THE teaching of Ruskin is generally piecemeal and unsystematic, but, happily, there is one exception to this. In collecting his Cornhill papers for publication as Unto This Last he wrote a Preface summarizing his practical proposals at their “worst.” They are as follows:

1. Government Schools, in certain cases compulsory, wherein a child shall be taught

Compulsory popular education was established ten years after this demand, and it was long overdue. It was quite central in Mill’s programme and in that of the school of Cobden and Bright. Only Herbert Spencer, in obstinate and inflexible individualism, disapproved of State Schools, and only the Anglican and Catholic Churches, in their own interest, blocked the way. As to what is taught there, we are slowly learning Ruskin’s lessons about physical and moral training, and in the continuation schools and the technical schools are advancing to trade instruction also; though we are far behind Munich and other German cities in this regard. More will be found on this on pp. 175-8 in Chap. VI. The recent orders of the Board of Education distinctly recognize some difference of subjects for urban, rural and sea-side children.

2. Government workshops for all articles, in fair competition with private ventures, and turning out nothing that was not genuine and of good quality.

Broadly speaking, this has not matured. Concerning it we may use Ruskin’s own words on the whole scheme: “It is only possible to answer for the final truth of principles, not for the direct success of plans.”[69] The right attitude, I would suggest, is to develop on practical lines of utility, and have work done by whatever agency does it most effectively. This is Ruskin’s drift. It looks as though municipal milk and beer, municipal houses and coal, as well as heat and light, municipal theatres and opera, and government transport and electrical power, were already with us in idea, if not yet in realization. The method is one for gradual application. Every step will, very properly, be contested. The experience of the transaction of business by Government during the Great War has just now strongly reinforced faith in private enterprise. We should keep an open mind. No high or final principle comes in, and dogma and prejudice are out of place.

Hitherto Government has controlled and inspected, rather than itself carried on the businesses of the country. Very few things are now left wholly to perfectly free competition. Later on Ruskin gave up Government workshops in favour of businesses owned and managed by Trade Gilds, thus anticipating the sequence of public thought in later years. See below in this Chapter.

3. The unemployed to be taught, or employed at fixed wages, or medically treated, or coerced to painful labour, according to the need of each case.

This close pastoral care by public authority has never yet been realized. It has been left to private philanthropy, guided at one time by the Elberfeld system as practised in the industrial towns on the Rhine. As in manufactures the State has guided and inspected business, rather than conducted it, so its Labour Exchanges and its unemployment allowance and Insurance against sickness have done much to ease and diminish the pain of unemployment. But, of course, this is only a stage in our progress. And the comprehensive lines of Ruskin’s case for the orphans of Great Business may well be earnestly remembered as a standard to work towards. We have at any rate left behind us mere reliance on the terrors of starvation and death as the only spur to industry in the Great Society, as the present world of vast production and exchange has been called.[70]

4. Comfort and home for the old and destitute, free from the slur of the Poor Law.

This has been provided by Old Age Pensions.

Thus Ruskin’s schemes are being or are on the way to be realized, in quite remarkable detail. How much, uttered by leading writers in 1862, remains so fresh as these in 1920? Ruskin proclaimed some truths too early for his peace of mind, but not for the service of men. The characteristic novelty of the proposals was that they were social, not political, though written in a period when political reforms occupied the forefront of progressive thought. They were no doubt a necessary stage. We should not belittle them in disappointment. For without a democratic franchise no social reforms could have been achieved. Ruskin’s proposals are also extremely moderate, and essentially conservative. He declares his disbelief in “the common Socialist idea of the division of property,”[71] though, as land is to be in the hands of those who can use it best, there was to be much compulsory purchase, a practice with which we are increasingly familiar, for housing, for allotments, and for small holdings. Nationalization of railways is definitely part of the programme, as we should expect.[72]

The most radical change concerned Wages. Ruskin declared that wages should be fixed and steady under the responsibility of either the Government or the Craft Gilds, and should be independent of the number of people competing for work. As usual, he blamed the economists because this was not so in nature, as though physiologists were to blame for indigestion. But, as mere economics, he understood the doctrine, and accepted its truth. He says that the cheapening of bread under the absence of the Corn Laws would cause wages “to fall permanently in precisely the same proportion.”[73] That is, he accepted the “supply price” of wages—being the maintenance which the labourer under competition would accept.

