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NEW POLITICAL ECONOMY; 
 
 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF 
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE, JOHN RUSKIN,. 
 AND HENRY GEORGE; 
 
 WITH OBSERVATIONS ON 
 
 JOSEPH MAZZINL. 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY ROSE. 
 
 JAMES SPEIRS: 
 
 36 BLOOMSBURY STREET, LONDON. 
 1891. 
 

PREFACE. 
 
 THE object of this work is to provide a simple and 
 lucid exposition of the New Political Economy for 
 popular use,. but especially for the use of students 
 and Christian teachers and preachers. 
 
 I believe that in these days amongst the public 
 at large there is a growing spirit of inquiry in 
 relation to social and economic questions. This 
 work may help to give that spirit intelligent direction. 
 
 I believe also that amongst Christian teachers 
 and preachers there is now, more than at any 
 previous time, being fostered a lively appreciation 
 of the necessity of active concern on the part of 1 ' 
 the churches for the material well-being of the 
 people. This work may assist inquirers to a clear 
 understanding of the principles that must be ob- 
 served and of the methods that must be followed 
 for the reconciliation of individual, social, and public 
 conduct with Christian ethics w^here questions of a 
 politico-economic character are involved. 
 
 To persons already familiar with the more ad- 
 vanced school of political economy this work will 
 
vi PREFACE. 
 
 be relatively of less value than to others. But I 
 indulge the hope that it will be deemed worthy 
 even of their kindly regard from the careful way in 
 which, in carrying out my general scheme of ex- 
 position, I have correlated the teachings of Carlyle, 
 Ruskin, and Henry George, and from the manner 
 in which the indebtedness of these teachers to 
 Mazzini the herald of the New Economy is 
 elucidated. 
 
 My task in this respect was especially difficult as 
 regards Carlyle, who in all his brilliant and inspiring 
 treatment of social and economic problems never 
 concerned himself to put his ideas forth in the form 
 of a system which might readily be understood by 
 the people. In the chapters which I devote to 
 Carlyle, I show what of system there was in his 
 teaching. My work in this respect will enable 
 Carlyle's position amongst the apostles of the New 
 Economy to be more plainly discerned. 
 
 The substance of the chapters which treat more 
 particularly of the teaching of Mr. Ruskin was 
 contained in a lecture which I gave on February 3, 
 1890, to the Ruskin Society of Glasgow, which 
 lecture has since been published in Igdrasil, the 
 organ of the various Ruskin Societies of the country 
 
 and of the Ruskin Reading Guild. 
 
 H. ROSE. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTORY THE NEW POLITICAL ECONOMY versus THE 
 
 DISMAL SCIENCE, I 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE IMPORTANCE OF THE STUDY. ... 8 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 CENTRAL PRINCIPLES, 14 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE GOSPEL OF DUTY, . . .23 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 A TEACHER OF THE TEACHERS: JOSEPH MAZZINI, . . 28 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 'THOMAS CARLYLE, . . . ... . -37 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 CARLYLE AND MAMMON-WORSHIP HELL OF NOT SUC- 
 CEEDING, 7" . 45 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 RULERS-POLITICAL AND RULERS-INDUSTRIAL, ... 49 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 CARLYLE'S PRACTICAL PROPOSALS THE ORGANIZATION OF 
 
 LABOUR, 57 
 
viii CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER X. ,, AOE 
 
 / CARLYLE AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH, ... 63 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 , OTHER PROPOSALS OF CARLYLE EDUCATION EMIGRATION 
 
 SANITATION, . 69 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 JOHN RUSK1N, . . .'"."" 74 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 RUSKIN AND THE jJ>OTEWtnn OK I.TFE, 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 g^USKIN AND GOVERNMENTAL AND INDUSTRIAL ORDER, . 91 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 VARIOUS PRACTICAL PROPOSALS Ol 
 
 i<" RUSKIN, C .fi v ^^. 97 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 RUSKIN AND THE OBJECTIONS TO THE NEW ECONOMY, . 105 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 HENRY GEORGE, I IO 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 HENRY GEORGE AND HUMAN SOCIETY AS IT MIGHT BE, . 1 2O 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 HENRY GEORGE'S "FIRST GREAT REFORM," . . . 127 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 EVOLUTIONARY METHODS OF PROGRESS, . . . -135 
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 UTOPIAN IDEALS CONCLUSION, 143 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY THE NEW POLITICAL ECONOMY VERSUS 
 THE DISMAL SCIENCE. 
 
 " The days of the nations bear no trace 
 
 Of all the sunshine so far foretold ; 
 The cannon speaks in the teacher's place 
 
 The age is weary with work and gold, 
 And high hopes wither, and memories wane : 
 
 On hearths and altars the fires are dead ; 
 But that brave faith hath not lived in vain," 
 
 And this is all our watcher said. Frances Brown. 
 
 We grow less worthy as the years go by ; 
 Our common life is an incarnate wrong ; 
 We fight where victory is to the strong ; 
 111 is our good, and low alone is high ; 
 Gold is our god, and whoso hath can buy 
 The land, the lives, the honour of the throng ; 
 No ancient pride doth to our age belong ; 
 Aimless we live, and therefore hopeless die. 
 
 Come rich-robed Mistress, hid so long a while ! 
 
 We look for thee stern-visaged, as is meet ; 
 
 For well we know thy service will be pain 
 
 Till we have much renounce^. Then thou wilt smile, 
 
 And in thy smile a stately life and sweet 
 
 Will rise, and Labour bringing Beauty in its train. 
 
 Henry Norman. 
 
 OME time ago the Pall Mall Gazette made the 
 highly interesting announcement that there were 
 at any rate six entirely .honest persons in the 
 
 A 
 
2 mE FAR OF POVERTY. 
 
 British Empire. These were six people in the colony of 
 Victoria, who, in filling up their census papers, had 
 candidly described their religion as "; s. d." The 
 Pall Mall Gazette remarked that this was the religion 
 of the vast majority of the British people everywhere. 
 It was speaking, of course, of what Mr. Ruskin describes 
 as " the real, active, continual, national worship ; that by 
 which men act while they live ; not that which they 
 talk of when they die " the practical religion about 
 which we are all at heart unanimous, but which, 
 excepting the honest six of Victoria, we none of us 
 avow, not the nominal religion about which we dispute 
 so much. 
 
 Many a truth is spoken in jest ; there was more sense 
 than nonsense in these allusions to the honest six. 
 It is undeniable that, in these days even more than at 
 any previous time, the pursuit of riches is keen. Nation 
 competes with nation rather for pelf than for glory. 
 And within the circle of each great nation and people 
 the severest competition is fostered between man and man. 
 What co-operation exists is for the most part a co-operation 
 having as its motive, not love of man, but self-interest. 
 The alliances of the peoples are alliances offensive and 
 defensive, and last just about as long as the interest of 
 the stronger party makes it convenient that they should 
 last. So it is with our individual relationships wherever 
 money-getting is concerned. " Educate, educate,'' 
 " Keep abreast of the times," " Adapt your goods to the 
 taste of your customers," "Foster every useful invention," 
 are the cries of the rulers and of the men of commerce. 
 But whether education and all these other matters are 
 considered in relation to national well-being, or to 
 
COMPETITION. 3 
 
 individual well-being, it is almost always the goal of 
 material advantage which is striven for. " s. d." is 
 indeed the religion by which most men act while 
 they live. 
 
 It is an open question whether fear of poverty or a 
 positive spirit of avarice is the greater of the impelling 
 motives to this condition of things. I strongly incline to 
 the view that the fear of poverty is the main cause. If we 
 judged from a superficial examination of the competitive 
 anarchy which prevails in the world, we might be impelled 
 to conclude that men are universally avaricious as soon 
 as they are raised by education to an appreciation of 
 the advantages of wealth and solid comfort "English 
 comfort ; " we might be impelled to conclude also that 
 beneath all the courtesies and refinements of life there 
 is an almost general spirit of hate. But the state 
 of things which we thus behold is, I imagine, an 
 appearance only at least, so far as the great majority 
 of men are concerned. Human nature is vastly better 
 than it seems to be. The fear of poverty a sin of a 
 negative*sort and not avarice a sin of a positive sort 
 is most probably the great cause of our anarchy of 
 competition. 
 
 There is much in the conditions of our so-called civil- 
 ization to make the fear of poverty excusable. When, 
 taking things as a whole, men find that the multipli- 
 cation of human beings of agents to do the world's 
 work does not make that work easier, and that, 
 where those human beings most concentrate, the 
 work is hardest of all and the material results 
 often most unequally divided; when, too, they find that 
 '"labour-saving inventions" do not in the broad and 
 
4 A FALSE METHOD OF LIFE. 
 
 general sense save labour, but simply increase the riches 
 for the possession of which there is such intense strife all 
 round ; when, too, they continually witness if they do not 
 experience the miseries of the poor, why should not the 
 fear of poverty assail them ? 
 
 Consider for a moment what a condition of nervous 
 tension amongst the work-a-day citizens of the capital of 
 our great empire is revealed by a statement such as the 
 following which I take from a leading London paper : 
 "The Londoner works at a high rate of speed all the 
 year, and his brief summer holiday is the one breathing 
 space allowed him. We live fast, travel fast, eat fast. 
 Business competition increases, and with it the strain 
 upon human nerve and endurance increases also. The 
 quiet days of old-fashioned leisure are wholly departed. 
 Every man in a great city is trying to bear a little more 
 strain than he can well endure, to accomplish a little 
 more work than he has the strength and will for, to put a 
 day-and-a-half s work into every twenty-four hours. New 
 diseases of the nerves and brain have sprung up, and 
 are Nature's witnesses against this false method of life." 
 No one, I think, would have the temerity to say that 
 men engage in the mad strife which is here depicted 
 simply because they like it. It is a strife to which they 
 feel themselves impelled; their necessity and not their 
 will consents. And what but the chronic fear of poverty 
 makes men conceive that it is necessary thus to live ? 
 
 Unfortunately, those who are thus afflicted the 
 great majority find but little solace or help from 
 the conventional political economy of the day a 
 political economy which has deduced its laws for 
 the most part from the external phenomena of human 
 
>/^ CHANGE. 5 
 
 experience, but has to a quite fatal degree left out of 
 account the glorious possibilities of changed conditions 
 of human will has not calculated upon the possibility 
 of developing, and therefore done nothing of a positive 
 kind to develop the dynamic force of the social affection. 
 All too much have the conventional economists assumed 
 self-interest as the one guiding principle of human nature, 
 and so made it the basis of their science. They have 
 not seen that even if self-interest were now the guiding 
 principle of human nature, it might not always be so, 
 and that therefore their science to which they have 
 affected to give such appearances of exactitude and 
 permanence would require to be remodelled. 
 
 Many years ago Carlyle wrote : " Our political econo- 
 mists should collect facts^ such as, What is the lowest sum 
 a man can live on in various countries? What is the 
 highest he gets to live on ? How many people work with 
 their hands ? How many with their heads ? How many 
 not at all? and innumerable such. What all want to 
 know is the condition of our fellow-men, and, strange to 
 say, it is the thing least of all understood, or to be under- 
 stood, as matters go. The present ' science ' of political 
 economy requires far less intellect than successful bellows 
 mending, and perhaps does less good, if we deduct all 
 the evil it brings us. Though young, it already carries 
 marks of decrepitude a speedy and soft death to it." 
 
 Threatened men live long, and so do threatened systems 
 of thought and belief. This political economy, which 
 has had the marks of decrepitude from its youth and 
 which may now be called old, has still all the wizard's 
 power to perplex and mislead simple minds; and to 
 confirm unjust men in their practices. Hence, as I have 
 
6 THE PAN-ANGLICAN SYNOD. 
 
 said, the great majority of men find little solace or help 
 from the conventional economy of the day. 
 
 There are signs, however, which to those who have 
 eyes to see and ears to hear are portentous of coming 
 changes. We are drawing towards a crisis in the life of 
 humanity one of those periods in which, as Mr. Henry 
 James says, man is " providentially called upon to shed 
 his old skin, and put on another more pliant to the 
 behests of his inward and essential freedom." On all 
 hands we hear discussion as to the relations of capital 
 and labour: the year 1889 witnessed one of the 
 greatest strikes of modern times the strike of dock 
 labourers conducted happily by peaceful methods which 
 in themselves considering the magnitude of the issues 
 at stake were full of hope for the future. Generally 
 speaking, questions of economic and social reform are 
 more and more engaging the thoughts of politicians of 
 both the great parties in the United Kingdom, and not 
 a few wise decisions have already had effect given to 
 them by the Legislature. At Church Congresses and 
 the representative gatherings of the great religious 
 bodies, economic and social questions are also being 
 freely discussed. 
 
 It is in this connection especially worth calling to 
 mind that at the last Pan-Anglican Synod, attended 
 by the Archbishops and Bishops of the Anglican 
 Church throughout the world, " The Church's work 
 in relation to Socialism" was one of the subjects 
 discussed, and that a committee was appointed to 
 prepare a report. The chairman of the committee was 
 the Bishop of Manchester, and the other members 
 were the Bishops of Wakefield, Carlisle, Rochester, 
 
THE DUTY OF THE CHURCHES. 7 
 
 Deny, Michigan, Mississippi, Pittsburgh, Sydney, and 
 Brisbane. A very instructive report was presented 
 sympathetic, on the whole, to the aims of Socialism, but 
 containing much wise questioning as to many so-called 
 Socialist methods. Incidentally, the committee urged 
 that the Church should require some knowledge of 
 economic science from her candidates for holy orders. 
 
 When a knowledge of political and social economy is 
 coming to be regarded as a special qualification for the 
 Christian ministry, it may truly be said that we are getting 
 into the right way something practical is being done to 
 bring the New Jerusalem of the Apocalyptic seer down 
 from Heaven something to establish at least the external 
 order of the New Earth. This is indeed a work to which 
 we should all feel called. And it is a work for the 
 performance of which Christian ministers and teachers 
 are especially responsible. On whom more than on 
 them is it incumbent to show why and wherefore love of 
 man and not self-interest should be the basis of human 
 conduct, and thus to promote the work of revolutionizing 
 political economy or shall we say of laying in the grave 
 the old economy, and of bringing up in spiritual nurture 
 and in the "admonition and fear of God" the new 
 economy which is already being ushered into the world ? 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE IMPORTANCE OF THE STUDY. 
 
 ( ' Good and bad results cannot be accidental, but must be necessary 
 consequences of the constitution of things, and it is the business of 
 moral science to declare from the laws of life and the conditions of 
 existence what kind of actions necessarily tend to produce happiness, 
 and what kinds to produce unhappiness." Herbert Spencer. 
 
 the need of special and careful study of political 
 and social economy by all leaders of men much 
 might be said. Partly as a means of illustrating 
 this need, but chiefly as a means of preparing the 
 reader for the reception of certain facts and argu- 
 ments which I wish to present, I may here refer to 
 a somewhat notable address which was delivered in 
 St. Paul's Cathedral by his Grace the Archbishop of 
 York on the occasion of the Conference of the Pan- 
 Anglican Synod, to which allusion is made in my opening 
 chapter. Speaking not without much kindly feeling of 
 Socialism, which he described as the outcry of hungry 
 despair, his Grace said and truly said that many of the 
 remedies which Socialists proposed for existing evils were 
 childish and contradictory, and had proved in former ages 
 to be useless. He then went on to say, " The terrible 
 feature of modern progress, which science is powerless to 
 
A PUZZLED ARCHBISHOP. 9 
 
 is that it tends to double the gains of the rich and 
 halve the miserable wages of the poor." 
 
 His Grace could not have made a more damning 
 indictment against so-called " modern progress." No one 
 who has studied the subject at all closely can doubt that 
 under existing conditions it is the tendency of great and 
 superfluous wealth to grow and to reproduce itself, whilst 
 in the opposite direction, even more and more, the 
 destruction of the poor is their poverty. Landlordism 
 and capitalism constituting a legalized power on the 
 part of possessors of riches in land and money to tax 
 production for their private advantage alone account 
 for a great part of the evil. The conditions thus explained 
 are rendered still more grievous by growing competition 
 for work on the part of workmen of every grade, and espe- 
 cially of the lowestgrade. Demand and Supply nominally 
 the " law " of the market shows itself in operation to be 
 Demand for facilities to work on the part of the working 
 class, and Supply of the means to work on the part of the 
 possessors of land and money. Those who supply the 
 facilities must, in the nature of things, in the main dictate 
 the conditions. In the degree that they are selfish and 
 unwise, or unselfish and wise, they will make these 
 conditions unduly favourable to themselves or equitable 
 as between themselves and those by whom the demand 
 for facilities to work is raised. Inferentially, those who 
 possess these facilities those who exercise the function 
 of Supply are now, relatively speaking, selfish and unwise. 
 Hence we have the phenomena which the Archbishop of 
 York had such good reason to deplore. 
 
 But his Grace entirely begged the question of the 
 helplessness of science. Why say that this terrible 
 
io THE POWER OF ECONOMIC SCIENCE. 
 
 tendency was one which science was "powerless" to 
 alter ? Science ! What is science the science which 
 the Archbishop described as powerless to alter the evil 
 state of things over which he lamented ? 
 
 Science, as relating to the ordering of human society 
 to political and social economy is simply the know- 
 ledge of the laws of human and societary life. These laws 
 the Archbishop would allow to be of Divine origin, as 
 are the laws which govern the motions of the heavenly 
 bodies, and the growth of the seed. Unless the Arch- 
 bishop was prepared to demonstrate that we have no 
 means of knowing what Divine order is in these things 
 and of harmonizing human conduct with Divine order, 
 he should not for a moment have doubted that remedies 
 are to be found. He should have seen that in itself the 
 science of political economy and government is ^^/power- 
 less. How should it be ? That which is powerless is a 
 spurious and selfish system. In other words, as a class, 
 economists and rulers are not scientific. We want the 
 true science, and, of course, a willingness to act 
 according to the laws of human society which it shall 
 discover. We might then arrive at a progress under 
 which the reward of labour would be proportionate to 
 the quality and extent of such labour a progress under 
 which, however much the gains of the rich might increase, 
 the miserable wages of the poor would not necessarily be 
 halved. 
 
 Unfortunately, in continuing his argument, his Grace 
 involved himself in positive contradiction. " We should," 
 he said, "consider deeply, with prayers and tears, with 
 shame and constant sympathy, the evils which the poor 
 endure, which are mainly caused by thoughtless marriages, 
 
PERTINENT QUESTIONS. ir 
 
 intemperance, and want of thrift." How did this accord 
 with his Grace's previous declaration ? If the tendency 
 of "modern progress," which science is "powerless to 
 alter," is to double the gains of the rich, and halve the 
 miserable wages of the poor, how can it be otherwise than 
 that as riches increase on the one hand, poverty should 
 deepen on the other? How can poverty under such 
 conditions be " mainly caused " by thoughtless marriages, 
 intemperance, and want of thrift? What amount of 
 prudence in marriage, temperance, and thrift would 
 ensure competence, or even the preservation of health to 
 those poor, whose miserable wages, according to the 
 Archbishop, are being halved by a " tendency of modern 
 progress ? " 
 
 Analyzing thus the language of the Archbishop, we may 
 see that, despite his most lofty and generous sympathy, his 
 Grace had no real grasp of the problem. Evidently he 
 had accepted, more or less tacitly, certain teachings of the 
 professors of a pseudo-economic science. Hence, with 
 the best intentions imaginable, he had made himself an 
 unconscious exponent of doctrines which in their help- 
 lessness and hopelessness in relation to social and 
 economic evils have caused political economy to appear 
 to many minds as a science of despair doctrines which 
 have caused political econony to become in some quarters 
 a bye-word and a reproach to be even spoken of as " the 
 dismal science ; " something the very reverse of a science 
 of human economy. 
 
 The sound course for the Archbishop to have taken 
 would have been to have shown that modern conditions 
 of life let us not say "progress" tend to "douBIe^the 
 gains of the rich and halve the miserable wages of the poor;' 7 
 
12 THE ARCHBISHOP PUT RIGHT. 
 
 that the poor, rendered thus miserable by conditions which 
 they cannot control, are rendered still more miserable 
 by conditions which they might control by thoughtless 
 marriages, intemperance, and want of thrift. Proceeding 
 from this basis, he might the more effectively have shown 
 which was, indeed, one of his leading objects that a 
 chief duty of reformers is to induce the poor to be more 
 prudent and more temperate. This he might have spoken 
 of as an immediate and pressing duty. Each may arrest 
 one knave or reform one reprobate himself. Even 
 though he yet be comparatively helpless and down-trodden, 
 his case will be all the less desperate the less knavish or 
 reprobate he becomes. Next his Grace might have gone 
 on to show that a form of social life which tends to double 
 the gains of the rich and halve the miserable wages of the 
 poor, must be per se wrong. He might then in withering 
 accents have told the men of science the political 
 economists and those who govern, or ought to govern, by 
 something else than the rule of thumb that surely they 
 must be neglecting their duty. Professed expounders of 
 the laws of social and economic life, and of the principles 
 of government physicians of the body-politic they were 
 wholly failing as a class to give such wise guidance as was 
 needed by their fellow-countrymen. To have taken this 
 course would indeed have been useful I regret that his 
 Grace did not take this course. I believe that if there is 
 one class more than another which needs preaching to in 
 these days, it is the political economists those who lay 
 down the laws of political and industrial government. 
 
 It will be our task to obtain a glimpse of a political 
 economy which would not be powerless of a science 
 which is not "dismal." The plan I propose to follow is 
 
THE PLAN OF OUR WORK. 13 
 
 briefly this : Believing that the teachings of Socialism, 
 mixed up though they are with much that is false, 
 properly command primary consideration in an inquiry 
 of this kind, I shall first emulate the example of the 
 committee of the Pan- Anglican Synod, and offer some 
 remarks of my own on the subject of Socialism. I shall 
 then direct attention to the way in which what is best in 
 Socialist teachings has been expounded by certain leading 
 writers none of them, by the way, popularly regarded 
 as Socialist I mean Carlyle, Ruskin, and Henry George. 
 Finally, I shall offer some general observations on the- 
 truths at which we shall have arrived. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 CENTRAL PRINCIPLES. 
 
 "Such is undoubtedly the cause and object of human diseases, 
 to carry us deeper and higher than brute health can go ; or to make 
 the health of soul, mind, and body inseparable and co-ordinate. For 
 this reason there is no joyous inhabitation of the earth for man, unless 
 the inner man also be right with this world, and the social with his ; 
 or unless wholeness be fulfilled. Our maladies, therefore, are 
 warnings of a lost integrity, which is to be sought and found again ; 
 and where cure does not come, it is an evidence that the problem has 
 been stated and worked on some partial ground, and that a further 
 view and a higher sacrifice are asked. "-J. ./. Garth Wilkinson. 
 
 DE LAVELEYE has somewhere remarked that 
 there must be in human affairs one order which 
 is best ! That order is not always the one which 
 exists. But it is the order which should exist for the 
 greatest good of humanity. God knows it, and wills it : 
 man's duty is to discover and establish it. Now, follow- 
 ing the lead of the Pan-Anglican Synod, and offering some 
 observations on the subject of Socialism, I hope I shall 
 be successful in indicating an order of society which 
 would best accord with our knowledge of the Divine attri- 
 butes, and under which the greatest good of humanity 
 would best be secured. My task, however, is one of 
 peculiar difficulty, and one in the performance of which 
 I hope I shall have the indulgence of the reader. 
 
SOCIALISM, 15 
 
 What is Socialism? It has been well said that the 
 word " Socialism " is used in very different senses and 
 expresses very different ideas to different minds. 
 When Proudhon was asked, " What is Socialism ? " 
 he replied, " It is every aspiration towards the 
 improvement of society." Laveleye remarks upon this 
 answer, "Proudhon's definition is too wide it omits 
 two characteristics. In the first place, every Socialist 
 doctrine aims at introducing greater equality into social 
 conditions ; and, secondly, it tries to realize this reform 
 by the action of the law or the State." Another authority, 
 Schaffle, says : " The Alpha and Omega of Socialism is I 
 transformation of private competing capitals into a united 
 collective capital." Mr. T. Kirkup, in an article on 
 Socialism in the Encyclopedia Britannica, affirms that 
 " the central aim of Socialism is to terminate the divorce 
 of the workers from the natural sources of subsistence 
 and of culture;" and, again, he says, "the essence of the 
 theory consists in this associated production, with a 
 collective capital, with a view to an equitable distribution." 
 Finally, the committee of the Pan-Anglican Synod say : 
 " Any scheme of social reconstruction may be called 
 Socialism which aims at uniting labour and the instru- 
 ments of labour (land and capital), whether by means of 
 the State, or of the 'help of the rich, or of the voluntary 
 co-operation of the poor." 
 
 All these definitions are applicable to certain forms of 
 Socialism. On the whole, however, I prefer the first 
 that of Proudhon "every aspiration towards the im- 
 provement of society." I prefer it for the very reason 
 , that Laveleye objects to it because it is so inclusive. 
 Inasmuch as provision for the material needs of men 
 
16 THE LIFE MORE THAN MEAT. 
 
 the making sure in a reasonable and provident way of 
 that which ministers to the material needs is essential to 
 the perfecting of the individual and to the building up of 
 the State, it is natural that those who earnestly reflect on 
 the condition of human society should fix their attention 
 first of all upon this phase of the problem of social 
 reconstruction. We must not forget, however, that this 
 is only a phase. The life is more than meat and the 
 body than raiment. Society is not merely an aggregation 
 of well-fed, well-clothed men and women. In a social or 
 societary consideration, therefore, of the problem of 
 human progress, it is not enough to say that any system 
 of social reconstruction may be called Socialism which 
 aims at uniting labour and the instruments of labour. 
 Let us, then, for the present put aside those definitions 
 which would narrow our investigation to that point. If 
 we do so, it may be that when we approach the question 
 of Socialism as affecting the material needs of the 
 people, particularly, it will be with a more clear under- 
 standing a mind better framed to impartially consider 
 the specific claim which is implied in these definitions, 
 especially in the claim that labour and the instruments 
 of labour land and capital ought to be united. 
 
 Eighteen hundred and more years ago a Galilean 
 teacher informed an evil and adulterous generation that 
 the whole law and the prophets hang on the simple 
 precept, " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy 
 heart, and thy neighbour as thyself." What, think you, 
 was the philosophic and scientific basis of this declaration? 
 For, of course, it had a philosophic and scientific basis. 
 The law and the prophets hang on the precept of love to 
 God and to man because of the homogeneity the 
 
WHAT DANTE TAUGHT. 17 
 
 essential unity of things. God made all things, and in 
 all God's creation the great unifying power is love. It is 
 love which, descending from the highest to the lowest, 
 and ascending from the lowest to the highest, is the 
 essential principle of life and activity in every plane of 
 existence, spiritual, moral, and material. " God is love." 
 Departure from love involves disorder or loss of life 
 withdrawal from God. Perfect life is perfect unity 
 perfect love. 
 
 Now as I must avoid converting into a homily what is 
 designed as a treatise, I will not enlarge on this truth, 
 much as I feel tempted to do so. Only let me add, 
 because it is really necessary to a comprehension of the 
 subject, that perfect love being perfect unity, and perfect 
 unity being perfect love, so far as individually and collec- 
 tively we depart from such love we promote disorder in 
 God's universe, in society, and in ourselves we act 
 contrary to the law and the prophets. On. the other 
 hand, so far as individually and collectively our life is the 
 expression of love, we are promoters of unity and order. 
 Love is the fulfilling of the law in every individual and 
 societary sense. 
 
