr of
myself in answering it, as I must this blessed day--a martyr, at least,
in the way of witness; for if we rich people don't begin to speak
honestly with our tongues, we shall, some day soon, lose them and our
heads together, having for some time back, most of us, made false use
of the one and none of the other. Well, for the point in question then,
as to means of living: the most exemplary manner of answer is simply
to state how I got my own, or rather how my father got them for me. He
and his partners entered into what your correspondent mellifluously
styles "a mutually beneficent partnership,"[62] with certain laborers
in Spain. These laborers produced from the earth annually a certain
number of bottles of wine. These productions were sold by my father
and his partners, who kept nine-tenths, or thereabouts, of the price
themselves, and gave one-tenth, or thereabouts, to the laborers. In
which state of mutual beneficence my father and his partners naturally
became rich, and the laborers as naturally remained poor. Then my good
father gave all his money to me (who never did a stroke of work in my
life worth my salt, not to mention my dinner), and so far from finding
his money "grow" in my hands, I never try to buy anything with it;
but people tell me "money isn't what it was in your father's time,
everything is so much dearer." I should be heartily glad to learn from
your correspondent as much pecuniary botany as will enable me to set
my money a-growing; and in the mean time, as I have thus given a quite
indubitable instance of my notions of the way money is made, will he be
so kind as to give us, not an heraldic example in the dark ages (though
I suspect I know more of the pedigree of money, if he comes to that,
than he does),[63] but a living example of a rich gentleman who _has_
made his money by saving an _equal_ portion of profit in some mutually
beneficent partnership with his laborers?
I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
J. RUSKIN.
BRANTWOOD, CONISTON,
King Charles the Martyr, 1873.
P.S.--I see by Christie & Manson's advertisement that some of the
best bits of work of a good laborer I once knew, J. M. W. Turner (the
original plates namely of the "Liber Studiorum"), are just going to
be destroyed by some of his affectionate relations. May I beg your
correspondent to explain, for your readers' benefit, this charming case
of hereditary accumulation?
FOOTNOTES:
[62] W. R. G. had declared that the rich man (or his ancestors) got the
money "by co-operation with the poor ... by, in fact, entering into a
mutually beneficent partnership with them, and advancing them their
share of the joint profits ... paying them beforehand, in a word."
[63] W. R. G. had written: "In nine cases out of ten, in the case of
acquired wealth, we should probably find, were the pedigree traced
fairly and far back enough, that the original difference between the
now rich man and the now poor man was, that the latter habitually spent
all his earnings, and the former habitually saved a portion of his in
order that it might accumulate and fructify."
[Date and place of publication unknown.]
_COMMERCIAL MORALITY._[64]
MY DEAR SIR: Mr. Johnson's speech in the Manchester Chamber of
Commerce, which you favor me by sending, appears to me the most
important event that has occurred in relation to the true interests of
the country during my lifetime. It begins an era of true civilization.
I shall allude to it in the "Fors" of March, and make it the chief
subject of the one following (the matter of this being already
prepared).[65] It goes far beyond what I had even hoped to hear
admitted--how much less enforced so gravely and weightily in the
commercial world.
Believe me, faithfully yours,
J. RUSKIN.
FOOTNOTES:
[64] This letter was received from Mr. Ruskin by a gentleman in
Manchester, who had forwarded to him a copy of the speech made by Mr.
Richard Johnson (President) at the fifty-fourth annual meeting of the
Manchester Chamber of Commerce, Feb. 1, 1875. Mr. Johnson's address
dealt with the immorality of cheapness, the duties of merchants and
manufacturers as public servants, and the nobility of trade as a
profession which, when rightly and unselfishly conducted, would yield
to no other "in the dignity of its nature and in the employment that it
offers to the highest faculties of man."
[65] In "Fors Clavigera," March, 1875, Mr. Johnson's speech is named
(p. 54) as "the first living words respecting commerce which I have
ever known to be spoken in England, in my time," but the discussion of
it is postponed.