The great issue for human welfare was then, and is now, whether there is a supply price for wages above the merest starvation line. Labour, so far, like commodities, has its price determined by the reciprocal action of the buyers and sellers of it. On the side of demand the buyers cannot give more than the value of the product of the last labourer they engage. On the side of supply the labourer would change his trade, or not have children, or not bring up his children to that trade, or he would starve and die, unless he received what he considered a maintenance. This is the supply price. And in any given trade, wages are fixed at the point where demand and supply are both satisfied. Enough labourers are employed to make the least valuable worth the required maintenance and no more. Now the economists, arguing from the phenomena they saw believed, with Malthus, that there was no decent supply price for labour in practice, that people would multiply to the very limit of subsistence. Hence they deduced the terrible doctrine of the Iron Law of Wages, that wages tend to a starvation level, because they thought first that food,[74] and afterwards that capital,[75] was fixed at any time, or increased very slowly. Finally, J. S. Mill taught that fluid capital or the Wages Fund, that famous centre of controversy, being fixed, the total capital available for wages had to be divided between an ever multiplying number of wage earners, some of whom were therefore always starving.

This treatment of Labour as governed by the same law of supply and demand as commodities, is the only way it can be treated as subject matter of a science dealing with the production, distribution and exchange of wealth. But no one would stop there, shutting his eyes to the fact that behind the labour stands the labourer, a human being, with all the spiritual and emotional gifts and needs of a man. Only military authority treats men so. Even an economist, writing on labour as a commodity, proceeds to explain how it differs from material commodities—how slow is its reaction on the side of supply—how high wages up to a point produce a still higher quality of labour, and so forth. Business management, also, is a commodity subject to the same law, but I have never heard that the General Managers of Railway Companies feel degraded for that reason to the mere level of slaves.

Unluckily the economists, influenced by the poverty that followed the last great war, which ended in 1815, concluded that the unskilled labourer would multiply till his children starved. They saw in fact starvation rampant in England.

This was why Political Economy was called by Carlyle the Dismal Science. But the economists were no more responsible for it than theologians are for the Judgment Day, perhaps much less so. Ruskin believed and hated the doctrine, and so, in fact, was an orthodox Millite. And both he and Mill had their remedies. Mill recommended education, emigration and small families. Ruskin appealed to the state or the gilds. In time Mill came to the same point of view, and died a Socialist. He was able to do this because he was persuaded by Thornton that the Wages Fund theory did not hold; that in fact workers produced their own wages, with the help of some capital to oil the wheels, that is, to fill the gap in time caused by distribution under the machinery of payment. This occurred in 1869 after Munera Pulveris had been published in Fraser’s Magazine in 1862 and 1863, but before it came out in book form in 1872; and it is grievous that these two men did not consciously co-operate. Ruskin’s method of controversy, possibly drove Mill to silence.

The central blast of Ruskin’s attack was against this—ultimately abandoned—doctrine of hopelessness. I do not mean that we may be quite cheerful about free competition in wages; for there are departments of labour so helpless that they cannot obtain a decently living wage.[76] To meet this, choice of employment is necessary, but cannot always be found for physically weak or mentally ill-qualified people. The nation has decided to carry out in specified trades the Ruskinian principle of the fixed living wage, enforced by the Sweated Industries Acts. Under these more and more trades may and will come. The economic storm of the war has broken down the equable course of free competition, and has caused regulation of wages and prices on all sides. We must not speak as if this were a normal development either of socialism or of competition. We have suffered under it as part of the evil of war. The benefits of competition require time, and a fair field for all forces. There will still be much done by provision of alternative employment on the land, by the investment of capital in developing local industries, and indirectly, by housing, education and temperance reform, to diminish the remnant of the helpless victims of sweating. Behind these the nation will probably soon stand, committed to a national minimum in wages and in hours. Above these government minima stand the various Trades Union fixed rules. All are Ruskinian,[77] and Mill would rejoice in them too.

