IC-NRLF 
 
 JOHN 
 
 HIS LIFE AND WORK 
 
 I 
 
 INAUGURAL ADDRESS 
 
 DELIVERED 
 
 SOCIETY OF GLASGOW 
 
 BY TIIJ 
 
 WILLIAM S M A R T . 
 
 GLASGOW 
 CO 
 
 X A S I K N HOI 
 
 II I LLH i 
 
TH 
 
 UNIY6RS1TY Of CALlfORNlA 
 LIBRARY 
 
JOHN RUSKIN : HIS pFE 
 
 AND 
 

JOHN RUSKIN: 
 
 HIS LIFE AND WORK 
 
 INAUGURAL ADDRESS 
 
 DELIVERED BEFORE 
 
 THE RUSKIN SOCIETY OF GLASGOW 
 
 BY THE PRESIDENT, 
 WILLIAM SMART. 
 
 MANCHEStER ABEL HEYWOOD & SON. 
 
 . fPORTEOUS BROTHERS. 
 (WILSON & M'CORMICK. 
 

IT is no light task that falls upon me, as President of this 
 Society, to deliver its inaugural address. I am conscious 
 tint I have before me comparatively few who come as 
 members of the Ruskin Society, or as sympathizers with its 
 work ; and that the bulk of my audience is composed of 
 those who hold very different opinions; from those who 
 look upon John Ruskin merely as a brilliant writer on Art, 
 down the varying scale, to those who come to hear something 
 in defence of one they consider a mere enthusiast. 
 
 To the former class I feel that I can say very little that is 
 new, not being by any means the best qualified among them 
 to say even that : while, in regard to the latter, I am aware 
 that, by want of skill in setting forth the truths Mr. Ruskin 
 has devoted his life to teach, I may raise such a prejudice 
 against him in their minds as will vitiate any effect that 
 the chance reading of his works might hereafter have. 
 And when, looking around me, I see not only those whose 
 views of life must have been more or less shaped by com- 
 mercial pursuits, but also many whose lives have been spent 
 in the domain of thought, and in the search for truth, I realize 
 most fully the responsibility attaching to one who preaches 
 what may seem a new gospel. 
 
 434521 
 
Of you, then, who know Mr Ruskin and his writings as 
 well as I do, I must beg indulgence if I traverse ground 
 which is already a beaten track to you, while I speak to that 
 wider-part of my audience which knows him only by name and 
 his writings by report. 
 
 There is probably no other great writer of whom so little is 
 now known, and that after forty years of continuous literary 
 work, as John Ruskin. One knows him not at all not even 
 by name : another knows him only as an art critic : a third, 
 as an aesthetic philosopher, whose work on art has unfitted 
 him for any practical views of life, and made him a dangerous 
 guide in morals. A more numerous class regard him as a 
 dreamer, or, less ambiguously, an amiable madman. 
 
 For it is a sorrowful fact that a self-styled practical world 
 is just as apt, in the nineteenth century, Anno Domini, to 
 say of its greatest men, as it did four thousand years ago, 
 " behold this dreamer cometh ;" or, at a later date, and of 
 a greater than man, "he hath a devil and is mad." And, 
 of our madman, we must again answer as one of the same 
 class did for himself ' Not mad, most noble world, but 
 speaking forth the words of truth and soberness.' 
 
 It would be curious, and perhaps interesting, to examine 
 the grounds on which an arrogant ignorance fixes the stigma 
 of madness on Mr. Ruskin, but I will only mention three, 
 and, for refutation, do little more than leave it to your good 
 judgment, when I have set forth his teaching, with such ex- 
 tracts from his works as may be necessary. 
 
For seventeen years Mr. Ruskin's name was in every one's 
 mouth as the model and mirror of prose writers. His grace 
 of diction was unequalled ; his canons of art stood firm 
 against all criticism ; the loftiness of his moral teaching was 
 almost inspired. But, one day, the unequalled style, the 
 stern logic, and sterner purity of mind, were all concentrated 
 into one sweeping denunciation of the social system of the 
 nineteenth century ; declaring that our greed of gold had led 
 us to such a state of wretchedness, degradation, and folly as 
 were never witnessed before in any state, savage or civilized, 
 and that, for salvation of the nation, we must return to the 
 simple rules of our Master, Christ. Naturally, the practical 
 world resented the imputation that its boasted civilization was 
 a mistake. The merchant derided the idea that he existed, 
 not that he might make money for himself, but that his em- 
 ployes might live. The professional man did not like being 
 told that, in the soul of things, he deserved less reward than 
 the agricultural labourer, for his work, because his real 
 reward was in his work, while the labourer's was_/y^ it. And 
 one and all declared that the Sermon on the Mount was a 
 beautiful ideal but totally impracticable. 
 
 Strong words, my friends, but I hope to show you, or, if 
 I cannot, it is my fault, not his, that Mr. Ruskin asks no 
 more, in any book of his, than that man should obey the law 
 of life given from Christ's own mouth : and the newspaper 
 press of this country, by its almost unanimous derision of his 
 later books, shows how far we have fallen from any realiza- 
 tion of pure religion. 
 
But he is content to take lower ground than thu. Even 
 supposing that our hopes for a future life be taken as ground- 
 less, that our faith is vain, and that the ears of those who 
 have travelled to the farthest confines of thought have 
 heard only the cry of a fatherless world, Mr. Ruskin takes 
 his stand on those simple laws of justice and mercy which 
 constitute the morality underlying all religions of the world, 
 and says no more and no less, than that the nation which 
 has left these must retrace its steps, or, as a nation, perish. 
 Maybe a gloomy view, but, assuredly, not a mad one ! 
 
 Another ground of his supposed madness merely rests 
 in the general and no less foolish than general opinion 
 that anything worth knowing can be known at a casual read- 
 ing, and that all truth is expressed in one unvarying mode of 
 simplicity. Those who judge thus forget that scholars and 
 thinkers for the last eighteen hundred years have been 
 digging deep in the resources of one book alone, and do 
 not seem to have at all exhausted them ; they forget the 
 innumerable commentaries on our own Shakespeare, as well 
 as on every other great writer of the past ; they forget the 
 somewhat amazing fact that there is one man, now. living, 
 confessedly the greatest thinker of modern times, whose 
 books are yet not understood by even a tithe of the reading 
 public Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 That two men should give forth substantially the same 
 message the one, indeed, everywhere acknowledging the 
 other as master and yet the one be honoured, the other 
 
s 
 
 scorned, seems due to the fact that Carlyle's rugged strength 
 carries conviction of its truth, even where only slightly under- 
 stood : just as the grip of death carries conviction of the 
 existence of a God to the dullest blockhead. But Mr. 
 Ruskin, with a strength of conviction, and force of eloquence 
 not second to Carlyle, has a heart as gentle and womanlike 
 as it is strong ; it pities and ioves even where it despises : 
 his amazement at the blindness which does not realize, and 
 the indifference which allows, the festering mass of human 
 misery around, bursts out in passionate, uncontrollable indig- 
 nation : he is driven to preach recklessly, as it seems, in 
 season and out of season : conjuring for love, threatening 
 by prophecied calamity, startling by strange rhetoric, if, by 
 any means, he may awake a world which sleeps on the verge 
 of its ruin. 
 
 As usual the newspapers, catering more for the amuse- 
 ment than the good of their readers, and neglectful of their 
 mighty, almost infinite responsibility, take care to publish 
 those parts of his writings which may raise a smile or 
 provoke a sneer. But, if ever the canon of criticism put 
 forth by himself applied to any one, it does to him : 
 * " Be sure" he says, " if the author is worth anything you 
 will not get at his meaning all at once nay, that at his 
 whole meaning you will not for a long time arrive in any 
 wise. Not that he does not say what he means, and in strong 
 
 * SESAME AND LILIES, p. 13. 
 
words too ; but he cannot say it all ; and what is more 
 strange, will not but in a hidden way, and in parables, in 
 order that he may be sure you want it." 
 
 There is a third ground for the accusation of madness 
 which I can only touch with reverent hands. 
 
 Endowed with that rare delight in nature granted only 
 to great painters and poets, he has seen into nature 
 and its mysterious connections with the powers above 
 us as we cannot see. Not without reason did Wordsworth 
 
 write : 
 
 " To me the meanest flower that blows can give 
 Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." 
 and the wonderful ways in which, to the poet, external 
 nature symbolizes and enshrines the spiritual, are apt to 
 excite ridicule among those of whom Peter Bell was pilloried 
 as everlasting type in the famous " yellow primrose " stanza. 
 
 And, as devoting all his life to/Art, he has had to face the 
 mysterious study of the meanirig of the many religions which 
 have only, or best, expressed themselves in their art : he has 
 had the problem continually before him of reconciling the 
 art, the religion, and the history of peoples. 
 