[From "The Monetary and Mining Gazette," November 13, 1875.]
_THE DEFINITION OF WEALTH._
CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, OXFORD,
_9th November_, 1875.
_To the Editor of "The Monetary Gazette."_
SIR: I congratulate you with all my mind on the sense, and with all my
heart on the courage, of your last Saturday's leading article, which I
have just seen.[66] You have asserted in it the two vital principles of
economy, that society cannot exist by reciprocal pilfering, but must
produce wealth if it would have it; and that money must not be lent,
but administered by its masters.
You have not yet, however, defined wealth itself, or told the ingenuity
of the public what it is to produce.
I have never been able to obtain this definition from economists;[67]
perhaps, under the pressure of facts, they may at last discover some
meaning in mine at the tenth and eleventh pages of "Munera Pulveris."
I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
J. RUSKIN.
FOOTNOTES:
[66] The article was entitled, "What shall we do with it?"
[67] At the meeting of the Social Science Association already alluded
to (p. 4, note), Mr. Ruskin said that in 1858 he had in vain challenged
Mr. Mill to define wealth. The passages referred to in "Munera
Pulveris" consist of the statement and explanation of the definition of
Value. See _ante_, p. 63, note.
[From "The Socialist," an Advocate of Love, Truth, Justice, etc. etc.
Printed and Published by the Proprietor, W. Freeland, 52 Scotland
Street, Sheffield, November, 1877.]
_THE PRINCIPLES OF PROPERTY._
_10th Oct._, 1877.
_To the Editor of "The Socialist."_
SIR: Some Sheffield friend has sent me your fourth number, in the
general teaching of which I am thankful to be able to concur without
qualification: but let me earnestly beg of you not to confuse the
discussion of the principles of Property in Earth, Air, or Water, with
the discussion of principles of Property in general.[68] The things
which, being our neighbor's, the Mosaic Law commands us not to covet,
are by the most solemn Natural Laws indeed our neighbor's "property,"
and any attempts to communize these have always ended, and will always
end, in ruin and shame.
Do not attempt to learn from America. An Englishman has brains enough
to discover for himself what is good for England; and should learn,
when he is to be taught anything, from his Fathers, not from his
children.
I observe in the first column of your 15th page the assertion by your
correspondent of his definition of money as if different from mine. He
only weakens my definition with a "certificate of credit "instead of
a "promise to pay." What is the use of giving a man "credit"--if you
don't engage to pay him?
But I observe that nearly all my readers stop at this more or less
metaphysical definition, which I give in "Unto this Last," instead of
going on to the practical statement of immediate need made in "Munera
Pulveris."[69]
The promise to find Labor is one which meets general demand; but the
promise to find Bread is the answer needed to immediate demand; and
the only sound bases of National Currency are shown both in "Munera
Pulveris," and "Fors Clavigera," to be bread, fuel, and clothing
material, of certified quality.
I am, Sir, your faithful servant,
J. RUSKIN.
FOOTNOTES:
[68] The references in the letter are to an article on Property
entitled "What should be done?"
[69] See "Unto this Last," p. 53, note. "The final and best definition
of money is that it is a documentary promise ratified and guaranteed by
the nation, to give or find a certain quantity of labor on demand." See
also "Munera Pulveris," §§ 21-25.
[From "The Christian Life," December 20, 1879.]
_ON CO-OPERATION._[70]
BRANTWOOD, CONISTON, LANCASHIRE.
DEAR MR. HOLYOAKE: I am not able to write you a pretty letter to-day,
being sadly tired, but am very heartily glad to be remembered by you.
But it utterly silences me that you should waste your time and energy
in writing "Histories of Co-operation" anywhere as yet. My dear Sir,
you might as well write the history of the yellow spot in an egg--in
two volumes. Co-operation is as yet--in any true sense--as impossible
as the crystallization of Thames mud.