A generation ago a national minimum wage had the support of Socialists of the school of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and of J. A. Hobson.[78] For a long time it was not orthodox. I remember hearing a Professor of Political Economy speaking on this subject twice, at an interval of about ten years. The first time he summed up against it, pointing out how a minimum tended, in Australian experience, to become a maximum, with certificates of invalidism or incapacity easily obtainable to authorize a lower wage. The second time he was for a minimum wage, as what progressive thinkers hoped for. The steps have, of late, become rapid. Miners had their wages fixed by the Government after the Coal Strike of 1912, and again, after the Sankey Commission in 1919. The Railway and Transport Workers are also under Government protection. An international Labour Charter is part of the Peace of Versailles, which must lead to an international minimum. It will be a delicate undertaking to work it out with any completeness. Within a nation the cost of living varies from place to place; the value of money rises and falls as general prices fall or rise. Internationally, between San Francisco, New York, London, Constantinople, and Yokohama, the differences forbid uniformity of wage. Nobody can compel an employer to employ anybody whose work results in no profit. Some people exist who are not worth a minimum wage, unless it is too low to be acceptable. There will have to be provision for these. Pensions for Old Age and invalidity will assume larger proportions. The race will have to worry out this complex tangle of man with his environment. What is clear is that we have reached the Ruskinian standpoint about it.

Fors Clavigera is the most remarkable of the writings of Ruskin. He who has read Fors, or a large part of it, knows Ruskin, and if he loves and reveres the author, has become a Ruskinian. But without reading Fors no man or woman can become a Ruskinian. In it you become intimate with the man. He talks to you like a friend, button-holes you very much as Socrates did, invites you to laugh with him, and join in laughs at himself, tells you all his troubles, and the causes of the ups and downs of his spirits, tells you of his loneliness and his hopes and intentions, shows you his accounts every month, tells you where he has lost money, and to whom he has given it away, lets you see his letters and his replies to them, and holds you, by the personal power of him, while he pours vials of prophetic denunciation upon Society only to be equalled in the pages of the Hebrew Prophets; and then clinches it all with “Mind you, I mean every word of it; no exaggeration here.”

Fors is a book—a message:—it is often playful in style, the matter all scattered. The subject changes from page to page; nothing in it can be referred to without that Queen of Indexes which accompanies it: but the unity of its subject is in the unity of the author. You carry on an idea, cropping up under all sorts of irrelevancies and chance illustrations—and you carry on certain jokes too, or humorous allusions, as we all do in common life. This miscellany, I am persuaded, will attract readers longer than the stately symmetry of Modern Painters, or the laborious detail of the Stones of Venice. Who but Ruskin could have brought thus out of his treasury things new and old?

We shall look in vain for a completely worked out system of business and legislation in Ruskin’s writings. His Utopia is delightfully worked up here and there in detail, but it has great gaps; it often seems to raise more difficulties than it settles; and it is not always consistent with itself.

Indeed, one could not expect completeness or real mastery of the problem, either from the man or from the nature of the subject. From the man, because the prophet and the practical administrator are rarely combined. Comte went into detail, and we do not much value the Positivist detail. The prophet is the man with the clear vision and hot heart. The practical administrator must sit on committees and keep secretaries, and meet deputations; he must check accounts and hold dinner parties. What we desire is that practical men should give ear to the prophet.