 But when, as result of all this life-long study, he proclaims, 
 that not alone in Protestantism, not even in all the Churches 
 which unite themselves only under the name of Christian, 
 but everywhere, in. all art, in all religions, in all history, he 
 finds God working : that even the Greek myths have lessons 
 for us Christians : and that in that far-off age the storied 
 
heroes and demigods were probably such messengers as God 
 saw fit for the times of course the modern religious world 
 which prays weekly for a Church Universal, but hates the 
 rival denomination over the way, finds this man an enthusiast, 
 a dreamer, a madman even a dangerous one. 
 
 But let any one who thinks such ideas merely the ex- 
 travagance of a poet's dream, in his next woodland walk, 
 try at anyrate to imagine that the flowers which meet his 
 careless eye have a something resembling human life, that 
 the rose blushes with delight in our admiration, and the 
 lily grows pale with rapture ; let him fancy that the dog 
 which leaps and gambols responsive to the joy in his 
 master's eye, or crouches sadly sympathetic in his sorrow, 
 has a counterpart in all the living things that too often 
 shrink and fly from the ill-usage they have learned to expect ; 
 let him only try to imagine all this, and human life will be- 
 come more sacred to him ; he will get a better idea of John 
 Ruskin, and of God. 
 
 I would it were possible to give you any idea how foolish 
 and cruel this imputation of madness, or anything approach- 
 ing to it, is. If it were only himself who was now address- 
 ing you, instead of a very humble though faithful disciple : 
 if you could see that spare stooping figure, that rough hewn 
 kindly face, with its mobile, sensitive mouth, and clear deep 
 eyes, so sweet and honest in repose, so keen, and earnest and 
 eloquent in debate, you would feel how noble and true a 
 gentleman he is, But a life spent in unselfish work has 
 
8 
 
 well earned the repose which sixty years demand. We 
 cannot hope for many more public appearances from him ; 
 and we must accept his own statement as final, when he says 
 that he has told us what truth it is necessary for us to know, 
 and that, if we will not learn from what he has already 
 written, he can teach us no more. But I must warn you in 
 this, that unless you approach the study of his works with 
 somewhat of a belief in the man, and of sympathy with him, 
 you will come little speed. * " // is quite possible" he says, 
 "for the simplest workman or labourer for whom I write to 
 understand what the feelings of a gentleman are, and share 
 them, if he will ; but the crisis and horror of this present time 
 are that its desire of money, and the fulness of luxury dishonest- 
 ly attainable by common persons, are gradually making churls 
 of all men ; and the nobler passions are not merely disbelieved^ 
 but even the conception of them seems ludicrous to the impotent 
 churl mind ; so that, to take only so poor an instance of tJiem 
 as my own life because I have passed it in almsgiving, not 
 in fortune-hunting; because I have laboured always for i '/ic 
 honour of others, not my own, and have chosen rather to make 
 men look to Turner and Luini, than to form or exhibit the 
 skill of my own hand; because I have lowered my rents, and 
 assured the comfortable lives of my poor tenants, instead of 
 taking from them all I could force for the roofs they needed ; 
 because I' love a wood walk better than a London street ; and 
 
 FORS IV., 41-103. 
 
would rather watch a seagull fly than shoot if, and rather 
 hear a thrush sing than eat it ; finally, because I never dis- 
 obeyed my mother, because I have honoured all women with 
 solemn worship, and have been kind even to the unthankful 
 and the evil ; therefore the hacks of English art and literature 
 wag their heads at me, and the poor wretch who pawns the 
 dirty linen of his soul daily for a bottle of sour wine and a 
 cigar, talks of the 'effeminate sentimentality of Ruskin. ' ' 
 
 It is then in the hope of convincing you that in Mr. 
 Ruskin we have not merely a great writer, but a great 
 teacher, that I have chosen to speak of his life as well as his 
 work. 
 
 We Scotch get the name of being hard-headed. We 
 are ready to suspect and despise humbug and sham 
 having so much in us at anyrate of the man we boast as 
 one of our race. We do not easily believe in a 
 man who preaches one thing and lives another. * / am 
 convinced" says Ruskin himself, " that it is by his personal con- 
 duct that any man of ordinary power will do the greatest 
 amount of good that it is in him to do" And I think I am 
 right in supposing that you will the more readily credit his 
 teaching, when I can show you how entirely noble, and, in 
 the truest sense, consistent, his whole life has been. 
 
 John Ruskin was born in London in February, 1819. 
 f" My father -,"he says, in one of the autobiographical passages 
 
 * FOKS II., 21, 2. t FORS I., 10, 5. 
 
10 
 
 in the Fors., "began business as a wine-merchant, with no 
 capital, and a considerable amount of debts bequeathed him by 
 my grandfather. He accepted the bequest and paid them all 
 before he began to lay by anything for himself, for which his 
 best friends called him a fool, and I, without expressing my 
 opinion as to his wisdom, which I knew in such matters to be 
 at least equal to mine, have written on the granite slab over 
 his grave that he was ''an entirely honest merchant? " 
 
 His parents were cousins, and of Scotch descent. Pro- 
 bably in virtue of this Scotch blood they were somewhat 
 severe in their training of this, their only son. A lonely child, 
 with no companions, scant toys, and few books, he grew up 
 a quiet, meditative boy. His books, however, if few, were 
 of the best.* " I had Walter Scott's novels, and" the Iliad, 
 (Pope's translation), for my only reading when I was a child, 
 on week days : on Sundays their effect was tempered by 
 ' Robinson Crusoe ' and the ' Pilgrim's Progress ;' my mother 
 having it deeply in her heart to make an evangelical clergyman 
 of me. Fortunately, I had an aunt more evangelical than my 
 mother ; and my aunt gave me cold mutton for Sunday's dinner, 
 which as I much preferred it hot greatly diminished the 
 influence of the * Pilgrim } s Progress,' and the end of the matter 
 was, that I got all the noble imaginative teaching of Defoe and 
 Bunyan, and yet am not an evangelical clergyman. I had, 
 however, still better teaching than theirs, and that compitlsorily 
 and every day of the week. Walter Scott and Pope's Homer 
 FORS I., 10, 2. 
 
II 
 
 were reading of ;// y own election, but wy motlicr forced me, by 
 steady daily toil, to learn long chapters of the Bible by heart 
 as well as to read it every syllable through, aloud, hard names 
 and all, from Genesis to the Apocalypse, about once a year ; 
 and to that discipline patient, accurate, and resolute / owe, 
 not only a knowledge of the book, which I find occasionally 
 serviceable, but much of my general power of taking pains, and 
 the best part of my taste in literature" 
 
 * " For toys" he says, " I had a bunch of keys to play with, 
 as long as I was capable only of pleasure in what glittered and 
 jingled ; as I grew older, I had a cart, and a ball ; and when 
 I was five or six years old, two boxes of well-cut wooden bricks. 
 With these modest, but, I still think, entirely sufficient posses- 
 sions, and being always summarily whipped if I cried, did not 
 do as I was bid, or tumbled on the stairs, I soon attained serene 
 and secure methods of life and motion ; and could pass my days 
 contentedly in tracing the squares and comparing the colours of 
 my carpet ; examining the knots in the wood of the floor, or 
 
 counting the bricks in the opposite houses But the 
 
 carpet, and what patterns I could find in bed-covers, dresses, or 
 wall papers to be examined, were my chief resources, and my 
 attention to the particulars in these was soon so accurate, that 
 when at three and a half I was taken to have my portrait 
 painted by Mr. Northcote, I had not been ten minutes alone 
 with him before I asked him why there were holes in his 
 carpet." 
 
 * FORS V., 51-55. 
 
12 
 
 Whatever we may think of the wisdom of such training, 
 it is to this limitation of books and toys that he owes that 
 habit of attention to particulars, that power of concentration, 
 and that delight in little things, which have made him at 
 once so great as a writer and an art student. Every year 
 his father made a two months' driving tour through England 
 on business, and if, in the course of the mid-day drive there 
 were any gentleman's house to be seen, his father baited the 
 horses, and father, mother, and son went reverently through 
 the state rooms. * " My father" he says, " had a quite in- 
 fallible natural judgment in painting. .... He never, 
 when I was old enough to care for what he himself delighted 
 in, allowed me to look for an instant at a bad picture ; and 
 if there were a Reynolds, Velasquez, Vandyck, or Rembrandt 
 in the rooms, he would pay the surliest housekeepers into patience 
 until we had seen it to hcarfs content ; if none of these, I was 
 allowed to look at Guido, Carlo Dolce or the more skilful 
 masters of the Dutch School, Cuyp, Tenters, Hobbima, 
 Wouvermans ; but never at any second-rate or doubtful 
 examples" 
 
 It was the fond hope of his friends that he would enter 
 the Church " He might have been a Bishop," said his 
 mother once, with tears in her eyes ; but the young man's 
 mind was early turned to his future work by getting a present 
 of Roger's Italy, illustrated by Turner, in whom he hence- 
 
 * FORS V., 56-227. 
 
