which Jevons once rose in a single rhetorical flight when he said that "the great problem of economy may, as it seems to me, be stated thus: Given a certain population with various needs and powers of production, in possession of certain lands and other sources of material : required the mode of employing their labour so as to maximise the utility of the produce," "1 found no place in the authoritative text-books, not even in those of Jevons himself.

Now Mr. Ruskin, though he did not philosophise upon the "organic" nature of the State, did always insist upon imputing to it that nature, premising that both the science and the art of Political Economy should be constructed from the standpoint of the well-being of the whole society. The state with which his "economy" is concerned is not merely an industrial and a political, but, in accordance with his view of life and art, distinctively a moral organism: justice is the life of his state as it was the life of Plato's. This organic conception. everywhere illuminates his theory and his practical constructive policy; it gives order to his conception of the different industrial classes and to the relations of individual members of each class; it releases him from the mechanical atomic notion of equality, and compels him to develop an orderly system of interdependence sustained by authority and obedience, and in the radical problem of distribution it drives him to have recourse to the analogy of the human body which is the type of organic life. "The circulation of wealth in a nation resembles that of blood in the natural body. The analogy will hold down to minute particulars. For as diseased local deter

1 Theory of Political Economy, p. 289 (2d ed.).

mination of the blood involves depression of the general health of the system, all morbid local action of riches will be found ultimately to involve a weakening of the resources of the body politic."1 Other sociologists, with more parade of scientific terminology, e. g. Herbert Spencer in England and Schäffle in Austria, have developed this industrial physiology, but the full worth of the analogy still waits recognition alike in its bearing upon the theory of production and of distribution of wealth.

This organic conception of industry is essential in order to justify the epithet "political," and the fact that it was wanting in the inductive science of the mercantile economists dominated by an individualist philosophy, is a fatal defect.

§ 15. We can now sum up Mr. Ruskin's radical reforms in the structure of Political Economy.

Whereas the current theory took for its subject-matter material marketable goods and the processes of making and distributing them, measured in terms of money, and regarded from a distinctively individual standpoint, Mr. Ruskin's theory took for its subject-matter all kinds of "goods," including those highest goods which are immaterial and unmarketable, and the processes of making and distributing them, measured in terms of "life" and regarded from a social standpoint.

The work of Mr. Ruskin then consists in this, that he has "humanised" Political Economy. Every fact and every process is stripped of its materialistic or its monetary garb and shown in its naked truth as "vitality." The "essence of wealth" consists neither in bankbalances nor in the lands, houses, goods they represent, 1 Unto this Last, p. 49.

but in "authority over men." 1 Here is "sentimentalism" with a vengeance! Hood in his "Song of a Shirt had declared, "It isn't linen you're wearin', it's human creatures' lives." Mr. Ruskin, by his powerful grasp of industrial physiology, proves that every "demand for commodities" is a demand for life or death, according as the work embodied in these commodities is good or evil in its nature and in the conditions under which it is performed. "Value," according to the professional economists, is not a property which anything possesses, a thing has no "value" inherent in it, the "value" depends upon the quantity of other things which it exchanges for. Value, according to Mr. Ruskin, is the life-sustaining properties of anything, which are neither dependent upon other things nor upon the opinions which people form about it. "The thing is worth what it can do for you, not what you think it can."2 Cost of Pro-duction, according to the text-books, was the quantity of money paid to get work done, or, in the more recent treatment, the amount of labour-power measured by time or some objective standard; cost of production, according to Mr. Ruskin, is expenditure of life. The only standard of utility recognised by the orthodox theory is a monetary measure of desire. Mr. Ruskin's utility means promotion of life and happiness. By thus vitalising and moralising every term and every process, Mr. Ruskin forms the outline of a Political Economy which is primarily concerned with the production of healthy life, the manufacture of "souls of a good quality." § 16. It is important to recognise the distinction between the "vitalising" and the "moralising" processes 1 Unto this Last, p. 63. 2 Queen of the Air, § 125.

here imputed to Mr. Ruskin. The reduction of moneycost and money-measured utility to the pains of production and the pleasures of consumption, estimated in accordance with the actual desires and feelings of those who produce and consume, would be a vitalising process, marking a distinct advance in the humanisation of Political Economy. Such an analysis would doubtless condemn the false economy of our white-lead industry and other painful, pernicious, or toilsome work, by showing that the money-wages were no true measure of the cost in human suffering, as it would explode the bloated bubble of utility imputed to expensive luxuries. But to take the imperfect or distorted desires and tastes of existing workers and consumers as a final standard of valuation, is but a halfway house at which Mr. Ruskin never consents to tarry. Neither order nor progress is possible or conceivable without ideals; no science or art of wealth can be founded upon the short-sighted, mistaken, and shifting desires of the moment; the welfare of an individual or a nation implies a standard of true humanity to which the desires and caprices of the moment must be referred. For the false short-range expediency of passing pleasures and pains, must be substituted a just and orderly conception of social well-being. Thus the practice of Political Economy demands an ideal alike of the individual and the social life: a just ordering of life which will lead to happiness.

Though Mr. Ruskin is stern in his denunciation of the doctrine of utility and the school of utilitarians, with their "greatest happiness of the greatest number," this repugnance is directed against the hedonism by which most of the utilitarian prophets delivered over the con

duct of life to fleeting pleasures and pains, without providing for the attainment of the conditions of abiding happiness. Indeed, Mr. Ruskin himself in his Political Economy, so far as his conception of the end is concerned, may not unaptly be classed as a utilitarian. For though the operating motives upon the individual man are to be the principles of Justice and Honesty, the result is measured in terms of happiness. "The final outcome and consummation of all wealth is in the producing, as many as possible, full-breathed, bright-eyed, and happy-hearted human beings." 1

In passing from Mercantile Economy to Mr. Ruskin's science and art of Social Economics, we do not abandon the self-seeking motives or the attainments of satisfaction as the goal; we enlarge the scope and expand the nature of these conceptions by rationalising and moralising the "self" which is seeking satisfaction. The domination of Justice and Honesty within the soul enlarges and purifies the self by imposing sacrifices of the narrower self in favour of a wider self which grows as we identify our good with that of others; it expands and orders our conception of happiness by imparting a broader and more complex character to our plan of life; sensations which are "just, measured, and continuous" evolve a true standard of utility for the conduct of life. When Mr. Ruskin insists that "the essence of the misteaching of your day concerning wealth of any kind consists in the denial of intrinsic value," 2 he is denouncing the lack of principle which underlies the so-called philosophy of utilitarianism in its refusal to furnish any satisfactory check upon short-range expediency of conduct.

1 Unto this Last, p. 65. 2 Fors, Letter xii. (i. 250).