Secondly, the subject is too vast and complicated for complete treatment. Great as has been the volume and secure the conviction of the attacks on our present social system, how very little in the way of stable fabric exists to-day in confessed substitution for it. Socialist and Communist colonies have failed through their principles being in advance of the practice of the men who had to pioneer their course. Of the thirty or forty whose history has been collected, most have broken up, a few with profit to the members, but most with loss. Religious communities have, of course, shown the greatest tenacity. The Shakers are now diminishing and discouraged, though they own some of the richest land in America, and are commercially connected with a valuable property besides, known as Mother Siegel’s Syrup. The Doukhobors from Russia now settled in the far West of Canada, have saved themselves by their communism under persecution. They again are bound by a mighty religious bond. But many are being absorbed by the society around, and their primitive faith in their leader Peter Verigin as an incarnation of God, will hardly survive Canadian education. We will not, then, expect to see a complete reconstruction of society. Ruskin’s is most fully worked out in Time and Tide: but Fors is thickly scattered with it too.

Roughly, then, and in the large, Regulation and Co-operation, rather than Competition and Economic freedom, are to be the guiding principles. That is, Ruskin is a Socialist. But he is no revolutionary nor divider up of property. He desired all things to be gradual, and was too wise to suppose that anything sweeping could be done at once, or indeed very much of any kind for a long time. To his private correspondents in Fors the advice was always given to stay where they were, and do as well as they could what they had in hand. Ruskin, again, is a Socialist of the aristocratic variety. He believed in graded ranks, and in people staying in the class they were born in. He did not say that everybody was equal. He was also of the earnestly religious type of Socialist. When I add that he considered that he and Carlyle were the only two Conservatives left in England, and that he was a Tory of the type of Scott and Homer, I may perhaps have succeeded in leaving my readers fairly confused in mind: as every one who tries to classify Ruskin will become.

As to Wealth, Ruskin proposes that there shall be a legislative upper limit to a man’s property; and that those whose superfluity is skimmed off by law should have titles instead and be employed in public service. As noted again in the chapter on Usury later, there are various ways of securing this: by steeply graduating the Income Tax and the Death Duties at the upper end, or by limiting the legal right of bequest, either by saying that you must not bequeath more than a certain sum to one person, or that a person must not inherit more than a certain total sum from all sources. These startling innovations would no doubt put an effective check on accumulation, if the State succeeded in fighting the ingenuity of the lawyers.

All interest on money he entirely forbids. This I deal with in Chapter VII.

All land is to be bought by the State from the landlords, and the aristocracy, living on the Government annuities thus created, are to become the legislators and leaders of the people. I don’t know whether he knew them very well. At any rate these annuities appear to me to be of the nature of interest.

War is to be managed by personal encounters between some of the military aristocrats and the aristocrats of the enemy, to save butchery of peasants and much needless devastation. A kind of international Rugby football match without referees might meet the case—where the honour of England was really at stake. It is a simple suggestion; but soberly Ruskin loathed war—particularly wars for conquest and all modern war by machinery and for the benefit of capitalists. This is shown in Chapter VIII.

Our factory system and the crowding into towns he detested; though he gives us no practical suggestions towards ending it except that most steam power should be abandoned—not quite all. There is a curious prophecy too about electricity superseding steam and smoke. We are beginning on hopeful lines here with Mond gas, central electrical power stations, and Garden Cities—if only we could and would compel our factories to stop making smoke, the greatest curse of the landscape. This is treated more fully in Chapter IX.

Our Government must also take heed to all means of keeping our population in the country.

Population Ruskin deals with fantastically by permitting marriages only to young men and young women after passing a suitable examination in business or domestic qualifications. He would provide them, on marriage, with an income for seven years from the State. If they had a private income beyond this minimum it must accumulate; so that all young couples start life on the same standard of expenditure. This is the most drastic of his regulations, and the most out of reach.[79]

Under land tenure from the State each person was to hold no more than he could properly make use of—a system of permanent peasant proprietors, that is, at a quit rent;—the land inalienable in title, and to descend by primogeniture.