 This truth was expressed in similar, though not identical, 
 terms to what I have employed by the Divine Dante. In 
 De Monar chia, and again in // Convito, Dante wrote : 
 "God is one; the universe is a thought of God; all 
 things spring from God ; they participate in the Divine 
 nature, more or less, according to the end for which they 
 are created, and tend towards that amount of perfectibility 
 
 of which they are susceptible The noblest of created 
 
 things is man. . God has given to man more of his own 
 nature than to the others. The capacity of perfectibility 
 
 B 
 
i8 INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL PROGRESS. 
 
 is indefinite in man Hence there must be a single 
 
 aim for all men, a work to be achieved by all. The 
 human race must work in unity, so that all the intellectual 
 forces diffused amongst men may obtain the highest 
 possible development in the sphere of thought and action." 
 These are elementary truths which we must grasp, 
 otherwise progress in a true science of human economy 
 is impossible. Notwithstanding all our so-called religious 
 and political progress, very crude ideas as yet prevail both 
 in religious and political circles, as to the relations of 
 society towards the individual, and of the individual 
 towards society. These crude ideas arise mainly from the 
 incapacity of most men to realize this homogeneity of the 
 human family upon which Dante so beautifully expatiates, 
 and which was present to Christ's mind when He declared 
 in the way already alluded to, that " the whole law and 
 the prophets " which means every precept and obligation 
 pertaining to the conduct of men individually and 
 collectively hang upon love to God and the neighbour. 
 That the power of society to progress is governed by the 
 condition, good or bad, of the individual, and that the 
 power of the individual to progress is in like manner 
 governed by the condition, good or bad, of society ; that 
 we are all members of one body; that if one member 
 suffers all suffer with it whether consciously or un- 
 consciously whether in obvious negation of life or in 
 negation of life which is not obvious-- these things are 
 amongst the grandest truths set forth in the Christian 
 system. Yet they are truths which very few of us under- 
 stand. And they are truths which it hath not yet entered 
 into the heart of any political government, any State 
 government, to consider. But only in proportion as they 
 
THE WAGES OF THE POOR. 19 
 
 are considered and understood will there be the slightest 
 possibility of forming right views as to our social, economic, 
 and political condition. Only in proportion as they are 
 considered and understood, will we be able to realize the 
 terribly tragic significance to us of the testimony that in 
 England there is one-third of the population who, from 
 causes which they cannot of themselves control, encounter 
 -a chronic difficulty in finding and keeping honest em- 
 ployment ; that of the thirty-six millions parents and 
 children of our population, there are thirty millions not 
 one of whom has an income of so much as three pounds 
 a week, and one-fifth of whom are the destitute, 
 necessarily unemployed class ; that of the population who 
 reach the age of 60, forty-five per cent, are or have been 
 paupers; and that of every twelve persons who die in 
 London, one dies in the Workhouse. Only in proportion 
 as these truths are considered and understood, will we be 
 .able to realize the significance to us of the Archbishop of 
 York's statement that the terrible tendency of modern 
 progress is to double the gains of the rich and halve the 
 miserable wages of the poor, or understand how it may be 
 very much our business to concern ourselves to check 
 those evils of thoughtless marriages, intemperance, and 
 want of thrift, of which the Archbishop also spoke, and 
 which aggravate the effects, though they do not bring 
 about the conditions, under which the miserable wages of 
 the poor tend to be halved whilst the gains of the rich 
 tend to be doubled. Furthermore, only in proportion as 
 these truths are considered and understood, will we be 
 able to realize that after all a country is not wealthy 
 because it is rich, or great because it is not devoid of 
 .great men ; that a true progress of society is not and never 
 
20 THE BODY-HUMAN. 
 
 can be a sectional or partial progress, that it must be a 
 progress of the mass universally consentaneous related 
 to a common religious and moral appreciation of the inter- 
 dependence of classes and to a common desire that all 
 shall be raised ; not only so, but that the process of social 
 elevation involves a continual lifting up of those who are 
 at the very bottom a work which demands the intensest 
 spirit pf love. For it cannot be undertaken successfully 
 if there be envy, malice, and uncharitableness, plus 
 ignorance, on the part of those who are at the bottom, 
 and fear, distrust, and selfishness, plus ignorance, on the 
 part of those who are at the top. 
 
 The better to understand such a conception of in- 
 dividual and societary relationships, let us consider the 
 analogy between the human body and human society 
 the body-politic. The Rev. J. T. Freeth, in an admirable 
 article on " The Human Form," has pointed out that in 
 the human body each organ, muscle, fibre, or cell has its 
 appropriate location. The true law of their health, how- 
 ever, is one of mutual service. The eminent life or 
 excellency of life of every member, and every organ, and 
 of every part of our bodies consists in this : that nothing 
 is proper to any member, organ, or part, unless it be in 
 common. There is no member, nor any organ or part 
 which does not derive its nourishment, its delights, from 
 what is common or general ; for in the human body what 
 is common or general provides for particular things, 
 according to their use. Thus there is no monopoly in a 
 healthy body no member, organ, or part overstocked, 
 while others are starved and perishing. If any part takes 
 more than it wants for its proper use, not only are other 
 parts denied their rights, but disease and death ensue ; 
 
THE BODY-POLITIC. 21 
 
 we strive with might and main to get rid of the accumula- 
 tions, for we know that otherwise they will soon get rid of 
 us ; we recognize them as opposed to comfort and order, 
 as foes to that harmony of action which constitutes health. 
 
 As every part of the individual body has an equal claim 
 to support, every part of the body-politic has an equal 
 claim to support also an equal right to the means of 
 existence. And, as it is contrary to the laws of life in the 
 individual body that any part should have more than it 
 needs for its proper use, so it is contrary to the laws of 
 societary life that there should be excessive opulence in 
 one part of the body-politic and starvation in another. In 
 short, physical health is conditioned by honouring the 
 least as well as the vital parts and organs ; social health 
 is conditioned by the practical recognition of the same law 
 between man and man. We must secure the common 
 profit, and acknowledge the fraternity of feet and head, 
 hand and heart, and of the all-compassing skin. Undue 
 repletion in any part of the body brings about inflammation 
 and disorders the entire physical organism ; in like manner, 
 the creating of trade monopolies, the accumulation of 
 wealth in the hands of a few, not less than thoughtless 
 marriages, intemperance, and want of thrift, disorder the 
 entire social organism. 
 
 It is disregard of human rights, of the law of fraternity, 
 of that just equity which would secure to every man the 
 means and opportunities of developing his best, which is 
 the prolific source of our social evils. To make men feel 
 the want of a higher order of life to make them sensible 
 of their true needs as men, and to provide them with a 
 standard of public health as beautiful and as scientific as 
 any standard of private and individual health which the 
 
22 HOMOGENEITY OF SOCIETY. 
 
 College of Physicians has ever set up, is certainly a primary 
 object of a wise Socialism. Therefore, as I have already 
 observed, our first business must be to persistently proclaim 
 that doctrine of the homogeneity of society to which I 
 have referred, 
 
 If I may now say what in my opinion Socialism is, I 
 would reply that it is any form of social belief and practice 
 which honestly aims at the realization of the truths to 
 which I have just alluded. It is any form of social belief 
 and practice which grows out of the conception of the 
 fatherhood of God, to teach which Christ spoke the parable 
 of the Prodigal Son ; and of the brotherhood of man, to 
 teach which He spoke the parable of the Good Samaritan. 
 It is any form of social belief and practice which prepares 
 the way for the Kingdom golden, the time when 
 
 x All men's good 
 
 Shall be each man's rule, and universal peace 
 Lie like a shaft of light across the land, 
 And like a lane of beams across the sea, 
 Through all the circle of the golden years. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE GOSPEL OF DUTY. 
 
 We are they whose bugle rings, 
 
 That all the wars may cease ; 
 We are they will pay the Kings 
 
 Their cruel price for Peace ; 
 We are they whose steadfast watchword 
 
 Is what Christ did teach, 
 " Each man for his Brother first 
 
 And Heaven, then, for each." 
 
 We are they who will not falter 
 
 Many swords or few 
 Till we make this Earth the altar 
 
 Of a worship new ; 
 W T e are they who will not take 
 
 From palace, priest, or code, 
 A meaner Law than " Brotherhood " 
 
 A lower Lord than GOD. Ediuin Arnold. 
 
 SAID, in criticising the remarks of the Archbishop 
 of York, at the outset of this work, that if 
 political economy and the science of government, 
 as ordinarily understood, are " powerless,' 7 as his Grace 
 declared, to deal with the great economic and social 
 problems which are facing us, it must be that this political 
 economy and this science of government are of a spurious 
 character. I urged that we should not assume the 
 powerlessness of science, but rather that we are not yet 
 
24 ORGANIZATION ACCORDING TO AN IDEA. 
 
 scientific. We want the true science, and, of course, a 
 willingness to act according to the laws of human society 
 which it shall discover. I have shown that whatever 
 the true science may be in the details of its application, 
 the basis of that science must be a Christian basis the 
 basis of recognizing that we are all members of one body, 
 and that therefore the power of society to progress is 
 governed by the condition, good or bad, of the individual, 
 and that the power of the individual to progress is in like 
 manner governed by the condition, good or bad, of 
 society. I have indicated that in proportion to the 
 realization of this truth will be the sense of responsibility 
 on the part of each citizen towards every other citizen ; 
 and the sense of responsibility on the part of the 
 governing power in relation to the citizen. 
 
 It now devolves upon me to direct attention to the 
 way in which what I regard as best in Socialist teaching 
 in the teaching, that is, of professed Socialists is 
 expounded by what I have called unorthodox yet leading 
 writers not popularly regarded as Socialist. But first, let 
 me say, I have a special object in adopting this method 
 of elucidating my subject. I believe that the reader is 
 likely to receive with reverence the guidance of men 
 whom he may have learned to trust from the manner 
 in which they may have been helpful to him in other 
 fields of mental occupation or inquiry. Furthermore, I 
 am bound to confess that many avowed and leading 
 Socialists do not impress me in so favourable a way that 
 I should feel impelled first of all to refer the inquirer to 
 their writings. 
 
 Many avowed Socialists approach the problem of 
 social reconstruction, chiefly from the intellectual and 
 
ORGANIZATION ACCORDING TO AN AFFECTION. 25 
 
 not the affectional side. They seek to organise society 
 primarily according to an idea, and not primarily according 
 to an affection. They elaborate most ingenious systems 
 as well-balanced, intellectually speaking, as the finest 
 machinery. They are thoroughly convinced that under 
 this system or that system things would work well, and 
 that we all might be happy. It is not to be said of their 
 systems that none is commendable. Whilst some of these 
 Socialists contend rather fiercely among themselves as to 
 which system is best, we might say that generally speaking 
 most of them are good. Given the nexus of affection of 
 love in society, they might work. But unfortunately this ^ 
 nexus is wanting. It is the absence of it which is the chief 
 cause of our difficulties. Its restoration is essential to 
 the effort after social reconstruction. 
 
 Socialists who approach the problem chiefly from the 
 intellectual side do not sufficiently take this into account. 
 Sometimes they even write and speak in such a way that 
 we have some difficulty in persuading ourselves that they 
 would not hang, draw, and quarter us for the sake of the 
 cause, if they thought that by taking that measure a clean 
 start might be made with their own ideal systems. 
 .Probably in this they are only half serious. They may be 
 more warm-hearted more pitiful to their opponents than 
 they appear to be. Yet to appeal to their speeches and 
 writings might not help me much in my present task. Sn 
 the degree that the intellectual conception dominates and 
 the affectional is subordinate in their work, such men* 
 cannot offer; the guidance which is now most necessary. J^~ 
 Therefore, notwithstanding the possible protests of such 
 unsocial Socialists, I turn for guidance to Carlyle, Ruskin, 
 and Henry George. 
 
26 REVOLUTIONARY METHODS. 
 
 These teachers have not elaborated schemes of social 
 reconstruction professedly complete in every detail and 
 warranted to work with automatic precision, but I believe 
 they have done their utmost to promote the organization 
 of society according to an affection ; they realize, if ever 
 men have realized, the interdependence of the parts of 
 the social fabric the spiritual and natural homogeneity 
 of society. Deriving their impulse from the Gospel, they 
 strive for the time when the nexus between men shall be 
 love which, of course, includes justice and not the 
 community of interest alone ; when the motive power 
 shall be not the desire to recoup oneself even though 
 that may mean the claiming of what one believes to 
 be one's own but the desire to give and the wish to 
 take only what will enable us out of an honest heart and 
 simple life to go on doing and giving to the utmost of our 
 power. We shall find that Carlyle, Ruskin, and Henry 
 George are at all times safe guides. Some particular plan 
 of theirs affecting the social organization may on examina- 
 tion, or after the test of experience, be deemed imperfect. 
 But that can matter relatively little. The spirit is right 
 and the aim good. If there is one thing of which I am 
 more persuaded than another, it is that in affairs of 
 government methods which are even imperfect will yield 
 relatively good results if sympathetically applied. But 
 no method, however perfect it may be in the abstract, 
 will yield good results if it is not sympathetically applied. 
 The secret of the comparative failure of French and all 
 similar though less important revolutionary movements 
 lies in that. Protestations they may have been in favour 
 of truth. But just for such reasons as I have indicated 
 the revelation which has come as a result of the 
 
RIGHTS AND DUTIES. 27 
 
 popular uprising has been a revelation of " truth clad in 
 hell-fire." 
 
 Carlyle, Ruskin, and Henry George ever keep before 
 them that in all reform which is to be of a lasting and 
 truly beneficent character, we must work from a spiritual 
 conviction of duty, and not from a merely intellectual 
 conception of right. 
 
 In that remarkable book, The Duties of Man> Joseph 
 Mazzini points out that in human society there must 
 always be apparent antagonism of interest. Men's rights, 
 or seeming rights, wilTcTashT And when the rights, or 
 seeming rights, of one individual do happen to clash 
 with those of another, how can we hope to reconcile 
 and harmonize them, if we do not refer to some- 
 thing which is above all rights? This something is 
 DUTY. " We must convince men that they are all sons of 
 one sole God, and bound to fulfil and execute one sole law 
 here on earth; that each of them is bound to live, not for 
 himself but for others ; that the aim of existence is, not 
 to be more or less happy, but to make themselves and 
 others more virtuous ; that to struggle against injustice 
 and error, wherever they exist, in the name and for the 
 benefit of their brothers, is a duty which may not be 
 neglected without sin the duty of their whole life." 
 
 In the effort thus to work out the salvation of men 
 below, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Henry George are in all 
 points qualified to assist us. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 A TEACHER OF THE TEACHERS : JOSEPH MAZZINI. 
 
 Happy he whose inward ear 
 Angel comfortings can hear, 
 
 O'er the rabble's laughter ; 
 And while hatred's fagots burn, 
 Glimpses through the smoke discern 
 
 Of the good hereafter ; 
 
 Knowing this that never yet 
 Share of truth was vainly set 
 
 In the world's wide fallow ; 
 After hands shall sow the seed, 
 After hands from hill and mead 
 
 Reap the harvests yellow. Whittier. 
 
 EFERRING to the great Italian patriot, Joseph 
 Mazzini, I am reminded that the late Mr. 
 Arnold Toynbee, in his lecture on " Industry 
 and Democracy," said that not Carlyle, great as he 
 was, nor any other, but Mazzini was the true teacher 
 of the age. His book The Duties of Man, was, in 
 Mr. Toynbee's opinion, the most simple and passionate 
 statement published in this century of man's duty to 
 God and his fellows. "Mazzini," said Toynbee, "was a 
 democrat, who spent his life in struggling to free his 
 country, but he believed in liberty not as an end but as a 
 means a means to a purer and nobler life for the whole 
 
MAZZINrS GREAT WORK. 29 
 
 people." Carlyle's own testimony to Mazzini's life and 
 character is not less remarkable. In a letter to The Times 
 of November I5th, 1844, he described Mazzini as " a man 
 of genius and virtue, a man of sterling veracity, humanity, 
 and nobleness of mind, one of those rare men, numerable, 
 unfortunately, but as units in this world, who are worthy 
 to be called martyr souls ; who, in silence, piously in 
 their daily life, understand and practise what is meant 
 by that." 
 
 So far as the claim which Toynbee and Carlyle re- 
 spectively put forth on Mazzini's behalf, relates to the 
 general spirit, the grand motive of Mazzini's work, I am 
 quite disposed to agree with it. Let me say, however 7 , 
 that I have not chosen to include Mazzini with the other 
 teachers I have selected for the purpose of giving a 
 detailed exposition of the new political economy, partly 
 because the name of Mazzini is not so familiar to the 
 English public as the names of the other men I have 
 mentioned, and, therefore, he is not one whom the reader 
 may have learned to trust to the same degree that he may 
 have learned to trust Carlyle and Ruskin, at least, amongst 
 my trio of representative teachers. Furthermore, I have not 
 included Mazzini, because he did not elaborate and apply 
 his economic views to the same extent as the others. He 
 is certainly not in this respect to be compared with 
 Ruskin and Henry George in helpfulness to the student 
 of social problems. 
 
 Mazzini was of necessity far too much occupied with 
 the great work of freeing his beloved Italy from a foreign 
 yoke, and of establishing her political institutions, to be 
 able to elaborate and even on paper apply in the purely 
 economic field those glorious principles of which he had 
 
.30 THE EQUALITY OF MAN. 
 
 such fine mental and moral grasp. None the less it is 
 fitting that at this stage of our work acknowledgment 
 should be made of Mazzini's services to the cause of 
 humanity. 
 
 I have nowhere met with a more convincing exposure 
 of the fallacies of Communism and of State Socialism of 
 the types which seek to accomplish their objects by the 
 method of compulsory organization according to an idea 
 the method of organization decreed by statute and en- 
 forced by authority than is to be found in Mazzini's 
 writings. At the same time, in all that tends to inspire 
 lofty ideals in harmony with a natural and orderly social 
 evolution, Mazzini is most helpful. To paraphrase his 
 words in Thoughts upon Democracy in Europe, he laboured 
 that the development of human society might be as far 
 ,as possible in the likeness of the Divine society, in the 
 likeness of the heavenly country, where all are equal ; 
 where there exists but one love, but one happiness for all. 
 He sought the paths of heaven upon earth, for he knew 
 that this earth was given to us for our workshop, that 
 through it we can rise to heaven, that by our earthly 
 works we shall be judged, by the number of the poor 
 whom we have assisted, by the number of the unhappy 
 whom we have consoled. " The law of God," he declared, 
 " has not two weights and two measures : Christ came for 
 all: He spoke to all: He died for all. We cannot 
 logically declare the children of God to be equal before 
 God and unequal before men. We cannot wish our 
 immortal spirit to abjure on earth that gift of liberty 
 which is the source of good and evil in our actions ; the 
 exercise of which makes man virtuous or criminal in the 
 eyes of God. We cannot wish the brow that is raised to 
 
THE COMMON WANT OF FAITH. 31 
 
 heaven to fall prostrate in the dust before any created 
 being ; the soul that should aspire to heaven, to rot in 
 ignorance of its rights, its powers, and its noble origin, 
 while. on earth. We cannot admit, that instead of loving 
 one another like brethren, men ought to be divided, 
 hostile, selfish ; jealous, city of city, nation of nation. 
 We protest, then, against all inequality, against all oppres- 
 sion, wheresoever it is practised : we recognize only the 
 just and the unjust ; the friends and the enemies of the 
 law of God." 
 
 The motto which Mazzini devised for the new age was, 
 "The progress of all through all, under the leading of 
 the best and wisest." The social arrangement of the 
 external world was to him only the manifestation of the 
 interior man, of the moral and intellectual condition of 
 humanity at a given time, of its faith above all. Society, 
 such as he saw it in his day, and it is no whit the 
 better yet, was the result of a common want of faith, 
 a result of the anarchy which reigned amongst intelli- 
 gences and interests, and of the selfishness inevitably 
 resulting from this anarchy. He saw that even amongst 
 the would-be reformers the want of a religious and a 
 truly binding conception of duty was fatal. Each had 
 snatched a rag of the ensign of progress, and paraded it 
 as proudly as if it were the whole flag, repudiating or not 
 deigning to look at others who also thought to forward 
 human well-being. One had fallen upon an exclusively 
 political idea ; he had his ten-pound franchise, or 
 other tool of power. To this he would cling. He 
 regarded, often with hostility, always with disdain, 
 those who proposed another measure, even if that 
 measure appeared to him good in itself, because 
 
 >> (OT THE 
 
\ 
 
 32 IDEA-HUNTING. 
 
 he was afraid it might divert the public attention from 
 his favourite plan. Another, seizing the merely econo- 
 mical part of the question, calculated progress by the 
 number of railroads about to open, of steamers which 
 afforded new means of transit, of new markets gained for 
 the national industry ; he called himself a practical man, 
 and laughed at political inquiry as idea-hunting. A 
 third, disgusted with our existing social organization, but 
 disgusted like the child who breaks his toy because he 
 has knocked his head against it, desired to suppress, to 
 annihilate all that he thought mischievous. He had 
 drawn from his brain a model republic of beavers or of 
 bees ; he called upon the human race to come and frame 
 itself therein, and remain there for ever. Others, again 
 choice spirits, who had intuitively discovered the truth, 
 without troubling themselves much how to impregnate 
 the masses with it felt pity for all this. They said, 
 " Man is now sick ; above all things, he must make haste 
 to get well : he is egotistical ; he has only to become 
 again affectionate and devoted : he is sceptical, he has 
 lost the light of faith ; he must recover it as soon as 
 possible under pain of death : when he has once 
 recovered health and sight all will go well." 
 
 Such were the different plans and points of view which 
 Mazzini saw propounded and assumed by those who called 
 themselves reformers. But, alas, below all this, the people, 
 without leisure to compare, to study, and to select, among 
 these conflicting ideas, the one which was nearest to or 
 contained the most truth, became accustomed to doubt. 
 " For the people," exclaimed Mazzini, " there is but one 
 thing certain their own misery, and the feeling of dis- 
 trust and reaction produced by it a feeling which the 
 
MAN AND HIS MISSION. 33 
 
 spectacle offered by their teachers is not calculated to 
 diminish." 
 
 Amongst all the reformers there was, in the opinion 
 of Mazzini, not one completely right, not one com- 
 pletely wrong. As for the advocates of a mere 
 political idea, of franchise extension, or other tool 
 of power, they needed to learn that if we gave 
 the suffrage to a people unfitted for it, governed by 
 hateful reactionary passions, they would sell it, or make 
 a bad use of it ; they would introduce instability into 
 every part of the State ; they would render impossible 
 those great combined views, those thoughts for the 
 future, which make the life of a nation powerful and 
 progressive. As for those who looked merely at 
 the economical part of the question, they needed to 
 learn that however much we might develop material 
 interests, if moral advancement did not outstrip 
 them, it was probable we would increase the already 
 too great riches of the few, while the mass of producers 
 would not see their condition improved ; or even we 
 would increase egotism, we would stifle under physical 
 enjoyments all that was noblest in human nature ; 
 material progress alone might end in a Chinese society. 
 As for the Utopists, they forgot that we are placed here 
 below, not to create human nature, but to carry it forward ; 
 they forgot that all the elements of human activity, 
 individual property and so forth, are in themselves neither 
 good nor evil ; they are instruments with which we may 
 do good or evil. We should anathematize none of them ; 
 we should find out how to direct them aright.. And as 
 for the moralists, the philosophical writers, who would begin 
 by transforming the inward man they forgot that the 
 
34 EDUCATION IN AIMS AND METHODS. 
 
 labourer, who works fourteen or sixteen hours a day for a 
 bare subsistence, with no security for the morrow's exist- 
 ence but the labour of his hands, has not time to read and 
 reflect, even if he knows how to read he drinks and sleeps. 
 And yet the suffrage, the progress of industry, the 
 increase of comfort, the copartnership of labour with 
 intelligence and capital, all these were good in Mazzini's 
 view ; all these would enter into the future, either as the 
 application or the consequence of the great democratic 
 and social idea which guides the world. The evil was 
 that each of us having discovered one face of the polygon, 
 one aspect of the human problem, endeavoured to 
 substitute it for the entire problem. It was that we 
 persisted in endeavouring to amend the details, without 
 troubling ourselves about the principle which governs 
 them. The suffrage, political securities, progress of 
 industry, arrangement of social organization, all these 
 things were not the cure for which we were engaged ; 
 they were its means, its partial applications or consequences. 
 In reality the problem of which we must seek the solution 
 was an educational problem, it was the eternal problem 
 of human nature ; only at every great era, at every step 
 we ascend, our starting-point changes, and a new object, 
 beyond that which we have just attained, is brought into 
 our view. " We wish man," urged Mazzini, "to be better 
 than he is. We wish him to have more love, more feeling 
 for the beautiful, the great and the true ; that the ideal 
 which he pursues shall be purer, more Divine ; that 
 he shall feel his own dignity, shall have more respect for his 
 immortal soul. We wish him to have, in a faith freely 
 adopted, a Pharos to guide him, and we would have his 
 acts correspond to that faith." 
 
ELEVATING MEN TO ELEVATE MAN. 35 
 
 This being the object, if we wished to attain it man 
 must commune as intimately as possible with the greatest 
 possible number of his fellows. He must enlarge on 
 those words of Jesus, rendered by Mazzini thus, " When 
 three or more of you are assembled in my name, the 
 spirit of truth and of love shall descend upon you." The 
 true spirit of progress, as voiced by Mazzini, cried, 
 " Endeavour all to unite. Invite ail to the banquet of 
 love. Throw down the barriers which separate you. 
 Suppress all the privileges which render you hostile or 
 envious ; retain only those of intelligence and morality. 
 Make yourselves equal as far as it can be done. And 
 this, not only because human nature has everywhere the 
 same fights, but because you can only elevate men by 
 elevating MAN ; by raising our conception of life, which 
 the spectacle of inequality tends to lower." " When all 
 men," proclaimed the great liberator, " shall commune 
 together in reverence for the family and respect for 
 property, through education and the exercise of a political 
 function in the State ; the family and property, the 
 fatherland and humanity, will become more holy than 
 they are now. When the arms of Christ, even yet stretched 
 out on the cross, shall be loosened to clasp the whole 
 human race in one embrace when there shall be no 
 more pariahs nor brahmins, nor servants, nor masters, 
 but only men we shall adore the great name of 
 God with much more love and faith than we do 
 now." 
 
 This, in very rough and imperfect outline, is the teach- 
 ing of Mazzini. I have drawn it not from his greater 
 work On the Duties of Man, but from his Thoughts 
 on Democracy in Europe, because the form in which 
 
36 A REASONABLE CLAIM. 
 
 the ideas are presented in the latter work appears 
 to me to lend itself most readily and usefully to the 
 special objects which I have in view. But if the 
 reader wishes to know Mazzini truly, he must go to 
 Mazzini's writings for himself. What I have given is 
 sufficient to show that Toynbee's claim on Mazzini's 
 behalf and Carlyle's estimate of Mazzini's genius and 
 character were not unreasonable, and also sufficient to 
 further my effort to impress on those who follow the argu- 
 ment of this work studiously, the paramount importance 
 of ever keeping in view that it is primarily the organization 
 of society according to an affection at which we must 
 aim that the conception of the individual and societary 
 relationships to be evolved must be a conception based 
 from first to last on a very literal acceptance of the 
 doctrine of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood 
 of man. 
 
 We may now, without further explanation or digression, 
 proceed to that exposition of the teachings of Carlyle, 
 Ruskin, and Henry George, which I have proposed to 
 give. First of all we shall take Carlyle. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE. 
 