Ever faithfully yours,
J. RUSKIN.
FOOTNOTES:
[70] This letter, which was reprinted in the _Coventry Co-operative
Record_ of January, 1880, was written, some time in August, 1879, to
Mr. George Jacob Holyoake, who had sent Mr. Ruskin his "History of
Co-operation: its Literature and its Advocates," 2 vols. London and
Manchester, 1875-7.
[From "The Daily News," June 19, 1880.]
_ON CO-OPERATION._
BRANTWOOD, CONISTON, LANCASHIRE,
_April_ 12, 1880.
DEAR MR. HOLYOAKE: I am very glad that you are safe back in England,
and am not a little grateful for your kind reference to me while
in America, and for your letter about Sheffield Museum.[71] But
let me pray for another interpretation of my former letter than
mere Utopianism. The one calamity which I perceive or dread for an
Englishman is his becoming a rascal, and co-operation among rascals--if
it were possible--would bring a curse. Every year sees our workmen
more eager to do bad work and rob their customers on the sly. All
political movement among such animals I call essentially fermentation
and putrefaction--not co-operation.
Ever affectionately yours,
J. RUSKIN.
FOOTNOTES:
[71] The "kind reference to Mr. Ruskin while in America" alludes to a
public speech made by Mr. Holyoake during his stay in that country. The
"letter about Sheffield Museum," was one in high praise of it, written
by Mr. Holyoake to the editor of the _Sheffield Independent_, in which
paper it was printed (March 8, 1880).
MISCELLANEOUS LETTERS.
I. THE MANAGEMENT OF RAILWAYS.
II. SERVANTS AND HOUSES.
III. ROMAN INUNDATIONS.
IV. EDUCATION, FOR RICH AND POOR.
V. WOMEN: THEIR WORK AND THEIR DRESS.
VI. LITERARY CRITICISM.
MISCELLANEOUS LETTERS.
I.
THE MANAGEMENT OF RAILWAYS.
IS ENGLAND BIG ENOUGH? 1868.
THE OWNERSHIP OF RAILWAYS. 1868.
RAILWAY ECONOMY. 1868.
OUR RAILWAY SYSTEM. 1865.
RAILWAY SAFETY. 1870.
I.
THE MANAGEMENT OF RAILWAYS.
[From "The Daily Telegraph," July 31, 1868.]
_IS ENGLAND BIG ENOUGH?_
_To the Editor of "The Daily Telegraph."_
SIR: You terminate to-day a discussion which seems to have been greatly
interesting to your readers, by telling them the "broad fact, that
England is no longer big enough for her inhabitants."[72]
Might you not, in the leisure of the recess, open with advantage
a discussion likely to be no less interesting, and much more
useful--namely, how big England may be made for economical inhabitants,
and how little she may be made for wasteful ones? Might you not invite
letters on this quite radical and essential question--how money is
truly made, and how it is truly lost, not by one person or another, but
by the whole nation?
For, practically, people's eyes are so intensely fixed on the immediate
operation of money as it changes hands, that they hardly ever reflect
on its first origin or final disappearance. They are always considering
how to get it from somebody else, but never how to get it where that
somebody else got it.
Also, they very naturally mourn over their loss of it to other people,
without reflecting that, if not lost altogether, it may still be of
some reflective advantage to them. Whereas, the real national question
is not who is losing or gaining money, but who is making and who
destroying it. I do not of course mean making money, in the sense of
printing notes or finding gold. True money cannot be so made. When an
island is too small for its inhabitants, it would not help them to one
ounce of bread more to have the entire island turned into one nugget,
or to find bank notes growing by its rivulets instead of fern leaves.
Neither, by destroying money, do I mean burning notes, or throwing
gold away. If I burn a five-pound note, or throw five sovereigns
into the sea, I hurt no one but myself; nay, I benefit others, for
everybody with a pound in his pocket is richer by the withdrawal of my
competition in the market. But what I want you to make your readers
discover is how the _true_ money is made that will get them houses
and dinners; and on the other hand how money is truly lost, or so
diminished in value that all they can get in a year will not buy them
comfortable houses, nor satisfactory dinners.
