The Harvest of Ruskin

“Taking it for granted that a more equal distribution of wealth is to be desired, how far would this justify changes in the institution of property, or limitations of free enterprise, even when they would be likely to diminish the aggregate of wealth? In other words, how far should an increase in the income of the poorer classes and a diminution of their work be aimed at, even if it involved some lessening of national material wealth? How far could this be done without injustice, and without slackening the energies of the leaders of progress? How ought the burdens of taxation to be distributed among the different classes of society?”

“Ought we to rest content with the existing forms of division of labour? Is it necessary that large numbers of the people should be exclusively occupied with work that has no elevating character? Is it possible to educate gradually among the great mass of workers a new capacity for the higher kinds of work, and in particular for undertaking co-operatively the management of the businesses in which they are themselves employed?”

“What are the proper relations of individual and collective action in a stage of civilization such as ours? How far ought voluntary association in its various forms, old and new, to be left to supply collective action for those purposes for which such action has special advantages? What business affairs should be undertaken by society itself acting through the Government, imperial or local? Have we, for instance, carried as far as we should the plan of collective ownership and use of open spaces, or works of art, of the means of instruction and amusement, as well as of those material requisites of a civilized life, the supply of which requires united action, such as gas and water and railways?”

“When Government does not itself directly intervene, how far should it allow individuals and corporations to conduct their own affairs as they please? How far should it regulate the management of railways and other concerns which are to some extent in a position of monopoly, and again, of land and other things the quantity of which cannot be increased by man? Is it necessary to retain in their full force all the existing rights of property, or have the original necessities for which they were meant to provide, in some measure passed away?”

“Are the prevailing methods of using wealth entirely justifiable? What scope is there for the moral pressure of social opinion in constraining and directing individual action in those economic relations in which the rigidity and violence of Government interference would be likely to do more harm than good?

“In what respect do the duties of one nation to another in economic matters differ from those of members of the same nation to one another?”

In fact, we have to deal with the problems of Socialism, of Co-operation, of Municipal action, of Luxury and of Trade Wars. He might have added Pauperism and Old Age Pensions, Standard Wages and Hours, and Nationalization of various kinds of property. There is a strong and audible echo of Ruskin’s aims about these practical problems; and one does not yet see why we cannot make room in our own minds both for economic science and the Ruskinian Economy to which these issues belong.

There are passages, too, in Mill, which Ruskin himself might have written, which look beyond Production and Distribution to the larger needs and joys of man. He is considering the stationary state of capital and wealth, when economic progress has ceased, when people are not always growing more numerous and more wealthy, a state dreaded by the older economists, and ever to be held at arm’s length. But Mill says he thinks it would be better than our present condition. “I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on, that the trampling, crushing, elbowing and treading on each other’s heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of humankind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress. The northern and middle states of America are a specimen of this stage of civilization in very favourable circumstances, having apparently got rid of all social injustices and inequalities, that affect persons of Caucasian race and of the male sex, while the proportion of population to capital and land is such as to ensure abundance to every able-bodied member of the community who does not forfeit it by misconduct. They have the six points of Chartism, and they have no poverty; and all that these advantages do for them is that the life of the whole of one sex is devoted to dollar-hunting, and of the other to breeding dollar-hunters. The best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.”58

That is Ruskin without the eloquence; that is his advice to stay in the station in which we have been placed, and not be always trying to get out of it. A little more from Mill:

“I know not why it should be matter of congratulation that persons who are already richer than any one needs to be, should have doubled their means of consuming things which give little or no pleasure except as representative of wealth, or that numbers should pass over, every year, from the middle classes into a richer class, or from the class of the occupied rich to that of the unoccupied.”

This reminds one of the well-known passage where Ruskin speaks of those who try “to advance in life without knowing what life means, who mean only that they are to get more horses and more footmen and more fortune and more public honours and – not more personal soul.”59

As some injustice has been done to Mill, particularly by us the pupils and friends of his eloquent antagonist, I will quote a little more from him to show that though the laws of Nature were represented by him as hard, he was himself as Ruskinian as any of us. He suggests a limitation of the right of bequest, so that no one should receive by gift or inheritance more than a moderate independence, so that there might be “a well paid and affluent body of labourers; no enormous fortunes, except what were earned and accumulated during a single lifetime; but a much larger body sufficiently at leisure to cultivate freely the graces of life.” Just so does Ruskin tell us that a man who dies rich dies disgraced. Mill proceeds to express his dread of greater density of population, because it crowds out solitude, so needful for depth of character, and takes away wild natural beauty. The whole passage might have come from Brantwood.