13 
 
 forth became an ardent believer. His first education was 
 done under worthy tutorship in his father's house, from 
 which he went straight to Christ Church, Oxford. The 
 Newdigate Prize for the poem " Salsette and Elephanta," 
 and a complimentary fourth class pass, were his only achieve- 
 ments. But under Dr. Buckland he laid the foundation of 
 that thorough geological knowledge which became so valu- 
 able to him as an art critic. Thereafter he studied the 
 elements of drawing and painting under Copley Fielding and 
 J. D. Harding, and spent much of his time in the galleries 
 of Italy. 
 
 At the age of twenty-four appeared the first volume of his 
 great work ' Modem Painters.' Originating, as he says, in 
 indignation at the shallow and false criticism of the 
 periodicals of the day on the works of Turner, it had ampli- 
 fied itself into something very like a treatise on Art. Turner 
 was now sixty-eight. Five years before he had painted the 
 Old Temeraire, and he was still in the zenith of his power. 
 For years he had held the leading place among the landscape 
 painters of England, but his fame had lasted too long for a 
 novelty-loving public, and the press had begun to write him 
 down. Public taste, to use Ruskin's words, was seemingly 
 plunging deeper and deeper in degradation every day, in 
 admiration of all that was theatrical, affected, and false in art. 
 Never was such a daring attempt. For a youth of twenty- 
 four to take up the position that Turner was the greatest land- 
 scape painter the world had ever seen, and to prove it by 
 
14 
 
 formulating the before unwritten canons of art, was Titanic 
 work ; but never was daring crowned with such success. 
 Henceforth Turner's place in art was secure, and Ruskin 
 took his own place in the first rank of English writers. 
 
 ' Modern Painters' remains, perhaps, the most wonderful 
 example of youthful genius extant. The reader cannot but be 
 amazed that the exact observation of nature, and the exhaus- 
 tive study of the productions of painters, ancient and modern, 
 could have left time for the grasp and extent of erudition it 
 evidences. But, if for nothing else, Ruskin deserves the 
 thanks of succeeding generations for elevating criticism of 
 Art into an art of itself, and delivering us from the diatribes 
 of those who thought that the only thing necessary to 
 criticize the productions of the brush was the possession of 
 a pen. 
 
 Three years later appeared the second volume ; ten years 
 after that, volumes third and fourth; and the last volume in 
 1860. Between times, in 1849, appeared the 'Seven Lamps 
 of Architecture,' being an application of the principles of 
 * Modern Painters ' to the sister art ; and, in 185 1, the ' Stones 
 of Venice/ being a discourse on the history, art, and moral 
 decline of that Queen of Cities. It is, of course, impossible 
 to do any justice to these three stupendous treatises on Art 
 in a few sentences. I give Mr. Ruskin's own epitome : 
 " ' MODERN PAINTERS ' teaches the claim of all lower nature on 
 the hearts of men : of the rock and wave and herb as a part of 
 their necessary spirit life. It declares the perfectness and 
 
eternal beauty of the work of God, and tests all work of 
 man by concurrence with, or subjection to that.' 1 '' Of the 
 others, he says, that they "teach the laws of constructive 
 art, and the dependence of all human work or edifice for 
 its beauty on the happy life of the workman" 
 
 In 1860, after some minor works, lectures, and pamphlets, 
 appeared the famous four essays in the * Cornhill,' reprinted 
 under the title of ' Unto this Last,' being an attack on the 
 popular conception and tendency of Political Economy. 
 They were founded on the perfectly just basis that Political 
 Economists of the school of Mill and Ricardo, instead 
 of analyzing the true economy of a State, had analyzed 
 the modern outcome of wealth and money-making as 
 it exists in the present corrupt state of society, and had 
 taught their students that the deductions from this were 
 the eternal laws of wealth and commerce. 'Unto this 
 Last ' expounds the true economy of a State which takes 
 for its first aim the healthy and happy life of the people ; 
 and, at the same time, it teaches that the first duty of 
 the citizen is to carry out this true Economy in his own 
 life and business. 
 
 'Mumera Pulveris,' six essays on the Elements of 
 Political Economy, soon followed, being an expansion of 
 the same views, ' Political Economy plus Philanthropy,' as 
 it was scornfully called. 
 
 The part of his life during which he was writing these 
 was spent partly at home, partly in Italy and Switzerland ; 
 
all his energies being given to ascertain the truth of natural 
 forms, fixed and accidental. No one will ever have any 
 idea of the actual art Work he did in the course of his long 
 life, in study and preparation for his books. It is with no 
 amateur we are dealing. What he might have been as an 
 artist, and what he resigned in not becoming one, is enough 
 evidenced by such of his drawings as have seen the light. 
 
 And here I must ask you to note how perfectly and 
 entirely noble his art life has been. Endowed with every 
 capacity to be a great artist, seeing and loving nature as only 
 poets do, watching and catching her varying moods as only 
 painters can, and with a technical aptitude which might 
 have been the willing slave of these, he had the strength of 
 self-denial to follow the advice he gives to others " In a 
 general way remember that it is far better to find out other 
 great men than to become one yourself, for you can but be- 
 come one at the best, but you can bring others to light in 
 numbers" advice which I cannot but think most essential 
 in an age when every man thinks his own half-digested 
 opinions as good as the life thoughts of a great man. 
 
 But this is the key-note of Ruskin's whole life, it has 
 been entirely spent for others. He has gone through life 
 with all the chivalry of a knight of old, a freelance for the 
 defence of what was noble and true against the base and the 
 churlish. First, as the champion of Turner ; then as the 
 champion of the noble in art against the untrue and the 
 degrading ; then in the defence of all natural beauty against 
 
man's desecration ; finally, standing forth against those foul 
 forms of our national life which degrade man while they 
 increase gold you will find equally perfect consistency 
 throughout his life and his teaching ; he has never worked 
 for honour or reward, but always for others. 
 
 Of his various other works on life, art, mythology, &c., 
 written between 1860 and 1870, valuable as they are, I have 
 no time to say anything, except that ' Sesame and Lilies,' and 
 the 'Crown of Wild Olive,' contain perhaps the finest 
 passages in the whole range of English prose, the former in 
 the lecture entitled ' Queens' Gardens,' the latter in the 
 lecture on War. 
 
 In 1870 Oxford honoured herself by appointing him to 
 the chair of Fine Art, then newly founded. As a Professor, 
 I may say that he roused the passionate enthusiasm of his 
 students. Indeed his personal influence has always been 
 notoriously so powerful that he made it a point of honour in 
 Oxford not to mix much personally with his students, in 
 case he should be suspected of unduly influencing them. 
 And from my own experience, limited as it has been, I can 
 endorse what those nearest him have said to me " he is a 
 man one could die for, or better, live for." 
 
 One episode at Oxford was much talked of, and laughed 
 at, at the time the " digging." As usual, Mr. Ruskin, looking 
 out for other people's good, thought that the superfluous 
 energy the men got rid of on the river and in the gymnasium, 
 might be profitably and pleasantly spent to some good end. 
 
i8 
 
 " Will none of you," he said, " of your strength and your 
 leisure do anything for the poor drain a single cottage, repair 
 a single village byevvay and you yourselves will be more 
 strong, and your hearts more light, than had your leisure 
 been spent in costly games, or more hurtful amusement." 
 About fifty men responded, and set to work under Ruskin's 
 old head gardener to make a road past a few cottages which 
 were without a decent bye-way. The digging went on 
 vigorously for some time, but eventually the diggers dropped 
 off, and the scheme was abandoned, chiefly, I have been 
 informed by one of the diggers, because the rustics stood 
 round with their hands in their pockets and laughed ! If 
 there is one thing which is harder for the ordinary English 
 gentleman to stand than another, it is to be laughed at. 
 
 In 1871, a year after taking the Art Chair, he began the 
 'Fors Clavigera,' that much derided and much misunderstood 
 series of Letters to the Labourers and Workmen of Great 
 Britain. A few words as to the causes which led to this 
 step. An intense admirer of Carlyle, he shared with him 
 the expectation that the higher classes would gradually come 
 to realize their duty toward the lower. But all that Carlyle 
 had written in 1843, when he began 'Past and Present' with 
 the words : " The condition of England is justly regarded as 
 one of the most ominous, and withal one of the strangest ever 
 seen in this world. England is full of wealth, of multifarious 
 produce, supply for human want in every kind ; yet E?ig- 
 land is dying of inanition'' remained true in 1871. 
 
19 
 
 Ruskin saw and felt, as only a true man can, that the 
 lust of gold was debasing our humanity ; that, against it, 
 all the revelation of that nature which it desecrates, and all 
 the rights of man which it tramples on, are powerless. 
 
 But Carlyle had ended his life work, and was silent : the 
 mighty pen that had written the ' Latter Day Pamphlets,' 
 was laid down, and men had already forgotten the prophecy 
 of woe and warning. A first place in the national literature 
 was indeed awarded him without question. His books 
 were such as ' no gentleman's library is complete without '; 
 but of practical following of his teaching there was nothing. 
 His winged words lay deep in some few scholars' hearts, 
 but from the leaders of labour to whom he trusted there 
 came no response. No landowner stirred from his position 
 as heaven-appointed beatitude ; statues to Hudson still re- 
 mained the national sculpture ; and the gulf between rich 
 and poor yawned yet wider and deeper. 
 