Surely this is a question which people would like to have clearly
answered for them, and it might lead to some important results if the
answer were acted upon. The riband-makers at Coventry, starving, invite
the ladies of England to wear ribands. The compassionate ladies of
England invest themselves in rainbows, and admiring economists declare
the nation to be benefited. No one asks where the ladies got the money
to spend in rainbows (which is the first question in the business), nor
whether the money once so spent will ever return again, or has really
faded with the faded ribands and disappeared forever. Again, honest
people every day lose quantities of money to dishonest people. But that
is merely a change of hands much to be regretted; but the money is
not therefore itself lost; the dishonest people must spend it at last
somehow. A youth at college loses his year's income to a Jew. But the
Jew must spend it instead of him. Miser or not, the day must come when
his hands relax. A railroad shareholder loses his money to a director;
but the director must some day spend it instead of him. That is not--at
least in the first fact of it--_national_ loss. But what the public
need to know is, how a final and perfect _loss_ of money takes place,
so that the whole nation, instead of being rich, shall be getting
gradually poor. And then, indeed, if one man in spending his money
destroys it, and another in spending it makes more of it, it becomes a
grave question in whose hands it is, and whether honest or dishonest
people are likely to spend it to the best purpose. Will you permit
me, Sir, to lay this not unprofitable subject of inquiry before your
readers, while, to the very best purpose, they are investing a little
money in sea air?
Very sincerely yours,
J. RUSKIN.
DENMARK HILL, _July_ 30.
FOOTNOTES:
[72] The discussion had been carried on in a series of letters from
a great number of correspondents under the heading of "Marriage or
Celibacy," its subject being the pecuniary difficulties in the way
of early marriage. The _Daily Telegraph_ of July 30 concluded the
discussion with a leading article, in which it characterized the
general nature of the correspondence, and of which the final words were
those quoted by Mr. Ruskin.
[From "The Daily Telegraph," August 6, 1868.]
_THE OWNERSHIP OF RAILWAYS._[73]
_To the Editor of "The Daily Telegraph."_
SIR: The ingenious British public seems to be discovering, to its
cost, that the beautiful law of supply and demand does not apply in
a pleasant manner to railroad transit. But if they are prepared to
submit patiently to the "natural" laws of political economy, what
right have they to complain? The railroad belongs to the shareholders;
and has not everybody a right to ask the highest price he can get for
his wares? The public have a perfect right to walk, or to make other
opposition railroads for themselves, if they please, but not to abuse
the shareholders for asking as much as they think they can get.
Will you allow me to put the _real_ rights of the matter before them in
a few words?
Neither the roads nor the railroads of any nation should belong to any
private persons. All means of public transit should be provided at
public expense, by public determination where such means are needed,
and the public should be its own "shareholder."
Neither road, nor railroad, nor canal should ever pay dividends to
anybody. They should pay their working expenses, and no more. All
dividends are simply a tax on the traveller and the goods, levied by
the person to whom the road or canal belongs, for the right of passing
over his property. And this right should at once be purchased by the
nation, and the original cost of the roadway--be it of gravel, iron, or
adamant--at once defrayed by the nation, and then the whole work of the
carriage of persons or goods done for ascertained prices, by salaried
officers, as the carriage of letters is done now.