As to machinery, Mill goes on in the very spirit of Fors Clavigera: “Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make large fortunes.” I am afraid that with posterity John Stuart Mill may suffer in reputation from being the object of so much invective, embedded in peerless English, and written under a mighty spirit of prophesying. Fors Clavigera and Unto This Last will be read much longer than Mill’s Principles, and future ages may describe him as a cold-blooded Philistine, when really he was among the best and wisest of men. Certain Stoics and Epicureans, of whom all we know is that they encountered Paul, have hardly had justice from the ordinary English reader of the Acts. Mill obtained the verdict of contemporaries: but the future is the charmer’s.

In some ways these two protagonists, both of them among the princes of our race, were strangely alike in their history. Mill, born in 1806, was the elder by thirteen years. Both children were extraordinarily precocious, Mill with his Greek at two, Ruskin with his pencil and his poetry at seven. At sixteen Mill was writing in The Traveller in defence of his father and of Ricardo. From eighteen to twenty he contributed to the Westminster Review and other journals articles on the Game Laws, the Corn Laws, the Law of Libel and on a Paper Currency, and reviews of books on Economics. At this age Ruskin’s poetry was appearing in Friendship’s Garland, and at twenty-four he came out with the first volume of Modern Painters, with a fully developed style made in heaven, and an originality in his art criticism which made him a public man at once. Each of them, after a long and famous literary life, gave the world an autobiography it would not willingly lose.

They were both only sons, brought up with unusual solicitude, close parental control and remarkably severe if loving discipline. Their attachment to and regard for their parents was a great power with both, all their lives. The gravity, earnestness, and deep sense of responsibility taught in childhood never left either of them.

Both passed through the fires which try faith; and there are reasons for believing in both cases that what might have been a happy marriage was frustrated by want of conventional orthodoxy. So that they both suffered for the cause of truth in the hardest of all ways. Each of them had only six or seven years of married life, and neither left any children.

Strangely enough, also, Mill was forty-one when his Principles of Political Economy was written, and Ruskin at forty-one brought out his papers in the Cornhill, under the title of Unto This Last, which are his counterblast to Mill.

Each of them found it necessary in later life to recant some of their earlier teaching, and each faithfully did so. Mill gave up the Wages Fund Theory he had learnt from his father, and Ruskin scatters the later editions of his earlier works with notes denouncing the dogmatic evangelicalism which runs through them, which he had learnt from his mother.

So, in tragic conflict, these two men are before us. Not that Mill ever replied. He died in 1872, and during his lifetime he could afford to ignore the eccentricities of an unstable genius, at whom all sober people smiled in pity. But now I would fain even for Mill’s sake reconcile them. You have true tragedy, not when right meets wrong, the noble the ignoble, but when two principles, both noble, are brought into a conflict they cannot avoid – Mill, the Liberal, the rationalist, with his watchwords of equality, liberty and a free chance for all – and Ruskin the Conservative, the indignant enemy of mechanical progress, speaking ever of order and obedience, reverence and graded ranks: – Mill, a servant of present humanity, with but a faint critical hold on the Unseen; Ruskin, emotional and inspired, who not seldom would fain call down fire from heaven on Mill’s newly enfranchised citizens, because they blasphemed.

So that I conclude that scholastic Economics is a reliable, useful scientific enquiry, forming a basis for the very same practical aims which Ruskin has set us striving for, and written by men who loved their fellows and were conspicuous examples of uprightness and benevolence, truth-keeping and friends of their kind.

We know how unscrupulous men of business used their conclusions, particularly those conclusions which have not stood the test of criticism, as a sort of textbook of oppression, as giving a scientific necessity for starvation, and so excusing hardness of heart. That this was so, must be Ruskin’s excuse for declaring war upon the economists. But it was a war wholly unnecessary; it clouded his prophecy with confused issues, and it laid the Master himself among the wounded.

It will be necessary, in order properly to express the scope of Political Economy, to examine more fully its definition of the two factors whose action and reaction upon one another form the subject matter of the science. These two factors are Man and Wealth. What is Man as an economic being? What is the “economic man”?

He is assumed by Mill and others60 as a being who considers his own side of a bargain only, who in all contracts will do the best he can for himself, and who, in the use of his capital, and the direction of his labour, is influenced by an intelligent and passionless eye to his own interests. He has no regard for custom, or public opinion, or compassion, or resentment, or personal partiality, or class prejudice.

Mill does not pretend that this person actually exists; but that the tendency of things is as though he did exist; and that it is most easy to assume his existence, and after that recognize the qualifications which other parts of human nature require us to put in, just as in mechanics we calculate what would happen if surfaces were smooth, and then allow for friction afterwards.