We have also the somewhat obscure remark[80] that bread, water, and the roof over his head must be tax (i.e. rent) free to every man. Methods of administration are to be left to settle themselves. Also, “every man is to build his own house to his mind, and to have a mind to build it to.”

As a system this leaves large gaps. What are to be the exact duties of the aristocratic annuitant landowners, and who are they to be? There is an echo of Plato’s “Guardians” in their position and duties: indeed they seem very like in their functions to those hierarchical beings. It may have been from Plato too that Ruskin learnt to emphasize the degradation of continuous mechanical work, particularly that which is connected with the mechanical use of fire.

The Church is, as we have seen in Chapter III, to be exactly on the Quaker model. No one is to be paid for preaching. The preachers are to earn their living like other men; and the distinction between clergy and laity is to be absolutely done away. “Of clergymen’s usual work, admonition, theological demonstration, and the like I shall want very little done indeed, and that little done for nothing! for I will allow no man to admonish anybody, until he has previously earned his own dinner by more productive work than admonition.” The lesson on humility to religious persons in Time and Tide is very amusing.[81]

Turning to the business world, the deadliest war of Society would be against occult stealing, by making bad goods, by adulteration, and passing off sham articles. These practices would be guarded against by the formation of trade guilds. Ruskin enumerates in Letter LXXXIX of Fors twenty-one trades. The men of each trade are to form themselves into a guild, buy land and buildings, regulate prices and qualities, and become, in fact, capitalist employers. Retail dealers are to be salaried officers under the guild. Such is the proposal of Fors of 1879, and Time and Tide of 1867. In Unto This Last of 1860 the Government is to have the workshops, not private guilds. Ruskin began to think his later plan of private guilds more possible as years went on. Also, and always, property is to be acquired by the guilds by honest payment and voluntary bargains. It is very striking how prophetic these schemes are of the proposals now known as Guild Socialism, treated in the next chapter, at present the most popular form of socialistic reconstruction. They are, indeed, a sketch of the very thing.

Competition, outside the guilds or Government shops, is always allowed—“as a safety valve for outlet of irrepressible vice.” He believed in the cutaneous and curable eruption of such, rather than in forcing it into the system of the body politic—a wise and cautious idea, in no way that of a blind optimist. Another reason for this permission of outside competition was to provide scope for erratic ingenuity and original genius, and to conserve individual initiative; also to protect the rights of foreigners trading here. There is also much other sensible elasticity of arrangement hinted at. Honesty, truthfulness, freedom from oppression, some plan by which all the good national elements could become availing instead of being neglected and choked off, these are the objects of his trade guilds. The difficulty of foreign competition at low prices he does not touch, except to anticipate for a far future a similar international guild system.

One can easily see that increased facilities for combination are putting it into the power of combines and trusts to fix qualities and prices in a way the men of 1867 would never have expected. Is it beyond hope that what combinations of capital and management can do, labour combinations may do, for more public ends? Then indeed out of the eater will have come forth meat. “The lion and the bear shall feed,” and the capitalist shall dine like the labourer. “They shall not hurt nor destroy” in all my holy workshops and markets.

One of the most startling, but at the same time, most thought-compelling proposals for the ideal State are Mr. Ruskin’s Bishops. The ?p?s??p?? of the New Testament was an Overseer, a man who looked after the members of the Early Church, the agent of their relief, and the supervisor of their conduct. This order of men Ruskin proposes to declericalize and to municipalize. The preaching, we shall remember, is to be separated from pastoral care, and to be done gratuitously by unofficial ministers. This leaves no link between the State and the family; even the action of the Fatherland as a father, now afforded by the State clergy, being done away with. Therefore, over every fifty or a hundred families there is to be elected, for life, a Bishop, who is to be a friendly counsellor, and to keep a record of all notable events—a much extended public registrar. All exceptional treatment which special circumstances may render desirable, any mitigation of ordinary law, is arranged through him. Where law is to be so pervasive, some cushion for its impact would certainly be necessary. He bears to the Government the relation which the Charity Organisation Society bears to the Poor Law Guardians, or an Inebriate Home to the Jail, or (in theory) Equity to Common Law. Thus the terrible loneliness and neglect of the poor, and haunts of undiscovered vice, would no longer be possible. The whole episcopal action was to be elastic, the methods patient, gentle, not compulsory, and not intrusive. The Bishops were to be paid officers, and they had to report to a higher officer called a Duke (Time and Tide, XIII).