I believe, if the votes of the proprietors of all the railroads in the
kingdom were taken _en masse_, it would be found that the majority
would gladly receive back their original capital, and cede their right
of "revising" prices of railway tickets. And if railway property _is_
a good and wise investment of capital, the public need not shrink from
taking the whole off their hands. Let the public take it. (I, for one,
who never held a rag of railroad scrip in my life, nor ever willingly
travelled behind an engine where a horse could pull me, will most
gladly subscribe my proper share for such purchase according to my
income.) Then let them examine what lines pay their working expenses
and what lines do not, and boldly leave the un-paying embankments to
be white over with sheep, like Roman camps, take up the working lines
on sound principles, pay their drivers and pointsmen well, keep their
carriages clean and in good repair, and make it as wonderful a thing
for a train, as for an old mail-coach, to be behind its time; and the
sagacious British public will very soon find its pocket heavier, its
heart lighter, and its "passages" pleasanter, than any of the three
have been, for many a day.
I am, Sir, always faithfully yours,
J. RUSKIN.
DENMARK HILL, _Aug._ 5.
FOOTNOTES:
[73] In the _Daily Telegraph_ of August 3 appeared eight letters, all
of which, under the heading of "Increased Railway Fares," complained of
the price of tickets on various lines having been suddenly raised. In
the issue of August 4 eighteen letters appeared on the subject, whilst
in that of the 5th there were again eight letters. Mr. Ruskin's letter
was one of four in the issue of the 6th. It has, it will be seen, no
direct connection with that one entitled, "Is England Big Enough?"
which precedes it in these volumes owing to the allusions to it in one
of these railway letters (p. 86).
[From "The Daily Telegraph," August 10, 1868.]
_RAILWAY ECONOMY._
_To the Editor of "The Daily Telegraph."_
SIR: I had not intended again to trespass on your space until I could
obtain a general idea of the views of your correspondents on the
questions you permitted me to lay before them in my letters of the
31st July and 5th inst.; but I must ask you to allow me to correct
an impression likely to be created by your reference to that second
letter in your interesting article on the Great Eastern Railway, and to
reply briefly to the question of your correspondent "S." on the same
subject.[74]
You say that I mistook the charge against the railway companies in
taunting my unfortunate neighbors at Sydenham[75] with their complaints
against the operation of the law of supply and demand, and that it was
because the companies neglected that law that they suffered.
But, Sir, the law of supply and demand, as believed in by the British
public under the guidance of their economists, is a natural law
regulating prices, which it is not at all in their option to "neglect."
And it is precisely because I have always declared that there is no
such natural law, but that prices can be, and ought to be, regulated by
laws of expediency and justice, that political economists have thought
I did not understand their science, and you now say I laugh at it. No,
Sir, I laughed only at what was clearly no science, but vain endeavor
to allege as irresistible natural law, what is indeed a too easily
resisted prudential law, rewarding and chastising us according to our
obedience. So far from despising true political economy, based on such
prudential law, I have for years been chiefly occupied in defending its
conclusions, having given this definition of it in 1862. "Political
Economy is neither an art nor a science; but a system of conduct and
legislature founded on the sciences, including the arts, and impossible
except under certain conditions of moral culture."[76]
And, Sir, nothing could better show the evil of competition as opposed
to the equitable regulation of prices than the instance to which you
refer your correspondent "Fair Play"--the agitation in Brighton for a
second railway. True prudential law would make one railway serve it
thoroughly, and fix the fares necessary to pay for thorough service.
Competition will make two railways (sinking twice the capital really
required); then, if the two companies combine, they can oppress the
public as effectively as one could; if they do not, they will keep the
said public in dirty carriages and in danger of its life, by lowering
the working expenses to a minimum in their antagonism.
Next, to the question of your correspondent "S.," "what I expect the
capitalist to do with his money," so far as it is asked in good faith
I gladly reply, that no one's "expectations" are in this matter of the
slightest consequence; but that the moral laws which properly regulate
the disposition of revenue, and the physical laws which determine
returns proportioned to the wisdom of its employment, are of the
greatest consequence; and these may be briefly stated as follows:
1. All capital is justly and rationally invested which supports
productive labor (that is to say, labor directly producing or
distributing good food, clothes, lodging, or fuel); so long as it
renders to the possessor of the capital, and to those whom he employs,
only such gain as shall justly remunerate the superintendence and
labor given to the business, and maintain both master and operative
happily in the positions of life involved by their several functions.