 On ist January, 1871, Ruskin began the *Fors Clavigera' 
 with the memorable words : "Friends, we begin to-day another 
 group of ten years, not in happy circumstances. Although, for 
 the time, exempted from the direct calamities which have fallen 
 on neighbouring states, believe* me, we have not escaped them 
 because of our better deserving*, nor by our better wisdom ; but 
 only for one of two bad reasjfa, or for both : either that we 
 have not sense enough to determine in a great national quarrel 
 which side is right, or that we have not courage to defend the 
 right, when we have discerned it. / believe that both these 
 
20 
 
 bad reasons exist in full force ; that our own political divisions 
 prevent us from understanding the laws of international justice ; 
 and that, even if we did, we should not dare to defend, perhaps 
 not even to assert them, being on this first of January, 1871, 
 in much bodily fear ; that is to say, afraid of the Russians ; 
 afraid of the Prussians ; afraid of the Americans ; afraid of 
 the Hindoos ; afraid of the Chinese ; afraid of the Japanese ; 
 afraid of the New Zealanders ; and afraid of the Caffres : and 
 very justly so, being conscious that our only real desire respecting 
 any of these nations has beeen to get as much out of them as we 
 could. They have no right to complain of us, notwithstanding, 
 since we have all, lately, lived ourselves in the daily endeavour to 
 get as much out of our neighbours and friends as we could ; and 
 having by this means, indeed, got a good deal out of each other, 
 and put nothing into each other, the actually obtained result, 
 this day, is a state of emptiness in purse and stomach, for the 
 solace of which our boasted f insular position ' is ineffectual. 
 I have listened to many ingenious persons, who say we are 
 better off now than ever we were before. I do not know how 
 well off we were before ; but I know positively that many very 
 deserving persons of my acquaintance have great difficulty in 
 living under these improved circumstances : also, that my desk 
 is full of begging letters, eloquently written either by distressed 
 or dishonest people ; and that we cannot be called, as a nation, 
 well off, while so many of us are either living in honest or in 
 villanous begging. For my own part, I will put up with this 
 state of things, passively, not an hour longer. I am not an 
 
21 
 
 unselfish person, nor an Evangelical one ; I have no particular 
 pleasure in doing good ; neither do I dislike doing it so much 
 as to expect to be rewarded for it in another world. But I 
 simply cannot paint, nor read, nor look at minerals, nor do any- 
 thing else that Hike, and the very light of the morning sky, when 
 there is anywhich is seldom, now-a-days, near London has 
 become hateful to me, because of the misery that I know of, and 
 see signs of, where I know it not, which no imagination can 
 interpret too bitterly. Therefore, as I have said, I will endure 
 it no longer quietly ; but henceforward, with any few or many 
 who will help, do my poor best to abate this misery. But that 
 I may do my best, I must not be miserable myself any longer ; 
 for no man who is wretched in his own heart, and feeble in his 
 own work, can rightly help others. Now my own special 
 pleasure has lately been connected with a given duty. I have 
 been ordered to endeavour to make our English youth care 
 somewhat for the Arts ; and must put my uttermost strength 
 into that business. To which end I must clear myself from all 
 sense of responsibility for the material distress around me, by 
 explaining to you, once for all, in the shortest English I can, 
 what I know of its causes ; by pointing out to you some of the 
 methods by which it might be relieved ; and by setting aside 
 regularly some small percentage of my income, to assist, as one 
 of yourselves, in what one and all we shall have to do ; each of 
 us laying by something, according to our means, for the common 
 service ; and having amongst us, at last, be it ever so small, a 
 National Store instead of a National Debt" 
 
22 
 
 And farther on:* " What am. I, myself then, infirm and 
 oldy who take, or claim, leadership even of these lords ? God 
 forbid that I should claim it ; it is thmst and compelled on me 
 utterly against my will, utterly to ??iy distress, utterly, in many 
 things, to my shame. But I have found no other man in 
 England, none in Europe, ready to receive it, or even desiring 
 to make himself capable of receiving it. Such as I am, to my 
 own amazement, I stand so far as I can discern alone in 
 conviction, in hope, and in resolution, in the wilderness of this 
 modern world. Bred in luxury, which I perceive to have been 
 unjust to others, and destructive to myself ; vacillating, foolish, 
 and miserably failing in all my own conduct in life and 
 blown about hopelessly by storms of passion I, a man clothed 
 in soft raiment, /, a reed shaken with the wind, have yet this 
 Message to all men again entrusted to me : ' Behold, the axe is 
 laid to the root of the trees. Whatsoever tree therefore bringeth 
 not forth good fruit shall be hewn down, and cast into the 
 fin.'" 
 
 These words contain the foreshadowing and the justifica- 
 tion of that much misunderstood scheme of St. George's 
 Guild. For seven years Mr. Ruskin wrote the monthly 
 letters of the Fors Clavigera, in which the scheme was 
 gradually unfolded. Briefly put, it starts from the proposi- 
 tion that no man, whatever his rank or wealth may be, is 
 exempted from work and responsibility for that work ; and 
 that the noblest, as well as the most natural form of exist- 
 ence, is that spent in producing the first necessities of life, 
 * FORS. V., 58, 281. 
 
23 
 
 viz., in agricultural labour. I need scarcely say that this is 
 not the view of modern society. It seems to be held, 
 now-a-days, that, while ownership of land is the most 
 honourable social condition of man, labour on the land is, 
 of all labour, the least honourable : whence it comes that 
 the position of the agricultural labourer is, of all others, the 
 most deplorable Hodge having formed the theme of Eng- 
 lish caricature for the last half century as the type of 
 animal stupidity. It is generally considered as the undoubt- 
 ed right and privilege of the landowner to keep bird and 
 fish and beast in healthy life on his broad moors, and clear 
 streams, although his tenants should starve in miserable 
 hovels ; and, broadly speaking, it is held as the mark of a 
 gentleman that he soil his hands with no manual labour, 
 but kill time, and spend money in any destructive or harm- 
 less way he pleases. 
 
 The Guild then proposed to become a land-owning Society, 
 carrying out the principles which Mr. Ruskin conceives that 
 all land owners would carry out if they were patriotic instead 
 of selfish. In his own words : " The St. George's Guild con- 
 sists of a body of persons who think, primarily, that it is time 
 for honest persons to separate themselves intelligibly from 
 knaves, announcing their purpose, if God helps them, to live in 
 Godliness and honour, not in atheism and rascality : and who 
 think, secondarily, that the sum which well-disposed persons 
 usually set aside for charitable purposes, (namely, the tenth 
 part of their income,) may be most usefully applied in buying 
 
2 4 
 
 land for the nation, and entrusting the cultivation of it to a 
 body of well taught and well cared for peasantry '." 
 
 So much has been said about the Utopianism of this 
 scheme, that I may have some difficulty in convincing you 
 that it is the practical project of a practical man. It has 
 been saddled with the name of Communism, and I suppose 
 that that name, in these days of shallow opinion, is enough 
 to discredit any society. But Mr. Ruskin is a Communist 
 just as he is a Conservative in a sense very different from 
 the ordinary acceptation of the term. There is nothing in the 
 constitution of the Guild which any consistent Christian could 
 not approve of, and adhere to. Its members, indeed, bind 
 themselves that they will not deceive, nor cause to be de- 
 ceived, any human being for their gain or pleasure : nor 
 hurt, nor cause to be hurt, any human being for their gain or 
 pleasure : nor rob, nor cause to be robbed, any human being 
 for their gain or pleasure which might interfere with some 
 operations of respectable commercial pursuits : and that they 
 will not kill nor hurt any living creature needlessly, nor 
 destroy any beautiful thing; but will strive to save and 
 comfort all gentle life, and guard and perfect all natural 
 beauty, upon the earth which might interfere with some of 
 our sport, and much of our thoughtless cruelty. The idea 
 of Communism has arisen from a confusion of the Guild 
 with the labourers employed by it. We of the Guild, 
 generally speaking, live exactly as we always did, in our 
 usual avocations, not becoming anything more marked 
 
25 
 
 in the world than, presumably, honest, God-fearing men. 
 But, on the lands of the Guild, no steam machinery is 
 allowed in agriculture for reasons which I shall afterwards 
 explain. The rivers are kept pure from pollution, and, 
 generally speaking, all natural beauty is held as sacred. The 
 farmer's rent is fixed for life, if he conform to the require- 
 ments of the Guild ; but is diminished for every improve- 
 ment he makes on the land. The rents do not go to any 
 private interest or dividend, but are paid back to the tenants 
 in the shape of improvement of the Guild lands generally. 
 No one is allowed to live in squalor or wretchedness, the 
 first business of the Guild being to see that its tenants have 
 the necessary conditions of healthy and happy .life. The 
 labourers under the Guild farmers are paid fixed wages, un- 
 alterable, undiminished in time of sickness ; and, when unable 
 to work, they will think it no more shame to live on pension 
 from the Guild than a government official thinks shame to 
 take a pension from his government. On each estate the 
 Guild provides the means of intellectual and physical 
 recreation as well as education. The children are trained 
 on the lines of education laid down for them by the founder 
 of the Guild. 
 
 Is there anything in this so very unpractical ? It is true 
 that we have here a Society paying in a tithe of the income of 
 its members, and not expecting a five per cent, for it not 
 even a return of the principal ; which is something new, I am 
 aware, in business circles. But it is a great organized 
 
26 
 
 attempt to roll back the torrent of pauperism in Great 
 Britain : it is based on the principle laid down in ' Latter 
 Day Pamphlets,' that the only chanty likely to be ef- 
 fectual is that which prevents the cause, rather than 
 tries to cure the effect ; and so it undertakes the rearing of a 
 new generation of labourers, under such conditions as will 
 make a labouring man's life at least as free from temptation 
 to excess and sin as that of the upper classes. Says Mr. 
 Ruskin : " To divert a little of the large current of English 
 charity and justice from watching disease, to guarding health, 
 and from the punishment of crime to the reward of virtue ; to 
 establish, here and there, exercise grounds instead of hospitals, 
 and training schools instead of penitentiaries, is not, if you will 
 slowly take it to heart, a frantic imagination" 
 
 For my own part, I cannot but think that the Guild is 
 more certain of practical result than any of our schemes 
 of poor relief ; but, as I have no intention of entering into 
 any defence of the Guild, I must refer you for further infor- 
 mation to the seven volumes of the ' Fors,' with the warning 
 that, unless you are prepared to read right through them, 
 you had better not touch them. No writer suffers so much 
 as Mr. Ruskin from being read in extracts, and you simply 
 cannot understand the ' Fors Clavigera ' unless you can 
 read the great purpose developing itself all through. 
 
 I spoke before of the nobleness of Mr. Ruskin's Art life. 
 Although it is really a minor sacrifice, a statement of the 
 money he has spent for the good of others may be more im- 
 
27 
 
 pressive to the many. The Chair of Art at Oxford being in- 
 complete without an attached system of technical education in 
 Art, Mr. Ruskin, in 1875, gave ^5,000 to found a Mastership 
 of Drawing connected with the Chair. At the same time he 
 gave ^2, ooo more for a collection of drawings to be placed 
 in the Schools. By 1875, roughly estimating his remaining 
 fortune then at ^70,000, he had given the tithe of it, viz., 
 ^"7,000, to the Guild. In the same year he gave over 
 some property in London, worth ,3,500, to be managed for 
 the Guild by Miss Hill. All that is left now of his immense 
 fortune no less than ^150,000 in cash, left him by his 
 father, besides houses and pictures, is ;i 2,000, yielding 
 him ^360 a year ; and on this he lives in the house he 
 loved as a child Brantwood, on Coniston Lake. Of the 
 manner in which the rest of that great fortune has been 
 spent it would be out of place for me to speak, but I can 
 safely affirm that John Ruskin has faithfully and nobly acted 
 as steward of the wealth given to him, as to all men, for his 
 Master's service and honour. And that he has proved by 
 stripping himself to the lowest sum on which he can live the 
 life of an English gentleman, full of dignified repose and 
 grave simplicity, and yet dispense the hospitality which 
 Brantwood is never slow to offer. 
 
 Thus far I have told you what I could of the public life 
 of John Ruskin, and shown you its entire consistency with 
 his writings the whole manifesting devotion to the common 
 good as at once its key-note and its harmony. But I should 
 
28 
 
 be doing him an injustice were I to let you believe that the 
 truth or falseness of his teaching would be shown by the 
 success or failure of the St. George's Guild. Understand 
 that the Guild is only the immediate plan he proposes to 
 meet the present distress, and to amend the condition of the 
 agricultural labourer. In fact, we may well believe that it 
 was started to meet the reproach so often levelled at re- 
 formers, that they are wholly destructive, and cannot suggest 
 anything definite in place of what they destroy. To such 
 objections the St. George's Guild is standing answer : 
 Here is what a land-owner may do, and ought to do ; and, 
 as all cannot become land-owners, let those who trust me 
 band themselves together, and become at once a protesting, 
 and a land-owning Society. 
 
 But before the ' Fors Clavigera ' was ever written Mr. 
 Ruskin was already famous as a master of ethics ; and, even 
 if the passages bearing directly on the Guild were left out, 
 the ' Fors ' would still be a treasure house of the thoughts of 
 a great man the more interesting as the letter mode of 
 publication allowed him to speak of matters occurring in the 
 world at the time, instead of dealing with principles in the 
 abstract. 
 
 By that part of my subject then which deals with the Work 
 of John Ruskin, I mean the ethical and practical teaching 
 which underlies all he has written on art and economies, 
 and is the groundwork out of which the Guild of St. George 
 sprang. 
 
And, as it is obviously impossible to give a complete 
 system of morals in the few minutes during which I dare 
 detain you further, I will merely touch on the most 
 prominent, or least understood parts of his teaching content 
 if I can show you that, however strange such teaching may 
 be at first hearing, it is that of a man who, as he himself claims, 
 has never preached an "opinion," but always the truths 
 accredited by all the great thinkers of the past, and, in 
 consequence, much more likely to be true than our "drifted, 
 helpless, entangled weed of customary thought." 
 
 First, then, Mr. Ruskin, viewing the hurrying life of busy 
 England, with the unprejudiced eye of one whose knowledge 
 of the past had made him well acquainted with what history 
 has proved true or false in the life of nations, and whose 
 work on Art had taught him man's true province and 
 essential greatness as lord of Nature, came long ago to the 
 same conclusion as Carlyle, that the condition of England 
 was indeed most unsatisfactory even ominous. To walk 
 through the crowded streets of a great city ; to look on the 
 pinched faces that tell of want, and the low brutal foreheads 
 that tell of sin to say nothing of that terrible weltering 
 mass of human misery in court and alley, whose only whole- 
 some food is the prison fare, whose only fresh air is breathed 
 in the prison court, was an acute pain to one who, living 
 constantly with Nature, saw that every creature in her domain 
 was happy in its short day of life, except man. And, looking 
 at the grim division between the criminal and the educated 
 
30 
 
 classes, the question of the rig/if ness of all this would arise : 
 Arc we so much separated from their crime but by the 
 conventional rules we are ashamed to break ? Is the acci- 
 dent of birth a thing that we have reason to consider entirely 
 providential except to ourselves ? Whether providental or 
 not, have we done our duty by these fallen classes ? Or are 
 our little schemes of poor relief much more after all than 
 sops to our conscience mere plantings in the quicksand ? 
 Have we not erected prisons to restrain the vice we have 
 not tried to eradicate ; nay, hospitals to cure the diseases 
 we have caused ? In short, is crime a part of the divine 
 world-plan, or are we men responsible for it ? 
 
 And when the silence of his lonely hills was broken by 
 the blast of quarrying, and the loveliest vales and rivers 
 of smiling England were filled up and polluted by men who 
 measured God's work by its price per square yard, the 
 sensitive heart could not but cry out : Are we to become 
 the world's workshop at such a cost ? Are other nations to 
 have their happy homesteads, and their peaceful life among 
 the green fields, while we do the dirty work of the world, 
 and soil our hearts and degrade our manhood to produce 
 cloth a farthing a yard cheaper than our neighbours ? 
 
 Setting himself then to answer these questions, Mr. 
 Ruskin soon came to the conclusion that the love of 
 money was undoubtedly, now as always, the root of all the 
 evil, but that, in this age, it had assumed a proportion and 
 a hideousness which it never had before in any country. And 
 
the first issue which would naturally present itself to an 
 artist's eye was the desecration of natural beauty for 
 purposes of private gain. 
 
 In effect, he says that, next to the bodies of its citizens, 
 the most precious possessions of a State are its natural and 
 distinctive features of scenery its mountains and valleys, 
 lakes and rivers, trees and fields. Only in virtue of these, 
 and of the memories which gather around them, is a nation 
 patriotic. We, for example, are proud of our Scotch birth, 
 not because we belong to this or that commercial centre, 
 but because we are natives of the 
 
 " Land of brown heath and shaggy wood, 
 
 Land of the mountain and the flood" 
 
 But what practically are we doing every day with our hills 
 and streams ? Instead of counting them as a sacred national 
 charge, jealous over every encroachment or diminution 
 of their beauty, we let any jolterhead who can scrape together 
 a few pence buy the land and water, and do as he likes 
 with them turn them into an ash heap and a puddle if he 
 pleases. For typical extract, take this : * " There was a 
 rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell, once upon a time^ 
 divine as the Vale of Tempe ; you might have seen the Gods 
 there morning and evening Apollo and all the sweet Muses 
 of the Light walking in fair procession on the lawns of V/, 
 and to and fro among the pinnacles of its crags. You cared 
 
 * FORS I., 5, io. 
 
32 
 
 neither for Gods nor grass, but for cash (which you did not 
 know the way to get); you thought you could get it by what the 
 1 Times ' calls ' Railroad Enterprise' You Enterprised a Rail- 
 road through the valley you blasted its rocks away, heaped 
 thousands of tons of shale into its lovely stream. The valley 
 is gone, and the Gods with it ; and now, every fool in Buxton 
 can be at Bakewellin half an hour, and every fool in Bakewell 
 at Buxton ; which you think a lucrative process of exchange 
 you Fools Everywhere." The meaning of which passage is, 
 that, in destroying a beautiful valley, no matter for what 
 convenience and gain to the few, we are robbing the 
 heritage of the poor the heritage their Maker left them, of 
 looking at His works at least, although they might never 
 possess them. 
 
 To any thoughtful man the destruction of land and 
 stream which goes on, quite uselessly except for private 
 gain, is evident enough, and mournful enough ; and with 
 any one who has the soul to read Scott and Burns, I do 
 not need to plead for the preservation of our streams and 
 glens from the sacrilegious hands which would destroy them, 
 and, with them, all possibility of Scottish song for ever after. 
 
 I know that what I am saying may excite a smile from too 
 many. The grievance may seem more fanciful than real : 
 it may be true enough, you will say, of town districts, but 
 consider the vast stretches of country lying around, where 
 no such abuse exists. But is the small extent of fresh 
 country around our great cities not serious enough ? For 
 
33 
 
 those who can afford it, it is easy enough to fly from the 
 smoke and the grime, and you will note as a significant fact 
 that town residents find it necessary to do so over the week 
 ends in summer time. But what of those whose life is one 
 unending round of degrading labour ? Have we a right, we 
 may well enquire, to enjoy the pure air for ourselves, 
 while we make pure air an impossible luxury for our poor 
 neighbours ? And is the extent of smoke-bound territory 
 so small? East and west and north and south rise 
 the flames of iron furnaces and the smoke of factories, 
 and wherever they rise the fields around grow dark, 
 and the streams grow foul. More and more does the city, 
 with its sins and its sorrows, encroach on the country. A 
 seam of coal is found in the loveliest part of a smiling 
 pasture land. Down goes the shaft, and the heap of ashes 
 begins to gather at the pit mouth. The railway is projected, 
 tunnelling and blasting and polluting. Hordes of railway 
 navvies, with all the vice and rudeness of the town, are let 
 loose on the peaceful village. And all for what? Not 
 that labour may be abundant, and the labourer live : not 
 that the public interests demand it : do not think so. Most 
 of our railways are projected, not from any view to public 
 interest, far less from philanthropic motives, but that a few 
 capitalists may be made richer. 
 
 Mr. Ruskin's words are no more forcible than true when 
 he says : * " The benevolence involved in the construction oj 
 * FORS. IV., 47, 261. 
 
34 
 
 railways amounts exactly to this much and no more, that if 
 the British public were informed that engineers were now 
 confident, after their practice in the Cents a?id St. Gothard 
 tunnels, that they could make a railway to Hell, the British 
 public would instantly invest in the concern to any amount ; 
 and stop church-building all over the country, for fear of 
 diminishing the dividends" 
 
 And all this is done by men who, honestly enough, consider 
 the Heaven and Earth as God's first revelation to man : who 
 complacently read, " Consider the lilies, how they grow," 
 and are for ever taking away any possibility of our great 
 city poor ever seeing any lilies to consider ! 
 
 From nature Mr. Ruskin turned to our social system, and 
 was not slow to find out the anomalies which most of us are 
 aware of, but have not the courage to put so plainly 
 into words. Briefly stated the position of society is 
 this : There are multitudes of labourers and workmen 
 whose industry is dictated and guided, for good or evil, by a 
 few rich men called capitalists and landowners ; and there is 
 an immense class between the two which lives by exchang- 
 ing commodities. This separation of destinies we who are 
 not labourers, with admirable modesty, ascribe to Providence, 
 tacitly assuming that the fact of a man's being born in a 
 certain rank in life expresses God's opinion of it as the best 
 possible place for him. And the present position of the 
 land question is this, according to Mr. Ruskin, that we 
 generously lend the labourer our land, and geneiously lend 
 
35 
 
 him tools, and we stand by with our hands in our pockets, 
 while he digs. For this we allow him enough of the produce 
 to keep him in life barely enough sometimes ; and we 
 pocket the rest as our right. What is the real meaning 
 of all this ? Is it not an assumption on our part that God 
 has been good enough to give money and land to us in 
 virtue of which we make men our slaves, while we 
 stand by and present a celestial appearance to them ? Now 
 on what tenure is the land held ? " Some land has been 
 bought ; some won by cultivation ; but the greater part, in 
 Europe, seized originally by force of hand," and actual 
 possession, unquestioned during many generations, is the 
 real tenure of most large landowners. Such a tenure 
 will not long stand keen inspection ; and if the possess- 
 ion of land should ever be revised on principles of justice 
 it will be seen that landholding is a trust given by the 
 nation for the nation's benefit ; that the only just claim which 
 can now be made by any landowner is that he is worthy of 
 the trust from the nation, and that he deserves it, not now by 
 the right of fighting for it, but in virtue of a truer Captaincy 
 that of being first to share all dangers with his tenants, 
 and first to lead all good work. In view of which wise 
 Captaincy he will be indeed worthy to have such an income 
 from the land as may keep him in all noble and beautiful 
 life. 
 
 The modern landowner's conception of himself is, I need 
 not say, generally very different ; it is the altogether selfish 
 
36 
 
 one, that the land exists for him, not he for the land, and that 
 it is purely of grace or for gain that he allows anyone but him- 
 self to live on it * "For, during the last eight hundred years," 
 says Ruskin, " the upper classes of Europe hare been one large 
 Picnic Party. Most of them have been religious also ; and in 
 sitting down, by companies, upon the green grass, in parks, 
 gardens, and the like, have considered themselves commanded 
 into that position by Divine authority, and fed with bread 
 from Heaven : of which they duly considered it proper to 
 bestow the fragments in support, and the tithes in tuition, of 
 the poor" 
 
 All this, friends, must be changed. Such a conception of 
 landowner's position was only possible when the classes who 
 worked were uneducated, and accepted their own position 
 without question. But with the march of Education comes 
 inevitably the march of Reform, and Reform, if resisted, means 
 Revolution. The workers are learning already have learned 
 that while it is indeed necessary that there should be 
 higher and lower classes, these must be determined by a 
 standard of worth and work not of birth alone : that, just 
 as in old times, the strongest won the land by his lance and 
 kept it because he was the best man, so now all artificial 
 barriers must be removed, and the man who is altogether 
 worthiest must be allowed to win when he can, and keep 
 by such wisdom as he has. The cry has been and 
 
 * FORS I., 2, 15. 
 
37 
 
 rightly has been Educate, Educate, but we must accept 
 the consequences of education. We have raised an im- 
 mense class to think, and we have given them the sharpest 
 inducement to think by making their surroundings so alto- 
 gether unbearable ; we have made the advantage of the rich 
 over the poor the more conspicuous as we widened the gulf 
 between the two. Do not think our social anomalies will 
 long stand the fierce glare cast on them by emancipated 
 minds. There is only one way to escape the fell torrent 
 of revolution that will soon sweep from one end of Europe 
 to the other, and that is to lead it. The agitation in 
 Ireland at the present time is only the beginning of the 
 storm. The Irish people have caught at a part of a great 
 truth, namely, that the land was meant for the many, not for 
 the few. What the consequences of this half truth may be, 
 unless the landowners have the courage to accept the situa- 
 tion and lead the reform, Heaven alone knows. The 
 despair of a great people who imagine they are in the right 
 is apt to take many a mad and bloody direction. 
 
 I have spoken mainly of the land interest, but similar 
 thoughts suggest themselves as regards other interests. When 
 the possesssion of land is questioned, the possession of 
 capital may soon enough come under the same keen glance. 
 And will it not be found that here the same truth holds, 
 that, in all Tightness, those who have the wealth must hold 
 it principally for the common good, and not for selfish 
 purposes? Rightly understood, for example, nothing 
 
would be esteemed more noble than the vocation of the 
 merchant to feed, clothe, and provide for the nation ; and 
 when our merchants get into their heads the truth so well 
 set forth in ' Unto this Last,' that, just as the duty of the 
 soldier is to defend the nation, of the pastor to teach it, of 
 the physician to keep it in health, and of the lawyer to dis- 
 pense justice in it, so the first and most honourable duty of 
 the merchant is to provide for the nation, we shall see such 
 a beginning of national life as will make England once more 
 the centre of the world. 
 
 But Mr. Ruskin for many years has seen what is the 
 canker in our national history namely, that we have no 
 true patriotism. We are no longer a nation so much as an 
 aggregate of individuals, seeking each one his own interests, 
 and, generally, disregarding all others. We have forgotten 
 that a nation's first duty is to rear all its sons and daughters 
 in healthy life, and to disregard or over-ride every private 
 interest which interferes with that. And we have allowed 
 the greed of gold to corrupt our national as well as our 
 individual conscience. What can be thought of a nation's 
 honour when the first question in a European war is " how 
 will it affect the bondholders ?" Is it not the case that year 
 after year we have sunk millions in Turkish and Egyptian 
 loans, fully conscious, if we cared to think, that the interest 
 on these was squeezed out of an unhappy people by a 
 rapacious government ? Is it not notorious that in the last 
 Cape War the savages were found armed with breechloaders 
 
39 
 
 smuggled to them, against all law, by British merchants? 
 Is it not the case that during the Indian Famine of 1876 
 enormous exports of com were made from the very districts 
 where the natives were dying in thousands ? These are not 
 exceptional cases ; only more noticeable because on a larger 
 scale, and on a national stage. They are the legitimate 
 outcome of our commercial maxim " buy in the cheapest 
 market and sell in the dearest." 
 
 I venture to say that there is no more significant sign of 
 the utter absence of the spirit of Christ from the business 
 world than the fact, that such a maxim passes unchallenged 
 as a standard law of business morality. For what does it 
 mean ? Let me put it in Mr. Ruskin's own words : 
 * " Suppose three sailors castaway on an uninhabited coast, and 
 obliged to maintain themselves there by their own labour for a 
 series of years. Suppose two of them separate to farm different 
 pieces of land at some distance from each other along the coast ; 
 each estate furnishing a distinct kind of produce, and each more 
 or less in need of the material raised on the other. Suppose 
 that the third man, in order to save the time of all three, 
 undertakes simply to superintend the transference of commodities 
 from one farm to the other ; on condition of receiving some 
 sufficiently remunerative share of every parcel of goods conveyed, 
 or of some other parcel received in exchange for it. If this 
 carrier or messenger always brings to each estate, from the 
 
 * UNTO THIS LAST, 49 & 55. 
 
4 o 
 
 other, what is chiefly wanted, at the right time, the operations 
 of the two farmers will go on prosperously, and the largest 
 possible result in produce, or wealth, will be attained by the 
 little community. But suppose no intercourse between the land- 
 owners is possible, except through the travelling agent ; and 
 that, after a time, this agent, watching the course of each man's 
 agriculture, keeps back the articles with which he has been en- 
 trusted until there comes a period of extreme necessity for them, 
 on one side or other, and then exacts in exchange for them all 
 that the distressed farmer can spare of other kinds of produce ; 
 it is easy to see that by ingeniously watching his opportunities, 
 he might possess himself regularly of the greater part of the 
 superfluous produce of the two estates, and at last, in some year 
 of severest trial or scarcity, purchase both for himself, and 
 maintain the former proprietors thenceforward as his labourers 
 or servants. This would be a case of commercial wealth 
 acquired on the exactest principles of modern political economy" 
 The truth of all this, in simple case, is self-evident, and to see 
 that it applies in the complex operations of modern commerce 
 only requires conscientious thinking. And, if you carry out 
 the principle of true commerce further, you will find 
 that the manufacturer exists for the sake of the workmen 
 employed by him, and is responsible to a considerable 
 extent for the bodies and souls of his employe's as well as 
 for the fabric they produce. You will find that the merchant 
 exists that he may exchange articles in such a way as to 
 benefit both him who buys and him who sells. But if we were 
 
41 
 
 to imagine it possible that our physician might carry out his 
 profession on commercial principles ; might first of all make 
 us ill that he might be called in, and then keep us ill that he 
 might get paid for attendance, we should find out the fallacy 
 of our commerce sooner. Undoubtedly Mr. Ruskin is right 
 when he says that the learned professions and the army 
 have been esteemed so much more honourable than the 
 mercantile, because they are presumed to be mainly 
 unselfish, holding their life and work for the common good, 
 while the present principle of commerce is supposed, and 
 rightly supposed, to be in the main a selfish one. 
 
 But Mr. Ruskin was not content with exposing the degra- 
 dation of our ideas in regard to commerce ; was not con- 
 tent even in pointing the remedy ; but he searched into 
 the causes of this wide-spread contagion of sordidness, 
 with a very curious result. The greed of gold had, 
 presumably, been as strong in other nations of the past, 
 and the fearful want of appreciation of their responsibility on 
 the part of the wealthy had had a parallel in other times ; 
 but never with such wide -spread and disastrous results. 
 Mr. Ruskin found the explanation in that which is almost the 
 foundation of all modern commerce the taking of usury or 
 interest for the use of money. 
 
 Bear with me if I venture, in the face of almost certain 
 incredulity on your part, to lay before you in a few sentences 
 the good reasons he has for this belief. And that you may not 
 be hardened into indifference by so many hard sayings about 
 
42 
 
 our modern life put into one short address, I may say that 
 Mr. Ruskin himself sees that our commercial pursuits are so 
 entirely rooted in this wrong principle that the present 
 conditions of life must all suffer an immense reform, before a 
 change can be made in this : only he says of it as of all his 
 teaching ; " I tell you what is truth, and I have nothing in 
 the world to do with whether it is practicable at present or 
 not." 
 
 His reasons against usury then are these. First, It is 
 absolutely forbidden in the Word of God. All the Levitical 
 law is against it j the prophets repeatedly denounce it ; and 
 the Fifteenth Psalm "Lord, who shall abide in Thy 
 Tabernacle ? . . . the man that putteth not his coin to 
 usury," is quite sufficient proof for any one who wishes it. 
 The strongest passage against it in the New Testament, in 
 the Parable of the Talents, has by a curious misreading 
 been repeatedly quoted in its favour, whereas the very con- 
 ception of God as an ' hard man ' shows the text clearly to 
 mean " You call me an hard man ; if I had been so I would 
 not have scrupled to take usury, that simplest way of 
 gathering where I had not strawed ; so you are without 
 excuse.' We might as well imagine that our Lord, in the 
 similar parable, meant to represent Himself as the Unjust 
 Judge who feared not God neither regarded man, as imagine 
 that He meant to represent Himself here as an hard man 
 who commended usury." Second, >It taxes the labour of 
 those to whom the loan is made : to make a profit, as 
 
43 
 
 well as pay the interest, they must work harder and longer than 
 the possessor of the capital, who has only to work for his profit. 
 The attempt to evade this law is the explanation of shoddy 
 manufactures. Third, It is a means of making money with- 
 out work and without responsibility, whereas no man, in the 
 true conception of things,, has a right to cause or command 
 labour of which he cannot know the justness, alike in the 
 course of the work and in its consequence. The principle 
 is seen at its height when the nation flings its money 
 rapturously into a five per cent, loan to some people whose 
 whole career is in contradiction to all we hope for from our 
 truly enlightened civilization. Fourth, Every great states- 
 man of the past has denounced it, and we are not yet wise 
 enough to despise the wisdom of our fathers. Fifth, Great 
 commerce has been, and great commercial nations have 
 flourished, where usury was unknown, or the practice of it 
 branded with disgrace. 
 
 I leave this point now without further defence. I know 
 that bur commercial world is not yet capable of forming an 
 impartial opinion where its interests are so much involved : 
 and I have done as much as I could hope for, if I unsettle 
 your minds on the unquestioned Tightness of interest of 
 which I daresay you before have had no doubt, and if what 
 I have said may lead you at least to doubt whether it is alto- 
 gether Christian to lend a poor relation a few pounds, and 
 charge him five per cent, for it. 
 
 For men do not exist primarily to buy and sell, but to do 
 justly and to love mercy. It is a very small matter whether 
 
44 
 
 by our trade we become poor or rich, but it is a very great 
 matter as regards ourselves before God that no human being 
 should be hurt or destroyed by what we make the business 
 of our lives. 
 
 There is one other point which I must take up, not that it 
 is perhaps the most important, but that it is the least under- 
 stood it is Mr. Ruskin's teaching on machinery. I often 
 hear it said " Ruskin objects to steam and machinery ;" and 
 this is generally enough to condemn Mr. Ruskin for ever in 
 the mind of a man of the world. But this is not altogether 
 true. You will find in Mr. Ruskin's works some very 
 gigantic proposals of tidal and water-driven machinery. 
 But he certainly objects, and in the strongest manner, to 
 the abuse of machinery. To do by machine without thought 
 what might be as well done by hand seems a foolish 
 and a simple thing to him. For instance : he objects to a 
 steam reaping machine, while willing reapers, who would 
 have had the healthy discipline of honest labour, are sent 
 starving about the country ; idleness producing its crop 
 certain enough without steam power, and for net result such 
 a harvest of vice and wretchedness as we have to spend 
 millions yearly to gather into jails and poorhouses. 
 
 His own words give the gist of the matter : * " Observe. 
 A man and a woman, with their children, properly trained, 
 are able easily to cultivate as much ground as will feed them ; 
 
 * FORS I., 5, 10. 
 
45 
 
 to build as much wall and roof as will lodge them, and to 
 weave as much cloth as will clothe them. They can all be 
 perfectly happy and healthy in doing this. Supposing that 
 they invent machinery that will build, plough, thresh, cook, and 
 weave, and that they have none of these things any more to do, 
 but may read, or play croquet, or cricket, all day long, I believe 
 myself that they will neither be so good nor so happy as with- 
 out the machines. But I waive my belief in this matter for the 
 time. I will assume that they become more refined and moral 
 persons, and that idleness is in future to be the mother of all 
 good. But observe, I repeat, the power of your machine is 
 only in enabling them to be idle. It will not enable them to 
 live better than they did before, nor to live in greater numbers. 
 Get your heads quite clear on this matter. Out of so much 
 ground only so much living is to be got, with or without 
 machinery. You may set a million of steam ploughs to work 
 on an acre, if you like out of that acre only a given number 
 of grains of corn will grow, scratch or scorch it as you will. 
 So that the question is not at all whether, by having more 
 machines, more of you can live. No machines will increase 
 the possibilities of life. They only increase the possibilities of 
 idleness. Suppose, for instance, you could get the oxen in your 
 plough driven by a goblin, who would ask for no pay, not even 
 a cream-bowl, ( you have nearly managed to get it driven by 
 an iron goblin, as it is ;) Well, your furrow will take no 
 more seeds than if you had held the stilts yourself. But, in- 
 stead of holding them, you sit, I presume, on a bank beside the 
 
46 
 
 field, under an eglantine ; watch the goblin at his work, and 
 read poetry. Meantime, your wife in the house has also got a 
 goblin to weave and wash for her. And she is lying on the 
 sofa reading poetry. 
 
 " Now, as I said, I don't believe you would be happier so, but 
 I am willing to believe it ; only since you are already such 
 brave mechanists, show me at least one or two places where 
 you are happier. Let me see one small example of approach to 
 this seraphic condition. I can show you examples, millions of 
 them, of happy people, made happy by their own industry. 
 Farm after farm I can show you, in Bavaria, Switzerland) 
 the Tyrol, and such otlier places, where men and women are 
 perfectly happy and good, without any iron servants. Show 
 me, therefore, some English family, with its fiery familiar, 
 happier than these. Or bring me, -for I am not inconvin^ible 
 by any kind of evidence, bring me an evidence of an English 
 family or two to their increased felicity. Or if you cannot do 
 so ?nuch as that, can you convince even themselves of it ? They 
 are perhaps happy, if only they knew how happy they were : 
 Virgil thought so, long ago, of simple rustics ; but you hear at 
 present your steam-propelled rustics are crying out that they 
 are anything else than happy, and that they regard their 
 boasted progress ' in the light of a monstrous Sham? " 
 
 Generally speaking Mr. Ruskin objects to the labour 
 of any man being turned into a mechanical exercise, 
 instead of the healthful play of brain and sinew ; knowing 
 that, while labour is indeed cursed, it is divinely redeemed 
 
47 
 
 from the curse in the true pleasure which the workman has 
 in putting heart and taste and character into his work. It 
 is the great distinction between the mechanical and the 
 artistic. An artist, a creator, is the highest type of man in 
 work : the man who turns the handle of a machine which 
 turns out the entire finished article, perhaps the lowest ; but 
 between these there are all grades of work, and in proportion 
 as you rise to the artist, as in all fine handwork, or sink to 
 the mechanic, as in self-acting machine work, do you raise 
 or lower man. Mr. Ruskin believes that the strong 
 tendency of trade at present is to supplant man by machinery, 
 or to subordinate man to machinery : in the one case you 
 make England a machine shop instead of a happy country; 
 in the other you make men the slaves of thankless, heartless 
 toil. 
 
 The answer may be made, as I have heard it : But 
 machinery must 'supplant hard labour unless you put a limit 
 to the discovery and perfecting of machinery, and what 
 justification can be offered for restraining mechanical in- 
 genuity and inventiveness ? To which I have little doubt 
 Mr. Ruskin would merely reply : If the few should happen 
 to be spending their lives in inventing machines for the 
 many to kill themselves with, the sooner you put an end to 
 such beneficent invention the better. 
 
 Consider what the apotheosis of all our modern trade 
 would be. Our country would become all riddled with 
 coalpits and mines, and the bank of dross would become the 
 
48 
 
 prominent feature in all landscapes as it is now around this 
 city. Our hills would be blasted and torn for minerals the 
 veins of ore within being counted more gracious than the 
 red heather without. Our rivers would become slimy 
 canals, smoking with the drains and refuse of innumerable 
 mills. Everywhere convenient would stand a five-storey 
 factory filled with machines, at which a dull workman, or, 
 better, a worn-out woman she would work cheaper would 
 stand listlessly, perhaps turning a crank every hour or so, 
 the machine meantime running on from hour to hour with 
 the minimum of attention. The men and women of this 
 commercial Paradise would live always within shadow of 
 their workplace, and would be content with the very 
 smallest wages possible to keep life in. Of course the men 
 would not be able to afford the luxury of marriage, so there 
 might be some scarcity of workers in the next generation, 
 but that would only be providential, as machinery would 
 have made man quite a useless and expensive article. The 
 condition of the millowners might not be quite so satisfactory 
 as one would expect. In such a celestial state of things 
 they ought to have been very wealthy, and lived in fine 
 country seats away from their work people ; but, un- 
 fortunately, the country would then be only a memory, 
 thanks to coal-pits, mines, and mills, and there would 
 be neither salmon fishing nor grouse shooting. And 
 besides, on the { cheapest market ' principle, the wealth would 
 be mostly in the hands of the exchangers, called merchants, 
 
49 
 
 and the poor millowners would be finding out the beneficent 
 results of the usury system by having money lent them, 
 instead of lending it. If, however, the love of something 
 beautiful should still exist, it would be very easy to adopt 
 Mr. Ruskin's suggestion, and raise a new platform on iron 
 scaffolding above this ; and by pulverizing the mountains, 
 and strewing the duly pulverized and, by wise medical 
 geology, drugged materials, over the upper stages, to obtain 
 quite a creditable stretch of green fields above. These 
 however would be duly monopolized by the rich, and our 
 present ingenious manufactures would be carried on by the 
 poor in the dark lower storeys. For this apotheosis, when 
 it is accomplished, and when you get all you are striving 
 to attain, as Ruskin says, may the Lord make you truly 
 thankful ! 
 
 I know it will immediately be said : " This is begging 
 the whole question : what is the use of arguing on an ex- 
 travagantly imagined abuse of anything?" But is this 
 apotheosis so extravagant ? Is it not already suffiicently 
 realized in the life of the great working population of towns 
 like Wigan or St. Helens? 
 
 What, then, is the practical issue of all Mr. Ruskin's 
 teaching ? You may be ready enough to grant the wrong- 
 ness of things as they are, and you may also grant that Mr. 
 Ruskin's views are right in theory at least. But you will 
 say " Is it possible under present conditions to do other- 
 wise than our neighbours ? " 
 
5 
 
 My friends, we have to blame such an argument, thought- 
 lessly and so far criminally adduced, as the cause of almost 
 all the mischief that is. * " You have thought things would 
 rig/if themselves" says Ruskin, " or that it was God's business 
 to right tiicm, not yours. Peremptorily, it is yours. Kot, 
 observe, to get your rigJits, but to put tilings to rights. Some 
 eleven in the dozen of the population of the world are occupied 
 earnestly in putting tilings to wrongs, thinking to benefit them- 
 selves thereby. Is it any wonder, then, you are uncomfortable, 
 when already tlie world, in our part of it, is over-populated, 
 and cUven in the dozen of the over-population doing diligently 
 wrcng, and the remaining dozenth expecting God to do their 
 work for them /" 
 
 A beginning of reform must be made ; and it must be 
 made by the upper classes, or the march of reform will soon 
 leave no upper classes to do anything. Sacrifice there must 
 be, but the time is yet far distant when any great good can 
 be done without sacrifice ; and, when it does come, virtue 
 will have lost what makes it virtue the glory of being its 
 own reward. In one thing we can all follow Mr. Ruskin 
 in resolute protest against all we know to be evil, and in 
 unselfish devotion of our lives to rectify all we know to be 
 unjust. 
 
 I have spoken of Mr. Ruskin, his life, and his work, and 
 have tried to crowd into one short hour what I have been 
 
 * FORS II., 17 i. 
 
years of learning. In attempting a general survey I have 
 been forced to do injustice to all the topics I have touched 
 to give conclusions without adequate statement of the 
 premises. Do not, I beg of you, take my words as anything 
 but the barest shadow of a shadow of all he has taught. I 
 feel overpowered and helpless when I think of how little I 
 have told you of that vast store-house of far-reaching 
 wisdom, and how faint has been my echo of his wonderful 
 words. Of himself I beg you to listen : to read before you 
 criticize : above all, to understand before you condemn ; and, 
 incredulous as you may be now, you will end, I am con- 
 fident, in saying with me that, of all men in this century, 
 the spirit of Him who went about continually doing good 
 breathes through the entire Life and Work of John Ruskin, 
 
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