IN

N his preface to" Munera Pulveris" Mr. Ruskin tells us quite frankly his experience in getting before the English public as a political economist. He began a series of papers in the Cornhill Magazine, the editor being his friend. The outcry against them. became such that upon the appearance of the third number the editor wrote him in great distress and with many apologies that he could admit but one more political economy essay. He took the liberty of making this longer than the rest, giving to it "such blunt conclusion as he could," and, using his own words, "the Cornhill public was protected for that time against further disturbance on his part.'

These four essays now stand in his published works under the general caption, "Unto This Last," suggested evidently by Christ's paralle in which he represents the householder as paying the same wages to each of the late and early workers in his vineyard, and justifying himself by saying, "I will give unto this last even as unto thee. It is lawful for me to do what I will with mine own."

The respective titles of these delightfully disquieting essays are," The Roots of Honor," The Veins of Wealth," "Qui Judicatis Terram," and "Ad Valorem." On reading them from the standpoint of applied Christianity, or the Biblical notion of man's rightful bearing toward man, and remembering that the English people are supposed to have been schooled from the time of St. Augustine and his monks in such notions, one wonders why they should have so disturbed "the Cornhill public." This happened in 1860. Mr. Ruskin did not cease to write because certain people made up their minds to dislike

him.

No true prophet ever did. In 1863, he published "Munera Pulveris," and unless his critics had changed their opinions meanwhile materially, he must have enjoyed their dislike in a manifold degree.

But the times change, whether great men's critics do or not. Here is the deliberately expressed opinion of Mr. Alfred Ewen Fletcher, editor of the London Daily Chronicle, as to Ruskin's place in the world of political economy. The extract is from a speech delivered before the Grindewald Conference in 1894:

"You ask me to define a living wage. I frankly tell you I cannot. The living wage to me is a living principle, which is-that wages shall govern contracts, and not contracts wages, and that the capitalists shall not be allowed to enter into cut-throat competition with the asfrom loss by taking it out of wages. sumption that they shall recoup themselves We are told that the principle is contrary to political economy It is not contrary to the political economy of the New Testament, which is quite good enough for me, and I am prepared to say quite good enough for the greatest and most scientific of political economists, John Ruskin. work, Unto This Last, and the people said, Ruskin thirty years ago published his great Mr. Ruskin may be a very great art critic but

he should not write about what he does not un

derstand. Now they say, after thirty years experience of this political economy according to the Gospel, Mr Ruskin is not an art critic, but a great economist."

Still further, in the preface to "Munera Pulveris," Mr. Ruskin gives us a confession, in substance without reserve, and in forin completely beautiful, of his indebtedness to Carlyle. He inscribes the work to him, calls him his "friend and guide in all chief labor," and says, "I would that some better means were in my power of showing reverence to the man who alone, of all our masters of literature, has written, without thought of himself, what he knew it to be needful for the people of his time to hear, if

the will to hear were in them; whom, therefore, as the time draws near when his task must be ended, Republican and free-thoughted England assaults with impatient reproach; and out of the abyss of her cowardice in policy and dishonor in trade, sets the hacks of her literature to speak evil, grateful to her ears, of the Solitary Teacher who has asked her to be brave for the help of man, and just for the love of God."

So Ruskin sends us to Carlyle for political economy, and if any of us had not thought of going there be fore we had better immediately upon his advice make a pilgrimage thither. "Sartor Resartus" may be read, but "Past and Present" must be if we would reach the fundamentals of the science as Ruskin esteems them. There are a certain half dozen of Carlyle's short chapters, which, if they were digested and assimilated by our pulpits and parliaments, and above all by our "Mill-owning Aristocracy," would revolutionize a good deal of our misdirected social thinking and practice. Let us say, "The Gospel of Mammonism," "The Gospel of Dilettantism," "The English," "Un-working Aristocracy," "Working Aristocracy," "Democracy," "The Captains of Industry," and "Permanence," these chapters, and a few others for which the digestion of these will bring on the appetite, would be an excellent diet for both Canada and the United States with their drunken, mammonistic "Sir Jabesh Windbags," now and again uppermost in parliament. Unfortunately the hell that Carlyle discovered, what he calls the "Hell of the English," the "hell of not making money," has been too generally extended since his time, and the Americans as well as the English have their "cash payment the sole nexus," and their "supply and demand the sole law of nature," and their "paroxysms of prosperity on the old methods of competition and devil take the hindmost," paroxysms to be followed inevitably by

paroxysms of adversity, when the devil does take the hindmost, and the foremost too, of our once happily employed working men, and sends them to gutters and back alleys to pick rags, or puts them to sleep, after thin soup, among the vermin in an eight-cent lodging house, or boards them in prisons for specified times, thereafter turning them out penniless to beg or steal or starve.