And it is highly advantageous for the nation that wise superintendence
and honest labor should both be highly rewarded. But all rates of
interest or modes of profit on capital, which render possible the rapid
accumulation of fortunes, are simply forms of taxation, by individuals,
on labor, purchase, or transport; and are highly detrimental to the
national interests, being, indeed, no means of national gain, but only
the abstraction of small gains from many to form the large gain of one.
For, though inequality of fortune is not in itself an evil, but in many
respects desirable, it is always an evil when unjustly or stealthily
obtained, since the men who desire to make fortunes by large interest
are precisely those who will make the worst use of their wealth.
2. Capital sunk in the production of objects which do not
immediately support life (as statues, pictures, architecture, books,
garden-flowers, and the like) is beneficially sunk if the things thus
produced are good of their kind, and honestly desired by the nation for
their own sake; but it is sunk ruinously if they are bad of their kind,
or desired only for pride or gain. Neither can good art be produced as
an "investment." You cannot build a good cathedral if you only build it
that you may charge sixpence for entrance.
3. "Private enterprise" should never be interfered with, but, on the
contrary, much encouraged, so long as it is indeed "enterprise" (the
exercise of individual ingenuity and audacity in new fields of true
labor), and so long as it is indeed "private," paying its way at
its own cost, and in no wise harmfully affecting public comforts or
interests. But "private enterprise" which poisons its neighborhood, or
speculates for individual gain at common risk, is very sharply to be
interfered with.
4. All enterprise, constantly and demonstrably profitable on
ascertained conditions, should be made public enterprise, under
Government administration and security; and the funds now innocently
contributed, and too often far from innocently absorbed, in vain
speculation, as noted in your correspondent "Fair Play's" excellent
letter,[77] ought to be received by Government, employed by it, not in
casting guns, but in growing corn and feeding cattle, and the largest
possible legitimate interest returned without risk to these small and
variously occupied capitalists who cannot look after their own money.
We should need another kind of Government to do this for us, it is
true; also it is true that we can get it, if we choose; but we must
recognize the duties of governors before we can elect the men fit to
perform them.
The benefit of these several modes of right investment of capital
would be quickly felt by the nation, not in the increase of isolated
or nominal wealth, but in steady lowering of the prices of all the
necessaries and innocent luxuries of life, and in the disciplined,
orderly, and in that degree educational employment of every able-bodied
person. For, Sir (again with your pardon), my question "Is England
big enough?" was not answered by the sad experience of the artisans
of Poplar. Had they been employed in earth-building instead of in
shipbuilding, and heaped the Isle of Dogs itself into half as much
space of good land, capable of growing corn instead of mosquitoes,
they would actually have made habitable England a little bigger by
this time;[78] and if the first principle of economy in employment
were understood among us--namely, always to use whatever vital power
of breath and muscle you have got in the country before you use the
artificial power of steam and iron for what living arms can do, and
never plough by steam while you forward your ploughmen to Quebec--those
old familiar faces need not yet have looked their last at each other
from the deck of the St. Lawrence. But on this subject I will ask your
permission to write you in a few days some further words.[79]
I am, Sir, your faithful servant,
J. RUSKIN.
DENMARK HILL, _Aug._ 9.
FOOTNOTES:
[74] The _Daily Telegraph_ of Saturday, August 8, contained an article
on the "Increased Railway Fares," in which, commenting on Mr. Ruskin's
statement that, given the law of political economy, the railways might
ask as much as they could get, it is said that Mr. Ruskin mistook "the
charge against the companies. While they neglected the 'law of supply
and demand,' they suffered: now that they obey that law, they prosper."
The latter part of the article dealt with a long letter signed "Fair
Play," which was printed in the _Daily Telegraph_ of the same day. "To
Mr. Ruskin, who laughs at Political Economy," concluded the article;
"and to 'Fair Play,' who thinks that Parliament is at the bottom of
all the mischief, we commend a significant fact. An agitation is now
on foot in Brighton to have a second railway direct to London. What is
the cause of this? Not the Legislature, but the conduct of the Brighton
company in raising its fares. That board, by acting in the spirit of a
monopoly, has provoked retaliation, and the public now seeks to protect
itself by the aid of a competing line."
The letter of the correspondent "S." (also in the _Daily Telegraph_ of
August 8) began by asking "what the capitalist is to do with his money,
if the Government works the railways on the principle of the Post
Office."
[75] Several of the letters had been written by residents in the
neighborhood of Sydenham.
[76] B "Essays on Political Economy" (_Fraser's Magazine_, June, 1862,
p. 784), now reprinted in "Munera Pulveris," p. 1, § 1.
[77] "Fair Play's" letter noted the result of investments made in
bubble railways, generally by "honest country folks" or "poor clergymen
and widows."
[78] A Alluding to an article in the _Daily Telegraph_ of August 8,
headed "East-End Emigrants," which, after remarking that "Mr. Ruskin's
question, Is England big enough?" had been just answered rather sadly
by a number of Poplar artisans, described the emigration to Quebec on
board the St. Lawrence of these inhabitants of the Isle of Dogs, and
how, as the ship left the dock, "there were many tears shed, as old,
familiar faces looked on each other for the last time."
[79] Never, it seems, written.
[From "The Daily Telegraph," December 8, 1865.]
_OUR RAILWAY SYSTEM._
_To the Editor of "The Daily Telegraph."_
SIR: Will you allow me a few words with reference to your excellent
article of to-day on railroads.[80] All you say is true. But of what
use is it to tell the public this? Of all the economical stupidities of
the public--and they are many--the out-and-out stupidest is underpaying
their pointsmen; but if the said public choose always to leave their
lines in the hands of companies--that is to say, practically, of
engineers and lawyers--the money they pay for fares will always go,
most of it, into the engineers' and lawyers' pockets. It will be spent
in decorating railroad stations with black and blue bricks, and in
fighting bills for branch lines. I hear there are more bills for new
lines to be brought forward this year than at any previous session.
But, Sir, it might do some little good if you were to put it into the
engineers' and lawyers' heads that they might for some time to come get
as much money for themselves (and a little more safety for the public)
by bringing in bills for doubling laterally the present lines as for
ramifying them; and if you were also to explain to the shareholders
that it would be wiser to spend their capital in preventing accidents
attended by costly damages, than in running trains at a loss on
opposition branches. It is little business of mine--for I am not a
railroad traveller usually more than twice in the year; but I don't
like to hear of people's being smashed, even when it is all their
fault; so I will ask you merely to reprint this passage from my article
on Political Economy in _Fraser's Magazine_ for April, 1863, and so
leave the matter to your handling:
"Had the money spent in local mistakes and vain private litigation
on the railroads of England been laid out, instead, under proper
Government restraint, on really useful railroad work, and had no absurd
expense been incurred in ornamenting stations, we might already have
had--what ultimately it will be found we must have--quadruple rails,
two for passengers and two for traffic, on every great line, and we
might have been carried in swift safety, and watched and warded by
well-paid pointsmen, for half the present fares."[81]
I am, Sir, your faithful servant,
J. RUSKIN.
DENMARK HILL, _Dec._ 7.
FOOTNOTES:
[80] An article which, dealing directly with some recent railway
accidents, commented especially on the overcrowding of the lines.
[81] "Essays on Political Economy" (_Fraser's Magazine_, April, 1863,
p. 449); "Munera Pulveris," p. 137, § 128.
[From "The Daily Telegraph," November 30, 1870.]
_RAILWAY SAFETY._[82]
_To the Editor of "The Daily Telegraph."_
SIR: I am very busy,
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