 " I should like to make every man, woman, and child whom I 
 meet, discontented with themselves, even as I am discontented with 
 myself. I should like to awaken in them, about their physical, 
 their intellectual, their moral condition, that divine discontent which 
 is the parent, first of upward aspiration, aud then of self-control, 
 thought, effort to fulfil that aspiration even in part. This is the very 
 germ and first up-growth of all virtue." Charles Kingsley. 
 
 jTiF any man believes that this is the best of all possible 
 31T worlds let him read Carlyle's works with an open 
 mind, and he will soon find that it is tragically the 
 reverse of the best. No man had a more intense con- 
 viction of the magnitude of the social and economic 
 evils of his time. He had an equally intense conviction 
 that most of the politico-economic teachings which passed 
 current in reference to those evils were delusive mere 
 ingenious explanations of learned minds to soothe the 
 consciences of the rich and to hinder the poor from being 
 infected with a divine discontent. 
 
 Carlyle, however, was not a pessimist. His faith in the 
 ultimate triumph of the laws of justice and right, and in the 
 possibilities opening out to the human race, was unbounded. 
 Ruskin, the grandest optimist of modern times, wrote 
 
38 EMERSON'S GRAND QUESTION. 
 
 of him in The Croivn of Wild Olive, as " Our one quite 
 clear-sighted teacher." Mr. J. R. Lowell in My Study 
 Window, declares that Carlyle's value as an inspirer and 
 awakener cannot be over-estimated. " It is a power which 
 belongs only to the highest order of minds, for it is none 
 but a divine power that can so kindle and irradiate. The 
 debt due to him from those who listened to the teach- 
 ings of his prime, for revealing to them what sublime 
 reserves of power even the humblest may find in 
 manliness, sincerity, and self-reliance, can be paid with 
 nothing short of reverential gratitude. As a purifier of 
 the sources whence our intellectual inspiration is drawn, 
 his influence has been second only to Wordsworth's, if 
 even to his." 
 
 In few writers will you find a more powerful stimulus 
 to undertake the high calling of the reformer. " What is 
 a man born for but to be a reformer, a remaker of what man 
 has marred, a renouncer of falsehood, a restorer of truth 
 and good ; imitating that great Nature which embosoms 
 all, and which sleeps no moment in an old past." This 
 grand question of Emerson is the question which is ever 
 on. the lips of Carlyle. It is a question which he demands 
 that each faithful disciple of his shall courageously answer 
 for himself labouring to establish order, beauty, rest, and 
 affection in all human affairs. 
 
 " How he shakes our comfortable reading circle 
 with a touch of the old Hebraic anger and prophecy," 
 wrote Walt Whitman in Specimen Days. ..." How he 
 splashes like leviathan in the seas of modern literature 
 and politics ! Doubtless, respecting the latter, to under- 
 stand the best meaning of his pages, one needs first to 
 realize, from actual observation, the squalor, vice, and 
 
CARLYLE A DEMOCRAT. 39 
 
 doggedness ingrained in the bulk of the population of the 
 British Islands, with the red tape, the fatuity, the flunkey- 
 ism everywhere. Though he was no Chartist or Radical, 
 I consider Carlyle's by far the most indignant comment 
 or protest anent the fruits of feudalism to-day in Great 
 Britain the increasing poverty and degradation of the 
 homeless, landless twenty millions, while a few thousands, 
 or rather a few hundreds, possess the entire soil, the 
 money, and the fat berths ; the most indignant protest 
 against a stupendous hoggishness which trade and 
 shiprjlng, and clubs and culture, and prestige and guns, 
 and a fine select class of gentry and aristocracy, with 
 every modern improvement, cannot salve or defend." 
 
 There is much, very much, in Carlyle that appears to 
 conflict with many of our popularly received notions of 
 progress. Like Mazzini he had no absolute confidence 
 in Parliamentary institutions, universal suffrage, and 
 governmental mechanism of that sort. He never tired 
 of warning his countrymen that they were apt to put 
 too great faith in these things. Parliament was at one 
 time a " quite solid and serious actuality," and it might 
 become so again. But in modern times it had been but 
 a solemn Convocation of all the Stump Orators in the 
 nation. As to the franchise, " voting " might be in itself 
 a thing of little value. If of ten men nine were recogniz- 
 able as fools, how would you ever get a ballot-box to 
 grind out wisdom from their votes ? In Carlyle's view, it 
 was necessary to the king or governor to know what the 
 mass of men thought on public questions. He might 
 thus choose his path with prudence, and reach his aim 
 surely if more slowly. But that the absolute deter- 
 mination of high matters should, at all times and under 
 
40 CARL YLE'S THEORY OF DEMOCRACY. 
 
 all conditions, rest with a mass of men consulted at the 
 hustings was, he held, as ugly an exhibition of human" 
 stupidity as this world could see. 
 
 We cannot wonder that to some students of Carlyle it 
 may appear that there is much that is the very reverse 
 of Democratic in these views which Carlyle held with 
 respect to the machinery of government. But I must 
 offer a word of warning against any such conclusion. 
 All this criticism of Parliamentary institutions on Carlyle's 
 part was merely intended to rouse his countrymen to a 
 sense of the fact that they might have the form of a 
 Democratic Government without the substance it was 
 to make them feel that whether they had the substance 
 or not depended on the character of the ideal which the 
 nation set before it. Carlyle was essentially a Democrat. 
 But with him Democracy was not necessarily government 
 by the people and for the people. It was government 
 for the people not, it might be, the government they 
 liked best, but the government that was best for them. 
 All true Democracy, he said, is this, that the able man 
 be chosen, in whatever rank he be found, and that to him 
 the task of government shall be committed. Amongst a 
 noble and truth-seeking people the able man would be 
 chosen. But if the people were not noble and truth-seeking, 
 then they could only be saved from effecting their own 
 damnation by noble and truth-seeking men, if there 
 happened to be such among them, assuming the command 
 of affairs. In the latter case just because the rulers would 
 be noble and truth-seeking, they would seek first of all the 
 good of those they ruled. This, of course, would not be 
 the ideal Democracy. Injhe ideal Democracy the people 
 would know what was good and support their best men 
 
CARLYLES RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT. 41 
 
 inthe effort to attain it_ But yet it would be Democracy 
 decidedly the best for such a people. 
 
 When properly understood the theory of Democracy 
 which Carlyle held will be seen to be at bottom similar 
 to the theory held by Mazzini. If the.re is in Carlyle an 
 apparently deliberate and calculated preference for the 
 Individual rather than the Collective idea in Government, 
 and an even more persistent fear than Mazzini entertained 
 that political agencies may be mistaken for ends rather 
 than means if there is, moreover, an at-times almost 
 savage disposition to rail at certain political agencies as 
 of necessity evil because they were in practice so often 
 valued for themselves alone, we must not on these 
 accounts be led to misconstrue Carlyle's teaching. Of 
 this be certain, nothing that Carlyle ever wrote which 
 magnifies the idea of the efficacy of One-man Government, 
 and seems to call in question the efficacy of popular 
 political agencies and methods, justifies the conclusion 
 that he took a view of governmental and societary 
 relationships which was not in principle and aim 
 Democratic. 
 
 The religious sentiment by which Carlyle was impelled 
 was not so definite and so intense as it was in the case of 
 Mazzini that " God-intoxicated man." Because of this, 
 and because of the manner in which government by the 
 best man was insisted upon by Carlyle, even Mazzini himself 
 was led to express doubt whether Carlyle was quite on the 
 right track as a reformer. He feared that the writings of 
 Carlyle were not without a tendency to materialism. 
 They appeared to show a want of fixed belief as to the 
 law of eternal progress, as to the mission and destiny of 
 Humanity. Mazzini acknowledged that Carlyle's noble 
 
42 A PROOF OF SISTERHOOD. 
 
 heart and powerful intellect " instinctively " urged him 
 to belief in a law of collective and continuous progress of 
 Humanity, but he lamented that no living and active 
 faith in this belief dominated Carlyle's actual teaching. 
 
 There was partial justification for this criticism. We 
 must not judge in this respect, however, according to the 
 highly-wrought judgment of Mazzini a judgment, by the 
 way, which was first expressed before some of Carlyle's 
 best social writings had been penned. Compared with 
 Mazzini's own standard Carlyle fell short what man has 
 there been in modern times who would not ? But the 
 difference between the ideas of the two men was rather a 
 difference of degree than kind. We who can study 
 Carlyle's teaching as a whole and view his life and work 
 in perspective, may see this plainly enough. 
 
 The basis of all his teaching is the basis of the father- 
 hood of God and the brotherhood of man. Call to mind 
 his comments on the story which had been brought 
 to notice by Dr. Allison, in some observations which 
 the worthy doctor had made on the management of 
 the poor in Scotland. The husband of an Irishwoman 
 died in one of the lanes in Edinburgh. The widow 
 went forth with her three children, bare of all resource, 
 to solicit help from the charitable establishments of the 
 modern Athens. At this charitable establishment and 
 then at that she was refused. She was referred from 
 one to the other, helped by none. When she had 
 exhausted them all her strength and heart failed her. 
 She sank down in typhus fever. She died, and infected 
 her lane with fever so that seventeen other persons died of 
 fever there in consequence. Dr. Allison asked, would it 
 not have been economy to have helped this poor widow ? 
 
AA r ALARMING PROBLEM. 43 
 
 Carlyle echoes the inquiry. " She took typhus fever," he 
 grimly remarks, " and killed seventeen of you ! Very 
 curious. The forlorn Irish widow applies to her fellow- 
 creatures, as if saying, * Behold I am sinking, bare of help : 
 ye must help me ! I am your sister, bone of your bone ; 
 one God made us : ye must Jhelp me.' They answer, ' No, 
 impossible ; thou art no sister of ours.' But she proves 
 her sisterhood ; her typhus fever kills them : they actually 
 were her brothers, though denying it.' Had human 
 creature ever to go lower for a proof? " 
 
 Need I quote further? God's fatherhood and man's 
 brotherhood are alike declared here. 
 
 As regards the actual causes of our social evils, and 
 as regards methods of social reconstruction, we do not 
 get so much help from Carlyle as we do jrom the other 
 two teachers of whom I shall speak. He says much 
 about causes, but he made relatively little attempt to set 
 forth, with a strictly scientific precision, the remedies 
 which he would have his countrymen adopt. In this 
 respect he stands midway, as it were, between Mazzini, 
 of whom I spoke in my previous chapter, and Ruskin 
 and Henry George, of whom I have yet to speak. His 
 special mission was to infuse soul into men. " Let not 
 any Parliament, Aristocracy, Millocracy, or member of the 
 Governing class/'' he writes, "ask with the least anger of 
 this editor, What is to be done, How that alarming 
 problem of the working classes is to be managed ? 
 Editors are not here, foremost of all, to say How. A 
 certain editor thanks the gods that nobody pays him 
 three hundred thousand pounds a year, two hundred 
 thousand, twenty thousand, or any similar sum of cash 
 for saying How : that his wages are very different, 
 
44 CARLYLES STIPULATED WORK. 
 
 his work somewhat fitter for him. An editor's stipulated 
 work is to apprise tkee that it must be done. The ' way 
 to do it,' is to try it ... thou whose trade it is." 
 
 Let us see how far the " editor's stipulated work " was 
 performed. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 CARLYLE AND MAMMON-WORSHIP- -HELL OF 
 NOT SUCCEEDING. 
 
 " My Father worketh hitherto, and I work. 
 
 " It is as easy for a camel to go through the eye of a needle as for 
 a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. 
 
 "Take heed and beware of covetousness ; for a man's life con- 
 sisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth. 
 
 " Take no thought (i.e. have no anxiety), saying, What shall we 
 eat ? or, What shall we drink ? or, Wherewith shall we be clothed ? 
 for your heavenly Father knoweth ye have need of all these things. 
 But seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all 
 these things shall be added unto yon. " Jesus Christ. 
 
 tHE grand cause of our difficulties, in Carlyle's 
 "opinion, is our selfishness. He regarded the age 
 as essentially atheistical and material not that 
 it had ceased to profess a belief in God and in the 
 supernatural, but that in practice it rejected all that such 
 a belief requires. The word hell, we are cynically told, 
 is still frequently in use among the English people, but 
 it is difficult to ascertain what they mean by it. Hell 
 generally signifies the Infinite Terror, the thing a man 
 is infinitely afraid of, and shudders and shrinks from, 
 struofgrl : ng with his whole soul to escape from it. There 
 is a hell, therefore, if we will consider, which accompanies 
 man in all stages of his history, and religious or other 
 
46 THE NEXUS OF CASH PA YMENT. 
 
 development; but the hells of men and peoples differ 
 notably. With Christians it is the infinite terror of being 
 found guilty before the Just Judge. With old Romans, 
 we may conjecture, it was the terror not of Pluto, for 
 whom probably they cared little, but of doing unworthily, 
 doing unvirtuously, which was their word for unmanfully. 
 " And now what is it, if you pierce through his Cants, 
 what he calls his Worships and so forth what is it that 
 the modern English soul does, in very truth, dread 
 infinitely, and contemplate with entire despair ? What is 
 his Hell ? The terror of ' not succeeding;' of not making 
 money, fame, or some other figure in the world, chiefly 
 of not making money ! Is not that a somewhat singular 
 hell ? " 
 
 A working Mammonism divides the world with idle 
 game-preserving Dilettantism. vX We say we form society, ' 
 but we go about professing openly the totalist separation. 
 Our life is not a mutual helpfulness ; but rather, cloaked 
 under dire laws of war, named "^fair .competition " and so 
 , forth, it is a mutual hostility. We have profoundly 
 forgotten everywhere that Cash payment is not the sole 
 nexus between man and man ; we think, nothing 
 doubting, that //. absolves and liquidates all engagements 
 of man. " My starving workers I " answers the rich mill- 
 owner, " Did I not hire them fairly in the market ? Did 
 I not pay them, to the last sixpence, the sum covenanted 
 for? What have I to do with them more?" Verily 
 Mammon-worship is a melancholy creed. " When Cain, 
 for his own behoof, had killed Abel, and was questioned, 
 ' Where is thy brother ? ' he, too made answer, Am I 
 my brother's keeper? Did I not pay my brother his 
 wages, the thing he had merited from me ?' O, sumptuous 
 
WHO IS THE BETTER FOR OUR WEALTH? 47 
 
 Merchant - Prince, illustrious game - preserving Duke, is 
 there no way of killing thy brother but Cain's rude 
 way?" 
 
 Carlyle comes to the conclusion that, as a consequence 
 of this Mammon-worship, there has been no time, since 
 the beginnings of society, when the lot of the dumb 
 millions of toilers was so entirely unbearable as it is even 
 in the days now passing over us. " It is not to die, or 
 even to die of hunger, that makes a man wretched ; many 
 men have died; all men must die the last exit of us all 
 is in a Fire-chariot of Pain. But it is to live miserable, 
 we know not why ; to work sore, and yet gain nothing ; 
 to be heart-worn, weary, yet isolated, unrelated, girt in 
 with a cold universal Laissez-faire : it is to die slowly all 
 our life long, imprisoned in a deaf, dead, infinite injustice, 
 as in the accursed iron belly of a Phalaris' Bull ! This is, 
 and remains for ever, intolerable to all men whom God 
 has made." 
 
 The worship of Mammon, the infinite dread of the 
 hell of not succeeding, is of course related to a tragic 
 misconception as to what wealth is. Never was Eng- 
 land richer ; but never had it relatively less of wealth. 
 4 To whom is this wealth of England wealth ? Who, 
 is it that it blesses \ makes happier, wiser, beautifuler, 
 in any way better ? Who has got hold of it, to make 
 it fetch and carry for him, like a true servant, not like 
 a false mock servant ; to do him any real service what- 
 soever? As yet no one. We have more riches than 
 any nation ever had before ; we have less good of 
 them than any nation ever had before." In the midst 
 of plethoric plenty, the people perish ; with gold walls 
 and full barns, no man feels himself satisfied. 
 
48 APPEALING TO THE RICH. 
 
 longed for gold, and insulted the Olympians. He got 
 gold, so that whatever he touched became gold, and 
 he, with his long ears, was little the better for it. 
 Midas had misjudged the celestial music-tones ; Midas 
 had insulted Apollo and the gods ; the gods gave him 
 his wish, and a pair of long ears, which also were a 
 good appendage to it. What a truth in these old 
 fables ! " 
 
 Convinced that this selfishness, this Midas-eared 
 Mammon worship, is the prime cause of the disorder of 
 the body - politic, Carlyle considers the question of 
 remedies. If in doing this he peculiarly, almost ex- 
 clusively, appeals to the rich and powerful the so-called 
 upper and middle classes do not let us misunderstand 
 him. It is but reasonable that he should address him- 
 self to those best able to help themselves and others. 
 Of him to whom much is given much shall be required. 
 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 RULERS-POLITICAL AND RULERS-INDUSTRIAL. 
 
 "All social institutions must have for their end the moral, 
 intellectual, and physical improvement of the largest and poorest 
 class. To everyone according to his capacity, to every capacity 
 according to work done." St. Si //ion. 
 
 r^OLLOWING Carlyle's arguments into detail, let it 
 be observed that Carlyle distinguishes " rulers " 
 into two divisions rulers in the political sense 
 (all law-makers and governors of State), and rulers in 
 the economic or purely industrial and commercial sense 
 (capitalists, employers, and controllers and regulators 
 of labour). These divisions may, of course, overlap ; 
 men in each may exercise power in the other. Still, 
 when we think of the " governing classes," as they 
 appeared to the mind of Carlyle, it is often important 
 that we should have the existence of these two divisions 
 distinctly before us. 
 
 As regards the rulers-political he emphatically declares 
 that a government of the under-classes by the upper on 
 a principle of Let-alone is no longer possible in England. 
 The working-classes cannot any longer go on without 
 government ; without being actually guided and governed. 
 " Parliament will absolutely, with whatever effort, have to 
 lift itself out of these deep ruts of do-nothing routine ; and 
 
 D 
 
50 PARLIAMENT AND THE TOILING MILLIONS. 
 
 learn to say, on all sides, something more edifying 'than 
 Laissez-faire. If Parliament cannot learn it, what is to 
 become of Parliament ? The toiling millions of England 
 ask of their English Parliament foremost of all, Can'st 
 thou govern us or not ? Parliament with its privileges is 
 strong ; but necessity and the laws of nature are stronger 
 than it. If Parliament cannot do this thing, Parliament 
 we prophesy will do some other thing or things which, 
 in the strangest and not the happiest way, will forward its 
 being done, not much to the advantage of Parliament 
 probably ! Done, one way or other, the thing must be 
 . . . Vain is it to think that the misery of one class, of 
 the great universal under-class, can be isolated, and kept 
 apart and peculiar, down in that class. By infallible 
 contagion, evident enough to reflection, evident even to 
 Political Economy that will reflect, the misery of the 
 lowest spreads upwards and upwards till it reaches the 
 very highest ; till all has grown miserable, palpably false, 
 and wrong." 
 
 Elsewhere he also speaks in terms of entreaty and 
 warning. " One thing I know, and can again assert with 
 great confidence, supported by the whole universe, and by 
 some two hundred generations of men, who have left us 
 some record of themselves there,. T^hat the few Wise will 
 have, by one method or another, to take command of the 
 innumerable Foolish ; that they must be got to take it; 
 and that, in fact, since Wisdom, which means also Valour 
 and heroic Nobleness, is alone strong in this world, and 
 one wise man is stronger than all men unwise, they can 
 be got [to take it]. . . . Having taken, they must keep 
 it, and do their God's-Message in it, and defend the 
 same, at their life's peril, against all men and devils. 
 
CARLYLE AND THE LANDLORDS. 51 
 
 This I do clearly believe to be the backbone of all 
 Future Society, as it has been of all Past ; and that with- 
 out it, there is no Society possible in the world." 
 
 With the rulers in the political sense he especially 
 identifies the landlords. He insists that those who 
 own the land should consider themselves charged with 
 special and peculiar responsibilities because of such 
 ownership. One of these responsibilities is to see that 
 the land is put to the best possible use, not for the 
 exclusive benefit of those who own it, but for the 
 general benefit a respect in which the landowners 
 become identified with the rulers in the economic sense. 
 The other responsibility is to take a foremost part in 
 national, in political government. 
 
 Surveying the relationship of the land to the national 
 well-being, and our natural claims in regard to it, he 
 exclaims, "The land is mother of us all; nourishes, 
 shelters, gladdens, lovingly enriches us all ; in how many 
 ways, from our first wakening to our last sleep on her 
 blessed mother-bosom, does she as with blessed mother- 
 arms enfold us all." From noblest Patriotism to humblest 
 industrial Mechanism ; from highest dying for your 
 country, to lowest quarrying and coal-boring for it, a 
 nation's life depends upon its land. Men talk of 
 " selling " land. Land, it is true, like Epic poems, and 
 even higher things, in such a trading world as this has to 
 be presented in the market for what it will bring, and as 
 we say be "sold." But the notion of "selling" for 
 certain bits of metal the land of the World-Creator, is a 
 more ridiculous impossibility than " selling " the Iliad of 
 Homer. We buy what is saleable of it ; nothing more 
 was ever buyable. Who can or could sell it to us ? 
 
52 WHO THE SOIL RIGHTLY BELONGS TO. 
 
 " Properly speaking, the Land belongs to these two : To. 
 the Almighty God ; and to all His children of Men that 
 have ever worked well in it, or that shall ever work well 
 in it. No generation of men can or could, with never 
 such solemnity and effort, sell Land on any other 
 principle : it is not the property of any generation, but 
 that of all the past generations that have worked in it, 
 and of all the future ones that shall work in it." 
 
 It had been said that the soil of England was properly 
 worth nothing except the labour bestowed upon it. 
 Carlyle even falls foul of this idea. " The rudest space 
 of country equal in extent to England could a whole 
 English nation, with all their habitudes, arrangements, 
 skills, with whatsoever they do carry within the skins of 
 them, and cannot be stripped of, suddenly take wing and 
 alight in it would be worth a very considerable thing ! 
 Swiftly, within year and day, this English nation, with its 
 multiplex talents of ploughing, spinning, hammering, 
 mining, road-making, and trafficking, would bring a 
 handsome value out of such a space of country." On 
 the other hand, fancy what an English nation, once " on 
 the wing," could have done with itself, had there been 
 simply no soil, not even an inarable one, to alight in ? 
 Vain all its talents for ploughing, hammering, and what- 
 ever else. There would be no earth-room for this nation 
 with all its talents. This nation would have to keep 
 hovering on the wing, dolefully shrieking to and fro ; and 
 perish piecemeal ; burying itself, down to the last soul of 
 it, in the waste unfirmamented seas. " Ah, yes, soil, with 
 or without ploughing, is the gift of God. The soil of all 
 countries belongs evermore in a very considerable degree 
 to the Almighty maker ! The last stroke of labour 
 
QUESTIONS FOR THE "IDLE ARISTOCRACY." 53 
 
 bestowed on it is not the making of its value, but only 
 the increasing thereof." 
 
 It is almost strange that, having gone thus far having 
 enunciated the doctrine that in every natural and moral 
 sense the land of a nation belongs to the people of that 
 nation he^djd not go so far as to urge that in the economic 
 and actual sense it should belong to the nation also. I 
 think it probable that if he could have participated in 
 some of the economic teaching of the present day he 
 would have done so. But we need not discuss that 
 here. Suffice it to say that it is on the basis of this 
 doctrine of a common natural and moral right which 
 the people of a country have in the land of their 
 country that he demands that those who own the 
 land shall put it to its right use, and in the matter of 
 political government recognize that they have special and 
 peculiar obligations to discharge. Again and again he 
 asks, " What shall we say of the Idle Aristocracy, the 
 Owners of the Soil, of England, whose recognized function 
 is that of handsomely consuming the rents of England, 
 shooting the partridges of England, and, as an agreeable 
 amusement (if the purchase money and other conveniences, 
 serve), dilettanting in Parliament and Quarter Sessions 
 for England ? We will say mournfully, in the presence 
 of Heaven and Earth, that we stand speechless, stupent,. 
 and know not what to say ! " 
 
 He laments that the landlords have not learned even 
 to sit still and do no mischief. You ask the typical 
 landlord at the year's end, " i Where is your three 
 hundred thousand pounds : what have you realized to 
 us with tfoat?' He answers, in indignant surprise, 
 * Done with it ? Who are you that ask ? I have 
 
54 THE TRUE FEUDAL ARISTOCRACY. 
 
 eaten it ; I and my flunkies, and parasites, and slaves 
 two-footed and four-footed, in an ornamental manner; 
 and I am here alive by it ; /am realized by it to you ! ' 
 Such an answer was never before given under this sun/' 
 
 KsWh a class as this, entitled to live sumptuously on the 
 
 l -l marrow of the earth and doing nothing in return, not even 
 
 yielding to the entreaty that they will refrain from setting 
 
 \ mischievous examples of idleness and luxury, was never 
 before seen. Such a class is transitory, exceptional, and 
 unless Nature's laws fall dead, cannot continue. It will 
 have to find its duties and do them, or else it must and 
 will cease to be seen on the face of this planet, which is 
 a working one, not an idle one. Wrathfully he turns to 
 the lords of the soil and exclaims, " I say, you did not 
 make the land of England ; and, by the possession of it 
 you are bound to furnish guidance and government to 
 England ! " 
 
 By way of precedent, he points to the Feudal the 
 true Feudal Aristocracy. To a respectable degree, its 
 Jarls, what we now call Earls, were "Strong-Ones" in 
 fact as well as etymology ; its Dukes, '" Leaders ; " its 
 Lords, " Law- Wards" They did all the soldiering and 
 police of the country, all the judging, law-making, even 
 the Church extension ; whatsoever in the way of 
 governing, of guiding, and protecting could be done. It 
 was a land aristocracy ; it managed the governing of 
 this English people, and had the reaping of the soil of 
 England in return. " It is, in many ways, the Law of 
 Nature, this same Law of Feudalism ; no right aris- 
 tocracy but a Land one ! The curious are invited to 
 meditate upon it in these days. Soldiering, Police, and 
 Judging, Church Extension, nay, real Government and 
 
PLUGSON OF UNDERSHOT. 55 
 
 Guidance, all this was actually done by the Holders of 
 the Land in return for their Land. How much of it is 
 now done by them ; done by anybody ? Good Heavens, 
 ' Laissez-faire, Do ye nothing, eat your wages and sleep,' 
 is everywhere the passionate half-wise cry of this time." 
 
 Incidentally, he complains, that the landlords only paid 
 in taxes on their land a twenty-fourth part of the fifty- 
 two millions which was then the annual expenditure of 
 the nation for purposes of government. 
 
 Passing to those who are rulers in the economic sense, \ 
 or in the industrial or purely commercial sense, these are 
 in his view the natural coadjutors of the rulers in the 
 political sense. It is the duty of each class to co-operate 
 with the other in promoting the well-being of those they 
 govern. But he is oppressed to find that the employers 
 and controllers of labour have a^ low a conception of their 
 duties as^the-kuadlords. He draws a picture of the typical 
 employer in the character of Plugson of Undershot. 
 "Plugson, who has indomitably spun cotton merely to 
 gain thousands of pounds, I have to call as yet a Buccaneer 
 and Choctaw ; till there come something better, still more 
 indomitable from him. His hundred thousand-pound 
 notes, if there be nothing other, are to me but as the 
 hundred scalps in a Choctaw wigwam. The blind Plugson, 
 he was a captain of Industry, born member of the Ultimate 
 Genuine Aristocracy of the Universe, could he have known 
 it ! These thousand men that spun and toiled round him, 
 they were a regiment whom he had enlisted man by man ; 
 to make war on a very genuine enemy : Bareness of back, 
 and disobedient cotton-fibre, which will not, unless forced 
 to it, consent to cover bare backs. Here is a most genuine 
 enemy ; over whom all creatures will wish him victory. 
 