We now approach the question of national leadership. So great was Ruskin’s distrust of the People, his hatred of Liberty and Equality, that he fell back upon our Aristocracy, commonplace as he knew it to be, for the power of governance. He is not so far out of our current national habit. We know well that any good, hardworking peer, baronet or landed magnate of good family, has at once a favourable hearing, and possesses by birth an open door to the confidence of the people; and he has only to show that he deserves it, to maintain it with ease. We democrats love a lord. So the Home Office and police work, also the Judgeships and the officering of the citizen army are to be the work of the present landed gentry; the careful husbanding of the nation’s resources in a glorified Board of Trade is to be the work of the present kings of business. The Education Department and the now nonexistent Artistic Department, the Board of Works, together with the few necessary Doctors, and the Musicians, are the third department of upper-class work, to be undertaken by the professional classes. It will be remembered that there are to be no hired soldiers or clergy and very few lawyers.

For the realization of this Utopia, no violence is to be used. As a prophet with an ethical gospel he entirely distrusted methods of physical force, as leaving you in reality just the men you were before, only damaged by the conflict in mind and person and estate. Nor did he, as a Conservative and a believer in continuity, look with favour or hope on a general confiscation bill, abolishing rent and interest. The whole thing had to be done by converting the upper classes, those classes whose glory is in living in comfort and pride served by the labour of others, and whose alienation from the multitude is graven deep into their characters by every one of their cherished habits. We have seen that the landlord would become an annuitant, the parson transformed, the solicitor and the barrister nearly wiped out. Many merchants, most bankers and stockbrokers and all shareholders in banks, if and when interest is abolished, would find themselves without the profits on which, it is to be feared, much of their happiness depends. Some of these persons would become public officers, living on salaries and earning them. Manufacturers would become profit sharers, and be invited to join a Guild. Doubtless the liquor interest would find that it had a stern master, though but little detailed allusion to it is made, and prohibition is not intended.

If you have ever tried to convince a man by some highly abstruse, or at any rate, long and intricate process of thought, of truths or proposals which upset his whole career, blighted his interests, and wrote him down a useless and pernicious person—if, for instance, you have explained the wickedness and folly of Protection to a friend from Pennsylvania, or the theoretical righteousness of Home Rule to a friend from Belfast, or the innate errors of Vivisection to a physiologist, or discoursed on Homoeopathy to your own medical man, you will be able to foresee the blank look of polite indifference with which Ruskin’s schemes would be likely to be received by the Marquis of B. or by the distinguished directors of your bank. Why am I not to make cotton look like silk? will be asked by certain very excellent Lancashire firms. Is shoddy not to continue its useful, if humble career? is the cry of certain parts of the West Riding; and some of the metallic business of Birmingham would be a cause of much searching of heart. And there is not a retired old lady living in her bower of roses from the Lake District to Penzance whose peace of mind and perhaps nourishment of body would not, if interest were truly abolished, cease. I always notice that reformers who would abolish interest do not explain what they would do with the large class of ladies of all ages, and the smaller class of elderly men who, after all, do constitute the greater part of the technically idle class, and who are totally unable to earn a living; since neither the arts of dress nor of graceful conversation have a market value.