Somebody has felicitously called Carlyle a good Old Testament Christian. The phrase is a contradiction. in terms; but perhaps for that reason all the more pertinent. If there could be such a nondescript as an Old Testament Christian, Carlyle was that. He echoes the thunders of Sinai, but he does not repeat the prayers of Golgotha. Here is his merit, and his demerit. Since the former is so great, let us in charity not emphasize the latter.

But Ruskin, when he tells us the whole truth about himself, had other masters than Carlyle, one of them greater than any man. In "Fors Clavigera," Letter X., he makes a clean breast of himself, pretty much as follows, quoting and paraphrasing:

"You have perhaps been provoked, in the course of these letters, by not being able to make out what I was. It is time you should know, and I will tell you plainly. I am, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school (Walter Scott's school, that is to say, and Homer's). I name these two of numberless great Tory writers, because they were my own two masters. I had Walter Scott's novels and the Illiad (Pope's translation) for my only reading, when I was a child, on week days; on Sundays their effect was tempered by Robinson Crusoe and Pilgrim's Progress, my mother having it deeply in her heart to make an evangelical clergyman of me. Fortunately, I had an aunt more evangelical than my mother, and my aunt gave me cold mutton for my Sunday dinners, which, as I much preferred it hot, greatly and the end of the matter was that I got all the diminished the influence of Pilgrim's Progress, noble imaginative teaching of Pope and Defoe, and yet I am not an evangelical clergyman. theirs, and that compulsorily, and every day in "I had, however, still better teaching than the week. My mother forced me by steady, daily toil, to learn long chapters of the Bible by through aloud, hard names and all, from Geneheart, as well as to read it every syllable sis to the Apocalypse, about once a year.

To

that discipline I owe my power of taking pains, and the best part of my taste in literature, and might have been led from Walter Scott and Homer to Johnston's English, or Gibson's, but once having known the 32nd of Deuteronomy, the 119th Psalm, the 15th of First Corinthians, the Sermon on the Mount, and the most of the Apocalypse, every syllable by heart, and having always a way of thinking with myself what words meant, it was not possible for me, even in the foolishest times of youth, to write entire ly superficial or formal English."

In any adequate statement, therefore, of the factors that go to make a Ruskin, the childhood memorising of the Sermon on the Mount and the 15th chapter of First Corinthians must not be left out. Walter Scott and Defoe, and Bunyan and Carlyle may be there, but Christ and the resurrection of Christ are also there. But what have Christ and the resur

rection of Christ to do with political economy? Much every way. Whoever does not believe it let him read Ruskin till he does.

It is all but impossible to make a complete classification of Ruskin's writings on political economy. The chiefest are, "Unto this Last," "Munera Pulveris," and "Fors Clavigera." The latter consists of numerous letters to working men, covering a period of ten years, from 1871 to 1881. But you will find political economy like the grains of gold in its native quartz almost anywhere in his writings. In his Arrows of the Chase," in "A Joy Forever," in "Lectures on Art," in "The Two Paths," even in "The Stones of Venice," and quite frequently in his miscellaneous writings are to be found iteration and reiteration of the author's political economy convictions.

แ

If classification is difficult, characterization is more so. None but a master artist in the use of words, and a genius as original, as sparkling and as daring as his own could succeed in an attempted faithful description of his ways of coming at the matter. The very titles of his most distinctive chapters are conundrums. You must figure them out, sometimes at a good deal of pains. For "Munera Pulveris" you must go to the 28th Ode