56 WILLIAM THE NORMAN. 
 
 He enlisted his thousand men : said to them, ' Come, 
 brothers, let us have a dash at Cotton ! ' They follow 
 with cheerful shout ; they gain such a victory over Cotton 
 as the Earth has to admire and clap hands at : but, alas, 
 it is yet only of the Buccaneer or Choctaw sort as good 
 as no victory ! Does Plugson hope to become illustrious 
 by hanging up the scalps in his wigwam, the hundred 
 thousands at his banker's, and saying, ' Behold my 
 scalps ? ' i Why, Plugson, even thy own host is all in 
 mutiny: Cotton is conquered, but the bare backs are 
 worse covered than ever ! ' ' 
 
 He reminds Plugson that William the Norman did not 
 manage so. At the end of the campaign he did not 
 turn off his thousand fighters. He said to them, " Noble 
 fighters, this is the land we have gained. Be I lord in 
 it what we call law-ward, maintainer and keeper of 
 heaven's laws. And be ye loyal men around me in it. 
 We will stand by one another, as soldiers round a 
 captain, for again we shall have need of one another ! " 
 Plugson, buccaneer-like, says, "Noble spinners, this is 
 the hundred thousand we have gained, wherein I mean to 
 dwell and plant vineyards ; the hundred thousand is mine, 
 the three and sixpence daily was yours. Adieu, noble 
 spinners ; drink my health with this groat each, which I 
 give you over and above ! " The entirely unjust Captain 
 of Industry, says Carlyle, not Chevalier, but Buccaneer ! 
 
 But granting that these two classes, the rulers-political 
 and the rulers-industrial, could throw off their selfishness, 
 and were willing to govern and not misgovern, what is it 
 Carlyle would have them to do ? 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 CARLVLE'S PRACTICAL PROPOSALS THE 
 ORGANIZATION OF LABOUR. 
 
 " Surely every medicine is an innovation, and he that will not apply 
 new remedies must expect new evils ; for time is the greatest innovator ! 
 And if time, of course, alter things to the worse, and wisdom and counsel 
 shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the end?" Bacon. 
 
 r^ARLYLE holds that . the. first .task x>f the rulers, f 
 political and industrial, is to see to it that labo 
 "throughout the State is well organized, and that 
 the product of labour is justly distributed. " This that 
 they call ' Organizing of Labour.' is, if well under- 
 stood, the Problem of the whole Future, for all who 
 will in future pretend to govern men. But our first 
 preliminary stage of it is, How to deal with the Actual 
 Labouring Millions of England ? This is the imperatively 
 pressing Problem of the Present, pressing with a truly 
 fearful intensity and imminence in these very years and 
 days. No Government can longer neglect it : what can 
 our Government do in it ? " They must first deal with 
 those who are at the very bottom of the social scale. 
 Carlyle believes that it is the duty of the State to provide 
 work for those who cannot secure it for themselves 
 not, mind you, work of the semi-penal kind provided in 
 our present workhouses, but work as well suited as may 
 
.58 INDUSTRIAL ARMIES. 
 
 be to the capacity of the worker, and paid for according 
 to its worth. 
 
 Those requiring thus to be put to work are to be taken 
 in hand on a military system. This is a proposition 
 with which Carlyle is intensely in love. The very 
 contemplation of the possibilities it opens out revives his 
 faith in Governments even as they now exist. Who, he 
 asks, that passes a soldier's guard-house or meets a red- 
 coated man in the streets can despair of Governments ? 
 That a body of men could be got together to kill other 
 men when you bid them : this, a priori, seems one of 
 the most impossible things. Yet, look, behold it : in the 
 stolidest of Do-nothing Governments that impossibility is a 
 thing done. The soldier, is, perhaps, one of the most 
 difficult things to realize ; but Governments, had they not 
 realized him, could not have existed : accordingly he is here. 
 
 As he reflects still more upon this phase of the subject, 
 Carlyle exclaims, "O heavens, if we saw an army ninety 
 thousand strong, maintained and fully equipped, in 
 continual real action and battle against Human Starvation, 
 against Chaos, Necessity, Stupidity, and our real 'natural 
 enemies,' what a business were it ! Fighting and molesting, 
 not the French, who, poor men, have a hard enough 
 battle of their own in the like kind, and need no 
 additional molesting from us ; but fighting and incessantly 
 spearing down and destroying Falsehood, Nescience, 
 Delusion, Disorder, and the Devil and his angels ! " 
 
 As the complement to this demand that work shall 
 be provided by the State for those who cannot find 
 work, he is severe to the utmost of severity in urging 
 that it is the duty of the State to take in hand by penal 
 methods, if need be, the idle, the dissolute, and the 
 
PAUPERS AND CRIMINALS. 59 
 
 thriftless. These are running sores in the body-politic 
 centres of mortification, if you will and in nowise to 
 be left untouched. 
 
 The criminal class have, in his opinion, a far too tender 
 consideration bestowed upon them. He gives the picture 
 of a model prison he visited in London. It was in 
 charge of a really worthy. Governor, whose problem was 
 to drill twelve hundred scoundrels to do nothing, by the 
 method of kindness. It should not be the devil's 
 regiments of the line that a servant of God should first of 
 all concentrate his attention on, but rather those who 
 from the pressure of external conditions find it difficult 
 to escape from becoming recruits of the devil. If he 
 must concentrate attention on the devil's regiments of the 
 line, let it not be merely to drill them into a state of 
 externaPorder which is virtual idleness, but into a useful 
 activity. For this purpose being a servant of God he 
 might be trusted to use Divine methods of severity, if he 
 could not accomplish his task otherwise. 
 
 In this connection it is worth quoting the supposed 
 " Speech of the British Prime Minister to the floods of 
 Irish and other beggars, the able-bodied Lackalls, 
 nomadic or stationary, and the general assembly, out-door 
 and indoor, of the Pauper Population of these Realms " : 
 " One thing, after much meditating, I have at last 
 discovered and now know for some time back : That you 
 cannot be left to roam abroad in this unguided manner ; 
 .... that this of locking you up in Idle Workhouses, 
 when you stumble, and subsisting you on Indian meal, 
 till you can sally forth again on fresh roam ings, and fresh 
 stumblings, and ultimate descent to the devil ; that this is 
 not the plan ; and that it never was, nor could out of 
 
60 AN END TO THE "IDLE WORKHOUSE." 
 
 England have been supposed to be, much as I have 
 
 prided myself upon it Your want of wants is that 
 
 you be commanded in this world, not being able to 
 command yourselves. Know, therefore, that it shall be 
 
 so with you Nomadism, I give you notice, has 
 
 ended ; needful permanency, soldier-like obedience, and 
 the opportunity and the necessity of hard steady labour 
 for your living have begun. Know that the Idle Work- 
 house is shut against you henceforth ; you cannot enter 
 there at will nor leave at will ; you shall enter a quite other 
 refuge under conditions strict as soldiering, and not leave 
 
 till I have done with you Arise, enlist in my Irish, 
 
 my Scotch, and English regiments of the New Era .... 
 enlist there, ye wandering banditti; obey, work, suffer, 
 abstain, as all of us have had to do ; so shall ye be useful 
 in God's creation, so shall ye be helped to gain a 
 manful living for yourselves ; not otherwise than so. 
 Industrial regiments ! . . . I will lead you to the Irish 
 bogs, to the vacant desolations of Connaught, Minister, 
 Leinster, Ulster. I will lead you to the English fox- 
 covers, furze-grown commons, New Forests, Salisbury 
 Plains ; likewise to the Scotch hillsides and bare rushy 
 slopes which as yet yield only sheep moist uplands, 
 thousands of square miles in extent, which are destined 
 yet to grow green crops, and fresh butter and milk and 
 beef without limit (wherein no foreigner can compete 
 with us') were the Glasgow sewers once opened on them, 
 and you with your Colonels carried thither. In the Three 
 Kingdoms, or in the Forty Colonies, depend upon it, you 
 shall be led to your work ! To each of you I w r ill then 
 say : Here is work for you ; strike into it with man-like, 
 soldier-like obedience and heartiness, according to the 
 
HUMANITARIANS OF EXETEK NALL. 61 
 
 methods here prescribed. Wages follow for you without 
 difficulty; all manner of just remuneration, and at length 
 emancipation itself follows. Refuse to strike into it ; 
 shirk the heavy labour, disobey the rules I will admonish 
 and endeavour to incite you ; if in vain, I will flog you : 
 if still in vain, I will at last shoot you and make God's 
 earth, and the forlorn-hope in God's battle, free of you. 
 Understand it, I advise you ! : ' 
 
 On the whole we see that as regards the idle, the dissolm 
 and the criminal, Carlyle's methods are short, sharp, 
 and decisive not wholly acceptable to the humani- 
 tarianism of Exeter Hall. At times Carlyle's proposals 
 in this respect seem severe almost to the point of cruelty. 
 But this is only because of his intense yearning for the 
 welfare of that other section of the population who are 
 doing their best to keep themselves from falling into " the 
 Devil's regiments," but who need help in that effort. Time 
 after time he implores the ruling classes, political and 
 industrial alike, no longer to neglect their duty to these. 
 For this purpose they are especially to remember that 
 love of man cannot be bought by cash-payment ; and 
 that without love men cannot endure to be together. 
 " You cannot lead a Fighting World without having it 
 regimented, chivalried : the thing, in a day, becomes 
 impossible ; all men in it, the highest at first, the very 
 lowest at last, discern, consciously or by a noble instinct, 
 this necessity. And can you any more continue to lead 
 a Working World unregimented, anarchic? I answer, 
 and the Heavens and Earth are now answering, No ! " 
 
 The leaders of Industry, if Industry is ever to be led, 
 are virtually the Captains of the World ; if there be no 
 nobleness in them, there will never be an Aristocracy 
 
62 THE CHIVALRY OF INDUSTRY. 
 
 more. " Let the Captains of Industry consider : once 
 again, are they born of other clay than the old Captains 
 of Slaughter? Are they doomed for ever to be no 
 Chivalry?" He hopes not. Captains of Industry are by 
 the nature of things fighters. Let them be true fighters : 
 fighters against Chaos, Necessity, and the Devils and 
 Jotuns ; let them lead on mankind in that great, and 
 alone true, and universal warfare ; the stars in their courses 
 will fight for them, and all Earth -will say audibly, "Well 
 done!" 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 CARLYLE AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. 
 
 " Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed 
 in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance surely is man 
 himself. Supposing it were possible to get houses built, corn grown, 
 battles fought, causes tried, and even churches erected and prayers 
 said, by machinery by automatons in human form it would be a 
 considerable loss to exchange for these automatons even the men 
 and women who at present inhabit the more civilized parts of the 
 world, and who assuredly are but starved specimens of what nature 
 can and will produce." -John Stuart Mill. 
 
 .' N 
 
 WE have seen what was, in Carlyle's opinion, the 
 first special work of Government in respect to 
 the organization of labour. Allied to this is 
 that phase of the problem which relates to the distribution 
 of the products of labour. 
 
 We found from the supposed address of the British 
 Prime Minister, that the State, when it organized industrial 
 regiments, had to pay them fairly. We may infer from 
 the references already made to Plugson of Undershot, that 
 in the case of the private employer the obligation is not 
 less imperative. It is, however, an obligation which, under 
 existing circumstances, is dependent on the employer's 
 conscience. This being, in many cases, a minus quantity, 
 Carlyle implies that he would allow considerable latitude 
 for Governmental interference. Whether by private action 
 
64 JUST PAYMENT, 
 
 or by Governmental interference, there should be a fair 
 day's wages for a fair day's work. This is as just a 
 demand as governed men ever made of their governors. 
 "It is the everlasting right of man." "The progress of 
 human society consists even in this same, the better and 
 better apportioning of wages to work. Give me this, you 
 have given me all. Pay to every man accurately what he 
 has worked for, what he has earned and done and deserved, 
 to this man broad lands and honours, to that man high- 
 gibbets and tread-mills : what more have I to ask ? . . . 
 This is the radiance of celestial Justice ; in the light or in 
 the fire of which, all impediments, vested interests, and 
 iron cannon are more and more melting like wax, and 
 disappearing from the pathways of men." 
 
 Coincidently with the payment of fair wages there should 
 also be more assured permanency of employment ; less 
 obligation for the workman to live a nomadic life. " A 
 question arises here : whether in some ulterior, perhaps 
 some not far-distant stage of this ' Chivalry of Labour,' 
 your master-worker may not find it possible, and needful, 
 to grant to his workers permanent interest in his enterprise 
 and theirs ? So that it become, in practical result, what 
 in essential fact and justice it ever is a joint enterprise ; 
 all men, from the chief master down to the lowest overseer 
 and operative, economically as well as loyally concerned 
 for it ? " 
 
 But there are difficulties in the way. Despotism is 
 essential in most enterprises. They do not tolerate 
 " freedom of debate " on board a seventy-four ! Re- 
 publican senate xo& plebiscita would not answer well in 
 cotton mills. And yet observe : Freedom not nomad's 
 or ape's freedom but man's freedom ; this is indispen- 
 
DEMAND AND SUPPLY. 65 
 
 sable. We must have it, and will have it ! " To reconcile 
 Despotism with Freedom : well, is that such a mystery ? 
 Do you not already know the way ? It is to make your 
 Despotism just. Rigorous as Destiny ; but just, too, as 
 Destiny and its Laws. The Laws of God : all men obey 
 these, and have no ' Freedom ' at all but in obeying 
 them. The way is already known, part of the way : and 
 courage and some qualities are needed for walking on 
 it!" 
 
 Then there are those spectres, Demand and Supply 
 and Over-production. They fright those in power from 
 attempting experiments of the humanitarian sort, and 
 even make the workers themselves submit the more 
 tamely to injustice, so much do the workers believe that 
 these spectres are realities. 
 
 Demand and Supply ! We are not to forget that 
 the determining factor in Demand and Supply is at all 
 times human will. According to what we, as a society 
 of human beings, demand, will be the supply. Do 
 we demand, above all, riches? We shall get them 
 Supply will respond. But it will be at the cost of 
 true wealth -of wejjjaejngj^ it will be at the cost of 
 
 spiritual, moral, and physical life. " Let inventive men 
 cease, then, to spend their existence, incessantly contriv- 
 ing how cotton can be made cheaper; and try to invent a 
 little how cotton at its present cheapness could be some- 
 what justlier divided amongst us. Let inventive men 
 consider whether the Secret of this Universe, and of 
 man's Life there, does, after all, as we rashly fancy it, 
 consist in making money? There is One God, just, 
 supreme, almighty : but is Mammon the name of Him ? 
 All this Mammon-Gospel of Demand and Supply, Com- 
 
66 UNDER-SELLING. 
 
 petition, Laissez-faire, and Devil take the hindmost, 
 begins to be one of the shabbiest Gospels ever preached 
 or altogether the shabbiest." 
 
 It is reported to Carlyle as a warning against the 
 speedy application of his principles that " the continental 
 people are exporting our machinery, beginning to spin 
 cotton and manufacture for themselves, to cut us out of 
 this market and then out of that ! " This is sad news, 
 indeed, but to him by no means the saddest. The saddest 
 news is that we should think that our national existence 
 depends on selling cotton at a farthing an ell cheaper 
 than any other people. This is a most narrow stand for 
 a great nation to build itself on, a stand which he does 
 not think will be capable of enduring. " My friends," 
 he exclaims, " suppose we quitted that stand ; suppose 
 we came honestly down from it, and said : ; This is our 
 minimum of cotton prices. We care not for the present 
 to make cotton cheaper. Do you, if it seem so blessed 
 to you, make cotton cheaper. Fill your lungs with 
 cotton-fuzz, your hearts with copperas-fumes, with rage 
 and mutiny : become ye the general gnomes of Europe, 
 slaves of the lamp ! ' I admire a Nation which fancies it 
 will die if it do not under-sell all other Nations, to the 
 end of the world. Brothers, we will cease to under-sell 
 them ; we will be content to eyuat-se\\ them ; to be happy 
 selling equally with them ! I do not see the use of 
 under-selling them. Cotton cloth is already twopence a 
 yard or lower ; and yet bare backs were never more 
 numerous amongst us." 
 
 When in addition to pleading the necessity of obeying 
 the law of Demand and Supply as an excuse for such 
 cheapening of labour as is destructive to body and soul, 
 
O VER-PRODUCTION. 67 
 
 Over-production is pointed to as another cause of the 
 prevalent distress, the Chelsea sage becomes more wrath- 
 ful than ever. He asks, what will reflective people say of 
 a governing class, such as ours, addressing the manufac- 
 turers with an indictment of Over-production ; saying, as 
 it were, " Ye miscellaneous, ignoble manufacturing indi- 
 viduals, ye have produced too much ! We accuse you of 
 making above two hundred thousand shirts for the bare 
 backs of mankind. Your trousers, too, which you have 
 made, of fustian, of cassimere, of Scotch plaid, of jane, 
 nankeen, and woollen broadcloth, are they not manifold ? 
 Of hats for the human head, of shoes for the human foot, 
 of stools to sit on, spoons to eat with nay, what say we, 
 hats or shoes? You produce gold watches, jewelries, 
 silver forks, and epergnes, cheffoniers, stuffed sofas 
 Heavens, the Commercial Bazaar and multitudinous 
 Howel-and-James's cannot contain you. You have pro- 
 duced, produced ; he that seeks your indictment, let 
 him look around. Millions of shirts, and empty pairs of 
 breeches, hang there in judgment against you. We 
 accuse you of over-producing : you are criminally guilty of 
 producing shirts, breeches, hats, shoes, and commodities, 
 in a frightful over-abundance. And now there is a glut, 
 and your operatives cannot be fed ! " 
 
 Never, surely, against an earnest Working Mammonism 
 was there brought, by game-preserving aristocratic Dillet- 
 tantism, a stranger accusation. He cynically retorts that 
 the Governing class are certainly guiltless of producing 
 anything. Not from them proceeds this frightful overplus 
 of shirts. In the wide domains of created Nature 
 circulates no shirt or thing of their producing. But he 
 begs that they will begin. Their duty is to produce 
 
68 THE CLASSES AND THE MASSES. 
 
 good-government. As part of this duty they will " preside 
 over the Distribution and Apportionment of the wages of 
 Work done." "My lords and gentlemen, why it was 
 you that were appointed, by the fact and by the theory of 
 your position on the Earth, to 'make and administer 
 Laws ' that is to say, in a world such as ours, to guard 
 against ' gluts ; ' against honest operatives, who had done 
 their work, remaining unfed." 
 
 Only by facing these duties manfully, can the classes 
 make themselves worthy of their place as governors, and 
 establish a real claim to the gratitude of the masses. 
 
 II 
 
CHAPTER XL 
 
 OTHER PROPOSALS OF CARLYLE EDUCATION- 
 EMIGRATION SANITATION. 
 
 Men 
 
 Perished in winter colds, till one smote fire 
 From flint stones coldly hiding what they held, 
 The red spark treasured from the kindling sun : 
 They gorged on flesh like wolves, till one sowed corn, 
 Which grew a weed, yet makes the life of man : 
 They moved and babbled till some tongue struck speech. 
 And patient fingers framed the lettered sound. 
 What good gift hath my brothers but it came 
 From search and strife, and loving sacrifice. 
 
 - Edwin Arnold. 
 
 3JL HAVE now set forth, as far as the scope of this 
 41T work will permit, those teachings of Carlyle which 
 relate to the duty of the governing classes the 
 makers of law r s and the employers of labour in relation 
 to many of the more pressing phases of the economic and 
 social problems of our country. Past and Present, and 
 Latter-Day Pamphlets, are the works that I have chiefly 
 followed ; but these I have compared and co-related with 
 various of Carlyle's Miscellaneous Essays and with the 
 well-known pamphlet on Chartism. I believe I have given 
 the essence of Carlyle's teaching on the subject of capital 
 and labour, and of the relations and responsibilities of the 
 
70 STATE CONTROL. 
 
 various classes in the State in regard thereto. But as the 
 reader has already been informed, Carlyle did not write 
 by way of saying the last word as to the methods of reform 
 which should be pursued, 'but rather to awaken the 
 conscience of the political and industrial rulers, and to 
 give such a trend to their thought as would help them 
 to find the right methods if they honestly sought them. 
 This we especially saw from the words which we quoted 
 in which Carlyle emphasized the fact that not being 
 himself an appointed rulsr of men, either in the political 
 or the industrial sense, it was not primarily his business 
 to show how certain reforms are to be effected. His 
 business was to apprise those concerned that it must be 
 done. "The 'way to do it' is to try it." 
 
 Elsewhere he says, " Of Time Bill, Factory Bill, and 
 other such Bills the present Editor has no authority to 
 speak. He knows not, it is for others than he to know, in 
 what specific ways it may be feasible to interfere, by legis- 
 lation between the Workers and the Master- Workers .... 
 He knows that Legislative interferences, and interferences 
 not a few, are indispensable ; that as a lawless anarchy of 
 Demand and Supply, on market wages alone, this province 
 of things cannot be left." Interference has begun. There 
 are already Factory Inspectors. Might there not be Agri- 
 cultural Inspectors, part of whose business would be to 
 ascertain for us how on a very few shillings a week a 
 human family does live? "Interference has begun; it 
 must continue, must extensively enlarge itself, deepen 
 and sharpen itself. Such things cannot longer lie idly 
 lapped in darkness, and be suffered to go on unseen : the 
 Heavens do see them ; the curse, not the blessing of the 
 Heavens is on an Earth that refuses to see them." 
 
A TEACHING SERVICE. 71 
 
 There are other recommendations which Carlyle makes, 
 but, though relating to subjects of importance, they do 
 not necessarily occupy so much of our present attention,, 
 because they are less novel, and have even won partial 
 acceptance from the State already. 
 
 It_buLremains to say that Carlyle was a strong advocate 1 
 of_Stat<. education and State emigration. An effective^ 
 "Teaching Service" there must be; some Education 
 Secretary, Captain-General of Teachers, who would 
 actually contrive to get us taught. Then, again, why 
 should there not be an " Emigration Service," Emigration 
 Secretary, with adjuncts, funds, forces, idle-Navy-ships 
 and ever-increasing apparatus ; in fine, an effective system 
 of free emigration ; so that, at length, every honest 
 workman who found England too strait, and the 
 organization of labour not yet sufficiently advanced, might 
 find, likewise, a bridge built to carry him into new lands, 
 there to organize, with more elbow-room, some labour 
 for himself? There he would be a real blessing, raising 
 new corn for us, purchasing new webs and hatchets from 
 us ; leaving us at least in peace, instead of staying here 
 to be perhaps a physical-force "reformer," unblessed and 
 not blessing. 
 
 " Is it not scandalous," he asks, " to consider that a 
 Prime Minister could raise within the year, as I have 
 seen it done, a hundred and twenty millions sterling to 
 shoot the French ; and we are stopt short for want of the 
 hundredth part of this to keep the English living ? The 
 bodies of the English living, and the souls of the English 
 living : these two 'services,' an Education Service and 
 an Emigration Service, these, with others, will actually 
 have to be organized ! " 
 
72 PUBLIC HYGIENE. 
 
 2 On the subject of Sanitation, he urges that there is 
 ^great need for more active Legislative interference. The 
 old Romans had their ^Ediles, who would, he thinks, in 
 direct contravention to Demand and Supply, have 
 rigorously seen rammed up into total abolition many 
 .a foul cellar in our Southwarks, St. Gileses, and dark 
 poison-lanes, saying sternly, " Shall a Roman man dwell 
 there ? " The Legislature, at whatever cost, would have 
 had to answer, "God forbid!" "The Legislature even 
 as it now is, could order all dingy manufacturing towns 
 to cease from their soot and darkness ; to let in the 
 blessed sunlight, the blue of Heaven, and become clear 
 -and clean ; to burn their coal smoke, namely, and make 
 flame of it. Baths, free air, a wholesome temperature, 
 ceilings twenty feet high, might be ordained by act of 
 Parliament, in all establishments licensed as mills. There 
 are such mills already extant honour to the builders of 
 them ! The Legislature can say to others : Go ye and 
 do likewise; better if you can." To whatever "vested 
 interest," or such like, stood up, exclaiming, " I shall lose 
 profits," the willing Legislature would answer, "Yes, but 
 my sons and daughters will gain health, and life, and a 
 soul ! " " What is to become of our cotton trade ? " cried 
 certain spinners, when the Factory Bill was proposed; 
 "what is to become of our invaluable cotton trade?" 
 The humanity of England answered steadfastly : " Deliver 
 me these rickety, perishing souls of infants, and let your 
 cotton trade take its chance. God Himself commands 
 the one thing ; not especially the other thing. We can- 
 not have prosperous cotton trade at the expense of keeping 
 the Devil a partner in them." 
 
 But here I must leave Carlyle and his teachings. 
 
WORDS OF PROPHECY. 73 
 
 Whilst he was with distress of soul penning thoughts that 
 breathe and words that burn, his sorrow was intensified by 
 the reflection that the Hengists and Alarics of our still- 
 growing, still-expanding Europe, who should like pillars 
 guide onwards those superfluous masses of indomitable 
 living valour the toiling myriads of our population- 
 equipped not with the battle-axe and the war-chariot, but 
 With the steam-engine and the ploughshare, were not more 
 usefully occupied than in preserving their game. But he 
 prophesied that the time would come when the last partridge 
 of England, of an England where men could get no corn to 
 eat, would be shot and ended. Aristocracies with beards 
 on their chins would find better work to do. They would 
 take their rightful places as governors. And as to the 
 workers, those who already worked, they would bear 
 their part. They would subdue mutiny, discord, wide- 
 spread despair, by manfulness, justice, mercy, and wisdom. 
 They would recognize that it is work for a god to make 
 some nook of God's creation a little fruitfuller, better, 
 more worthy of God ; to make some human heart a little 
 wiser, manfuller, happier more blessed, less accursed. Un- 
 stained by wasteful deformities, by wasted tears or heart's 
 blood of men, or any defacement of the Pit, noble fruitful 
 Labour, growing ever nobler, would come forth the grand 
 sole miracle of Man ; whereby Man had risen from the low 
 places of this Earth, very literally into divine Heavens. 
 For ploughers, spinners, builders ; prophets, poets, kings ; 
 Brindleys and Goethes, Odins and Arkwrights : all martyrs, 
 and noble men were of one grand host ; immeasurable ; 
 marching ever forward since the beginnings of the world. 
 In hope of the last partridge, we are advised to be patient 
 yet a while. 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 JOHN RUSKIN. 
 
 Was it right 
 
 While my unnumbered brethren toiled and bled 
 That I should dream away the entrusted hours 
 On rose leaf bowers ? 
 
 I therefore go and join head, heart and hand, 
 
 Active and firm, to fight the bloodless fight 
 
 Of science, freedom, and the truth in Christ. Coleridge. 
 
 have now come to the third stage, as it were, 
 of our inquiry into the nature and objects of 
 the New Political Economy. The first stage 
 was comprised in my opening chapters, in which the 
 need of a true science of political economy was pointed 
 out. It was argued that the basis of that science must 
 be the Christian basis the basis of recognizing that 
 we are all members of one body. And it was the 
 organization of society according to an affection, and" 
 not simply according to an idea, that we had first of all 
 to strive for. The fact that in the teachings of Carlyle, 
 Ruskin, and Henry George practical help was given in 
 the presentation of the new science of political economy 
 was insisted on. I then proposed that we should take 
 these teachers one by one and ascertain precisely what 
 
INDEBTEDNESS TO CARLYLE. 75 
 
 they had to teach us. We had especially to ask what 
 help they offered in respect to these specific problems 
 which troubled the heart and confused the logic of the 
 Archbishop of York when he said that the terrible feature 
 of modern progress " which science was powerless to 
 alter" was that it tended to double the gains of the rich 
 and halve the miserable wages of the poor ; and when he 
 added that we must consider deeply, with prayers and 
 tears, with shame and constant sympathy, the evils which 
 the poor endured. 
 
 In accordance with this plan I have given an exposition 
 of the economic teachings of Carlyle, which exposition 
 has comprised the second stage of -our inquiry. As 
 already stated we now r enter on the third stage, which 
 requires a similar examination of the doctrines of John 
 Ruskin. 
 
 Though for some years I had had a good general 
 acquaintance with the economic writings of Carlyle and 
 Ruskin, and saw that there was a kinship between them, 
 it was not until I engaged in the work of writing this 
 booklet that I realised how very similar these authors 
 are in their teachings, and in particular how very much 
 Ruskin has been influenced by Carlyle. From Ruskin 
 we not only get an inspiration akin to what Carlyle 
 gives us, but his views are more definite his practical 
 proposals more intelligible and more reduced to 
 scientific form. This is an advantage naturally to be 
 looked for in the younger man, able as he was to profit 
 by the experience and teaching of his predecessor and 
 contemporary. Great as our admiration for Ruskin may 
 be, let us not forget his indebtedness in this respect. Mr. 
 Ruskin himself does not fail to acknowledge it. He 
 
;6 KUSJCWS POSITION AS A TEACHEK. 
 
 inscribes " Munera Pulveris," his chief work on Political 
 Economy, to Carlyle, " The friend and guide who has 
 urged me to all chief labour." . He wishes that some 
 better means were in his power of showing reverence to 
 the man who, " alone, of all our masters of literature, has 
 written without thought of himself, what he knew to be 
 needful for the people of his time to hear, if the will to 
 hear were in them ; " who has asked England " to be 
 brave for the help of man, and just for the love 
 of God." 
 
 Ruskin is the more profitable to study, not only 
 because he has assimilated much that was best in Carlyle's 
 politico'-economic teaching, but because of the greater 
 advantages of culture which he enjoyed ; his more extensive 
 knowledge of men and things, and especially because 
 of the facilities which his condition of life from youth 
 upwards gave him for the study of economic and 
 social science. 
 
 What he himself has thought of these facilities he shall 
 personally testify. In the preface to " Munera Pulveris/' 
 he says: "The following pages contain, I believe, the 
 first accurate analysis of the laws of political economy 
 which has been published in England." 
 
 On reading these words we are apt to think that 
 Mr. Ruskin must surely be a very presumptuous person. 
 But he explains why he makes this statement. " Many 
 treatises," he says, " within their scope correct, have 
 appeared in contradiction of the views popularly 
 received. But no exhaustive examination of the subject 
 was possible to any person unacquainted with the value 
 of the products of the highest industries, commonly 
 called the 'Fine Arts,' and no one acquainted with the 
 
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE ARTS, 77 
 
 nature of these industries has, so far as I know, before 
 attempted or even approached the task." 
 
 Such is Mr. Ruskin's explanation of the claim he has 
 put forward. Why should he so distinctly insist that 
 in order to arrive at the truth in relation to political 
 economy it is absolutely essential that the inquiry should 
 include a consideration of the products of the highest 
 industries, " commonly called the ' Fine Arts ' " ? Why 
 should he claim to possess a knowledge of the truth 
 because of the acquaintance with the fine arts which he 
 possesses ? 
 
 Such is the similarity of the genius of Ruskin and 
 
 Carlyle that, singularly enough, it was" from a passage in 
 
 Carlyle that I was first of all helped to perceive what it 
 
 was Mr. Ruskin really meant to convey by the words of 
 
 his explanation. Of the Fine Arts, Carlyle himself knew 
 
 little and understood less. He, therefore, could not 
 
 elaborate any system of political economy the quality of 
 
 which was to be directly tested by the provision it made 
 
 for these "products of the highest industries." Yet so 
 
 true were his intuitions that we find him unconsciously 
 
 suggesting what Mr. Ruskin maintains as a primary 
 
 principle, and makes a main part of the basis of his system. 
 
 /Denouncing the orthodox political economy and especially 
 
 1 the views held on Demand and Supply, Carlyle writes : 
 
 l) " For what noble work was there ever yet any audible * de- 
 
 j mand ' in that poor [low commercial] sense ? The man of 
 
 * Macedonia speaking in vision to an apostle Paul, 'Come 
 
 over and help us,' did not specify what rate of wages he 
 
 would give ! Nor was the Christian religion itself 
 
 accomplished by Prize Essays, Bridgewater Bequests, 
 
 and a 'minimum of four thousand five hundred a year' 
 
78 A TEST OF CIVILISATION. 
 
 [salary]. No demand that I have heard of was made 
 then audible in any labour market, Manchester Chamber 
 of Commerce, or other like emporium and hiring 
 establishment ; silent were all these from any whisper of 
 such demand : powerless were all these to supply it had 
 the demand been in thunder and earthquake, with gold 
 Eldorados and Mahometan Paradises for the reward/' 
 
 In other words, for the nobler things, the things 
 that make for life life spiritually and morally, and 
 therefore in the best sense physically there is very rarely 
 a demand at all. The extent, however, to which a 
 demand for these things exists, and the manner in which 
 they are valued must ever be the true test of civilisation 
 in any given age. 
 
 If we would judge of systems of government and 
 social economy, let us learn when and how the 
 best work of the world has been done. We know the 
 strength of a chain when we know the strength of its 
 weakest link. But it is not thus with a civilisation ; the 
 measure of its quality is its highest achievements. How 
 many " men of Macedonia " are there at any given time 
 setting up a demand for the highest good ; and how 
 many Apostle Pauls are there willing and capable to 
 respond to it to supply ? 
 
 The reader has but to answer these questions for 
 himself, and then he will have the explanation of that 
 claim on Mr. Ruskin's part which at first seems so 
 presumptuous. Mr. Ruskin indisputably has studied the 
 conditions under which the highest industries, the Fine 
 Arts, have flourished ; he knows the conditions in which 
 work has become most spiritualised the conditions 
 under which men have stood most erect and God-like. 
 
STANDARDS OF EXCELLENCE. 79 
 
 It is for these reasons that in his writing the first 
 accurate analysis of the laws of political economy may 
 be found. 
 
 But Mr. Ruskin's teachings in political economy possess 
 special value not only because of his knowledge of the 
 highest industries and of the conditions in the economic 
 sense under which those industries have been pursued 
 and have most succeeded. They possess special value 
 because of the way in which he has been led to extend 
 into and apply in the economic field certain principles 
 which he first learned to appreciate in the field of art. 
 It has been well said that " He who grasps a principle 
 possesses a measuring reed that can compass all questions 
 and lay out dimensions in every field of truth." Ruskin 
 early in his career got hold of such a measuring reed. He 
 grasped not only a principle, but the greatest of principles. 
 This he did when he discovered that spiritually the progress 
 of the artist is mainly conditioned by fidelity to nature. 
 
 " Prior to his advent," says one of his disciples, Mr. J. 
 Marshall Mather, " it was generally understood that the 
 standard of excellence in the work of an artist was to be 
 found in the approximation of his work to the works of 
 the great masters. This necessarily crippled all develop- 
 ment in the realm of art : the standards were fixed and 
 the canons unalterable. Ruskin's position was far deeper 
 and far more searching as to test of excellency. He 
 asked, ' Is the artist true to nature ? ' and not, Is the 
 artist true to his master'? Hence this reiteration of the 
 principle : : Paint what you see as you see it, and not as 
 others paint it. Go to nature yourself; review the reve- 
 lation it unfolds \.oyo2tr own individual eye, and let your 
 work be a faithful record of it.' This dictum of Ruskin's 
 
80 AN ANALYTIC MIND. 
 
 has revolutionized modern art and supplied a new 
 standard by which the old masters are themselves 
 judged." 
 
 From this view of art was developed in Mr. Ruskin 
 a truer view of political economy once he entered into 
 this field of inquiry. As Mr. Mather says, " There , 
 is an economy in art, in architecture, in education,- 
 national policy, and in each of these realms economy 
 consists in one and the same thing unerring obedience to 
 natures laws. Neither nations nor men can set aside 
 these laws without incurring loss a loss proportioned in 
 its depth and hopelessness to the stupidity and selfishness 
 of the disobedience persisted in. Not only must artists 
 be true to nature in their pictures ; but architects in their 
 buildings, teachers in the training of their pupils, and 
 legislators in the laws they enact for the government of 
 their peoples." 
 
 'Thus it was on the one hand, looking to nature and 
 her laws, and on the other hand, forming and correcting 
 his judgment by his superior knowledge of the conditions 
 under which " the highest industries, commonly called 
 the ' Fine Arts,' " had flourished that Mr. Ruskin's 
 views on political economy were evolved. 
 
 I have devoted this much of my space specially to the 
 subject of Mr. Ruskin's peculiar claims as a _t?r.hpr 
 because of the strong belief which I entertain as to his 
 paramount worth as an exponent of the laws of social 
 life. Herein I do that which Mazzini and Carlyle, were 
 they still alive, would themselves approve. Was it not 
 the testimony of Mazzini that Mr. Ruskin possessed " the 
 most analytic mind in Europe." And surely, if there is 
 one subject more than another in which truth will be 
 
FIERCE LIGHTNING-BOLTS. Si 
 
 discerned only by an "analytic mind," that subject is 
 political economy. What Carlyle thought of Ruskin 
 is recorded in his correspondence with Emerson : 
 " Ruskin seems to me to have the best talent for ; 
 preaching of all men now alive. . . . There is, in 
 singular environment, a ray of real heaven in him." " Do 
 you read Ruskin's 'Fors Clavigera?' ... If you don't, 
 do, I advise you. Also his ' Munera Pulveris,' Oxford 
 Lectures on Art, and whatever else he is now writing. . . . 
 There is nothing going on among us as notable to me as 
 those fierce lightning-bolts Ruskin is copiously and 
 desperately pouring into the black world of Anarchy all 
 around him. No other man in England that I meet has 
 in him the divine rage against iniquity, falsity, and base- [ 
 ness that Ruskin has, and that every man ought to have." 
 Now having made these prefatory remarks in relation 5 
 to Mr. Ruskin, we shall examine somewhat in detail what 
 Mr. Ruskin has taught. As far as may be possible I will 
 arrange the divisions of the subject in a sequence similar 
 to what I adopted in explaining the teaching of Carlyle. 
 Thus the student to whom resemblances between the 
 two writers have in themselves special interest will have 
 but little difficulty in tracing them. 
 
CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 RUSKIN AND THE STANDARD OF LIFE. 
 
 " Whoever to-day feels in himself that there is a better standard of 
 life than the higgling of the market, and a juster standard of wages 
 than ' what A. or B. will take,' and a more important question in an 
 undertaking than 'how much per cent, it will pay,' contains or con- 
 ceals in himself \b& germs of a new social order." Edw. Carpenter. 
 
 my previous chapter I explained what are the pecu- 
 liar claims of Mr. Ruskin as a teacher of political 
 economy. We have now to ask what it is that he 
 teaches ? But first let me note that not less emphatically 
 than Carlyle does Mr. Ruskin impeach the governing 
 classes political and industrial for their failure to 
 regulate their action with a view to the maximum of 
 human well-being. He tells us that the study which 
 lately in England has been called political economy is in 
 reality " nothing more than the investigation of some 
 accidental phenomena of modern commercial operations." 
 Nor has it been true in its investigation even of these. 
 The assumption which lies at the root of most of it is 
 that its object is to accumulate money or exchangeable 
 property. But how this may be done in a way that may 
 best be of service to man not, mind you, to certain 
 men, but to man its professors have not been at any 
 pains to consider. The result is that our political govern- 
 
BEGINNING AT THE FEET. 83 
 
 ment and our industrial arrangements are in a state of 
 frightful disorder. He warns the ruling classes that their ^/^ 
 present insensibility to the surrounding aspects of suffer- 
 ing, uncleanness, and crime binds them not only into 
 one responsibility with the sin, but into one dishonour 
 with the foulness, which rot at their thresholds. /" The 
 crimes daily recorded in the police courts of London and 
 Paris (and much more those which are ^recorded) are, 7 ' 
 he says, " a disgrace to the whole body-politic ; they are 
 as in the body-natural, stains of disease on the face of a 
 delicate skin, making the delicacy itself frightful. The 
 filth and poverty permitted or ignored in the midst of us 
 are dishonourable to the whole social body, just as foul- 
 ness of hands and feet are dishonourable in the body- ! 
 natural, though the face may be clean." We have yet to 
 learn that in politico-economic arrangements Christ's way 
 is "the only true one," of beginning at the feet, leaving 
 the face to take care of itself. 
 
 When Mr. Ruskin comes to elaborate scientifically his 
 own views of a true political economy, we find that to 
 start with he fully adopts the conception of humanity as 
 spiritually, morally, and physically homogeneous. But 
 though homogeneous, it is not necessarily harmonious. 
 In order that it may become so, man must co-operate with 
 God. Human nature, he tells us, as its Creator made it, 
 and maintains it wherever His laws are observed, is 
 entirely jiarmojjiaus. What we have to do is to strive to 
 restore the image and likeness of the Maker in man, and 
 to secure the maintenance of His laws. To this end the i 
 aim of a true political economy must be " the multiplica- 1 I 
 tion of human life at the highest standard." What "the ' 
 highest standard " is, we have explained to us. It is 
 
84 WHAT WEALTH IS, 
 
 nothing short of the perfection of the bodies, affections, 
 and intelligence of men. Mr. Ruskin admits that in the 
 eifort to attain to this standard, it may at first seem 
 questionable whether we should endeavour to maintain a 
 small number of persons of the highest type of beauty and 
 intelligence or a larger number of a good, though relatively 
 inferior, class. But he comes very decidedly to the con- 
 clusion tharthe way to maintain the largest number of a 
 good class is first to aim at the highest standard. 
 " Determine the noblest type of man, and aim simply at 
 maintaining the largest possible number of persons of that 
 class, and it will be found that the largest possible number 
 of every healthy subordinate class must necessarily be 
 produced also." 
 
 In striving to reach a higher order of life than we have 
 yet attained to, the first thing needful is that we should 
 acquire a knowledge of what wealth really consists in ; 
 the other is that we should realise the part which the 
 social affection and honesty a natural outcome of the 
 social affection play in the economic relations of men. 
 
 To acquire a knowledge of what wealth really consists 
 in Mr. Ruskin has faithfully applied himself. Mr. Mill, 
 who has written what Mr. Ruskin calls " the most reputed 
 essay of modern times " on the subject, says that " to be 
 wealthy_2SjtoJtiave a large stock of useful articles." Mr. 
 Ruskin accepts this definition. But he warns us that we 
 must make sure that we understand it. First, what does 
 to have mean ? Second, what is the meaning of " useful " ? 
 "We will first examine our verb, as thus: Lately, in a 
 wreck of a Californian ship, one of the passengers fastened 
 a belt about him with two hundred pounds of gold in it, 
 with which he was found afterwards at the bottom of the 
 
RICHES VERSUS WEALTH. 85 
 
 sea. As he was sinking, had he the gold, or had the 
 gold him ? I presume the reader will see that possession, 
 or having, consists not only in the quantity or nature of,-^ 
 the thing possessed, but also (and in a greater degree) inj 
 its suitableness to the person possessing it. Therefore/; 
 we must make the have depend upon a can, and say the 
 ' possession of useful articles which we can use} " 
 
 "Next for our adjective. What is the meaning of 
 useful? It depends on the person much more than the 
 article whether its usefulness or ab-usefulness will be the 
 quality developed in it. When you give a man half-a-crown, 
 it depends on his disposition whether he is rich or poor 
 with it whether he will buy disease, ruin, and hatred, 
 or buy health, advancement, and domestic love. Thus 
 the moral elements, human capacities and dispositions, 
 must be taken into account." 
 
 In reality much that is popularly, and even by so- 
 called political economy esteemed wealth, is merely riches. 
 Wealth, as the very derivation of the word implies, always 
 expresses well-being. : But whether riches are wealth, 
 and are wholesome in their action, depends on the 
 wisdom, justice, and far-sightedness of the holders. It 
 iFHBy'lK) means to be assumed that persons who are 
 rich, will, in addition, be wise and just. We must, therefore, 
 in an ultimate analysis come to the conclusion that wealth 
 is " the possession of the^ valuable by the valiant." Value, 
 MrTITu'skm derives from valere, to be well, strong in life, 
 valiant (if a man) ; strong for life or valuable (if a thing). 
 
 So viewing the subject we are led to see that "there is 
 no wealth but life life, including all its powers of love, 
 of joy, and of admiration." That country is the most 
 wealthy which nourishes the greatest number of noble 
 
86 BALANCES OF EXPEDIENCY. 
 
 and happy human beings ; that man is the most wealthy 
 who having perfected the functions of his own life to the 
 utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both per- 
 sonally and by means of his possessions, over the life of 
 others. 
 
 ""It is a natural corollary of such a conception of national 
 and individual wealth as this that Mr. Ruskin should 
 point to the social affection and to honesty as the other 
 great needs of the age. The social affection is an 
 element which the orthodox political economy peculiarly 
 ignores in its calculations. 
 
 Alluding to certain great strikes Mr. Ruskin remarks, 
 " Here occurs one of the simplest cases, in a pertinent and 
 positive form, of the first vital problem which political 
 economy has to deal with (the relation between employer 
 and employed) ; and at a severe crisis, when lives in multi- 
 tudes, and wealth in masses, are at stake, the political 
 economists are helpless practically mute ; no demon- 
 strable solution of the difficulty can be given by them, such 
 as may convince or calm the opposing parties. Obstinately 
 the masters take one view of the matter ; and obstinately 
 
 ihe operatives another Disputant after disputant 
 
 vainly strives to show that the interests of the masters are, 
 or are not, antagonistic to those of the men, none of the 
 pleaders ever seeming to remember that it__does_T}ot 
 absolutely or always follow that the persons must be 
 antagonistic b(^ause_ their ^inr^rests^ are. If there is only 
 a crust of bread in the house, and mother and children 
 are starving, their interests are not the same. If the 
 mother eats it, the children want it ; if the children eat it, 
 the mother must go hungry to her work. Yet it does_iiQi 
 y follow fhnf thej^wi]ljj)ejj3nj^n^ 
 
BALANCES OF JUSTICE. 87 
 
 them, that they will fight for the crust, and that the mother 
 being strongest will get it and eat_it. Neither, in any , 
 other case, whatever the relations of the persons may be, 
 can it be assumed for certain that, because their interests 
 are diverse, they must necessarily regard each other with 
 hostility, and use violence or cunning to obtain the 
 advantage." 
 
 / " Even if it were as just as it is convenient," Mr. 
 / Ruskin elsewhere says, "to consider men as actuated by 
 no other moral influences than those which affect rats or 
 swine, the logical conditions of the question are still 
 undeterminable. It can never be shown generally either 
 that the interests of master and labourer are alike, or that 
 they are opposed; for, according to circumstances, they 
 may be either. It is, indeed, always the interest of both 
 that the work should be rightly done, and a just price 
 obtained for it ; but, in the division of profits, the gain of 
 the one may or may not be the loss of the other. It is 
 not the master's interest to pay wages so low as to leave 
 the men sickly and depressed, nor the workman's interest 
 to be paid high wages if the smallness of the master's 
 profit hinders him from enlarging his business or 
 conducting it in a safe and liberal way. A stoker ought 
 not to desire high pay if the company is too poor to keep 
 the engine-wheels in repair. The varieties of circumstance 
 which influence these reciprocal interests are so endless 
 that all endeavour to deduce rules of action from the 
 balance of expediency is in vain. And it is meant 
 to be in vain. For no human actions ever were' 
 intended by the Maker of men to be guided by balances- 
 of expediency, but by balances of justice. He has,, 
 therefore, rendered all endeavours to determine ex- 
 
88- THE i\EED FOR HONESTY. 
 
 pediency futile for evermore. No man ever knew, or 
 can know, what will be the ultimate result to himself or 
 to others of any given line of conduct. But every man 
 may know, and most of us do know, what is a just or an 
 unjust act. And all of us may know, also, that the 
 consequences of justice will be ultimately the best 
 possible, both to others and ourselves, though we can 
 neither say what is best, or how it is likely to come to 
 pass." Here, to guard against the possibility of being 
 misunderstood, Mr. Ruskin is careful to explain that in 
 the term justice he includes affection such affection as 
 
 ' one man owes to another. 
 
 / From such a recognition of the social affection as a 
 primary factor in economic adjustments to the insistance 
 upon honesty is a very short step. What honesty in- 
 volves in the politico-economic sense, and how much the 
 individual and general practice of honesty would do away 
 with nine-tenths of our difficulties are, in the light of Mr. 
 fluskin's teaching, quite surprising to think of. Honesty 
 lakes with it or implies love of man doing to others as 
 we would be done by. It implies conscientious, just 
 payment; absence of all open and, still more important 
 of all, absence of concealed extortion. Especially far- 
 reaching are the demands it makes on the rich in their 
 .dealings with the poor. That if you hire labour or buy 
 goods from another, you shall pay according to the true 
 worth of such labour or goods, and not according to 
 what the needs of the worker or seller compel. him to 
 accept is, of course, one of its distinct requirements. As, 
 for the most part, in the present order of things bargains 
 between the rich and the poor, the strong and the weak, 
 are determined by the standard of the necessities and not 
 
THE BRITISH WORKMAN. 9 
 
 of the rights of the poor and of the weak, Mr. Ruskin is 
 led to proclaim, " whereas it has long been known and 
 declared that the poor have no right to the property of 
 the rich, I wish it also to be known and declared that 
 the rich have no right to the property of the poor." 
 
 Such is Mr. Ruskin's estimate of the need and im- 
 portance of honesty at the present time that in his pre- 
 face to the essays published under the title " Unto this 
 Last," he says that in the following essays " the subject 
 of the organization of labour is only casually touched 
 upon ; because, if we once can get a sufficient quantity of 
 honesty in our captains, the organization of labour is easy, 
 and will develop itself without quarrel or difficulty ; but 
 if we cannot get honesty rn our captains, the organization 
 of labour is for evermore hopeless." In other words, 
 it is highly important that there should be honesty all 
 round. But it is obvious that, whilst partial dishonesty in 
 the rank and file may be controllable by honest rulers, ' 
 where the rulers are not themselves honest there can be 
 no possibility of economic and social progress at all. 
 
 Here it may be proper to observe that ifJVIr. _Ruskin I / 
 continually appeals to the rich and the powerful, just ' SHM* 
 as Carlyle did, it is for the same reason that their ^ 
 responsibilities are proportionate to their power. It \ 
 is not from any false assumption that those who < 
 constitute the so-called lower orders do not also need > 
 appealing to. If the British workman desires to be 
 flattered he must not go either to Ruskin or to Carlyle. 
 Both have plain speaking enough for him. From 
 these writers he will get instructions in obedience as 
 well as honesty ; just as the ruling classes get instruc- 
 tions in honesty and wise guidance. " My continual 
 
90 SOLDIERS OF THE PLOUGHSHARE. 
 
 I aim," says Mr. Ruskin, "has been to show the eternal 
 
 ' superiority of some men to others, sometimes even 
 of one man to all others ; and to show also the advisa- 
 Jbility of appointing such persons or person to guide, to 
 lead, or on occasion even to compel and subdue, their 
 inferiors, according to their own better knowledge andwiser 
 will. My principles of Political Economy were all involved 
 in a single phrase spoken at Manchester : ' Soldiers of the 
 Ploughshare as well as Soldiers of the Sword ; ' and they 
 were all summed in a single sentence in the last volume 
 of Modern Painters : l Government and co-operation are 
 
 jj in all things the Laws of Life ; anarchy and competition 
 
 : the Laws of Death.'" 
 
 Now, keeping clearly before us all that is expressed or 
 impliea^j^these references to the need of a true concep- 
 tion of wealth, and as to the development of the social 
 affection and the practice of honesty, let us obtain some- 
 what of a glimpse at the methods of government and 
 industrialism which Mr. Ruskin would have us adopt. 
 
CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 RUSKIN AND GOVERNMENTAL AND INDUSTRIAL ORDER. 
 
 " To preserve one's self, to be happy, is instinct, right, and duty. 
 But to be happy, contribute to the happiness of others; if you wish 
 them to be useful to you, be useful to them. Be good, because 
 goodness links hearts together ; be gentle, because gentleness wins 
 affection ; be citizens, because a country is necessary to ensure your 
 safety and well-being." CONDILLAC. 
 
 F Mr. Ruskin's views as to methods of govern- 
 mental and industrial procedure, we may get 
 the clearest and readiest knowledge by means 
 of a parable, or illustration. I am now about to quote, 
 but not with absolute closeness, from Munera Pulveris : 
 
 Let us imagine a society of peasants, living on a river 
 shore, exposed to destructive inundation at somewhat 
 extended intervals. Each peasant possesses of this good, 
 but imperilled ground more than he needs to cultivate 
 for immediate subsistence. We will assume, and that 
 with every probability of justice, that the greater part of 
 them keep in tillage just as much land as supplies them 
 with daily food ; also that they leave their children idle, 
 and take no precautions against the rise of the stream. 
 One of them, however we will say but one for the sake 
 of greater clearness cultivates carefully all the ground 
 of his estate. He makes his children work hard and 
 
92 A POLITICO-SOCIAL PARABLE. 
 
 healthfully. He uses his spare time and theirs in 
 building a rampart against the river. At the end of some 
 years he has in his store-houses large reserves of food and 
 clothing, in his stables a well-tended breed of cattle, and 
 around his fields a wedge of wall against flood. 
 
 The torrent rises at last. It sweeps away the harvests 
 and half the cottages of the careless peasants, and leaves 
 these peasants destitute. They naturally come for help 
 to the provident one, whose fields are unwasted, and 
 whdse granaries are full. He has the [legal] right to 
 refuse it to them. No one disputes this right. But he 
 will probably not refuse ; it is not his interest to do so, 
 even were he entirely selfish and cruel. The only 
 question with Him \vill be on what terms his aid is to be 
 granted. Clearly not on terms of mere charity. To 
 maintain his neighbours in idleness would not only be 
 his ruin, but theirs. He will require work from them in 
 exchange for their maintenance. And, whether in 
 kindness or in cruelty, all the work they can give. Not 
 now the three or four hours they were wont to spend on 
 their own land, but the eight or ten hours they ought to 
 have spent. On pain of starvation, he can force them to 
 work in the manner and to the end he chooses. How will 
 he apply this labour ? It is by his wisdom in this choice 
 that the worthiness of his mastership is proved, or its 
 unworthiness. 
 
 Evidently he must first set them to bank out the water 
 in some temporary way, and get their ground cleansed 
 and re-sown ; else, in any case, their continued 
 maintenance will be impossible. That done, and while 
 he has still to feed them, suppose he makes them raise a 
 secure rampart for their ground against all future flood, 
 
A TRUE LORD AND KING. 93 
 
 and rebuild their houses in safer places, with the best 
 material they can find, allowing them time out of their 
 working hours to fetch such material from a distance. 
 For the food and clothing advanced, he may take 
 security in land that as much shall be returned at a 
 convenient period. 
 
 We may conceive that a few years pass by. The 
 security is redeemed and the debt paid. How do 
 matters then stand ? The prudent peasant has sustained 
 no loss. But he is no richer than he was, and he has had 
 all his trouble for nothing. What he has done has been 
 to enrich his neighbours materially, better their houses, 
 secure their land, and render them in worldly matters 
 equal to himself. /;/ all rational and final sense, he has 
 been throughout their true lord and king. 
 
 We will next trace his probable line of conduct, pre- 
 suming his object to be exclusively the increase of his 
 own fortune. 
 
 After roughly recovering and cleansing the ground, he 
 allows the ruined peasantry only, to build huts upon it, 
 such as he thinks protective enough from the weather to 
 keep them in working health. The rest of their time he 
 occupies, first, in pulling down and rebuilding on a 
 magnificent scale his own house and in adding large 
 dependencies to it. This done, in exchange for his con- 
 tinued supply of corn he buys as much of his neighbours' 
 land as he thinks he can superintend the management of, 
 and makes the former owners securely embank and 
 protect the ceded portion. By this arrangement he 
 leaves to a certain number of the peasantry only as much 
 ground as will just maintain them in their existing number. 
 As the population increases he takes the extra hands who 
 
94 "REFINEMENT" OF LIFE. 
 
 cannot be maintained on the narrowed estates for his 
 own servants, and employs some to cultivate the ground 
 he has bought, giving them of its produce merely enough 
 for subsistence. With the surplus, which under his 
 careful and energetic superintendence will be large, he 
 maintains a train of servants for state and a body of 
 workmen whom he educates in ornamental arts. He 
 now can splendidly decorate his house, lay out its grounds 
 magnificently, and richly supply his table, and that of his 
 household and retinue. 
 
 Thus without any abuse of [legal] right we should find 
 established all the phenomena of poverty and riches 
 which, it is supposed necessarily, accompany modern 
 civilization. In one part of the district we should have 
 j unhealthy land, miserable dwellings and half-starved poor; 
 in another a well-ordered estate, well-fed servants, and 
 refined conditions of highly educated and luxurious life. 
 
 Mr. Ruskin follows up these illustrations by saying 
 that he has put the two cases in simplicity and to some 
 extremity. But though in more complex and qualified 
 operation all the relations of society are only the 
 expansion of these two typical sequences of conduct and 
 result. 
 
 What now becomes of the Archbishop of York's descrip- 
 tion of the terrible feature of modern progress which 
 science is powerless to alter, and which tends to double 
 the gains of the rich and halve the miserable wages of 
 the poor? For science, let us say " human will " acting 
 consciously or unconsciously, as the case may be and 
 then in the light of Mr. Ruskin's illustration we shall get 
 at the truth. With such views of political economy as 
 the modern Pharaohs of landlordism and capitalism adopt 
 
RUSK IN AND THE LAND QUESTION. 95 
 
 the gains of landlords and capitalists must of course tend 
 to be doubled, and thus the miserable wages of the poor 
 must tend to be halved. Improvidence in marriage, in- 
 temperance, and want of thrift may intensify the evil, but 
 they are not its primary cause. 
 
 We have had all this pictorially represented for the 
 archbishop's edification and our own. How the gains of 
 the rich are not thus to tend to be doubled and the wages 
 of the poor to be halved we have also seen. It depends 
 on how far those who possess the power of riches and 
 intelligence whether they act in the capacity of rulers in 
 the political sense, or in the capacity of rulers in the in- 
 dustrial sense employers and controllers of labour are 
 willing in all rational and final sense to be to their fellow- 
 men truly lords and kings, on how far they are willing to i 
 cure them of their vices and dissipate their ignorance, on 
 how far they are willing to refrain from taking advantage 
 of the wickedness and helplessness of their inferiors for 
 the purpose of bettering their own estate. 
 
 Incidentally I may express similar surprise to what I / 
 expressed in the case of Carlyle, that discussing the/ 
 bearings of the land question on the social problem so/ 
 far as he does, Ruskin has, like Carlyle, stopped short 
 of proposing State ownership of- land. He does no? 
 appear to have thought out this phase of the question 
 of social reorganization. Yet as we may see already, 
 and shall see much more clearly when we proceed 
 to the teachings of Mr. George, land nationalization 
 would in nowise conflict with Ruskin's statement of the 
 bearings of the problem, and with his general views 
 on the question of remedies. More than this I need 
 not here say. 
 
96 POLITICAL AND INDUSTRIAL UNITY. 
 
 You will recognise that in the examples given we have 
 typified for us the operations of government both in the 
 political and the industrial sense. And, as Mr. Ruskin 
 says, all the relations of society are only the expansion 
 of these two typical sequences of conduct and result. It 
 may strike you that no clear line is drawn in these 
 examples between that element in government which is 
 more strictly political and that element which is more 
 strictly industrial. This is perfectly true. But we have 
 already seen that in no wise conception of political 
 economy can we consider the two as separate. There 
 must be alliance and co-operation between the political 
 and the industrial. The character and extent of this 
 alliance and co-operation must, however, always in practice 
 be a variable quantity. It will be greater or less according 
 to the degree in which the whole State is permeated with 
 true ideas of wealth, is influenced by the social affection, 
 and has a right conception of honesty. 
 
CHAPTER XV. 
 
 VARIOUS PRACTICAL PROPOSALS OF RUSKIN. 
 
 " The fundamental principles of society require men to regard each 
 other as brothers, and to work together for their common welfare. Do 
 not forget this ! Remember that to do grand things we must have 
 enthusiasm. All my life resolves itself into one great thought to 
 secure for all mankind the most unfettered development of their 
 faculties." Sf. Simon. 
 
 ^N our last chapter Mr. Ruskin's views as to govern- 
 mental and industrial order were illustrated by the 
 parable of the peasants who were supposed to be 
 subject to inundation, and then made dependent on one 
 of their number who had been more far-seeing and for- 
 tunate than the rest. We saw what the strong peasant, 
 who wished to be as a true lord and king to his fellows, 
 would do under the circumstances ; and, on the other 
 hand, we saw what course he would follow if his object 
 were merely the increase of his own substance. Though 
 in more complex and qualified operation, all the relations 
 of society were " only the expansion of these two typical 
 sequences of conduct and result." I will assume that my 
 readers fully appreciate the meaning of the parable in 
 question. They will have recognized that it is invaluable 
 as an embodiment of principles. But, then, we have to 
 apply the parable to the actual state of society. 
 
 G 
 
98 "THE WORST" OF THE RUSKINITE CREED. 
 
 We are to-day not literally subject to inundation. But 
 we have disorder and distress amongst us which, whether 
 arising from human maladjustments or natural causes, or 
 both, place our people in a position corresponding with 
 that of the inundated peasantry. There are also amongst 
 us men whose position corresponds with the position of 
 fthe far-seeing and fortunate peasant who was able to choose 
 -^whether he would be as a true lord and king to his fellows 
 or take a selfish advantage of their distress. If Carlyle and 
 Ruskin are to be accepted as witnesses, and, indeed, 
 if we may accept the testimony of obvious facts, these 
 imen have hitherto not chosen to act as true lords and 
 kings. Not very easily either will they be led to change 
 their course. It may, however, be advantageous to ask 
 what are the first things Mr. Ruskin would have .them to 
 do, if, as a class, they could rise to a true perception of 
 their duty. 
 
 Considering them in the political aspect, we may learn 
 
 iwh&t he would have them to do from certain paragraphs 
 
 in Unto this Last, wherein he sets forth what he 
 
 * describes as " the worst " of the creed at which he wishes 
 
 i us to arrive. Here he declares that every man or woman, 
 
 ' joy or girl, out of employment should be received into 
 
 .Government establishments to be constituted for the 
 
 purpose. They should be set to such work as it appears 
 
 on trial they are fit for at a fixed rate of wages, deter : 
 
 mined every year. If found incapable of work through 
 
 ignorance they should be taught. If found incapable of 
 
 work through sickness they should be tended. If found 
 
 objecting to work they should be set under compulsion 
 
 of the strictest nature to the more painful ^and degrading 
 
 forms of necessary toil, especially to that in mines and 
 
THE CARE OF THE YOUNG. 99 
 
 other places of danger (such danger being, however, 
 diminished to the utmost by careful regulation and 
 discipline), the due wages of such work in their case to be 
 retained cost of compulsion first abstracted to be at 
 the workman's command so soon as he may come to 
 sounder mind respecting the laws of employment. 
 
 Here we have the suggestion of a system which would 
 have all the merits of the existing poor-law system with- 
 out its very patent defects. 
 
 It is not to be forgotten, however, that the task of 
 providing work in this fashion may not only be vast, but 
 continuous on a vast scale if our methods begin and end 
 with persons out of employment, whether from ignorance, 
 incapacity, or laziness. One thing further we must in- 
 evitably do look well to the education of the young, j 
 : 'There should be training schools for youth established 
 at Government cost and under Government discipline 
 over the whole country, so that every child born in the 
 country .should, at the parents' wish, be permitted, and in 
 certain cases, be under penalty required to pass through 
 them. In these schools the child should, with other 
 minor pieces of knowledge, hereafter to be considered, 
 imperatively be taught with the best skill that the country 
 could produce, the following three things : 
 
 The laws of health and the exercises enjoined by 
 
 them ; 
 
 Habits of gentleness and justice ; 
 The calling by which he is to live. 
 
 Perhaps with such a system of education effectively in 
 operation we should in the course of two or three 
 generations find a wonderful diminution in the number of 
 
ioo THE OLD AND THE DESTITUTE. 
 
 persons out of employment from causes related to personal 
 conduct or misconduct. 
 
 Still, something more will be required of us the care 
 qfjhe_old and the destitute those who have succumbed 
 to the uncontrollable changes and accidents of life. This 
 must also be the business of the State, and the provision 
 made in this respect, when, by the working out of Mr. 
 Ruskin's ideas, misfortune has been sifted from guilt, 
 must be declared honourable instead of disgraceful to 
 the receiver. " The labourer," we are reminded, " serves 
 his country with his spade just as the man in the middle 
 ranks of life serves it with sword, pen, or lancet. If the 
 service be less, and therefore the wages during health 
 Jess, then the reward when health is broken may be less, 
 but not less honourable. It ought to be quite as natural 
 \ and straightforward a matter for a labourer to take his 
 pension from his parish because he has deserved well of 
 his parish, as for a man in higher rank to take his pension 
 from his country because he has deserved well of his 
 country." 
 
 Such are Mr. Ruskin's proposals as regards provision 
 of work, education, and the care of the old and desti- 
 tute. 
 
 But the task of the State by no means ends even here. 
 / Monopolies have to be combatted, and care has to be 
 taken against extortion in prices, inferiority in goods, and 
 all those kindred evils which are but concealed forms of 
 robbery, and are especially oppressive to the poor. The 
 training schools for youth and the government manufac- 
 tories and workshops here show themselves to have a 
 double value. If they serve for purposes of education 
 and for the giving of employment to those who lack em- 
 
THE INTELLECTUAL PROFESSIONS. 101 
 
 ployment, they may also serve for the setting ' up' of 
 standards of excellence and of price two things which/ 
 the monopolist on the one hand, and the fraudulent 
 tradesman on the other, are always concerned to manipu- 
 late to their own advantage. " Interfering," says Mr. 
 Ruskin, " no whit with private enterprise, nor setting any 
 restraints or tax on private trade, but leaving both to dj 
 their best and beat the Government, if they could, there 
 should at these Government manufactories and shops be 
 authoritatively good and exemplary work done, and pure 
 and true substance sold, so that a man could be sure if 
 he chose to pay the Government price " that he got 
 genuine articles. 
 
 These are the practical works in which Mr. Ruskin 
 would have rulers-political engage. 
 
 Next, considering the rulersjudustri^l, let us see what 
 are his views as to the specific duties of those who cor- 
 respond w r ith the peasant of the parable already alluded 
 to the peasant w r ho desired to be a "true Lord and 
 King." In certain remarkable passages in Unto this 
 Last the true standard of the duty of the employer is set 
 up. It may, by the way, be noticed that the word 
 "merchant" is used, and not the word " employer." But as 
 we may see from the context it is the merchant as 
 employer that Mr. Ruskin has in view. 
 
 Five great intellectual professions, relating to daily 
 necessities of life, have, he tells us, hitherto existed 
 three exist necessarily, in every civilized nation : the 
 soldier's profession, to defend it ; the pastor's, to teach it ; 
 the physician's, to keep it in health ; the lawyer's, to 
 enforce justice in it ; the merchant's, to provide for it. 
 And the duty of all these is, on due occasion, to die for 
 
102 THE HEROISM OF TRADE. 
 
 it. * " On due' otcasibn;" namely : " The soldier, rather 
 than leave his post in battle ; the physician, rather than 
 leave his post in plague; the pastor, rather than teach 
 falsehood; the lawyer, rather than countenance injus- 
 tice." And the merchant what is his "due occasion 
 of death"? 
 
 This, says Mr. Ruskin, is the main question for the 
 merchant [or employer], as for all of us. For truly the man ' 
 who does not know when to die does not know how to- 
 live. " Because the production or obtaining of any com- 
 modity involves necessarily the agency of many lives and 
 hands, the merchant [or employer] becomes in the course 
 of his business the master and governor of large masses 
 of men in a more direct, though less confessed, way than 
 the military officer or pastor; so that on him falls, in great 
 j part, the responsibility for the kind of life they lead ; and 
 it becomes his duty, not only to be always considering 
 how to produce what he sells, in the purest and cheapest 
 forms, but how to make the various employments 
 involved in the production or transference of it most 
 beneficial to the men employed. And as into these two 
 functions, requiring for their right exercise the highest 
 intelligence, as well as patience, kindness, and tact, the 
 merchant [or employer] is bound to put all his energy, 
 so for their just discharge he is bound, as the soldier or 
 physician is bound, to give up, if need be, his life, in such 
 way as it may be demanded of him. Two main points 
 ' he has in his providing function to maintain : first, his 
 engagements (faithfulness to engagements being the real 
 i root of all possibilities in commerce) ; and, secondly, the 
 perfectness and purity of the thing provided; so that, 
 rather than fail in any engagement, or consent to any 
 
PATERNAL MASTERSHIP. 103 
 
 deterioration, adulteration, or unjust and exorbitant price 
 of that which he provides, he is bound to meet fearlessly 
 any form of distress, poverty, or labour, which may through 
 maintenance of these points come upon him. Again, in 
 his office of governor of the men employed by him the i 
 merchant [or employer] is invested with a distinctly paternal 
 authority and responsibility." 
 
 In brief, the only means which the master has of doing 
 justice to the men employed by him is to ask himself 
 sternly, whether he is dealing with such as he would w r ith 
 his own son, if his son, compelled by circumstances, had 
 to take such a position. Furthermore, as the captain of 
 a ship is bound to be the last man to leave his ship in 
 case of wreck, and to share his last crust with the sailors 
 in case of famine, so the employer in any commercial 
 crisis or distress, is bound to take the suffering of it withy 
 his men, and even to take mere of it for himself than he 
 allows his men to feel as a father would in a famine, 
 shipwreck, or battle, sacrifice himself for his son. 
 
 As regards the reciprocity of advantage in these 
 arrangements, so far as the relations of employer and 
 employee! are concerned, it is well to notice that if the 
 master, instead of endeavouring, on a selfish principle, to 
 get as much work as possible from the servant, seeks 
 rather to render his appointed and necessary work bene- 
 ficial to him, and to forward his interests in all just and 
 wholesome ways, the real amount of work ultimately done, j 
 or of good rendered by the person so cared for, will 
 indeed be the greatest possible. Nor is this, Mr. Ruskin 
 holds, one whit less true, because indulgence will be 
 frequently abused and kindness met with ingratitude. 
 For the servant who, gently treated, is ungrateful, treated 
 
J04 FIDELITY IN SER VICE. 
 
 *ungently, will be revengeful ; and the man who is 
 dishonest to a liberal master will be injurious to an 
 :unjust one. 
 
 Given such conceptions of duty on the part of the 
 Political Government and on the part of the Captains of 
 Industry as we have now had set before us, the problem of 
 r.social reconstruction would not be difficult. But there 
 :are objections to be met. There are our old enemies 
 Demand and Supply and Over-Production ; and there is 
 the question of the assumed unworthiness of the poor to 
 receive these benefits the possible perversion of benefit 
 by them. 
 
CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 KUSKIN AND THE OBJECTIONS TO THE NEW ECONOMY. 
 
 " In the end, the people who now murmur and ridicule what they 
 do not understand will be grateful for the real manhood that has 
 been revealed to them. In the end, truth alone will command 
 respect, truth alone will prevail ; and, in the end, in the far-ofT time, 
 truth shall make every heart of man its empire and its throne. "- 
 Felix Adler. 
 
 WE have now almost concluded that stage of our 
 inquiry which involves the examination of Mr. 
 Ruskin's teaching. Mr. Ruskin's views as to 
 State government and the duty of employers of labour, 
 have been especially set forth. But, as I said at the close 
 of my last chapter, there are objections to be met. There 
 are our old enemies, Demand and Supply, and there is 
 the assumed unworthiness of the poor to receive benefits, 
 the question of the possible perversion of benefit by 
 them. 
 
 Of Demand and Supply Mr. Ruskin makes short work. 
 The popular economist thinks himself wise in having 
 discovered that wealth, or property in general, must go 
 where it is required; that where Demand is Supply 
 must follow. Because where Demand is Supply does 
 follow, the popular economist warns us that any inter- 
 ference with Demand and Supply is sure to be fraught 
 
io6 THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. 
 
 with injurious consequences. But Mr. Ruskin points 
 out that in the sense in which forms of property go where 
 they are required the waters of the world go where they 
 are required. "Where the land falls the water flows. 
 The course neither of clouds nor rivers can be forbidden 
 by human will. But the disposition and administration 
 of them can be altered by human forethought. Whether 
 the stream shall be a curse or a blessing depends upon 
 man's labour and administering intelligence. For cen- 
 turies after centuries great districts of the world, rich in 
 soil and favoured in climate, have lain desert under the 
 rage of their own rivers ; not only desert, but plague- 
 struck. The stream which, rightly directed, would have 
 fjpwn in soft irrigation from field to field would have 
 purified the air, given food to man and beast, and carried 
 their burdens for them on its bosom now overwhelms 
 the plain and poisons the wind ; its breath pestilence, 
 jand its work famine. In like manner property 'goes 
 /where it is required.' No human laws can withstand its 
 * flow. They_can only guide it : but this, the leading 
 trench and limiting mound can do so thoroughly, that it 
 shall become water of life the riches of the hand of 
 wisdom ; or, on the contrary, by leaving it to its own law- 
 less flow, they may make it, what it has been too often, the 
 last and deadliest of national plagues : water of Marah 
 the water which feeds the roots of evil." 
 
 I There must then be regulation of distribution on the 
 
 / part of the governing power. Human conduct must not 
 
 / 'be a blind acquiescence in certain phenomena of riches, 
 
 / by which riches tend to flow to riches as water tends to 
 
 / flow to the common level of water. A true political 
 
 | economy will seek to guide riches where they are needed 
 
 v 
 
UNTRACTABILITY OF THE POOR. 107 
 
 most, where they may most truly be. wealth. From first 
 
 to last the question is one of moral control collective A 
 
 and individual. 
 
 It is curious to contrast Mr. Ruskin's views on this 
 subject with those ordinarily held. For instance, the 
 Archbishop of York, though declaring that the poor were 
 under a tendency of modern progress whereby their 
 miserable wages were halved for the benefit of the rich, 
 yet remarked that their poverty was mainly the result ot 
 improvidence in marriage, intemperance, and want of 
 thrift. Mr. Ruskin replies, and from what we now know 
 of his views we may see that he is right, that their 
 distress (irrespective of that caused by sloth, minor errors 
 or crime) arises on the grand scale from the two reacting | 
 forces of competition and oppression. " Oppression ! " 
 the economist of the old school, with a twinge of con- 
 science, exclaims. " No ! Competition, perhaps, but not 
 oppression." The economist of the old school will add 
 that what of distress the poor suffer, irrespective of that 
 which is caused by sloth, minor errors or crime, is due 
 simply to their excessive multiplication. The political 
 economist of the old school, in fact, ranges himself on the 
 side of the Archbishop. He cries " Hear, hear," and 
 assures his Grace that human science is indeed " power- 
 less " to alter that condition of things to which his Grace 
 refers. 
 
 I As to the untractability of the poor this presents an 
 obstacle truly formidable in its character. But Mr. Ruskin 
 warns us that our responsibility is as great as the obstacle is 
 formidable. In the main it is our failure in the discharge 
 of this responsibility which has made the obstacle 
 formidable. " Is it proposed to better the condition of 
 
1 08 THE G U1L T OF L UXUR Y. 
 
 the labourer by giving him higher wages ? ' Nay,' says 
 the economist, ' if you raise his wages, he will either people 
 down to the same point of the misery at which you found 
 him, or drink your wages away.' He will, I know it ! 
 Who gave him this will ? Suppose it were your own son 
 of whom you spoke, declaring to me that you dared not 
 take him into your firm, nor even give him a labourer's 
 just wage, because, if you did he would die of drunkenness 
 and leave half a score of children to the parish. I should 
 inquire, ' Who gave your sons these dispositions? Has 
 he them by inheritance or by education ? ' By one or 
 the other they must come ; and as in him so also in the 
 poor. Either these poor are of a race essentially different 
 /from ours, and unredeemable (which, however often implied 
 I have heard none yet openly say), or else by such care 
 as we have ourselves received, we may make them content 
 and sober as ourselves wise and dispassionate as we are 
 models worthy of imitation." 
 
 Such is Mr. Ruskin's teaching on this head. There 
 are many other points in Mr. Ruskin's economic writings 
 to which I should like to refer, but I have already given 
 a full proportion of the space of this work to this 
 writer. I will conclude this division with the quotation 
 of words which are amongst the most suggestive words 
 whid^Mr. Ruskin has ever penned : 
 
 '(If, on due and honest thought over these things, it 
 seems that the kind of existence to which men are now 
 summoned by every plea of pity and claim of right, may, 
 for some time at least, not be a luxurious one ; consider 
 whether, even supposing it guiltless, luxury would be 
 desired by any of us, if we saw clearly at our sides the 
 suffering which accompanies it in the world. Luxury is 
 
THE GREAT BEQUEST. 109 
 
 indeed possible in the future innocent and exquisite ; 
 luxury for all, and by the help of all ; but luxury at 
 present can only be enjoyed by the ignorant ; the cruellest 
 man living could not sit at his feast unless he sat blind- 
 fold. Raise the veil boldly ; face the light ; and if, as 
 yet, the light of the eye can only be through tears, and 
 the light of the body through sackcloth, go thou forth 
 weeping, bearing precious seed, until the time come, 
 and the kingdom, when Christ's gift of bread, and 
 bequest of peace, shall be * unto this last as unto thee ;' 
 and when, for earth's severed multitudes of the wicked 
 and the weary, there shall be holier reconciliation than 
 that of the narrow home, and a calm economy, where the 
 wicked cease not from trouble, but from troubling and 
 the weary are at rest."^ 
 
CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 HENRY GEORGE. 
 
 Ring in the valiant man and free, 
 The eager heart, the kindlier hand; 
 Ring out the darkness of the land, 
 
 Ring in the Christ that is to be. Tennyson. 
 
 HENRY GEORGE, the last in our trio of 
 representative teachers of the New Political 
 Economy, now commands our attention. 
 Carlyle and Ruskin have been fully dealt with ; we 
 have ascertained what their views are upon the subject 
 of political economy in general, and especially upon that 
 growth of poverty side by side with great riches which 
 was set forth in our opening chapters as the great problem 
 of modern civilization. 
 
 Though I have an intimate acquaintance with the 
 writings of Mr. George, and can in many places detect in 
 them the influence of Mazzini, I cannot say that I find in 
 them the evidence that Mr. George is at all familiar with 
 the works of the two other teachers with whom I have 
 chosen to classify him. Yet as regards the spirit of his 
 writing and his moral aims, Mr. George resembles Carlyle 
 and Ruskin very much more than any other contempo- 
 rary writer of similar eminence. Mr. George is in many 
 
HENR Y GEORGE 'S LITER A R Y TRAINING. 1 1 1 
 
 respects a unique personality. His whole life-training has 
 been so different from the life-training which Carlyle and 
 Ruskin received; he has walked along such different 
 roads that it is the more remarkable and at the same time 
 gratifying to find that he has arrived at such approximately 
 similar results. Of academic education he had little or 
 none. He is, in the true sense of the term, a self-educated 
 man. The Times > on the occasion of one of Mr. George's 
 visits to this country, ironically asked : Where did Mr. 
 George get his knowledge ? forgetful that the workshop, 
 the street, the field, and the pathless ocean are to open- 
 eyed men the most useful of academies, and that those who 
 regard facts more than opinions may, by their inexorable 
 logic, clear from the mind the mists which often envelop 
 other judgments. What Mr. George has chiefly been 
 indebted to has been his own aptness to learn in the 
 great school of the world a school in which through the 
 days when he " roughed it " at sea as a sailor, stood at 
 the frame of the compositor, burnt the midnight oil as 
 reporter and editor, or travelled in the freer capacity of a 
 special correspondent, he has ever been a close observer 
 of men and things, 
 
 He has withal been a voracious reader, chiefly in 
 standard works of English literature generally and of 
 political economy in particular. The late Mr. John 
 Bright was not more familiar with the Bible and better 
 able to employ its teaching for purposes of argument on 
 public questions than is Mr. George. The study of the 
 Book of Books, and the reading of Shakspere and of the 
 fine, nervous poetry of American apostles of freedom 
 like Whittier and Russell Lowell, have done much to 
 influence the whole bent of his thought. 
 
H2 MENTAL EXPERIMENTS. 
 
 His power of analysis and his familiarity with the prin- 
 ciples of logic would do credit to the best training of our 
 best universities. In a lecture delivered on April lyth, 
 1877, to the students of the University of California, on 
 u The Study of Political Economy," Mr. George related the 
 following anecdote of his boyhood : " When I was a boy 
 I went down to the wharf with another boy to see the 
 first iron steamship that had ever crossed the ocean to 
 Philadelphia. Now, hearing of an iron steamship seemed 
 to us then a good deal like hearing of a leaden kite or a 
 wooden cooking stove. But we had not been long aboard 
 of her before my companion said in a tone of contemp- 
 tuous disgust : ' Pooh ! I see how it is. She's all lined 
 with wood ; that's the reason she floats.' I could not 
 controvert him for the moment, but I was not satisfied, 
 and sitting down on the wharf when he left me, I set to 
 work trying mental experiments. If it was the wood in- 
 side of her that made her float, then the more wood the 
 higher she would float ; and, mentally, I loaded her up 
 with wood. But as I was familiar with the process 
 of making boats out of blocks of wood, I at once saw 
 that, instead of floating higher, she would sink deeper. 
 Then I mentally took all the wood out of her, as we dug 
 out our wooden boats, and saw that thus lightened she 
 would float higher still. Then, in imagination I jammed 
 a hole in her, and saw that the water would run in and 
 she would sink, as did our wooden boats when ballasted 
 with leaden keels. And thus I saw, as clearly as though 
 I could have actually made these experiments with the 
 steamer, that it was not the wooden lining that made her 
 float, but her hollowness, or, as I would now phrase it, 
 her displacement of water." Mr. George told this story 
 
MR. GEORGE AND EARLY COMMUNISM. 113 
 
 to the Californian students to show how we can isolate, 
 analyse, or combine economic principles, and by extend- 
 ing or diminishing the scale of propositions, either subject 
 them to inspection through a mental magnifying glass or 
 bring a larger field into view. To the readers of this 
 work the story, however, has special interest, as showing 
 how the analytical powers of mind for which Mr. George 
 is distinguished were even from his earliest years of an 
 exceptional character. 
 
