CHAPTER III.

THE INDICTMENT OF CURRENT POLITICAL ECONOMY.

§ 1. Qualifications for Political Economy - A trained specialist in fine work and its products. § 2. A master of words and their meanings. §3. Sincerity of sight and speech. § 4. A great analytic genius. § 5. Two heads of the indictment. § 6. False assumption of an "economic man." § 7. The mechanical treatment of an organic problem. § 8. Attempted humanisation of the "economic man" theory. § 9. Can there be a science of "getting and spending?" § 10. Political versus Mercantile Economy. § 11. Wealth rightly includes "all useful or pleasurable things." § 12. Wealth measured by life not by money. § 13. True utility, not passing desires, the standard of wealth. § 14. Organic conception of society essential to "Political Economy. § 15. Production of "souls of a good quality" the economic goal. § 16. The higher Utilitarianism of Mr. Ruskin. § 17. His pioneer work in social economics.

§ 1. THERE is a curious notion still widely prevalent, that Mr. Ruskin abandoned his proper work as an art teacher in order rashly to embark in Political Economy, for which he had neither natural aptitude nor the requisite training and knowledge. In order to show how ill founded such a notion is, it may be well to enumerate some of the special qualifications he possessed for this work of social and economic criticism. Political Economy, even in that narrow connotation of industrial science from which Mr. Ruskin sought to release it, takes for its subject-matter the work which men put into the

raw material supplied by Nature in order to furnish necessaries or conveniences for human consumption. Now Mr. Ruskin's first qualification is that of being a skilled specialist in the finer qualities of work on the one hand, and of enjoyment or consumption on the other hand. Both from personal practice and from long habits of close observation of the work of skilful men in many places, he obtained a wide and varied knowledge of the handling of different tools and materials for the production of useful and beautiful goods. This experience was by no means confined to painting, sculpture, and the socalled "fine arts," but comprised the practical work of architecture, wood and metal work, pottery, jewellery, weaving, and other handicrafts.

His investigations into agriculture, both on the Continent of Europe and in Britain, were minute and painstaking; and though his experiments in reclaiming and draining land were not always successful, they indicated close knowledge of the concrete facts.

Moreover, Mr. Ruskin made a life-long study of animal and vegetable life, and of the structure and composition of the earth, thus gaining an intimate acquaintance with the nature of the raw materials of that wealth which formed the chief subject-matter of commercial economy. He had spent most of his laborious life in patient detailed observation of nature and the works of man. Both from contemporary observation and from study of history, the actual processes by which large classes of goods were produced and consumed were familiar to him. How many of the teachers of Political Economy who have been so scornful of Mr. Ruskin's claims possessed a tithe of this practical knowledge?

How many of them had studied the growth of the different arts and handicrafts in the history of nature as he had studied them? Most of those who sought to laugh him out of the field of controversy, or to ignore him, were either arm-chair economists, whose knowledge of present industrial facts was almost entirely drawn from books, and whose acquaintance with industrial history, even from books, was then extremely slight, or else business men engaged in some special branch of machine production or finance, whose personal knowledge, sound enough doubtless within its limits, covered but a very small section of the whole industrial field. Of certain large typical modern forms of industry Mr. Ruskin indeed possessed neither experience nor special knowledge; but how many of our most authoritative writers on Political Economy have ever had their training in a cottonmill, a mine, a merchant's office, or a retail shop? So far as first-hand knowledge of work and its results is concerned, Mr. Ruskin enjoyed an immense superiority over his opponents.

§ 2. Another advantage which Mr. Ruskin enjoyed in a supreme degree was his mastery of language. In no study have "masked words" (to adopt his own familiar phrase) played so much havoc as in Political Economy; nowhere have "idols of the market-place" so often darkened counsel, pompous well-rounded phrases, which, usurping the dignity of scientific laws, browbeat the humble inquirer who seeks to get behind them to the facts they claim to represent.

This defect was inevitable in a science hastily improvised by gathering together the general results of a number of previously unrelated studies of agriculture, finance

and taxation, political philosophy, foreign trade, population, etc., into a science of "the wealth of nations," drawing its terminology partly from current politics, partly from philosophic text-books, and largely from the loose language of actual business intercourse. That much of the reasoning conducted by means of such illarranged and shifty terms should be illicit was inevitable, and it can be no matter for surprise that text-books of Political Economy should be largely occupied in detecting the loose arguments of predecessors based upon verbal duplicity, and in constructing, by similar methods, new arguments, destined in their turn to similar treatment by some not remote successor. Now in such a study Mr. Ruskin's finely trained instinct for language served him well. His passion of delving down to roots sometimes, it may be admitted, led him into false paths, and some of his work of literary" restoration was too fantastic to be really serviceable. But, making all allowance for the deceitfulness of philology, his habit of intelligent scrutiny applied to such terms as "value," "capital," "profit," "consumption," was really useful in exposing the ambiguity and falsification of facts to which these terms have lent themselves.

§3. Two other intellectual and moral qualities belonging to Mr. Ruskin's equipment deserve a word. First, his fearless honesty in dealing with all seen facts. No one who has faithfully followed the development of Political Economy can have failed to note how political or business interests, or else some academic bias, have warped and distorted the free natural growth of the study, making it subservient to the conveniences of some class or party cause. Now, Mr. Ruskin's absolute sin

cerity of sight and speech was quite unimpaired by such obscuring or distorting influences. Neither was he ever found servile to authority, though generally willing to defer to the reasonable and well-grounded judgment of others. The same originality by which he claimed to set aside the wrongful authority of Reynolds in art, he applied to the authority of Ricardo and Mill in Political Economy. This fearless exposure of insufficiently established authority, this insistence upon the right of independent inquiry into facts and principles, which is undeniably the source of his most valuable achievements as art critic, was equally serviceable in Political Economy, where the extreme paucity of intellects belonging to the first order had foisted into the seat of authority names quite undeserving of such high consideration.

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§ 4. Finally, without endorsing the claim that Mr. Ruskin is "the most analytic mind in Europe," all who have closely read his books from "Modern Painters " on to "Fors Clavigera" must admit his wonderful faculty of minute analysis. How many Englishmen of this century have evinced such intellectual vigour and subtlety as appears in the philosophic handling of the origins of art in the second volume of "Modern Painters," or such genius for classification as appears in "The Seven Lamps of Architecture"? This same faculty, heightened by wide experience, Mr. Ruskin brought to bear upon social science. When we consider his combats at close quarters with trained economists, we shall see how well he was able to hold his own, and though his constructive reasoning may not always prove sound, his exposure of the fallacious reasoning of others is generally forcible and convincing.