or

of Horace, and then very likely polish up your Latin for a week before you get his meaning. "Fors Clavigera " he explains at length himself, or you might never guess what he means by it. But think of his writing letters to working men for years under this caption, and pouncing at them, more especially one may guess, at some other bodies through them, from every imaginable standpoint of history, art, classical literature, mythology, science, philosophy, the daily papers, the Christian religion, the follies of royalty, and the sufferings of poverty! One is liable to meet anybody in these letters, from Zoroaster and the Eastern Magi to Weng Chin, the latest Chinaman merchant up to date hanged by a Los Angeles mob; and from "the tine ladies in the Queen's concert, sitting so trimly, and looking so sweet, and doing the whole duty of womanwearing their fine clothes gracefully; and the pretty singer, white throated, warbling Home, sweet Home' to them, morally and melodiously," to the wanderers of the street, the "canaille," going their way to their poor home-"bitter sweet"; "Cuvrier and petrouleuse-prisoners at lastglaring wild, on their way to die." These are wonderful letters. They are the store-house of a magician; but they are the sermons also of a seer, the warnings of a prophet, and the pathetic pleadings of a father.

And all the while there is the charm of his wonderful English. John Ruskin's mother tongue is the toy of his playful moods, the lightning and the thunder of his prophetic moods, the arsenal inexhaustible of his soldierly moods, the ring and robe of his fatherly moods, and always the perfect transparency of his thought. Professor Frederic Harrison, writing in the Nineteenth Century of last year, speaks of Ruskin's prose after this style: "Milton began, and once or twice completed, such a resounding voluntary on his glorious organ. But neither Milton, nor Brown, nor Jeremy

Taylor, was yet quite master of the noble instrument. Ruskin, who comes after two centuries further of continuous progress in their art, is the master of the sublime instrument of prose. And though it be true that too often, in wanton defiance of calm judgment, he flings to the winds his self control, he has achieved in this rare and perilous art some amazing triumphs over language, such as the whole history of our literature cannot match."

Ruskin is essentially a poet, only he has not taken the trouble to make his thoughts jingle. This is why so many prosy people were taken by surprise when Mr. Gladstone appointed him poet laureate three years ago. But the really funny thing escaped the critics. That John Ruskin should be appointed at a fixed yearly stipend to sing a sonnet or write an ode every time a sprig of royalty died or was born-this was the thing to be stared at and smiled at. However, such prose can come only from the soul of a poet. The insight, the music, the passion, the command of materials, the creative genius are all there; but, impatient of metre and rhyme, this essential poet flings his work broadcast in the form of rich and resistless prose, and lo! we in our stupidity sit waiting for a Gladstone to tell us that our hero is really a poet.

But if Ruskin is a poet, why should he meddle with a matter so prosy and supposedly scientific as political economy? That, now, is the question first uppermost in the mind of every purely materialistic, or legalistic, or mammonistic, or mechanical patent-right adjuster of the affairs of men with men. And the answer, bluntly, is simply this: Nobody but the essential poets, including the actual ones, should meddle with such matters on any great scale. They alone must be the masters, the fountain head, the light of the world, and the bread of life on such matters. Ten chances to one the economist who has neither insight nor sentiment will propose to

right up the wrongs among men in some purely mechanical or legalistic way, seriously advocating as his panacea government levers, and bands, and pulleys, and cog-wheels; government factories and store-houses; and railroads, and pneumatic tubes, and telephones, and trundle-beds. He would sing you to sleep with a government fiddle and rouse you to work with a government whistle, and expect you to be supremely happy. Mrs. Browning should be high authority with us here:

"A starved man exceeds a fat beast:
We'll not barter, sir,

The beautiful for barley. And even so
I hold you will not compass your poor ends of
Of barley feeding and material ease
Without the poet's individualism to move
Your universal.

It takes a soul to move a body;

It takes a high-souled man

To move the masses even to a cleaner sty;

It takes the ideal to blow a hair's breadth off
The dust of the actual. Ah, your Fouriers
failed
Because not poets enough to understand
That life develops from within."

He

Before attempting a statement of Ruskin's value as a political economist it is needful to note that he had some eccentricities. He quarrelled needlessly with steam power and its smokestacks, with railroads and the general multiplication of machinery. could have no patience with the itch for rushing off somewhere at the rate of a mile a minute if you had nothing to do when you got there. He complains that they have turned every river in England into a common sewer," so that you cannot so much as baptize an English baby but with filth, unless you hold its face out in the rain; and even that," he says, hitting at the coal smoke from boiler furnaces,-" even that falls dirty." In his fifth "Fors" he declares that no machines will increase the possibilities of life, but that they do increase the possibilities of idleness. Sometimes of late one is tempted to believe him in that. In this same "Fors" he proposes to give a tenth of his property, asking any others who will to