 The dominant note in all his teaching is a religious 
 note ; it is the organization of society according to an 
 affection for which above all he strives. " There are/ 7 he 
 says, " those who constantly talk and write as though 
 whoever finds fault with the present distribution of wealth 
 were demanding that the rich should be spoiled for the 
 benefit of the poor : that the idle should be taken care of 
 at the expense of the industrious, and that a false and 
 impossible equality should be created, which, by reducing 
 everyone to the same dead level, would destroy all in- 
 centives to excel and would bring progress to a halt. In 
 the reaction from the glaring injustice of present social 
 conditions, such wild schemes have been proposed, and 
 still find advocates. But, to my way of thinking, they 
 are as impracticable and repugnant as they can seem to 
 those who are loudest in their denunciations of 
 ' Communism/ I am not willing to say that in the 
 progress of humanity a state of society may not be 
 possible which shall realize the formula of Louis Blanc : 
 ' From each according to his abilities ; to each according 
 to his wants : ? for there exists to-day, in the religious 
 Orders of the Catholic Church, associations which 
 maintain the communism of early Christianity. But it 
 
 H 
 
114 PHYSICAL FORCE IN POLITICS. 
 
 seems to me that the^nJ^u^Qwey-bg^which such a state of 
 society can be attained and preserved is that which the 
 ffamers ot the scheines I, speak of generally ignbre7~"even 
 whenjhey^To not directly antagonize ra deep, definite^ 
 intensej^ligiousTajth, so clear, so burning as to utterly 
 melt away the thought of self a general moral condition 
 such as that which the Methodists declare, under the 
 name of ' sanctification,' to be individually possible, in 
 which the dream of rjrjstine, innocence shall become 
 reality, and man, so to speak, shall again walk with God." 
 
 It is but a corollary of his reliance on the religious 
 element in social movements that, not less than that 
 tenderest of men, Mr. Ruskin, he is predisposed to 
 condemn resort to physical force as a remedy for political 
 and economic evils. In the attitude he took up on the 
 occasion of the outrages by the Chicago Anarchists in 
 1887, his opposition to physical force was well shown. 
 The anarchists were convicted of using bombs with fatal 
 results upon the police in certain trade disturbances in 
 Chicago. From various causes a great deal of public 
 sympathy was evoked for the condemned men, and 
 naturally this sympathy was manifest most strongly of all 
 amongst the working classes. But Mr. George stood 
 forth fearlessly on the side of law and order, and severely 
 rebuked many of his own friends who were tempted to go 
 the wrong way. To the Socialist party in general he 
 gave great offence by the following passage in his paper, 
 The Standard of New York : 
 
 " There may be countries in which the suppression by 
 an absolute despotism of all freedom of speech and action 
 justifies the use of force, if the use of force ever can be 
 justified. But even in such countries complaint cannot 
 
IGNORANCE AMONGST THE MASSES. 115 
 
 be made when the sword is unsheathed against those who 
 draw the sword. In this country, however, where a 
 freedom of speech which extends almost to licence is 
 seldom interfered with, and where all political power rests 
 upon the will of the people, those who use force 
 or ^counsel the use of force in the name of political 
 or social reform are enemies of society, and especially 
 are they enemies of the working masses. What in this 
 country holds the masses down, and permits the social 
 injustice of which they are becoming so bitterly conscious, 
 is not any super-imposed tyranny, but their own ignorance. 
 The working men of the United States have in their own 
 hands the power to remedy political abuses and to change 
 social conditions by re-writing the laws as they will. For 
 the intelligent use of this power thought must be aroused 
 and reason invoked. But the effect of force, on the 
 contrary, is always to awaken prejudice and to kindle 
 passion. 
 
 " There is legitimate ground on which executive 
 clemency may be asked for the Chicago anarchists that, 
 being imbued with ideas which germinate in countries 
 where the legitimate freedom of speech and action is 
 sternly repressed, they are not fully conscious of the 
 moral criminality of their action, and that the main 
 purpose of their punishment the prevention of such 
 crimes in future will be as well served, if not even 
 better served by a commutation of the sentence of death 
 into a sentence of imprisonment. 
 
 " This last is a very strong ground for the interposition 
 of executive clemency, and it is sincerely to be hoped 
 that the Governor of Illinois will see its reasonableness. 
 A tragical death always tends to condone mistakes and 
 
n6 SLANDERING THE CREATOR. 
 
 crimes, and a certain amount of sympathy will undoubt- 
 edly attach to the Chicago anarchists if they are hanged, 
 which would not be aroused if they were merely 
 imprisoned. 
 
 " But in whatever expression of opinion associations of 
 working men who do not themselves believe in the use of 
 dynamite may see fit to make upon this subject, there 
 should be nothing which tends to put the Chicago 
 anarchists in the light of leaders and martyrs in the cause 
 of American social reform." 
 
 Add to the fine religious spirit which is indicated by 
 the above pleas for the organization of society according 
 to an affection and for the resort to other methods of 
 reform than those of physical force, the power of observing 
 and analysing facts, and of reporting truly upon them, 
 which I have already pointed to as distinguishing charac- 
 teristics of Mr. George, and it must surely be granted that 
 we have here combined qualities which should make a 
 man pre-eminent as a teacher. Mr. George has brought 
 these qualities to bear in the fullest possible degree in 
 his work as a political economist. 
 
 Hitherto political economy has been littte hotter tfm.n a. 
 scientific" exposition p and justification of, human 
 TeHTshness. It has been allied with the art of slandering 
 tKe Creator with a good grace, by the method of 
 accounting for social maladjustments by sophistries which 
 profess to show that those maladjustments are in harmony 
 with natural law. Men have by implication, if not by 
 direct teaching, been taught at least to refrain from ques- 
 tioning a heartless and immoral political economy, which 
 fails to enforce the equal rights of men to the land, which fails 
 to give labour its right place in relation to capital, and which 
 
 
THE BRUTE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE. 117 
 
 even goes so far in direct antagonism against human laws 
 and natural order as to regard the very peopling of God's 
 earth as a curse from the very tendency of things 
 assuming that in the growth of population there is exem- 
 plified a perpetual strife between Nature's decrees and the 
 peaceable and happy development of mankind. Happily 
 in Mr. George, not less than in Carlyle or in Ruskin, we have 
 a great questioner, a great doubter, and a great reconciler 
 a man who has sought to get at the root of things, to find 
 causes behind effects, and who has made a grand exposition^ 
 of a political economy which is in harmony with o^r hp.qfr 
 perceptions oflrToTarprincipla 
 
 To challenge the superstitions and inventions of the 
 conventional political economist is surely a noble task. 
 But there has been something vastly more than this in 
 Mr. George's mission. To him the anxious question, 
 after all, has been not so much how far is the existing 
 state of things consonant with God's law or the result of 
 human maladjustments ? His deep faith and clear sight 
 soon enabled him to answer that. What he has asked 
 himself most of all is What methods must I commend 
 to remedy these evils? How am I to show men that 
 the Creator did not intend that existence should necessarily 
 be a mere brute struggle to the great bulk of the race.?.. 
 
 It was in the effort to answer these questions that Mr. 
 George's chief contribution to the new science of political 
 economy an economy full of hope and illumined with 
 righteousness was evolved. 
 
 When Mr. George commenced his first great literary 
 work, " Progress and Poverty," it was with the most 
 vague ideas of what it would grow to. He had written 
 from the impulse to write, and unburden himself of 
 
ii8 HARMONY OF MORAL AND SOCIAL LAW. 
 
 thoughts which had found inception in the depths of his 
 soul, and which it became a necessity of his happiness 
 that he should deliver. To use his own words, " In this 
 inquiry I followed the course of my own thoughts. When 
 in mind I set out on it, I had no theory to support, no con- 
 clusions to prove. Only when I first realized the squalid 
 misery of a great city, it appalled and tormented me, and 
 would not let me rest for thinking of what caused it and 
 ^how it could be cured." 
 
 Of the results of his work he wrote : " If this investi- 
 gation has been carefully and logically pursued, its 
 conclusions completely change the_.haracter^orpolitLcal 
 economy, give it the coherence and certitude of a true 
 science, and bring it into full sympathy with the as- 
 
 pirations of the masses of mel^T'fron^vhich it has 
 been estranged. What I have done in this book, if I 
 have correctly solved the great problem I have sought to 
 investigate, is to unite the truth perceived by the school 
 of Smith a^ Ricardb^toTh^Irutir perceived by the schpol_ 
 of Proudhon and Lasselle ; to show that laissez-faire (in 
 its full true meaning) opens the 
 
 the nobler dreams of socialism; to identify sociaMajv 
 with moranaw, and to disprove ldeas~which inthe minds 
 of many cloud grand and elevating perceptions^ 
 ^These words are but a modesF"~clescription of Mr. 
 George's great book from its author's point of view. It 
 is unquestionable that apart from the suggestions to the 
 practical statesman which Mr. George has offered, his 
 success in identifying social law with moral law has been 
 most valuable in days when scepticism and materialism 
 are rife and the orthodox political economy has helped 
 but little to "justify the ways of God to man," or indeed 
 
APPLIED CHRISTIANITY. 119 
 
 in the most feeble way to explain the ways of man him- 
 self towards his fellow-man when also it has seemed as 
 though there was an impassable gulf between Christianity 
 and social science. 
 
 Those who have eyes may plainly see in the light of 
 his teaching that the fashionable political economy is a 
 man-made abortion, that it is a veritable Juggernaut, under 
 whose car not the willing only, but the unwilling, are- 
 crushed. They must hail as a priest and prophet a man-' 
 who so clearly shows them a political economy which is 
 in truth a 'scientific application _of Christianity ^tself j_a 
 pblitical economy rich in unity, harmony, and beauty 
 "things that in themselves are as sure signs of truth, as, 
 ugliness, discord, and disunion are of falsity. 
 
CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 HENRY GEORGE AND HUMAN SOCIETY AS IT MIGHT BE. 
 
 Again the Christ is coming. 
 
 Hear ye not the footfalls of the Lord ? 
 
 He comes, the Leader of a riper age, 
 
 When all that is not good and true shall die ; 
 
 When all that's bad in custom, false in creed, 
 
 And all that makes the boor and mars the man 
 
 Shall pass away forever. Yes, He comes 
 
 To give the world a passion for the truth, 
 
 'To inspire us with a holy human love ; 
 
 ' To make us sure that ere a man 
 
 vCan be a saint, he first must be a man. Anon. 
 
 fy S between Henry George on the one hand and 
 Carlyle and Ruskin on the other, there are certain 
 detailed differences in the application of prin- 
 ciples, but even these differences, or nearly all of them, are 
 more apparent than real. They are due not a little to the 
 very different social and political conditions in which the 
 American economist has been reared as compared with 
 >his English brethren conditions which have led him to 
 value more (shall I say to understand better) certain 
 .democratic forms of government which Carlyle and 
 Ruskin are disposed to discount. I am, I think, 
 warranted in saying that the only question involving a 
 
HENRY GEORGE AND USURY. 121 
 
 great and vital principle upon which Henry George and 
 Ruskin are in conflict is the question of interest or usury. 
 But I have purposely avoided, and shall in the remainder 
 of this work avoid, the introduction of this specific 
 question. It is a vexatious question which very few 
 social reformers understand, and upon which still 
 fewer are agreed. Though usury needs to be discussed 
 at proper times and seasons, I am not convinced that it 
 would contribute to the usefulness of this work 
 which is designedly limited in its scope were I to 
 interrupt its continuity by inviting the reader to judge 
 of the divergent views of Ruskin and Henry George on 
 this particular point, or ask him to side with the one 
 teacher as against the other. In order to obtain inspira- 
 tion for practical work we may find it best to trace what 
 common ground of belief these teachers mark out for us : 
 furthermore which is certainly of not less importance 
 we must observe wherein the teaching of the one harmo- 
 niously elucidates or supplements the teaching of the 
 other. 
 
 On that most important point the land question 
 the teachings of Henry George do elucidate and supple- 
 ment the teachings of Carlyle and Ruskin very remarkably. 
 They show more in detail, and, partly for this reason, 
 more conclusively, how very much the character of the 
 economic and social fabric at any given time depends on 
 the relations of the people to the land. Examining Mr. 
 George's teachings on this subject, with our minds already 
 instructed as to the views of Carlyle and Ruskin, we shall 
 probably conclude that in the effort to evolve an orderly 
 state of society we must certainly begin with the land. 
 This is a conclusion which I think is sure to be forced 
 
122 HENRY GEORGE'S RANGE OF VIEW. 
 
 upon us, whatever shape our views as to the best 
 method of land reform may ultimately assume. It is, 
 moreover, a conclusion to which we .may come without 
 necessarily prejudging the question of the practicability 
 of each and all of the various details of the system which 
 Carlyle and Ruskin would have set up details which we 
 shall be much better able to discuss as measures of 
 practical politics when the first necessary step of settling 
 the land question has been taken. 
 
 The chief work of Mr. George is " Progress and 
 Poverty." Another important work is " Social Problems," 
 and yet another, " Protection or Free Trade ? " As I 
 must give rather a popular than a scientific exposition of 
 the teachings of Mr. George, it will on various grounds 
 be convenient that I should in the main follow the lines 
 of "Social Problems" rather than of the other works. 
 "Social Problems" was published subsequently to 
 " Progress and Poverty." It may be said to restate and 
 also to carry forward much of the teaching of " Progress 
 and Poverty." From its greater simplicity of arrange- 
 ment, and its literary style generally it is much more 
 suited for popular reading than is " Progress and Poverty"; 
 its demands on the attention of the reader are not so ex- 
 acting. Mr. George himself has stated that whilst 
 " Progress and Poverty " is his chief work, " Social 
 Problems " forms a useful introduction to his teach- 
 ings " it would be a better book to begin with." For 
 my own part, I think that " Social Problems " and " Pro- 
 gress and Poverty " must both be read ere the student 
 can obtain a comprehensive idea of Mr. George's system. 
 Though the best order for the beginner is to read " Social 
 Problems " first of all, no student already familiar with 
 
MAN JUST BEGINNING TO LIVE. 123 
 
 "Progress and Proverty" should rest content without 
 studying " Social Problems " also. The latter work will 
 be a valuable corrective to the impression which some 
 readers of "Progress and Poverty" might derive that Mr. 
 George's interests as a reformer are wholly centred in the 
 land question, and that he fails to take such wide and 
 universal views as will include the hundred and one other 
 great problems which relate to human well-being. 
 
 Mr. George holds that with the ' European race, 
 and in the nineteenth century, man is just beginning 
 to live just grasping his tools and becoming conscious 
 of his powers. Rapid changes are going on. These 
 are bringing up "problems that demand most earnest 
 attention. Creeds are dying, beliefs are changing; the 
 old forces of conservatism are melting away. Political - 
 institutions arej^.ning 2 _a^clearly in democratic America \ ^ v 
 as in monarchial Europe. There is growing unrest" 
 and bitterness among the masses, whatever be the 
 form of government a blind_ j grcipin^jbr escape from 
 conditions becoming intolerable. To attribute all this 
 to the teachings of demagogues is, he thinks, like 
 attributing fever to the quickened pulse. It is the new 
 wine beginning to ferment in old bottles. To adjust our 
 institutions to growing needs and changing conditions is 
 the task which devolves upon us. To put into a sailing 
 ship the powerful engines of a first-class ocean steamer 
 would be to tear her to pieces with their play. So the 
 new powers rapidly changing all the relations of society 
 must shatter social and political organizations with their 
 strain, unless we anticipate and provide for their opera- 
 tion. " Mnrp and more intelligence must be o!evoted to 
 social affairs, and this not the intelligence 
 
I2 4 JUSTICE VERSUS SELF-INTEREST. 
 
 but that of the many. We cannot safely leave politics to 
 politicians, or political economy to college professors. 
 The people Ihgrnselves must think^j^causejhe^cople 
 alone can act. The intelligence required, moreover, js 
 ^ot a mere trijng"o'f the intellect- It must be animated 
 with religious sentiment and warm with sympathy for 
 .human suffering;. Jit must stretch out beyond self-interest, 
 whether it be the self-interest of the few or of the many. 
 It must seek justice. For at the, bottom of_every social 
 jDroblem we shall find a social wrong." 
 
 Such is the spirit in which Mr. George sets out on his 
 task. We first view the problem of the state of society 
 from the sociaj and economic point f yiV We are told 
 that the tendency of all inventions and improvements so 
 wonderfully augmenting productive power is to concentrate 
 enomious v jwaltl2_^^ to make the 
 
 conditions of,the_ many more_hopeless ; to force into the 
 position of machines for the production of wealth they 
 are riot to enjoy, men whose aspirations are being aroused. 
 Causes which the workman can neither prevent nor foresee 
 may at any time stop his machine and throw him upon 
 the world an utterly unskilled labourer, unaccustomed 
 even to swing a pick or handle a spade. When times are 
 good, and his employer is coining money, he can only get 
 an advance by a strike or a threatened strike. At the 
 least symptom of harder times his wages are scaled down, 
 and he can only resist by a strike, which means, for a 
 longer or shorter time, no wages. Between those who 
 work and want and those who live in idle luxury there is 
 so great a gulf fixed that in popular imagination the two 
 classes seem to belong to distinct orders of beings. " Did 
 you ever," asked Mr. George, " see a pail of wash given 
 
THE TENDENCY TO INEQUALITY. 125 
 
 to a pen of hungry hogs ? That is human society as it is. 
 Did you ever see a company of well-bred men and women 
 sitting down to a good dinner, without scrambling, or 
 gluttony, each knowing that his own appetite will be 
 satisfied, deferring to and helping the others ? That is 
 human society as it might be." 
 
 Mr. George next takes a survey of the situation from 
 the political stnnr)p ni ' n< " -T 1 " is impressed upon us that 
 the growth of society the unwieldy proportions of the 
 mere State involves danger of the gradual conversion 
 of government into something independent of and be- 
 yond the people, and the gradual seizure of its powers 
 by a ruling class. Under modern conditions, this class 
 is the rich class. Universal suffrage may add to, 
 instead of decreasing, this power of riches. This we 
 see when mill-owners and mine-operators vote their 
 hands. Therefore, the freedom to earn, without fear 
 or favour, a comfortable living, ought to go with the 
 freedom to vote. 
 
 The causes of the prevalence of poverty and of the 
 unequal distribution of wealth, with its accompaniment of 
 the unequal distribution of political power, are now 
 examined. To whatever cause poverty may be due, it is 
 not due to the niggardliness of nature. It is blasphemy 
 or blindness to assume that the Creator has condemned 
 the masses of men to hard toil for a bare living. So true 
 is it that poverty does not come from the inability to 
 produce more wealth that from every side we hear that 
 the power to produce is in excess of the ability to find a 
 market ; a seeming glut of production, a seeming excess 
 of productive power runs through all branches of industry, 
 and is evident all over the civilized world. 
 
126 TRUE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL ORDER. 
 
 Mr. George freely admits that under present conditions 
 inequalities would tend to assert themselves, even if 
 arbitrarily levelled for a moment. But that does not 
 prove that the conditions from which this tendency to 
 inequality springs may not be altered. He points out 
 that the elements of monopoly, of appropriation, and 
 spoliation will, when we come to analyse them, be found 
 to largely account for all great fortunes. It is to this, 
 then, that we must direct our attention. In combating 
 monopoly, appropriation, and spoliation, so as to bring 
 about a just distribution of wealth, of the produce of 
 labour, we shall lay the true foundations of economic and 
 social order. 
 
CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 HENRY GEORGE'S "FIRST GREAT REFORM." 
 
 " What is man born for but to be a reformer, a remaker of what 
 man has made ; a renouncer of falsehood ; a restorer of truth and 
 good ; imitating that great Nature which embosoms us all, and 
 which sleeps no moment on an old past, but every hour repairs her- 
 self, yielding us every morning a new day, and with every pulsation 
 a new life ? " Emerson. 
 
 R. GEORGE'S survey of modern society, of the 
 phenomena of progress and poverty, so apparent 
 in these days, has brought us to the statement 
 of the right of man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of 
 happiness, and to the declaration that in a society where 
 the equality of natural rights is recognized there could be 
 no great disparity of fortune. We have next to examine 
 what in Mr. George's view hinders the bringing about of 
 an orderly state of things now. The primary cause lies 
 evidently in fundamental social adjustments in the 
 relations which we have established between labour and 
 the natural material and means of labour between man 
 and the planet which is his dwelling-place, workshop, and 
 storehouse. In like manner as land must be the founda- 
 tion of every natural structure, institutions which regulate 
 the use of land constitute the foundations of every social 
 organization, and must affect the whole character and 
 
128 LAND AND LABOUR. 
 
 development of that organization. In a community where 
 the soil is treated as the property of but a portion of 
 the people, some of the people from the very day 
 of their birth must be at a disadvantage, and some will 
 have an enormous advantage. Those who have no rights 
 in the land will be forced to sell their labour to the 
 landholders for what they can get ; and, in fact, cannot 
 live without the landlords' permission. Such a com- 
 munity must inevitably develop a class of masters and a 
 class of serfs a class possessing great riches, and a class 
 having little or no riches and its political organization, 
 no matter what may be its form, must finally become a 
 virtual despotism. 
 
 Mr. George elaborates this view thus : " Chief of 
 the natural resources of labour is land. Whatever be 
 the character of any improvement, its benefit, land 
 being monopolized, must ultimately go to the owners 
 of land. Were labour-saving inventions carried so far 
 that the necessity for labour in the production of wealth 
 were done away with, the result would be that the 
 owners of land could command all the wealth that could 
 be produced, and need not share with labour even what 
 is necessary for its maintenance. Were the powers and 
 capacities of land increased, the gain would be that of the 
 landowners. Or were the improvement to take place in 
 the powers and capacities of labour, it would still be the 
 owners of land, and not labourers, who would reap the 
 advantage. 
 
 " For land being indispensable to labour, those who 
 monopolize land are able to make their own terms with 
 labour, or rather the competition with each other of those 
 who cannot employ themselves, yet must find employment 
 
THE "IRON LAW OF WAGES." 129 
 
 or starve, will force wages down to the lowest point at 
 which the habits of the labouring class permit them to 
 live and reproduce. At this point, in all countries where 
 land is fully monopolized, the wages of common labour 
 must rest, and towards it all other wages tend, being 
 only kept up above it by the special conditions, artificial 
 or otherwise, which give labour in some occupations 
 higher wages than in others. And so no improvement, 
 even in the power of labour itself whether it comes from 
 education, from the actual increase of muscular force or 
 of machinery, or from the ability to do with less sleep 
 and work longer hours could raise the standard of 
 labour above this point. 
 
 "This is the * iron law of wages,' as it is styled by the 
 Germans the law which determines wages to the mini- 
 mum at which labourers will consent to live and reproduce. 
 It is recognized by all economists, though by most of them 
 attributed to other causes than the true one. It is mani- 
 festly an inevitable result of making the land, from which 
 all must live, the exclusive property of some. The lord 
 of the soil is necessarily lord of the men who live upon it.. 
 They are as truly and as fully his slaves as though his, 
 ownership in their flesh and blood were acknowledged. 
 Their competition with each other to obtain from him 
 means of livelihood must compel them to give up to hin> 
 all their earnings, save the necessary wages of slavery to- 
 wit, enough to keep them in working condition and 
 maintain their numbers. And as no possible increase in 
 the power of his labour, or reduction in his expenses 
 of living, can benefit the slave, neither can it, where 
 land is monopolized, benefit those who have nothing 
 but their labour. It can only increase the value of 
 
 i 
 
130 PUBLIC OWNERSHIP OF LAND. 
 
 land the proportion of the produce that goes to the 
 landowner.' 7 
 
 Here we have a most distinct point of contact between 
 Mr. George and Carlyle, and also with Mr. Ruskin, 
 whose illustration of the peasants on the inundated land 
 will be fresh in the reader's recollection. But we saw 
 that whilst Carlyle and Ruskin perceived the phenomena 
 which, under varying conditions, are incidental to private 
 landlordism they stopped short of suggesting any more 
 practical remedy than that landlords should rise to a 
 higher conception of personal duty. The result of Mr. 
 George's investigations, on the other hand, is to prove 
 that '''nothing short of making land common property 
 can give permanent relief, and check the tendency of 
 wages to starvation point." 
 
 This is the " first great reform " the reform which 
 would niake all other reform easier, and without which 
 all other reform must be relatively ineffective. 
 
 To secure to all citizens their equal right to the land 
 on which they live, does not, of course, mean, as some 
 of the ignorant suppose, that every one must be given a 
 farm, and that city land must be cut up into little pieces. 
 Among a highly civilized and rapidly-growing population, 
 with changing centres, with great cities and minute 
 division of industry, and a complex system of production 
 and exchange, such rude devices become ineffective 
 .and impossible. Must we therefore consent to inequality 
 must we therefore consent that some shall monopolize 
 what is the common heritage of all ? Not so. If two 
 men find a diamond they do not go to a lapidary to have 
 it cut in two. If three sons inherit a ship they do not 
 proceed to saw her into three pieces ; nor do they agree 
 
TAXATION OF GROUND RENTS. 131 
 
 that if this cannot be done equal division is impossible. 
 And so it is not necessary in order to secure equal rights 
 to land to make an equal division of land. All that 
 is necessary to do is to collect rent for the common 
 benefit. 
 
 What the effect of this would be we are now told. 
 " To appropriate ground rent to public uses by means 
 of taxation would permit the abolition of all the taxation 
 which now presses so heavily upon labour and capital. 
 This would enormously increase the production of wealth 
 by the removal of restrictions and by adding to the 
 incentives to production. It would at the same time 
 enormously increase the production of wealth by throwing 
 open natural opportunities. It would utterly destroy land 
 monopoly by making the holding of land unprofitable to 
 any but the user. There would be no temptation to any 
 one to hold land in expectation of a future increase in 
 its value, when that increase was certain to be demanded 
 in taxes. No one could afford to hold valuable land idle 
 when the taxes upon it would be as heavy as they would 
 be were it put to the fullest use. Land not in use would 
 become free to those who wished to use it." 
 
 I have already almost reached the limits of the space 
 I proposed to assign to Mr. George in this work. But 
 the passages in which Mr. George argues that his pro- 
 posed method of taxation -would be "natural taxation" 
 are so unique so full of instruction and so indicative of 
 the way in which Mr. George tries to ground his teaching 
 on first principles that I cannot refrain from quoting 
 them : 
 
 "It is no mere fiscal reform that is now proposed ; it is 
 a conforming of the most important social adjustments to 
 
132 SOCIETARY DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 natural laws. To those who have never given thought to 
 the matter, it may seem irreverently presumptuous to say 
 that it is the evident intent of the Creator that land values 
 should be the subject of taxation ; that rent should be 
 utilized for the benefit of the entire community. Yet, to 
 whoever does think of it, to say this will appear no more 
 presumptuous than to say that the Creator has intended 
 men to walk on their feet and not on their hands. Man, 
 in his social relations, is as much included in the creative 
 scheme as man in his physical relations. Just as certainly 
 as the fish was intended to swim in the water, and the 
 bird to fly through the air, and the monkey to live in trees, 
 and the mole to burrow underground, was man intended 
 to live with his fellows. He is by nature a social animal. 
 And the creative scheme must embrace the life and de- 
 velopment of society as truly as it embraces the life and 
 development of the individual. Our civilization cannot 
 carry us beyond the domain of law. Railways, telegraphs, 
 and labour-saving machinery are no more accidents than 
 are flowers and trees. 
 
 " Man is driven by his instincts and needs to form 
 society. Society, thus formed, has certain needs and 
 functions for which revenue is required. These needs 
 and functions increase with social development, requiring 
 a larger and larger revenue. Now, experience and analogy, 
 if not the instinctive perceptions, of the human mind teach 
 us that there is a natural way of satisfying every natural 
 want. And if human society is included in nature, as it 
 surely is, this must apply to social wants as well as to the 
 wants of the individual, and there must be a natural and 
 right method of taxation, as there is a natural or right 
 method of walking. 
 
A "NATURAL" SYSTEM OF TAXATION. 133 
 
 "We know, beyond doubt, that the natural or right 
 way for a man to walk is on his feet, and not on his 
 hands. We know this of a surety because the feet are 
 adapted to walk, while the hands are not ; because in 
 walking on the feet all the other organs of the body are 
 free to perform their proper functions, while in walking 
 on the hands they are not ; because a man can walk on 
 his feet with ease, convenience, and celerity, while no 
 amount of training will enable him to walk on his hands 
 save awkwardly, slowly, and painfully. In the same way 
 we may know that the natural or right way of raising the 
 revenues which are required by the needs of society is 
 by the taxation of land values. The value of land is in 
 its nature and relations adapted to purposes of taxation, 
 just as the feet in their nature are adapted to the purposes 
 of walking. The value of land only arises as in the 
 integration of society the need for some public or common 
 revenue begins to be felt. It increases as the develop- 
 mentof society goes on, and as largerand larger revenues are 
 therefore required. Taxation upon land values does not 
 lessen the individual incentive to production and accumu- 
 lation, as do other methods of taxation ; on the contrary, 
 it leaves perfect freedom to productive forces, and 
 prevents restrictions upon production from arising. It 
 does not foster monopolies and cause unjust inequalities 
 in the distribution of wealth as do other taxes; on the 
 contrary, it has the effect of breaking down monopoly 
 and equalizing the distribution of wealth. It can be 
 collected with greater certainty and economy than any 
 other tax ; it does not beget the evasion, corruption, and 
 dishonesty that flow from other taxes. In short, it con- 
 forms to every economic and moral requirement. What 
 
134 A QUESTION OF JUSTICE. 
 
 can be more in accordance with justice than that the 
 value of land, which is not created by individual effort, 
 but arises from the existence and growth of society, 
 should be taken by society for social needs ? " 
 
 Such is, in substance, Mr. George's teaching as an apostle 
 of the New Political Economy. As regards his modus 
 operandi of dealing with the land question, the disciples 
 of the New Political Economy may, or may not, be 
 generally agreed. But that he is right in putting the land 
 question first must now, I think, be most evident. And 
 even as regards the modus operandi^ if the spirit of justice 
 prevailed in society, we should not need to strive long 
 for some practicable way, once that in common with 
 Carlyle, Ruskin, and Henry George we accepted the 
 doctrine of the natural right of every man to a place in 
 the planet whereinto he is born. 
 
CHAPTER XX. 
 
 EVOLUTIONARY METHODS OF PROGRESS,- 
 
 Toward the final triumph 
 
 Of right a step we take 
 The twisted chain of error, u 
 
 Link after link we break. 
 
 What if we miss the harvest ? 
 
 'Tis ours to sow 7 the seed ; 
 'Tis not the prize which honours, 
 
 Tis doing of the deed. 
 
 W. C. WOOD. 
 
 R. HENRY GEORGE has well said that the great 
 work of the present, for every man and every 
 organization of men seeking to improve social 
 conditions, is the work of education the propagation 
 of ideas. It is only as it furthers this that anything 
 else can avail. " In this work everyone who can think 
 must aid first by forming clear ideas himself and then 
 by endeavouring to arouse the thought of those with 
 whom he comes into contact." Personally, I know 
 of nothing better fitted to make men think to aid 
 them in forming clear ideas, and to ipspire them 
 with the desire to arouse the thought of those with 
 whom they come into contact than a study of political 
 and social problems, with such assistance as Henry 
 
136 INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM. 
 
 George, in common with Carlyle and Ruskin, can 
 render. 
 
 I have now given such an exposition of the teachings 
 of these men as may, I hope, be of practical value. If it 
 should impel any of my readers to continue the study 
 for themselves in such directions and upon such lines as 
 I have indicated, I shall be well repaid. 
 
 Let me, in drawing to a close, ask attention to the 
 fact that in all I have said as to Carlyle, Ruskin, and 
 Henry George, it is obvious that the organization of 
 society according to an affection has been their heart's 
 desire. The standard they raise is the standard of duty. 
 They demand of us, as Christ did of the young man 
 who had great possessions, that we shall forsake all 
 and follow this standard that we shall lose our life 
 in order that we may gain it. Revolutionary though 
 their proposals might be in their ultimate achievement, 
 the method pursued, if their teachings be followed, must 
 of necessity be the evolutionary method, for the simple 
 reason that it is organization according to an affection at 
 which they aim. It is true that in proportion as we secure 
 .our organization according to an affection, we must strive 
 to have also our organization according to an idea. The 
 affection gives birth to the idea, and the idea seeks to be 
 carried into practice. The net result may be the most 
 remarkable changes of view as to the rights of individuals 
 and governments respectively as to land and capital. But 
 and this is a point which cannot be too often reiterated 
 so far as the wisdom and safety of our aims and 
 methods are concerned, everything will depend upon how 
 far love of man, and not of self, is dominant on how far 
 it is organization according to an affection that is striven 
 
SOCIAL CO-OPERATION. 137 
 
 for. " As man is so constituted," says Mr. George, 
 " that it is utterly impossible for him to attain happiness 
 save by seeking the happiness of others, so does it seem 
 to be of the nature of things that individuals and classes 
 can only obtain their just rights by struggling for the 
 rights of others. ... It is round the standard of duty 
 rather than round the standard of self-interest that men 
 must rally to win the rights of man. Herein may we see 
 the deep philosophy of Him who bid men love their 
 neighbours as themselves." 
 
 Another great merit of Carlyle, Ruskin, and Henry 
 George lies in the judicial way in which they recognize 
 the respective and reciprocal provinces of Individualism 
 on the one hand, and of State control on the other. 
 This is a quality only second in importance to the fine 
 spirit of affection by which they are inspired. They have, 
 indeed, in this matter struck the happy mean of sobriety 
 . and reason. What but the highest perfection of the 
 individual of every individual do they seek ? And 
 who have more powerfully pleaded for that measure of 
 liberty on which individual perfection depends ? But to 
 the conception of individual freedom to do right they add 
 the individual obligation to co-operate with society for the 
 general good. They clearly see that social progress makes 
 the well-being of each more and more the business of 
 all, and, contrariwise, the well-being of all more and more 
 the business of each, so that all may be bound closer and 
 closer together, not in bonds of tyranny, but of affection, 
 bonds like the bonds of heaven, which are the signs of 
 true liberty, and the accompaniments of fullest life. 
 They teach in short that it is the duty of the individual 
 to be not merely parent, brother, or citizen, but these and 
 
138 THE PAN-ANGLICAN SYNOD COMMITTEE. 
 
 something more a societary man. As Mr. George says, 
 " He who observes the law and the proprieties, and cares 
 for his family, yet takes no interest in the general weal, 
 and gives no thought to those who are trodden under 
 foot, save now and then to bestow alms, is not a true 
 Christian. Nor is he even a good citizen." 
 
 More than this I need* not say to emphasize my opinion 
 as to the claims of the leaders in the New Political 
 Economy to attention, and to commend the spirit as well 
 as the letter of their teaching. 
 
 I have spoken of the recognition on the part of the 
 Pan-Anglican Synod of the gravity of the social and 
 economic problems that are before us. I have shown 
 how this gravity is intensified because of the want of a 
 true science of political economy and because of the 
 extent to which many leaders in social and philanthropic 
 movements are, metaphorically speaking, in the dark on 
 these questions. I have pointed to an address of the 
 Archbishop of York by way of illustration. I have 
 stated that in my opinion light must be sought in the 
 direction in which it was sought by the Synod that in 
 the conception of Socialism in the conception of the 
 unity for better or worse of society we have the true 
 basis from which to proceed in our inquiry. I have 
 spoken of certain teachers who, being imbued with a love 
 of man and a philosophic and scientific perception of the 
 homogeneity of the human family, have been able to 
 throw much valuable light on social and economic 
 questions, and to instruct us as to the line of evolution 
 that must be followed. I have given indications of 
 necessity mere indications of what practical proposals 
 these teachers make. I have pleaded for special consi- 
 
WHAT THE COMMITTEE REPORTED. 139 
 
 deration to be extended to these proposals because of 
 my confidence in the spirit of affection by which they are 
 prompted. 
 
 Possibly the reader may think it an omission on my 
 part that whilst I have said so much from first to last 
 about the Pan-Anglican Synod and its committee on 
 Socialism, I have not stated what practical proposals the 
 committee itself made. I have had the subject in mind. 
 Probably it is here that a few extracts from the committee's 
 report may best be introduced : 
 
 " The committee do not doubt that Government can 
 do much to protect the class known as proletarians from 
 the evil effects of unchecked competition. The English 
 poor-law has long ago provided the bare necessaries of 
 life for those who cannot otherwise obtain them ; the 
 institution of State Savings Banks has provided for the 
 poor man a safe investment and a moderate return for 
 his savings. Acts of Parliament have required the 
 builders and owners of houses to have regard for the 
 health and comfort of their tenants, while the factory 
 legislation of this country has effectually protected those 
 labourers who cannot protect themselves. The com- 
 mittee believe, further, that the State may justly and 
 safely extend this protective action in several directions. 
 It may legalize the formation of boards of arbitration, 
 to avert the disastrous effects of strikes. It may 
 assist in the formation and maintenance of technical 
 schools. It may see that powers, already existing, under 
 Sanitary Acts, are more effectually exercised. It may 
 facilitate the acquisition by Municipalities of town lands. 
 The State may even encourage a wider distribution of 
 property by the abolition of entail, where it exists ; and it 
 
HO IMPORTANCE OF SELF-HELP. 
 
 may be questioned whether the system of taxation might 
 not be varied in a sense more favourable to the claims of 
 labourers than that which is now in operation. 
 
 " But, after all, the best help is self-help. More even 
 than increase of income, and security of deposit, thrift 
 and self-restraint are the necessary elements of material 
 prosperity. And in encouraging and strengthening such 
 habits and feelings the Church's work is invaluable. By 
 requiring some knowledge of economic science from her 
 candidates for holy orders ; by forming and fostering institu- 
 tions for the provision of practical education and rational 
 recreation : by establishing penny banks and workmen's 
 guilds ; above all, by inducing capitalists to admit their 
 workmen to profit-sharing, and by teaching artizans how 
 to make co-operative production successful, she may do 
 much to diminish discontent, and to increase the feeling 
 of brotherly interest between class and class. The clergy 
 may enter into friendly relations with Socialists, attending 
 when possible their club meetings, and trying to under- 
 stand their aims and methods. At the same time it will 
 contribute no little to draw together the various classes 
 of society if the clergy endeavour in sermons and 
 lectures, to set forth the true principles of society, 
 showing how property is a trust to be administered for 
 the good of humanity, and how much of what is good 
 and true in Socialism is to be found in the precepts of 
 Christ. 
 
 " The call to aid the weak, through works of what is 
 ordinarily known as charity, has been, at all times, faithfully 
 pressed by the Church of Christ, and has been met by a 
 noble response, which has been the chief strength of works 
 of beneficence in modern society. But the matter is one 
 
DOC TKINES OF S FOLIA 77 ON. 141 
 
 not merely of charity, but of social and Christian duty. 
 It is in this light that the Church has to proclaim it in 
 these critical days, with some special boldness and 
 earnestness. At the same time a word of warning 
 should not be wanting. Mutual suspicion and the 
 imputation of selfish and unworthy motives keep apart 
 those who have, in fact, a common aim. Intestine strife 
 and doctrines of spoliation destroy confidence, arrest trade, 
 and will but increase misery." 
 
 Such are the recommendations of the committee. I 
 fancy that if Carlyle, Ruskin, and Henry George could 
 have been present at the deliberations of these fathers of 
 the Church they would have found themselves in a 
 very genial and sympathetic company a company of 
 Socialists in every wise and every Christian sense. 
 
 The recommendations may appear to some of us 
 rather timid. The committee apologetically express the 
 belief that in the present condition of thought and 
 knowledge they could not wisely or profitably go further 
 than they have done in the way of detailed suggestion. 
 I quite agree with them. Having regard to their 
 representative character and to their prime object of 
 making practical proposals, and not simply promoting 
 discussion, they could not have gone 1 further. We, who 
 do not labour under the same limitation, may rightly 
 speak with greater freedom. At the same time let us 
 not ignore or deprecate such advances as these. In their 
 own way, as truly as Carlyle, Ruskin, or Henry George, or 
 any of ourselves, this committee have gripped hold of the 
 truth that the power of society to progress is governed 
 by the condition, good or bad, of the individual, and that 
 the power of the individual to progress is governed by 
 
142 THE GOSPEL OF SELFISHNESS. 
 
 the condition, good or bad, of society. In every respect 
 their proposals are opposed to the gospel of selfishness 
 which declares that the saving word for society is that 
 each shall mind his own business shall be free to exert 
 his powers to the full for his own advantage, the only limit 
 being the limit of the capacity of other men to protect 
 their interests when assailed by him. Their report is a 
 sign of the times. 
 
CHAPTER XXL 
 
 UTOPIAN IDEALS CONCLUSION. 
 
 " Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, and instead of 
 the briar shall come up the myrtle tree. And they shall build houses 
 and inhabit them ; and they shall plant vineyards and eat the fruit 
 of them. They shall not build and another inhabit ; they shall not 
 plant and another eat." Isaiah. 
 
 C^ 
 
 fHAVE now virtually completed the very limited 
 task which I assigned to myself when I undertook 
 this work. 
 
 Even as I close this to me pleasant labour, thoughts 
 arise in my mind of the objections which these teachings 
 must encounter, not merely in respect to points of detail, 
 but of principle. I shall not yield to the temptation to 
 enlarge the scope of my work by attempting to meet 
 such objections at length. On one or two points only 
 will I offer a few general observations. 
 
 First of all, I suppose that I shall be told that it is the 
 sheerest absurdity on my part, and on the part of the 
 school whose views I have sought to represent, to write 
 as though there were any justification for calling in question 
 the reality of the so-called progress of the age. I do not, 
 in the absolute sense, deny that we are making progress. 
 We are progressing as the children of Israel progressed 
 when they left Egypt on their long wandering to the 
 
144 THE COMPLEXITY OF CIVILIZATION. 
 
 Promised Land. We have passed from the complete 
 bondage in which the faculties and the hopes of men 
 were held under the teachings of the Old Economy. 
 But in our forward march we have but entered on the 
 desert part of the journey. The thunders of another 
 Sinai have yet to sound and a New Dispensation to be 
 established. 
 
 I have endeavoured, with the aid of the best priests 
 and prophets of our age, to foreshadow the character of 
 those social arrangements which will prevail in the New 
 Age ; even more have I endeavoured to indicate the 
 spirit which must of necessity prevail in society if those 
 arrangements are speedily to find acceptance and to be 
 fruitful of good results. 
 
 It is commonly urged against such arrangements that 
 they would institute complexity, that in practice they 
 could not possibly be workable. It is strange that men 
 in these days should talk of new proposals as in essence 
 objectionable because they are complex. What could be 
 more complex than society as we know it even now ? We 
 have complexity already. The choice to-day is not 
 between simplicity in the Individualist sense and com- 
 plexity in the Socialist sense. It is simply a choice 
 between the complexity of order and the complexity of 
 disorder. Our duty is to advance as far as possible 
 the complexity of order the complexity which signifies 
 the perfection of co-operation the wide distribution and 
 subdivision of duties and of labours by which a maximum 
 of common advantage is secured. 
 
 Shall we speak of complexity as in itself an evil ? 
 What so " simple " as a sun-dial ? What so " complex " 
 as a chronometer watch ? But which is the product of 
 
THE SIMPLICITY OF SA VAGERY. 145 
 
 the higher intelligence? And which is the greater in 
 human serviceableness ? The sun-dial is so " simple " in 
 construction that a schoolboy could make one ; for the 
 making of the chronometer watch we require the finest 
 training of head and hand. But the sun-dial will not 
 serve for every day in the year ; it will not serve even for 
 every hour in the day. It is of use only in fine weather. 
 The chronometer watch, on the other hand, will at all 
 times avail us. Be it dark or light, tempestuous or calm, 
 it will tell the hour, the minute, and the second. 
 
 What our opponents would institute is a state of society 
 which the sun-dial at best would typify ; we strive for a 
 social organization which the chronometer watch might 
 symbolize. Hereby we hope to develop the highest 
 measure of human serviceableness. 
 
 The " complexity," which the New Political Economy 
 would institute will, when morally and spiritually re- 
 garded, be seen to be the highest simplicity. In a merely 
 natural and literal sense, there are no arrangements so 
 " simple," so free from " complexity," as those of a 
 savage people ; in the nature of things complexity distin- 
 guishes the arrangements of civilized communities. The 
 test of the worth of any system of civilization is the 
 smooth working of the complex arrangements whereby 
 the common good is secured. 
 
 Mr. Stead, in his powerful contribution, in " Letters 
 from the Vatican," to the discussion of the question of 
 the relations of the Pope to modern social progress, tells 
 an impressive story of an incident which occurred as he 
 was on his way to Rome. " Hurrying southward along 
 the line that leads from Pisa to Rome, the train was 
 suddenly drawn up with a jerk that threw us from our 
 
 K 
 
146 A GRIM PICTURE. 
 
 seats. As we rushed to the windows the bitter wail of a 
 woman's voice rang horribly through the silent night. 
 A moment more, and we could see her pacing backwards 
 and forwards, wringing her hands, and crying aloud in 
 the very frenzy of passionate despair. We were at a level 
 crossing. Her husband, who was trying to lead his horse 
 and cart across the line, had been run over. The horse 
 without its master stood motionless as a statue in the 
 shade, gazing stolidly at the train that lay across its path. 
 It was black night ; in the neighbouring houses we could 
 see the lighted windows, and not a quarter of a mile off 
 we could discern dimly the dark outline of a village 
 through the trees. The only sound was that woman's 
 cry of agony. After a pause the search commenced. 
 The body of the unfortunate man was found under the 
 carriages at the rear of the train. When he was extricated 
 he was breathing. Blood was streaming from a great 
 wound on his brow, and although but barely conscious, 
 he did not appear to have suffered any mutilation. They 
 were going to lay the poor wretch on .the ground, when 
 an old English resident in Italy, who happened to be in 
 the train, interfered, and succeeded in getting him placed 
 on a truckle bed in the wayside cabin. But there our 
 resources seemed to disappear. The woman wailed on. 
 A group of curious passengers gathered round the 
 wounded man, who might at any moment breathe his 
 last. A couple of priests hurried up, ready to administer 
 consolation to .the dying. But of intelligent, practical, 
 
 helpful human service there was next to none 
 
 There was a general jabbering and gesticulating. Then 
 we all took our seats, and the train moved on, leaving the 
 poor bleeding wretch to his fate. Whether he recovered 
 
THE NEED OF INTELLIGENT DIRECTION. 147 
 
 or whether he succumbed to his injuries no one knew. 
 As we slowly steamed away the woman was still wringing 
 her hands and the masterless horse still stood motionless 
 in the roadway. A moment more and they were left 
 behind in the black and silent night." 
 
 There was amongst these passengers no lack of kindly 
 sentimental sympathy, but they were utterly at a loss how 
 to give it effect. There was no one to take the lead, to 
 initiate, to direct. 
 
 Mr. Stead tells us that the more he thought of that 
 sombre scene the more did it appear to be a grimly 
 faithful illustration of our present social state. " Down 
 beneath the wheels of our industrial civilization, bruised 
 and bleeding, but still conscious, lies the luckless prole- 
 taire. The bitter cry of his helpless women folk pierces the 
 silence, but no one knows what to do, or how to help. 
 Spiritual consolation is not wanting in case he were to die, 
 but of intelligent effective assistance to enable him to 
 live there is next to none. We stand and chatter and 
 express unavailing sympathy for a time and then we 
 hurry on, leaving him to his fate." This, thinks Mr. 
 Stead, is because of want of direction, the absence of 
 intelligent understanding of what ought to be done and 
 how to do it. 
 
 Even so. And shall we in our effort to determine 
 " what ought to be done and how to do it " be retarded 
 by warnings of the danger of imparting " complexity " to 
 our social arrangements ! Shall we leave the luckless 
 proletaire to lie bleeding whilst we maintain the sweet 
 simplicity of arrangements which render us powerless to 
 help ? Surely not. 
 
 I repeat that I have endeavoured to foreshadow the 
 
1 48 THE HIGHER CONSCIENCE. 
 
 character of those social arrangements which the growing 
 demands of the age require. But I have endeavoured 
 even more to indicate the spirit which must of necessity 
 prevail in society if those arrangements are to find accep- 
 tance and to be fruitful of good results. "We have 
 made," says Mr. George, " and still are making, enormous 
 advance on material lines. It is necessary that we 
 commensurately advance on moral lines." But for this 
 we must have finer motives and higher ideals. " Civiliza- 
 tion, as it progresses, requires a higher conscience, a 
 keener sense of justice, a warmer brotherhood, a wider, 
 loftier, truer, public spirit. Failing these, civilization 
 must pass to destruction. It cannot be maintained on 
 the ethics of savagery. Civilization knits men more and 
 more closely together, and constantly tends to subor- 
 dinate the individual to the whole, and to make more 
 and more complex and important social conditions." 
 
 Requires a higher conscience, a warmer brotherhood ! 
 Of this every intelligent reader must be profoundly con- 
 vinced. Happily, of the growth of this higher conscience, 
 of this warmer brotherhood, there are not wanting cheer- 
 ing signs. Already this higher conscience, this warmer 
 brotherhood, are coming into contact with orthodox 
 and almost effete conditions of society. It may be 
 that in due time they will cause widespread ecclesi- 
 astical, political, and economical disorganization. I have, 
 however, entire faith in the future. When mankind 
 shall have become sufficiently leavened by the new 
 Gospel of Humanity new, and yet how old ! it will, as 
 Henry James declares, compel society to lift all her 
 members out of abject and shameful want, in which so 
 many now grovel, by ensuring to all, without distinction, 
 
THE TRUE BASIS OF HUMAN WORTH. 149 
 
 a comfortable physical subsistence or a supply of absolute 
 physical necessities, so permitting men for the^first time 
 to draw a veritably free and human breath. 
 
 We have not yet attained our true human conscious- 
 ness. Individuals here and there have dimly discerned 
 the divine seed in them, but the mass of mankind have 
 been sadly destitute of spiritual quickening. Amidst all 
 God's overwhelming bounties they have nourished only 
 the furtive courage of mice, their care has been for the 
 things of the morrow. Under the kindling sunshine of 
 truth they have contentedly maintained the darkened in- 
 telligence of owls and bats. Christians they may in 
 many cases have called themselves. But little have those 
 who have named the name of Christ reflected on what 
 the Founder of their Faith meant when He asked, " How 
 can man love God, whom he hath not seen, when he 
 loveth not his brother, whom he hath seen ? " 
 
 But as I have indicated, larger views of human and 
 societary relationships are beginning to be felt. To use 
 Mr. James's words " More and more will man learn to 
 recognize all men as his brethren and equals, and grow 
 ashamed of loving his father and mother, his neighbour 
 and fellow-countryman with a love superior to that which 
 he accords to all other men. He will learn to love his 
 kindred and neighbours no longer for their relative or 
 negative worth, but only for their positive or human 
 worth ; no longer for what is their own in them, and 
 therefore separates them from the rest of mankind, but 
 only for what is God's in them, and therefore unites them 
 with all other men, esteeming those his dearest friends 
 and neighbours who most relate him, or bring him 
 nighest to universal man." 
 
ISO SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST. 
 
 Not in this our day and generation ; not, it may be, for 
 many days and generations will the glorious consummation 
 of which these words are the prophecy be reached. And 
 not to us will be the fruits of victory. On us devolves 
 the burden of the strife. 
 
 It may for this reason be tauntingly said of us that we 
 pursue merely imaginary objects that we are not prac- 
 tical men. Views such as these, we shall be told, will be 
 all very well in the millennium, in some Utopian age. But 
 we shall be warned that taking things as they are, taking 
 the world as we find it, we had better make up our minds 
 to accept the doctrines of the each-for-himself-and-the- 
 devil-take-the-hindmost school, since otherwise we shall 
 inevitably have to suffer from, and perhaps be extinguished 
 by, the pressure of the brute forces around us. 
 
 For my own part, I have at no time feared that in the 
 struggle for existence amongst the members of the human 
 family it is with the brute forces that the triumph will lie. 
 I believe not less than the most individualist of the 
 Individualists or the most materialist of the Materialists 
 in the doctrine of the survival of the fittest. But in this 
 strife of humanity intellect is already almost universally 
 being seen to be more powerful than brute force ; affec- 
 tion will yet be seen to be greater than all. The fittest 
 will, indeed, survive. 
 
 Ere we speak of the law on which the Individualist 
 and the Materialist lay such stress, as though it set up a 
 barrier, as it were, against us, let us clearly determine 
 what the fittest is. Brute force may triumph for a time. 
 Even Christ was crucified. But whilst those who laid 
 their hands upon Him are to-day a by-word and a 
 reproach amongst men, the doctrines which Christ lived 
 
MISSION OF THE NEW ECONOMY. 151 
 
 to teach are an ever-growing power in the world. Though 
 brute force seemed victorious when Christ was nailed to 
 the cross, the law of the survival of the fittest was neither 
 suspended nor contradicted. It merely commenced to 
 operate yet more powerfully on the higher plains of 
 intellect and of affection. 
 
 As to the millennium why should we be retarded 
 from present effort because our views are said to be mil- 
 lennialare said to be Utopian? What is the millennium ? 
 Or, rather, what would it be? It would be a state of 
 things in which human society would be brought into 
 order. Is this a desirable, or an undesirable, object ? 
 Clearly, it is a desirable object. Granting this, it is our 
 duty to labour, however imperfectly, to attain it. But 
 such labour necessarily implies human co-operation with 
 Divine forces. And for such co-operation we need first 
 of all clear ideas of what order in human society would 
 be clear ideas as to the true source and the right direc- 
 tion of healthful human progress. To help to disseminate 
 such ideas is the primary mission of the New Political 
 Economy. 
 
 This charge of trying to anticipate the millennium, of 
 being Utopian, is a charge which the reformer has often 
 to encounter, but there is no charge which he should 
 more strenuously deprecate. Mr. Ruskin well declares 
 that one of the most fatal sources of the misery and crime 
 from which the world suffers, is the assumption that 
 because things have long been wrong it is impossible 
 they should ever be right. " Whenever you hear a man 
 dissuading you from attempting to do well, on the 
 ground that perfection is ' Utopian,' beware of that man. 
 Things are either possible or impossible you can easily 
 
152 CONCLUSION. 
 
 determine which in any given state of human science. 
 If the thing is impossible, you need not trouble yoursel: 
 about it; if it is possible, try for it. It is Utopian tc 
 
 hope for the entire doing away of drunkenness, 
 
 but the Utopianism is not our business, the work is 
 It is Utopian to hope to give every child in the kingdon 
 a knowledge of God from its youth, but the Utopianisn 
 is not our business, the work is." 
 
 Truer words than these were never penned. In show 
 ing to men the need for millennial, for Utopian effort, an c 
 in showing them how best such effort can be directed, 
 may the apostles of the New Political Economy be eve 
 diligent. 
 
 ROBERT R. SUTHERLAND, PRINTER, EDINBURGH. 
 
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