regarded by all sane-minded and practical persons. So perverse is most men's judgment of criticism involving an unsettlement of convenient opinions, that they gladly seize upon some salient single weakness as a pretext for ignoring the deepest and most vital truths. Mr. Ruskin has remorselessly and accurately exposed the injustice inherent in all bargaining, and the existence of oppression in all forms of buying and selling, including the selling of the use of capital. But because he has found some special and separate fault in this last class of bargains which is not always there, his more fundamental criticism, which is valid, has been utterly disregarded by the great majority of cultured persons who yet pretend to think that Mr. Ruskin is a wise and wholesome teacher. "They read the words, and say they are pretty, and go on in their own ways." 1

Well might such obdurate irrationality drive a man of Mr. Ruskin's temperament to madness, as he declares it did. 2 Here was a man of wide experience and of the keenest penetration into life, coining his very soul into passionate eloquence and searching analysis, in order to convince the intellect and stir the heart of his countrymen to see the deadly injustice and inutility of the existing social order, and the necessity of labouring energetically towards reform; and his words are not unlistened to, and not unread, that were hard enoughbut eagerly heard and willingly read, and yet impotent for conviction and for the guidance of conduct. That people should gush over his beautiful writing about Art and Literature, should "sympathise" with much that

1 Fors, Letter lviii. (iii. 176).

2 Fors, Letters lxvi. and lxvii. (iii. 343, 362–63).

he has to say about the ugliness of industrial towns, the miseries of the poor, the dangers of luxury, the need of social solidarity, and should go their own way in comfortable self-complacency, giving their usual subscriptions to "charities," and deprecating any radical change in this best of all possible worlds for the well-to-dothis surely is a more scathing indictment of his age and country than any that Mr. Ruskin himself uttered in his most impassioned moments.

CHAPTER VII.

THE TRUE SOCIAL ORDER.

§ 1. Statement of the practical problem of reform. § 2. The first provision, good birth. § 3. The second provision, good education. §4. "La carrière ouverte aux talens." § 5. The utility of class distinctions for industrial and social life. § 6. The problem of base mechanical work. §7. The regulation of skilled industries by guilds. §8. The agricultural order-Feudalism plus direct State control. § 9. Trade cooperation or State action? § 10. The functions of Mr. Ruskin's "aristocracy." § 11. The scheme of government - Bishops and their work. § 12. The ideal and the practical in Mr. Ruskin's social order.

§ 1. WHAT is the right ordering of human activities in a true commonwealth? is the great practical question as it presented itself to Mr. Ruskin. In "Time and Tide" and "Fors Clavigera " he gives his answer, describing those changes necessary to establish a sound society upon right industrial and political principles. Certain axioms of social justice relating to work and property underlie his proposals. Every man must do the work which he can do best, and in the best way, for the common good and not for individual profit, receiving in return property consisting of good things which he has honestly got, and can skilfully use. 1 These general laws are applied to the circumstances of his age and country, so as to yield a body of definite proposals for social reform. 1 Fors, Letter lxx. (iii. 411).

Education, government, industrial order, are naturally and necessarily involved in the art of social economics, as Mr. Ruskin conceived it, and his leading proposals may all be set in their ethical, political, or economic aspects. Perhaps these several aspects may best be harmonised by thus restating and answering the social question as it familiarly appeared to Mr. Ruskin. "How can society consciously order the lives of its members so as to maintain the largest number of noble and happy human beings?"

§ 2. First, adequate care must be taken to provide good human material. Mr. Ruskin often bitterly complains that his most vital elements of teaching are precisely those which are ignored by his friends. Partly from prudishness, partly from sheer blindness, the fundamental importance attached by Mr. Ruskin to "the population question" is completely shirked by most of his professed followers and lovers. Mr. Ruskin was far too wise not to perceive that every great social question has one of its roots in physiology. The first provision for a sound society is that its citizens shall be well born, the second that they shall be well educated. We have come to a lip agreement at any rate on this second requisite, but the first is still wilfully and wofully ignored. Yet few who face the issue can or will deny the truth of the solemn declaration that "the beginning of all sanitary and moral law is in the regulation of marriage, and that, ugly and fatal as is every form and agency of license, no licentiousness is so mortal as licentiousness in marriage." That society should tacitly sanction the transmission and increase of every form

1

1 Time and Tide, § 123.

of hereditary disease, vice or folly, ignoring its first duty, that of maintaining the standard of health, intelligence, and morals in the community, is quite the most foolish and most wasteful abdication of responsibility in which any government can possibly indulge. Mr. Ruskin's proposals for state "permission to marry," with rigid regulations as to age and income, qualified by fantastic revivals of ancient ceremony, may seem impossible or intolerable, but the prohibition of definitely antisocial marriages, the refusal to allow epileptics, criminals, or the victims of any serious hereditary evil, to increase and multiply at an incalculable cost to society, is one of the plainest demands of social welfare.

§ 3. After provision for good birth comes the need of good education. Mr. Ruskin has so much to say about methods of education that it would be unwise to attempt to summarise his fuller teaching here. A very brief statement of the purpose and direction of his public education, which must be under state control, and free, liberal, and technical, will here suffice. Physical nurture is coupled with education in his scheme. "I hold it indisputable, that the first duty of a state is to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed, and educated, till it attain years of discretion." 1 This does not mean that children shall be taken from their parents' homes and brought up in state establishments, for the maintenance of home life and parental duties is a central feature in his conception of social order; but that society shall enforce the interest it possesses in the quality of its future citizens, by insisting that they shall grow up with sound physical as well as

1 Time and Tide, § 70.