It must be plain to us that any wholesale conversion and sudden awakening of the social conscience in Ruskin’s direction is not to be expected. Neither the intellectual conviction, nor the moral power to carry it out if formed, will be produced except in a few instances, here and there. The astonishment and delight with which we hear of the doings of exceptional employers show how rare they are. Every year, of recent years, has seemed darker and darker to some of us, in noting the treatment of public affairs by the wealthy, and the extent to which “Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind.”

Nor is it possible to an employer, even if intellectually convinced and morally sound, to raise his wages much above the rate paid by his competitors, to avoid drawing from the business wherewithal to pay interest on capital, nor, generally, to improve quality, with or without improving price.

We must fall back on legislation, on democratic conviction expressed by the organ of the national will, to bring about any portion of this scheme. We shall have to move all together, if we move at all. Take a comparative trifle, trifling compared to these large proposals—the weekly half-holiday. This can only be taken by all or none of a given trade in a given town; or take the Bank Holidays, popular benefits only to be won on the floor of the House of Commons, and which cost so much effort that a certain worthy banker has been canonized for his labours in obtaining St. Lubbock’s Day. Yet I am of Ruskin’s mind thus far—that any growth of an enlightened moral sentiment will most easily permeate the voting masses from individuals of the educated classes.

Ruskin cherished no delusions about it. He says: “You need not think that even if you obtained a majority of representatives in the existing Parliament, you could immediately compel any system of business, broadly contrary to that now established by custom. If you could pass laws to-morrow, wholly favourable to yourselves, as you might think, because unfavourable to your masters, and to the upper classes of society, the only result would be that the riches of the country would at once leave it, and you would perish in riot and famine. Be assured that no great change for the better can ever be easily accomplished, or quickly; nor by impulsive ill-regulated effort, nor by bad men; nor even by good men, without much suffering.”[82]

The scheme as a whole has never been systematized, nor worked out in detailed proposals. Still less has it been hinged on to our present social structure. It is a prophetic forecast, an inspiration of genius; it is a bow of glorious hue set in the clouds. When Ruskin wrote his economics the view was that by each man doing the best for himself the general good was automatically best advanced—an unseen hand behind human activities arranged the world’s welfare with nothing but individual selfishness to do it with.

We no longer accept this as a complete account of the matter. We recognize that that would be a wild-wood kind of a cosmic order; and that under it human affairs would be left to the same kind of governance as that of the forest and the jungle. The wolf pack and the wild bramble are all very well in their scale and their place; but for humanity this unrestrained individual luxuriance, with its terrible cost and waste, is now felt by us to be only a first approximation to society. It is the point whence we begin, not the goal we aim for. It is safe and stable as a foundation; it cannot be upset or overthrown, for it is actually itself the ground; and there is nothing to overthrow. Guilds, Monopolies, Trusts, also Governments and Charities are built upon it to regulate it; and they grow, and in time may decay and die, leaving the jungle of free competition to overrun once more the painful clearings. But out of the wilds men have in fact made their lawns and gardens, their orchards and their fields of wheat; they have built them palaces and cities which are permanent and stable enough, though not everlasting. The higher law of civilization is successfully holding at bay the wild tendencies. The millions of stray seeds, the storms of wind and crackings of frost, if let alone, would in time reduce a watering place like Scarborough to a green cliff side; still Scarborough exists and will exist, and justify its existence. Similarly there are limitations, orderly arrangements, which may be put upon the wild nature of economic freedom; and we may make a better world thereby. We all know how much is accepted already in the way of civilized restraint. When Parliament is free to attend to home affairs almost every Act is a regulation or limitation of individual freedom, or it is the taking up by Government of what had been previously left to the individual. The long list of municipal and imperial activities must be too familiar to need repetition here. We are indeed rushing rapidly in that direction. Can we go no further? Are we necessarily at the end just here?

I will try to outline in the following chapter a few ways in which we may. That is, we will test Ruskin by the changes of the last half century and those which are looming near; and see how much of his teaching abides our question.