Ruskin’s criticisms are not always fair. He writes:

“Political Economy, being a science of wealth, must be a science respecting human capacities and dispositions. But moral considerations have nothing to do with political economy (says Mill). Therefore, moral considerations have nothing to do with human capacities and dispositions.”61

Perhaps the logical fallacy is not very obvious, but it is there. Human capacities and dispositions touch moral considerations on one side, and they touch political economy on the other. But these two need not therefore be connected. Because a man has two relations, as a citizen and as a father, and because the state does not bring up his children, and the two relations are separate, we must not argue that the man has nothing to do with his family, because the state, with which he is also connected, has nothing to do with it. All this wrong criticism was produced by the obvious remark of Mill, that the ethical character of a taste for diamonds is not the economist’s affair.

It is only as a first approximation, then, that economics postulates the monster known as the economic man; cold, calculating, well informed, shrewd, selfish with the unthinking uniformity of a machine. It is perhaps clearer to say that it can take account only of such motives as are sufficiently regular and predictable to be worth so much in money. Some unselfish actions are of that kind, such as a man’s service to his children, or if he be a Highlander to his third cousin; and we can predict certain of his regular subscriptions. The Law of Supply and Demand applies to ministers and missionaries and hospital nurses, though their payment is all from charitable gifts. To some extent the Charity Fund is a steady sum in any nation. It could be predicted that when the national War Fund was absorbing large sums, other charities, particularly London charities, would suffer; and such has been the case. The same phenomenon occurred to a less degree when General Booth was raising his Darkest England Fund. Here is a charitable motive steady enough to be measurable.

It is not assumed here, as so constantly asserted by Ruskin, that men are and must be treated as rogues. The argument of Ruskin was that the qualifications to be introduced into problems due to the fact that man is not an economic man, are not like allowances for friction, or other mechanical matters, but are organic and revolutionary. The right reply probably is that sometimes this is so, but far more generally not so.

When remarkable instances of unselfishness occur outside the family circle, where the economist expects and allows for them, they are told as instances of the unexpected. When the newspaper boys near the Mansion House are found giving an undisturbed beat to a lame boy who could not compete with them in running to customers, and refuse to sell a paper there, the admiring customer concludes his beautiful and kindly story by asking how many business men round the Mansion House would leave a rival in possession because of his weakness?

The definition of Wealth must now be considered. Mill defines it as consisting of “All useful and agreeable things which possess exchangeable value.”

He decides to include in the wealth of a country such personal qualities, skill, energy, perseverance, as tend to make the man who possesses them industrially more valuable. A skilled cotton spinner is a greater national asset than a labourer; a skilled medical man who can restore to labourers their industrial efficiency, is also national wealth, a utility embodied in a person; but a gifted preacher, whose message may even make a man a less keen producer of wealth than he was before, would not be an instance of national wealth, unless he made, as he might, a drunkard or a loafer into a regular wage earner. So the actor, or the singer, or the orator, unless their work ultimately produces material goods, is not to be counted wealth in economics. There is evidently the usual difficulty about drawing the line.

What is more, the most precious parts of character are excluded from national wealth in the economic sense. Wealth, that is, is taken to mean property, and not, more generally, the means of true well-being. Again, the most necessary things are from their abundance not wealth. Air, sunshine, and water are not wealth where and when they are given profusely by nature; though they are the most needful supports to life. But air which has to be pumped in by a ventilating fan has cost something, and is wealth; sunshine which has passed through a coal measure and is brought to our firegrates on a winter’s night is wealth, water turned on at our taps is wealth for which we pay a water-rate. We may come to import oxygen into our halls and theatres and lecture rooms, perhaps even into our cellar workrooms, and then it too will have a price and an economic value.

There is clearly room for much difference of opinion in detail here. And yet it will be plain to all that the subject matter of a science must be limited; we must know when our studies begin and end. It is not demoralization which makes an economist deny holiness to be wealth, it is a classification of sciences. Holiness is not matter either, nor electricity, nor gas; it does not come into Physics any more than into Economics. It comes into Ethics and Theology and practical Politics, and it is the most important thing in the world. It may be true, as Ruskin urges, that wealth is not any good to a miser or a spendthrift or a rogue; that it is often I11th rather than Wealth, if it makes its user soft and slack and selfish, or proud and cruel. But nevertheless, it is an object of desire, of human motive; and that is enough for the economist.

The mistake of the early economists before John S. Mill was in not recognizing, however, the reaction of man’s possession of wealth upon his conduct as a producer; how high wages might be remunerative, if they increased efficiency, and big fortunes wasted if they increased idleness. We really have to treat two factors, each of which is, in the language of Mathematics, an implicit function of the other – or, if that does not make it more clear – each of which acts upon and is acted upon by the other. The early economists lived in the age when steam engines and electric telegraphs were great and new achievements, when Chemistry was being reborn in the atomic theory, and Joule was proving the great generalization of the conservation of energy. They treated their subject – man in business – as if he were matter; whereas he has biological characteristics, and is modifiable and can modify his environment. Our age, on the contrary, is concerned with the modification of characteristics under environment. It is the age of Darwin. Biological evolution is seen to govern the growth of men and societies; and these, in writings of the dominant school of thinkers since Herbert Spencer, are seen to follow biological laws of growth. The Economic man is no exception.

John Stuart Mill begins his chapter defining wealth by remarking that everyone has a notion sufficiently correct for common purposes, of what is meant by wealth. This is not his definition; he reaches that later: it is a reasonable introductory remark. But Ruskin assumes that this is his definition, and assails him for his lack of scientific precision and his looseness of thought, as though an astronomer were to begin by saying that everyone has a notion, sufficient for common purposes, of what is meant by a star. The criticism is the more unreasonable, when we find the critic himself doing the very same thing in his famous chapter on “The Nature of Gothic” in The Stones of Venice, in which, at the opening, the remark occurs: “We all have some notion, most of us a very determined one, of the meaning of the term Gothic.” Ruskin goes on to play with the etymology of value;62 from valor and valere, meaning that which avails towards life and health; and says true wealth is what tends to life and the increase of its powers, not pearls nor topaz, but air and light and cleanliness. “To be wealthy is to have a large stock of useful articles,” say the economists. What, he asks, is to “have" – has the embalmed body of Carlo Borromeo the golden crosier and the cross of emeralds on its breast? Has a gold-filled belt the man whom it drowns, or has he it? Does not “having” depend on the vital power to use? What, nextly, is “useful”? Persons called wealthy may be inherently incapable of wealth, mere reservoirs in the stream of national produce, if not impediments in its course, and so causing “illth” rather than “wealth.” Therefore the aim and end of Political Economy is to develop moral character and capacity for valiantly using valuables, and the great difficulty is that manly character is apt to suffer from possessing material wealth and also apt to cast it away. Wealth of character and wealth of goods tend to undermine one another.

“In a community regulated by laws of supply and demand but protected from open violence, the persons who become rich are, generally speaking, industrious, resolute, proud, covetous, prompt, methodical, sensible, unimaginative, insensitive and ignorant. The persons who remain poor are the entirely foolish, the entirely wise, the idle, the reckless, the humble, the thoughtful, the dull, the imaginative, the sensitive, the well-informed, the improvident, the irregularly and impulsively wicked, the clumsy knave, the open thief, and the entirely merciful, just and godly person.”63

With one further piece of Ruskin’s teaching on the nature of wealth, I think that the subject will be clear.

“ ‘Rich’ is a relative word implying its opposite ‘poor’ as positively as the word ‘north’ implies its opposite ‘south.’ Men nearly always speak and write as if riches were absolute, and it were possible by following certain scientific precepts (Ruskin’s capital error turns up here), for everybody to be rich. Whereas riches are a power like that of electricity, acting only through inequalities or negations of itself. The force of the guinea you have in your pocket depends wholly on the default of a guinea in your neighbour’s pocket. If he did not want it, it would be of no use to you; the degree of power it possesses depends accurately upon the need or desire he has for it – and the art of making yourself rich, in the ordinary mercantile economist’s sense, is therefore equally and necessarily the art of keeping your neighbour poor.”64

This is all true; if by rich we understand, as the use of the word in common practice warrants, relatively wealthy. The possession of money is the possession of an order upon labour; and it is of no use if there is no available labour needing it. Ruskin’s illustration is that of a large landed proprietor who could get no servants to feed his cattle, mine his gold, plough his corn lands, because no one was in want of his wages. He must lead a life of severe and common labour to produce even ordinary comforts, and live in the midst of a waste desert. Therefore, what is meant by making oneself rich is to produce the maximum inequality between ourselves and our neighbours.65

Ruskin is grievously unfair in saying that that is the object of mercantile (political) economy; that it is “the science of getting rich.” Such a statement libels both the science and its expounders; and it contains, for Ruskin, an extraordinary looseness in the use of words. There cannot be a science of getting rich, that is an art or a craft. Science is organized knowledge, not practical faculty to do anything or get anything.66

How wide is the range of Ruskin’s Economy, how practical its objects, how little of a science it is, how entirely an art, the art of practical government and production, will be further clear from this statement: