Unto This Last and Other Writings by Ruskin

Ref: John Ruskin (1860). Unto This Last and Other Writings. Hodder Paperback. 

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Summary

• John Ruskin (1819-1900): Ruskin is born in London, the son of John James Ruskin and Margaret Ruskin (née Cox). 

• 1826: Ruskin begins writing poetry (aged 7). 

• 1843: Publication of Modern Painters I anonymously ‘by a Graduate of Oxford’. 

• 1846: Publication of Modern Painters II. 

• 1856: Publication of Modern Painters III and IV and The Harbours of England. 

• 1858: Lectures on ‘The Work of Iron’. Meets the 10yo Rose La Touche (while aged 39), with whom he falls in love. 

• 1860: Publication of Modern Painters V and, at Chamonix, begins Unto this Last. The latter is serialized in the Cornhill Magazine, but hostile public reaction halts publication prematurely 1862. Unto this Last appears in book form. 

• 1864: Death of Ruskin’s father, John James. 

• 1866: Asks Rose (now 18yo) to marry him. Discouraged by her parents, she asks him to wait until she was older for an answer. He lives in hope for six years. 

• 1878: Ruskin suffers his first mental breakdown. He suspends publication of Fors and is fined a farthing damage for libeling Whistler. In protest, he resigns his professorship. 

• 1889: Ruskin concludes his autobiography Praeterita prematurely after his last and most severe attack of madness. He survives another ten years, incapacitated, living in seclusion and virtual silence. 

• 20 Jan, 1900: Ruskin dies of Influenza at Brantwood. He is buried in Coniston churchyard. 

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The King Of The Golden River (‘The Black Brothers’); A Legend of Stiria 

• The King of the Golden River was written in 1841 as a gift for the 13yo Effie Gray (who was later to become Ruskin’s wife). 

• The story goes that she challenged the melancholy John, engrossed in his drawing and geology, to write a fairy tale – as the least likely task for him to fulfil. Upon which he produced at a couple of sittings The King of the Golden River, a pretty medley of Grimm’s grotesque and Dickens’ kindliness and the true Ruskinian ecstasy of the Alps.

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The Stones of Venice Vol. II; The Sea Stories (Published 1853)

• Morally speaking the stones of Venice are also touchstones of social health and disease, moral grandeur and decay. 

• “The lesson Ruskin… teaches us, is that art is the expression of man’s pleasure in his labour”-Morris.

• Classical architecture is normally divided into three ‘orders’; Doric, Ionic and Corinthian. Ruskin saw Gothic as deriving its character from the Corinthian, the most richly ornamented of the three orders. This is because it goes further than the other two in pursuing the analogy between natural and architectural forms – in this case, the column and the tree. The Corinthian capital is decorated with formalized acanthus leaves. Romanesque and Gothic sculptors developed this convention further, often giving each capital its own particular leaves and adding other decorations, such as fruit, beasts, birds and human heads. Thus, it was through the Corinthian capital, as Ruskin saw it, that the naturalism and variety he so valued came into ‘Christian architecture’.

• Gothics’ external forms are pointed arches, vaulted roofs, etc. And unless both the elements and the forms are there, we have no right to call the style Gothic. 

• The characteristic or moral elements of Gothic are the following, placed in the order of their importance: 1. Savageness (rudeness). 2. Changefulness (love of change). 3. Naturalism (love of nature). 4. Grotesqueness (disturbed imagination). 5. Rigidity (obstinacy). 6. Redundance (generosity). 

• Servile Ornament: The execution or power of the inferior workman is entirely subjected to the intellect of the higher. The principal schools are the Greek, Ninevite, and Egyptian. 

• Constitutional Ornament: The executive inferior power is, to a certain point, emancipated and independent, having a will of its own, yet confessing its inferiority and rendering obedience to higher powers.

• Revolutionary Ornament: No executive inferiority is admitted at all.

• The Assyrian and Egyptian, less cognizant of accurate form in anything, were content to allow their figure sculpture to be executed by inferior workmen, but lowered the method of its treatment to a standard which every workman could reach, and then trained him by discipline so rigid, that there was no chance of his falling beneath the standard appointed. The Greek gave to the lower workman no subject which he could not perfectly execute. The Assyrian gave him subjects which he could only execute imperfectly, but fixed a legal standard for his imperfection. The workman was, in both systems, a slave…In the medieval, or especially Christian, system of ornament, this slavery is done away with altogether; Christianity having recognized, in small things as well as great, the individual value of every soul. But it not only recognizes its value; it confesses its imperfection, in only bestowing dignity upon the acknowledgment of unworthiness. 

• The modern English mind has this much in common with that of the Greek, that it intensely desires, in all things, the utmost completion or perfection compatible with their nature. This is a noble character in the abstract, but becomes ignoble when it causes us to forget the relative dignities of that nature itself, and to prefer the perfectness of the lower nature to the imperfection of the higher; not considering that as, judged by such a rule, all the brute animals would be preferable to man, because more perfect in their functions and kind, and yet are always held inferior to him, so also in the works of man, those which are more perfect in their kind are always inferior to those which are, in their nature, liable to more faults and shortcomings. For the finer the nature, the more flaws it will show through the clearness of it; and it is a law of this universe, that the best things shall be seldomest seen in their best form. 

• Understand this clearly: You can teach a man to draw a straight line, and to cut one; to strike a curved line, and to carve it; and to copy and carve any number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and perfect precision; and you find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool…If you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. 

• And now, reader, look round this English room of yours, about which you have been proud so often, because the work of it was so good and strong, and the ornaments of it so finished. Examine again all those accurate mouldings, and perfect polishings, and unerring adjustments of the seasoned wood and tempered steel. Many a time you have exulted over them, and thought how great England was, because her slightest work was done so thoroughly. Alas ! if read rightly, these perfectnesses are signs of a slavery in our England a thousand times more bitter and more degrading than that of the scourged African, or helot Greek. Men may be beaten, chained, tormented, yoked like cattle, slaughtered like summer flies, and yet remain in one sense, and the best sense, free. But to smother their souls with them, to blight and hew into rotting pollards the suckling branches of their human intelligence, to make the flesh and skin which, after the worm’s work on it, is to see God, into leathern thongs to yoke machinery with, – this is to be slave-masters indeed; and there might be more freedom in England, though her feudal lords’ lightest words were worth men’s lives, and though the blood of the vexed husbandman dropped in the furrows of her fields, than there is while the animation of her multitudes is sent like fuel to feed the factory smoke, and the strength of them is given daily to be wasted into the fineness of a web, or racked into the exactness of a line.

• It is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and therefore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure. It is not that men are pained by the scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot endure their own; for they feel that the kind of labour to which they are condemned is verily a degrading one, and makes them less than men. 

• We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilized invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men: – Divided into mere segments of men – broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail. Now it is a good and desirable thing, truly, to make many pins in a day; but if we could only see with what crystal sand their points were polished, – sand of human soul, much to be magnified before it can be discerned for what it is – we should think there might be some loss in it also. And the great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this, – that we manufacture everything there except men.

• How are these products to be recognized, and this demand to be regulated? Easily: by the observance of three broad and simple rules: 1. Never encourage the manufacture of any article not absolutely necessary, in the production of which Invention has no share. 2. Never demand an exact finish for its own sake, but only for some practical or noble end. 3. Never encourage imitation or copying of any kind, except for the sake of preserving records of great works. 

• So, again, the cutting of precious stones, in all ordinary cases, requires little exertion of any mental faculty; some tact and judgment in avoiding flaws, and so on, but nothing to bring out the whole mind. Every person who wears cut jewels merely for the sake of their value is, therefore, a slave-driver. 

• Above all, demand no refinement of execution where there is no thought, for that is slaves’ work, unredeemed. Rather choose rough work than smooth work, so only that the practical purpose be answered, and never imagine there is reason to be proud of anything that may be accomplished by patience and sand-paper. 

• If the workman is thinking about his edges, he cannot be thinking of his design; if of his design, he cannot think of his edges. Choose whether you will pay for the lovely form or the perfect finish, and choose at the same moment whether you will make the worker a man or a grindstone. 

• The demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art…Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent…To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy…Accept this then for a universal law, that neither architecture nor any other noble work of man can be good unless it be imperfect.

• Great art, whether expressing itself in words, colours, or stones, does not say the same thing over and over again; that the merit of architectural, as of every other art, consists in its saying new and different things; that to repeat itself is no more a characteristic of genius in marble than it is of genius in print.

• Monotony after a certain time, or beyond a certain degree, becomes either uninteresting or intolerable, and the musician is obliged to break it in one of two ways: either while the air or passage is perpetually repeated, its notes are variously enriched and harmonized; or else, after a certain number of repeated passages, an entirely new passage is introduced, which is more or less delightful according to the length of the previous monotony. Nature, of course, uses both these kinds of variation perpetually. The sea-waves, resembling each other in general mass, but none like its brother in minor divisions and curves, are a monotony of the first kind; the great plain, broken by an emergent rock or clump of trees, is a monotony of the second. 

• Those who will not submit to the temporary sameness, but rush from one change to another, gradually dull the edge of change itself, and bring a shadow and weariness over the whole world from which there is no more escape. 

• If we pretend to have reached either perfection or satisfaction, we have degraded ourselves and our work. God’s work only may express that; but ours may never have that sentence written upon it, – ‘And behold, it was very good. 

• Most of us do not need fine scenery; the precipice and the mountain peak are not intended to be seen by all men, -perhaps their power is greatest over those who are unaccustomed to them. 

• No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple; which refuses to address the eye, except in a few clear and forceful lines; which implies, in offering so little to our regards, that all it has offered is perfect; and disdains, either by the complexity or the attractiveness of its features, to embarrass our investigation, or betray us into delight. 

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---The Two Paths, Lectures on Art and its Application to Decoration and Manufacture (Published 1859)---

• The Two Paths brings together five of Ruskin’s lectures on applied art, all of which were composed in response to government policy on manufacture and design. In 1835, a House of Commons Select Committee had recognized that the expansion of manufacturing industry was creating problems of taste which modern artisans were ill–equipped to meet. The committee recommended the creation of a Government School of Design, but the brief given the first such school proved too limited. After a number of false starts, a Department of Science and Art was set up (in 1853) and made responsible for what came to be called Colleges or Schools of Art. 

• Ruskin approved in principle of governmental involvement in art education but was critical of the specific policies adopted. He argued that design could not be taught by rule and for strictly limited purposes. He also considered it wrong that the schools were to be confined to artisans and that the design taught was to be seen only in relation to manufacturing industry. What was needed was a programme to educate public taste; the role of the consumer in improving design was quite as important as that of the craftsman. If design was taught only in relation to manufacture, the result would be what Ruskin most despised, the conventionalization of natural forms. He advocated instead the teaching of drawing, since drawing compels the student to study nature, and it is in nature that our sense of form and beauty has its origin. These concerns inform every lecture in The Two Paths, the title of which refers to the two approaches to design that Ruskin contrasts – conventionalism and truth to nature. 

• The critic Nick Shrimpton has argued that this lecture, more than any other work of Ruskin’s, marks the transition from art criticism to social criticism in his writing. 

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The Work of Iron in Nature, Art, and Policy; A lecture delivered at Turnbridge Wells (16 Feb, 1858)

• Without mingling of heart-passion with hand-power, no art is possible. The highest art unites both in their intensest degrees: the action of the hand at its finest, with that of the heart at its fullest. 

• You can do nothing much worth doing, in this world, without trouble, you can get nothing much worth having, without expense. 

• A happy nation may be defined as one in which the husband’s hand is on the plough, and the housewife’s on the needle; so in due time reaping its golden harvest, and shining in golden vesture: and an unhappy nation is one which, acknowledging no use of plough nor needle, will assuredly at last find its storehouse empty in the famine, and its breast naked to the cold. 

• Nearly all our misery and crime result from this one misapprehension. The law of nature is, that a certain quantity of work is necessary to produce a certain quantity of good, of any kind whatever. If you want knowledge, you must toil for it: if food, you must toil for it: and if pleasure, you must toil for it. But men do not acknowledge this law; or strive to evade it, hoping to get their knowledge, and food, and pleasure for nothing: and in this effort they either fail of getting them, and remain ignorant and miserable, or they obtain them by making other men work for their benefit; and then they are tyrants and robbers. 

• Who are these poor? No country is, or ever will be, without them: that is to say, without the class which cannot, on the average, do more by its labour than provide for its subsistence, and which has no accumulations of property laid by on any considerable scale…There are a certain number of this (poor) class whom we cannot oppress with much severity. An able-bodied and intelligent work– man – sober, honest, and industrious, – will almost always command a fair price for his work, and lay by enough in a few years to enable him to hold his own in the labour market. But all men are not able-bodied, nor intelligent, nor industrious; and you cannot expect them to be. 

• We should surely consider a little whether among the various forms of the oppression of the poor, we may not rank as one of the first and likeliest – the oppression of expecting too much from them. 

• Let it be admitted that we never can be guilty of oppression towards the sober, industrious, intelligent, exemplary labourer. There will always be in the world some who are not altogether intelligent and exemplary; we shall, I believe, to the end of time find the majority somewhat unintelligent, a little inclined to be idle, and occasionally, on Saturday night, drunk; we must even be prepared to hear of reprobates who like skittles on Sunday morning better than prayers; and of unnatural parents who send their children out to beg instead of to go to school. 

• A nation corrupts itself by not acknowledging the eternal connection between its plough and its pleasure; – by striving to get pleasure, without working for it. Well, I say the first and commonest way of doing so is to try to get the product of other people’s work, and enjoy it ourselves, by cheapening their labour in times of distress; then the second way is that grand one of watching the chances of the market; – the way of speculation…Modern speculation involves much risk to others, with chance of profit only to ourselves. 

• I believe no feeling can be more mistaken; and that in reality, and in the sight of heaven, the callous indifference which pursues its own interests at any cost of life, though it does not definitely adopt the purpose of sin, is a state of mind at once more heinous and more hopeless than the wildest aberrations of ungoverned passion. 

• The choice given to every man born into this world is, simply, whether he will be a labourer or an assassin; and that whosoever has not his hand on the Stilt of the plough, has it on the Hilt of the dagger. 

• You hear every day greater numbers of foolish people speaking about liberty, as if it were such an honourable thing: so far from being that, it is on the whole, and in the broadest sense, dishonourable, and an attribute of the lower creatures. No human being, however great, or powerful, was ever so free as a fish. There is always something that he must, or must not do; while the fish may do whatever he likes….It is his Restraint which is honourable to man, not his Liberty; and, what is more, it is restraint which is honourable even in the lower animals. A butterfly is much more free than a bee; but you honour the bee more, just because it is subject to certain laws which fit it for orderly function in bee society. And throughout the world, of the two abstract things, liberty and restraint, restraint is always the more honourable…Both liberty and restraint are good when they are nobly chosen, and both are bad when they are basely chosen; but of the two, I repeat, it is restraint which characterizes the higher creature, and betters the lower creature: and, from the ministering of the archangel to the labour of the insect, – from the poising of the planets to the gravitation of a grain of dust, – the power and glory of all creatures, and all matter, consist in their obedience, not in their freedom. 

• The first power of a nation consists in knowing how to guide the Plough, its second power consists in knowing how to wear the Fetter. 

• Three talismans of national existence are expressed in these three short words – Labour, Law, and Courage. 

• The army is the salvation of myriads; and men who, under other circumstances, would have sunk into lethargy or dissipation, are redeemed into noble life by a service which at once summons and directs their energies. 

• You may either win your peace, or buy it : – win it, by resistance to evil; – buy it, by compromise with evil. You may buy your peace, with silenced consciences; – you may buy it, with broken vows, – buy it, with lying words, – buy it, with base connivances, – buy it, with the blood of the slain, and the cry of the captive, and the silence of lost souls.

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---Modern Painters Vol V Part IX of Invention Spiritual (Published 1860)---

• ‘Truth to Nature’ is the theme of Modern Painter…If the criterion of greatness in art is truth, it follows that inferior art is bad because it is false. Good taste, therefore, is a moral quality.

• Nature was, after the Bible, the second book of divine revelation. It could therefore be read by the pious observer. The function of art, Ruskin argued, was to interpret it and, thereby, the ‘word’ of God. 

• The one possible hope for art, as Ruskin sees it, in an unjust social order and a cruel world: the hope that the artist may tell the truth by exposing the facts of the human condition, however painful, to the great light of nature. 

• Ruskin divides artists into ‘three great classes’: 1) the men of facts- those who are preoccupied mainly with accurate representation, 2) the men of design- those who are only concerned with abstract values and 3) the men of both. For some purposes, pure fact and pure design are adequate, but the greatest art must always attend to both. He then analyses the errors of attitude that each of these classes is prone to: which brings him to a second set of classes. This time the categories are moral ones: Purists, who ‘perceive, and pursue, the good, and leave the evil’; Naturalists, who ‘perceive and pursue the good and evil together’; and Sensualists, who ‘perceive and pursue the evil, and leave the good’. At their best, in Ruskin’s view, only the Naturalists are capable of the highest forms of art.

• The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what he saw in a plain way… To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion – all in one.

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---Unto this Last Four Essays on the first principles of Political Economy (Published 1862)---

• The ‘Four essays on the first principles of Political Economy’ were written in the summer of 1860. 

• “Unto this Last captured me and made me transform my life.-Ghandi.  

• Christ’s Parable of the Vineyard is the source of the book’s title; ‘Friend, I do thee no wrong. Didst not thou agree with me for a penny? Take that thine is, and go thy way. I will give unto this last even as unto thee.’ 

• What counts in “Unto this Last” is the economic significance of Christ’s teaching. Ruskin’s understanding of this is never directly stated, but a careful reading of the book will suggest two emphases. First, that the economic relationship between employer and employee should not be seen as a question of profit or advantage, but of justice. Thus, we may take it that the householder pays all his workers the same, not in order to under-pay those who have borne ‘the burden and the heat of the day’, but because all men have equal needs. So, justice is to be seen in the recognition of need and reciprocal responsibility. Secondly, the parable has bearing on what at the time seemed Ruskin’s most eccentric proposal, that there should be a fixed rate of wages for any job of work, regardless of quality. 

• Ruskin’s Unto this Last is first and foremost a cry of anger against injustice and inhumanity. 

• Unto this Last is a critique of current beliefs and ideas. It sets out to do two things: to define wealth and to demonstrate that certain moral conditions are essential to its attainment. The book is a closely argued assault on the philosophical and scientific method the economists took for granted. 

• The first essay, ‘The Roots of Honour’, begins with Ruskin’s attack on the notion of economic man. He argues that in most branches of human affairs– it is normal to regard personal gain as secondary to the disinterested service of one’s fellows. The same should apply in industry and commerce: the job of the manufacturer and merchant should be to provide for the community. 

• The second essay, ‘The Veins of Wealth’, anticipates the charge of sentimentality. With the help of some simple fables, Ruskin shows that honour in commercial affairs is not only desirable but essential to true prosperity. The Political Economists miss this point because they isolate the individual from society. Ruskin’s model of the state is the family, in which survival and prosperity are grounded in interdependence. 

• The third essay, ‘Qui Judicatis Terrain’, considers fair reward for labour. Here Ruskin argues that behind all human transactions is the concept of abstract justice. The concept is innate, and when it is violated the sufferer feels himself the victim of a crime. An unjust wage is therefore a form of theft. 

• The last essay, ‘Ad Valorem’, begins with some redefinitions of key terms, misused–as Ruskin sees it–by Mill and Ricardo. The climax of the essay and of the book is a definition of ‘value’. As in the case of ‘justice’, Ruskin finds it necessary to define this word in absolute terms. Adam Smith’s distinction between value in use and value in exchange is relative and ultimately meaningless. The value of an object is its power to support life. It is thus intrinsic. 

• The book’s final message, that ‘there is no Wealth but Life’, is the logical outcome, in social terms, of Ruskin’s insistence on the morality of taste. 

• Human actions are motivated by self-interest. It was the function of law and institutions to ensure that the individual subordinated his own need for happiness to the happiness of the community. 

• Ruskin thought the wages-fund theory was nonsense, favouring the more modern view that workers are paid out of anticipated profits (on credit). He was also very much in favour of income tax as an instrument of social justice.

• Political economy should be concerned with the wealth of the polis (the state or community). It has nothing to do with ‘the science of getting rich’, which he calls ‘mercantile economy, the economy of “merces” or of “pay.”

• Ruskin was never an egalitarian, but he opposes the view that inequality necessarily promotes economic health. He considers that an inequality established by just means and directed towards the interest of the community is beneficial, but unjust inequalities, though they may seem to favour the individual, are actually harmful to everyone.

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Preface

• A labourer serves his country with his spade, just as a man in the middle ranks of life serves it with sword, pen, or lancet. If the service be less, and, therefore, the wages during health less, then the reward when health is broken may be less, but not less honourable; and it ought to be quite as natural and straightforward a matter for a labourer to take his pension from his parish, because he has deserved well of his parish, as for a man in higher rank to take his pension from his country, because he has deserved well of his country.’

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Essay I: The Roots of Honour

• Assuming, not that the human being has no skeleton, but that it is all skeleton, it founds an ossifiant theory of progress on this negation of a soul. 

• The first vital problem which political economy has to deal with- the relation between employer and employed. 

• No human actions ever were intended by the Maker of men to be guided by balances of expediency, but by balances of justice. 

• The largest quantity of work will not be done by this curious engine for pay, or under pressure, or by help of any kind of fuel which may be supplied by the chaldron. It will be done only when the motive force, that is to say, the will or spirit of the creature, is brought to its greatest strength by its own proper fuel: namely, by the affections. 

• The universal law of the matter is that, assuming any given quantity of energy and sense in master and servant, the greatest material result obtainable by them will be, not through antagonism to each other, but through affection for each other; and that, if the master, instead of endeavoring to get as much work as possible from the servant, seeks rather to render his appointed and necessary work beneficial to him, and to forward his interests in all just and wholesome ways, the real amount of work ultimately done, or of good rendered, by the person so cared for, will indeed be the greatest possible. 

• The officer who has the most direct personal relations with his men, the most care for their interests, and the most value for their lives, will develop their effective strength, through their affection for his own person, and trust in his character, 

• The price of labour is always regulated by the demand for it; but, so far as the practical and immediate administration of the matter is regarded, the best labour always has been, and is, as all labour ought to be, paid by an invariable standard. 

• ‘What!’ the reader perhaps answers amazedly: ‘pay good and bad workmen alike?’ Certainly. The difference between one prelate’s sermons and his successor’s – or between one physician’s opinion and another’s, – is far greater, as respects the qualities of mind involved, and far more important in result to you personally, than the difference between good and bad laying of bricks. 

• The natural and right system respecting all labour is, that it should be paid at a fixed rate, but the good workman employed, and the bad workman unemployed. The false, unnatural, and destructive system is when the bad workman is allowed to offer his work at half-price, and either take the place of the good, or force him by his competition to work for an inadequate sum. 

• I believe the sudden and extensive inequalities of demand, which necessarily arise in the mercantile operations of an active nation, constitute the only essential difficulty which has to be overcome in a just organization of labour.

• Supposing that a man cannot live on less than a shilling a day, his seven shillings he must get, either for three days’ violent work, or six days’ deliberate work. 

• The merchant is presumed to act always selfishly. His work may be very necessary to the community; but the motive of it is understood to be wholly personal. The merchant’s first object in all his dealings must be (the public believe) to get as much for himself, and leave as little to his neighbour (or customer) as possible. 

• Commerce is an occupation which gentlemen will every day see more need to engage in, rather than in the businesses of talking to men, or slaying them; that, in true commerce, as in true preaching, or true fighting, it is necessary to admit the idea of occasional voluntary loss; – that sixpences have to be lost, as well as lives, under a sense of duty; that the market may have its martyrdoms as well as the pulpit; and trade its heroisms as well as war. 

• Five great intellectual professions, relating to daily necessities of life, have hitherto existed – three exist necessarily, in every civilized nation: The Soldier’s profession is to defend it. The Pastor’s to teach it. The Physician’s to keep it in health. The Lawyer’s to enforce justice in it. The Merchant’s to provide for it. And the duty of all these men is, on due occasion, to die for it. ‘On due occasion,’ namely: – The Soldier, rather than leave his post in battle. The Physician, rather than leave his post in plague. The Pastor, rather than teach Falsehood. The Lawyer, rather than countenance Injustice. The Merchant-what is his ‘due occasion’ of death? It is the main question for the merchant, as for all of us. For, truly, the man who does not know when to die, does not know how to live. 

• Observe, the merchant’s function (or manufacturers) is to provide for the nation. It is no more his function to get profit for himself out of that provision than it is a clergyman’s function to get his stipend. 

• (The merchant) has to understand to their very root the qualities of the thing he deals in, and the means of obtaining or producing it; and he has to apply all his sagacity and energy to the producing or obtaining it in perfect state, and distributing it at the cheapest possible price where it is most needed. 

• Supposing the captain of a frigate saw it right, or were by any chance obliged, to place his own son in the position of a common sailor: as he would then treat his son, he is bound always to treat every one of the men under him…This is the only effective, true, or practical RULE which can be given on this point of political economy. 

• As the captain of a ship is bound to be the last man to leave his ship in case of wreck, and to share his last crust with the sailors in case of famine, so the manufacturer, in any commercial crisis or distress, is bound to take the suffering of it with his men, and even to take more of it for himself than he allows his men to feel; as a father would in a famine, shipwreck, or battle, sacrifice himself for his son. 

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Essay II The Veins of Wealth

• 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. 

• Political economy (the economy of a State, or of citizens) consists simply in the production, preservation, and distribution, at fittest time and place, of useful or pleasurable things. The farmer who cuts his hay at the right time; the shipwright who drives his bolts well home in sound wood; the builder who lays good bricks in well-tempered mortar; the housewife who takes care of her furniture in the parlour, and guards against all waste in her kitchen; and the singer who rightly disciplines, and never overstrains her voice, are all political economists in the true and final sense: adding continually to the riches and well-being of the nation to which they belong. 

• Mercantile economy, the economy of ‘merces’ or of ‘pay,’ signifies the accumulation, in the hands of individuals, of legal or moral claim upon, or power over, the labour of others; every such claim implying precisely as much poverty or debt on one side, as it implies riches or right on the other. 

• The idea of riches among active men in civilized nations generally refers to commercial wealth; and in estimating their possessions, they rather calculate the value of their horses and fields by the number of guineas they could get for them, than the value of their guineas by the number of horses and fields they could buy with them. 

• Thus the power of the riches of the patron (always imperfect and doubtful, as we shall see presently, even when most authoritative) depends first on the poverty of the artist, and then on the limitation of the number of equally wealthy persons, who also want seats at the concert. So that, as above stated, the art of becoming ‘rich,’ in the common sense, is not absolutely nor finally the art of accumulating much money for ourselves, but also of contriving that our neighbours shall have less. In accurate terms, it is ‘the art of establishing the maximum inequality in our own favour.’ 

• The eternal and inevitable law in this matter is, that the beneficialness of the inequality depends, first, on the methods by which it was accomplished; and, secondly, on the purposes to which it is applied. Inequalities of wealth, unjustly established, have assuredly injured the nation in which they exist during their establishment; and, unjustly directed, injure it yet more during their existence. But inequalities of wealth, justly established, benefit the nation in the course of their establishment; and, nobly used, aid it yet more by their existence. That is to say, among every active and well-governed people, the various strength of individuals, tested by full exertion and specially applied to various need, issues in unequal, but harmonious results, receiving reward or authority according to its class and service; while, in the inactive or ill-governed nation, the gradations of decay and the victories of treason work out also their own rugged system of subjection and success; and substitute, for the melodious inequalities of concurrent power, the iniquitous dominances and depressions of guilt and misfortune.

• Any given accumulation of commercial wealth may be indicative, on the one hand, of faithful industries, progressive energies, and productive ingenuities: or, on the other, it may be indicative of mortal luxury, merciless tyranny, ruinous chicane. 

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Essay III Qui Judicatis Terram

• ‘Rob not the poor because he is poor; neither oppress the afflicted in the place of business. For God shall spoil the soul of those that spoiled them’. This ‘robbing the poor because he is poor,’ is especially the mercantile form of theft, consisting in taking advantage of a man’s necessities in order to obtain his labour or property at a reduced price.

• As long as the world lasts, the action and counteraction of wealth and poverty, the meeting, face to face, of rich and poor, is just as appointed and necessary a law of that world as the flow of stream to sea, or the interchange of power among the electric clouds: – ‘God is their maker.’ 

• The mistake of the best men through generation after generation, has been that great one of thinking to help the poor by almsgiving, and by preaching of patience or of hope, and by every other means, emollient or consolatory, except the one thing which God orders for them, justice. 

• Water of Marah: The water which feeds the roots of all evil. 

• Absolute justice is indeed no more attainable than absolute truth; but the righteous man is distinguished from the unrighteous by his desire and hope of justice, as the true man from the false by his desire and hope of truth. And though absolute justice be unattainable, as much justice as we need for all practical use is attainable by all those who make it their aim. 

• Money payment consists radically in a promise to some person working for us, that for the time and labour he spends in our service to-day we will give or procure equivalent time and labour in his service at any future time when he may demand it. If we promise to give him less labour than he has given us, we under-pay him. If we promise to give him more labour than he has given us, we over-pay him. In practice, according to the laws of demand and supply, when two men are ready to do the work, and only one man wants to have it done, the two men underbid each other for it; and the one who gets it to do, is under-paid. But when two men want the work done, and there is only one man ready to do it, the two men who want it done overbid each other, and the workman is over-paid. 

• When we ask a service of any man, he may either give it us freely, or demand payment for it. Respecting free gift of service, there is no question at present, that being a matter of affection – not of traffic. But if he demand payment for it, and we wish to treat him with absolute equity, it is evident that this equity can only consist in giving time for time, strength for strength, and skill for skill. 

• If a man works an hour for us, and we only promise to work half an hour for him in return, we obtain an unjust advantage. If, on the contrary, we promise to work an hour and a half for him in return, he has an unjust advantage. The justice consists in absolute exchange; or, if there be any respect to the stations of the parties, it will not be in favour of the employer: there is certainly no equitable reason in a man’s being poor, that if he give me a pound of bread to-day, I should return him less than a pound of bread to-morrow; or any equitable reason in a man’s being uneducated, that if he uses a certain quantity of skill and knowledge in my service, I should use a less quantity of skill and knowledge in his. 

• The Law of Justice: That of perfect and accurate exchange. 

• The labour first given, or ‘advanced,’ ought to be taken into account, and balanced by an additional quantity of labour in the subsequent repayment. 

• The abstract idea, then, of just or due wages, as respects the labourer, is that they will consist in a sum of money which will at any time procure for him at least as much labour as he has given, rather more than less. And this equity or justice of payment is, observe, wholly independent of any reference to the number of men who are willing to do the work. I want a horseshoe for my horse. Twenty smiths, or twenty thousand smiths, may be ready to forge it; their number does not in one atom’s weight affect the question of the equitable payment of the one who does forge it. 

• Abstract Theory of Just Remunerative Payment: Just or due wages, as respects the labourer, will consist in a sum of money which will at any time procure at least as much labour as given, rather more than less. And this equity or justice of payment is, observe, wholly independent of any reference to the number of men who are willing to do the work. I want a horseshoe for my horse. Twenty smiths, or twenty thousand smiths, may be ready to forge it; their number does not in one atom’s weight affect the question of the equitable payment of the one who does forge it.

• The worth of the work may not be easily known; but it has a worth, just as fixed and real as the specific gravity of a substance. 

• A just person lays it down for a scientific principle that he is to pay a just price, and, without being able precisely to ascertain the limits of such a price, will nevertheless strive to attain the closest possible approximation to them. 

• When two men are ready to do the work, and only one wants to have it done. The unjust purchaser forces the two to bid against each other till he has reduced their demand to its lowest terms. 

• By the unjust procedure, half the proper price of the work is left in the hands of the employer. This enables him to hire another man at the same unjust rate, on some other kind of work; and the final result is that he has two men working for him at half-price, and two are out of employ. 

• By the just procedure, the whole price of the first piece of work goes into the hands of the man who does it. No surplus being left in the employer’s hands, he cannot hire another man for another piece of labour. But by precisely so much as his power is diminished, the hired workman’s power is increased: that is to say, by the additional half of the price he has received; which additional half he has the power of using to employ another man in his service. 

• The essential difference, that which I want the reader to see clearly, is, that in the unjust case, two men work for one, the first hirer. In the just case, one man works for the first hirer, one for the person hired, and so on, down or up through the various grades of service; the influence being carried forward by justice, and arrested by injustice. The universal and constant action of justice in this matter is therefore to diminish the power of wealth, in the hands of one individual, over masses of men, and to distribute it through a chain of men. The actual power exerted by the wealth is the same in both cases; but by injustice it is put all into one man’s hands, so that he directs at once and with equal force the labour of a circle of men about him; by the just procedure, he is permitted to touch the nearest only, through whom, with diminished force, modified by new minds, the energy of the wealth passes on to others, and so till it exhausts itself. The immediate operation of justice in this respect is therefore to diminish the power of wealth, first, in acquisition of luxury, and secondly, in exercise of moral influence. 

• But the sufficient or just payment, distributed through a descending series of offices or grades of labour, gives each subordinated person fair and sufficient means of rising in the social scale, if he chooses to use them; and thus not only diminishes the immediate power of wealth, but removes the worst disabilities of poverty. It is on this vital problem that the entire destiny of the labourer is ultimately dependent. Many minor interests may sometimes appear to interfere with it, but all branch from it. 

• The lower orders agitated for the repeal of the corn laws, thinking they would be better off if bread were cheaper; never perceiving that as soon as bread was permanently cheaper, wages would permanently fall in precisely that proportion. The corn laws were rightly repealed; not, however, because they directly oppressed the poor, but because they indirectly oppressed them in causing a large quantity of their labour to be consumed unproductively. 

• If there be any one point insisted on throughout my works more frequently than another, that one point is the impossibility of Equality. 

• My principles of Political Economy were all involved in a single phrase spoken three years ago at Manchester: ‘Soldiers of the Ploughshare as well as Soldiers of the Sword’: and they were all summed in a single sentence in the last volume of Modern Painters – ‘Government and co-operation are in all things the Laws of Life; Anarchy and competition the Laws of Death.’ 

• The writings which we (verbally) esteem as divine, not only denounce the love of money as the source of all evil, and as an idolatry abhorred of the Deity, but declare mammon service to be the accurate and irreconcilably opposite of God’s service: and, whenever they speak of riches absolute, and poverty absolute, declare woe to the rich, and blessing to the poor. 

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Essay IV Ad Valorem

• In the last paper we saw that just payment of labour consisted in a sum of money which would approximately obtain equivalent labour at a future time…We have now to examine the means of obtaining such equivalence. Which question involves the definition of Value, Wealth, Price, and Produce. 

• I should have regretted the need of pointing out inconsistency in any portion of Mr. Mill’s work, had not the value of his work proceeded from its inconsistencies. He deserves honour among economists by inadvertently disclaiming the principles which he states, and tacitly introducing the moral considerations with which he declares his science has no connection. 

• The agreeableness of a thing depends on its relatively human disposition. Therefore, political economy, being a science of wealth, must be a science respecting human capacities and dispositions. 

• Wealth is the possession of useful articles that possess exchangeable value.

• Valor, from valere, to be well or strong (ΰγΙαίν); – strong, in life (if a man), or valiant; strong, for life (if a thing), or valuable. To be ‘valuable,’ therefore, is to ‘avail towards life.’ A truly valuable or availing thing is that which leads to life with its whole strength. In proportion as it does not lead to life, or as its strength is broken, it is less valuable; in proportion as it leads away from life, it is unvaluable or malignant…“Value,” when used without adjunct, always means, in political economy, value in exchange’.

• Wealth is ‘THE POSSESSION OF THE VALUABLE BY THE VALIANT’; and in considering it as a power existing in a nation, the two elements, the value of the thing, and the valour of its possessor, must be estimated together. 

• The Greeks called a body an ‘idiotic’ or ‘private’ body, from their word signifying a person employed in no way directly useful to the State; whence finally, our ‘idiot,’ meaning a person entirely occupied with his own concerns. 

• in a community regulated only by laws of demand and supply, 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. 

• One man, by sowing and reaping, turns one measure of corn into two measures. That is Profit. Another, by digging and forging, turns one spade into two spades. That is Profit. But the man who has two measures of corn wants sometimes to dig; and the man who has two spades wants sometimes to eat: – They exchange the gained grain for the gained tool; and both are the better for the exchange; but though there is much advantage in the transaction, there is no profit. Nothing is constructed or produced.

• If, in the exchange, one man is able to give what cost him little labour for what has cost the other much, he ‘acquires’ a certain quantity of the produce of the other’s labour. And precisely what he acquires, the other loses. 

• The general law, then, respecting just or economical exchange, is simply this: – There must be advantage on both sides (or if only advantage on one, at least no disadvantage on the other) to the persons exchanging; and just payment for his time, intelligence, and labour, to any intermediate person effecting the transaction (commonly called a merchant); and whatever advantage there is on either side, and whatever pay is given to the intermediate person, should be thoroughly known to all concerned. 

• Conditions are the following: – The price of anything is the quantity of labour given by the person desiring it, in order to obtain possession of it. This price depends on four variable quantities. A. The quantity of wish the purchaser has for the thing; opposed to α, the quantity of wish the seller has to keep it. B. The quantity of labour the purchaser can afford, to obtain the thing; opposed to ß, the quantity of labour the seller can afford, to keep it. These quantities are operative only in excess: i.e., the quantity of wish (A) means the quantity of wish for this thing, above wish for other things; and the quantity of work (B) means the quantity which can be spared to get this thing from the quantity needed to get other things. 

• The price of everything is to be calculated finally in labour. 

• I believe nearly all labour may be shortly divided into positive and negative labour: positive, that which produces life; negative, that which produces death; the most directly negative labour being murder, and the most directly positive, the bearing and rearing of children: 

• Labour being thus various in its result, the prosperity of any nation is in exact proportion to the quantity of labour which it spends in obtaining and employing means of life. 

• Capital signifies ‘head, or source, or root material’ – it is material by which some derivative or secondary good is produced. It is only capital proper (caput vivum, not caput mortuum) when it is thus producing something different from itself. It is a root, which does not enter into vital function till it produces something else than a root: namely, fruit. 

• There are two kinds of true production, always going on in an active State: one of seed, and one of food; or production for the Ground, and for the Mouth…Since production for the Ground is only useful with future hope of harvest, all essential production is for the Mouth; and is finally measured by the mouth; hence, as I said above, consumption is the crown of production; and the wealth of a nation is only to be estimated by what it consumes. 

• The final object of political economy is to get good method of consumption, and great quantity of consumption: in other words, to use everything, and to use it nobly; whether it be substance, service, or service perfecting substance…It is the manner and issue of consumption which are the real tests of production. Production does not consist in things laboriously made, but in things serviceably consumable; and the question for the nation is not how much labour it employs, but how much life it produces. For as consumption is the end and aim of production, so life is the end and aim of consumption. 

• THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others. 

• The maximum of life can only be reached by the maximum of virtue. 

• Charitable persons suppose the worst fault of the rich is to refuse the people meat; and the people cry for their meat, kept back by fraud, to the Lord of Multitudes. Alas! it is not meat of which the refusal is cruelest, or to which the claim is validest. The life is more than the meat. The rich not only refuse food to the poor; they refuse wisdom; they refuse virtue; they refuse salvation. 

• Three remedies for over-population commonly suggested by economists- colonization; bringing in of waste lands; or Discouragement of Marriage. 

• If the ground maintains, at first, forty labourers in a peaceable and pious state of mind, but they become in a few years so quarrelsome and impious that they have to set apart five, to meditate upon and settle their disputes; – ten, armed to the teeth with costly instruments, to enforce the decisions; and five to remind everybody in an eloquent manner of the existence of a God; – what will be the result upon the general power of production, and what is the ‘natural rate of wages’ of the meditative, muscular, and oracular labourers? 

• The maximum of population on a given space of land implies also the relative maximum of edible vegetable, whether for men or cattle; it implies a maximum of pure air; and of pure water. Therefore: a maximum of wood, to transmute the air, and of sloping ground, protected by herbage from the extreme heat of the sun, to feed the streams. 

• All true economy is ‘Law of the house.’ Strive to make that law strict, simple, generous: waste nothing, and grudge nothing. Care in nowise to make more of money, but care to make much of it; remembering always the great, palpable, inevitable fact – the rule and root of all economy – that what one person has, another cannot have; and that every atom of substance, of whatever kind, used or consumed, is so much human life spent; which, if it issue in the saving present life, or gaining more, is well spent, but if not is either so much life prevented, or so much slain. 

• In all buying, consider, first, what condition of existence you cause in the producers of what you buy; secondly, whether the sum you have paid is just to the producer, and in due proportion, lodged in his hands; thirdly, to how much clear use, for food, knowledge, or joy, this that you have bought can be put; and fourthly, to whom and in what way it can be most speedily and serviceably distributed; in all dealings whatsoever insisting on entire openness and stern fulfilment; and in all doings, on perfection and loveliness of accomplishment; especially on fineness and purity of all marketable commodity: watching at the same time for all ways of gaining, or teaching, powers of simple pleasure; and of showing- the sum of enjoyment depending not on the quantity of things tasted, but on the vivacity and patience of taste. 

• Consider whether, even supposing it guiltless, luxury would be desired by any of us, if we saw clearly at our sides the suffering which accompanies it in the world. Luxury is indeed possible in the future – innocent and exquisite; luxury for all, and by the help of all; but luxury at present can only be enjoyed by the ignorant; the cruelest man living could not sit at his feast, unless he sat blindfold. 

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---From The Crown of Wild Olive Four Lectures on Industry and War (Published 1866)--- 

• The Crown of Olive stems from lectures by Ruskin in 1864 and 1865. The book was published in 1866. The lectures all directly or indirectly grow out of the question, exceptionally troubling to a man who has lost his faith in eternal life, of the ultimate goal of our labours here on earth. 

• The Greeks, says Ruskin, though they lacked the consolations promised by Christianity, saw the end of their activity as honour alone -not riches, nor the promise of a future life. The earth itself with its natural riches was sufficient. ‘They knew that life brought its contest, but they expected from it also the crown of all contest: No proud one! no jewelled circlet flaming through Heaven above the height of the unmerited throne; only some few leaves of wild olive, cool to the tired brow, through a few years of peace. 

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Traffic Delivered in the Town Hall, Bradford (21 Apr, 1864)

• You cannot have good architecture merely by asking people’s advice on occasion. All good architecture is the expression of national life and character; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty. 

• Taste is not only a part and an index of morality; – it is the ONLY morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is, ‘What do you like?’ Tell me what you like, and I’ll tell you what you are. 

• The entire object of true education is to make people not merely do the right things, but enjoy the right things: – not merely industrious, but to love industry – not merely learned, but to love knowledge – not merely pure, but to love purity – not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice. 

• What we like determines what we are, and is the sign of what we are; and to teach taste is inevitably to form character. 

• Every nation’s vice, or virtue, was written in its art: the soldiership of early Greece; the sensuality of late Italy; the visionary religion of Tuscany; the splendid human energy of Venice. 

• Every great national architecture has been the result and exponent of a great national religion. You can’t have bits of it here, bits there – you must have it everywhere or nowhere. It is not the monopoly of a clerical company – it is not the exponent of a theological dogma – it is not the hieroglyphic writing of an initiated priesthood; it is the manly language of a people inspired by resolute and common purpose, and rendering resolute and common fidelity to the legible laws of an undoubted God. 

• We Europeans have had three great religions: the Greek, which was the worship of the God of Wisdom and Power; the Mediaeval, which was the worship of the God of Judgment and Consolation; the Renaissance, which was the worship of the God of Pride and Beauty: these three we have had – they are past, – and now, at last, we English have got a fourth religion, and a God of our own…For Greece, out of imperfect knowledge spring terror, dissension, danger, and disdain; but from perfect knowledge, given by the full-revealed Athena, strength and peace, in sign of which she is crowned with the olive spray, and bears the resistless spear…Next followed in Europe the great Christian faith, which was essentially the religion of Comfort. Its great doctrine is the remission of sins; for which cause, it happens, too often, in certain phases of Christianity, that sin and sickness themselves are partly glorified, as if, the more you had to be healed of, the more divine was the healing. The practical result of this doctrine, in art, is a continual contemplation of sin and disease, and of imaginary states of purification from them; thus we have an architecture conceived in a mingled sentiment of melancholy and aspiration, partly severe, partly luxuriant, which will bend itself to every one of our needs, and every one of our fancies, and be strong or weak with us, as we are strong or weak ourselves. It is, of all architecture, the basest, when base people build it – of all, the noblest, when built by the noble…The Mediaeval religion of Consolation perished in false comfort; in remission of sins given lyingly. It was the selling of absolution that ended the Mediaeval faith; and I can tell you more, it is the selling of absolution which, to the end of time, will mark false Christianity. Pure Christianity gives her remission of sins only by ending them; but false Christianity gets her remission of sins by compounding for them…There followed the religion of Pleasure, in which all Europe gave itself to luxury, ending in death. First, bals masqués in every saloon, and then guillotines in every square. And all these three worships issue in vast temple building. 

• We have, indeed, a nominal religion, to which we pay tithes of property and sevenths of time; but we have also a practical and earnest religion, to which we devote nine-tenths of our property, and six-sevenths of our time. And we dispute a great deal about the nominal religion: but we are all unanimous about this practical one ; of which I think you will admit that the ruling goddess may be best generally described as the ‘Goddess of Getting-on,’ or ‘Britannia of the Market.’ The Athenians had an ‘Athena Agoraia,’ or Athena of the Market; but she was a subordinate type of their goddess, while our Britannia Agoraia is the principal type of ours. And all your great architectural works are, of course, built to her. 

• The most important question. Getting on – but where to? Gathering together – but how much? Do you mean to gather always – never to spend? If so, I wish you joy of your goddess, for I am just as well off as you, without the trouble of worshipping her at all. But if you do not spend, somebody else will – somebody else must. And it is because of this (among many other such errors) that I have fearlessly declared your so-called science of Political Economy to be no science; because, namely, it has omitted the study of exactly the most important branch of the business – the study of spending. For spend you must, and as much as you make, ultimately. 

• Look strictly into the nature of the power of your Goddess of Getting-on; and you will find she is the Goddess – not of everybody’s getting on – but only of somebody’s getting on. 

• Your ideal of human life then is, I think, that it should be passed in a pleasant undulating world, with iron and coal everywhere underneath it. On each pleasant bank of this world is to be a beautiful mansion, with two wings; and stables, and coach-houses; a moderately-sized park; a large garden and hot-houses; and pleasant carriage drives through the shrubberies. In this mansion are to live the favoured votaries of the Goddess; the English gentleman, with his gracious wife, and his beautiful family; he always able to have the boudoir and the jewels for the wife, and the beautiful ball dresses for the daughters, and hunters for the sons, and a shooting in the Highlands for himself. At the bottom of the bank, is to be the mill; not less than a quarter of a mile long, with one steam engine at each end, and two in the middle, and a chimney three hundred feet high. In this mill are to be in constant employment from eight hundred to a thousand workers, who never drink, never strike, always go to church on Sunday, and always express themselves in respectful language…It is very pretty indeed, seen from above; not at all so pretty, seen from below. For, observe, while to one family this deity is indeed the Goddess of Getting-on, to a thousand families she is the Goddess of not Getting-on. 

• Do you think the old practice, that ‘they should take who have the power, and they should keep who can,’ is less iniquitous, when the power has become power of brains instead of fist? and that, though we may not take advantage of a child’s or a woman’s weakness, we may of a man’s foolishness? 

• It does not follow, because you are general of an army, that you are to take all the treasure, or land, it wins; (if it fight for treasure or land;) neither, because you are king of a nation, that you are to consume all the profits of the nation’s work. Real kings, on the contrary, are known invariably by their doing quite the reverse of this, – by their taking the least possible quantity of the nation’s work for themselves. There is no test of real kinghood so infallible as that…True kinghood’s live, which are of royal labourers governing loyal labourers; who, both leading rough lives, establish the true dynasties. 

• To do the best for others, is finally to do the best for ourselves. 

• If you can fix some conception of a true human state of life to be striven for – life, good for all men, as for yourselves; if you can determine some honest and simple order of existence; following those trodden ways of wisdom, which are pleasantness, and seeking her quiet and withdrawn paths, which are peace; – then, and so sanctifying wealth into ‘commonwealth,’ all your art, your literature, your daily labours, your domestic affection, and citizen’s duty, will join and increase into one magnificent harmony. You will know then how to build, well enough; you will build with stone well, but with flesh better; temples not made with hands, but riveted of hearts; and that kind of marble, crimson-veined, is indeed eternal. 

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---From Sesame and Lilies Two Lectures (Published 1865)--- 

• ‘Sesame’ refers to the first lecture, ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’, which is reprinted here. ‘Lilies’ refers to the second, ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’. The book was, in its day, the most popular of all Ruskin’s works.

• ‘Valuable books should, in a civilized country, be within the reach of every one, printed in excellent form, for a just price…’ It is mainly a plea for the introduction of public libraries ‘in every considerable city’ in the kingdom. 

• The lilies are the ‘sceptres’ of queens: in other words, they represent the power and influence of women. Appropriately enough, ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ is concerned with female education. 

• The Kings’ Treasuries are primarily books; right education gives us the power to draw on their inexhaustible wealth. 

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Of Kings’ Treasuries

• I want to speak to you about the treasures hidden in books; and about the way we find them, and the way we lose them. 

• You might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough), and remain an utterly ‘illiterate’ uneducated person; but that if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, – that is to say, with real accuracy, – you are for evermore in some measure an educated person. The entire difference between education and non-education (as regards the merely intellectual part of it), consists in this accuracy. 

• Let the accent of words be watched; and closely: let their meaning be watched more closely still, and fewer will do the work. A few words well chosen, and distinguished, will do work that a thousand cannot, when every one is acting, equivocally, in the function of another. Yes; and words, if they are not watched, will do deadly work sometimes. 

• If you do not know the Greek alphabet, learn it; young or old – girl or boy – whoever you may be, if you think of reading seriously (which, of course, implies that you have some leisure at command), learn your Greek alphabet; then get good dictionaries of all these languages, and whenever you are in doubt about a word, hunt it down patiently. Read Max Müller’s lectures thoroughly, to begin with; and, after that, never let a word escape you that looks suspicious. It is severe work; but you will find it, even at first, interesting, and at last endlessly amusing. And the general gain to your character, in power and precision, will be quite incalculable. 

• A ‘Bishop’ means ‘a person who sees.’ A ‘Pastor’ means ‘a person who feeds.’ The most unbishoply character a man can have is therefore to be Blind. The most unpastoral is, instead of feeding, to want to be fed, – to be a Mouth. 

• Those who hold that men can be saved by thinking rightly instead of doing rightly, by word instead of act, and wish instead of work; – these are the true fog children – clouds, these, without water.

• Which is rightly called ‘reading’; watching every accent and expression, and putting ourselves always in the author’s place, annihilating our own personality, and seeking to enter into his, so as to be able assuredly to say, ‘Thus Milton thought’ not ‘Thus I thought, in mis-reading Milton.’ And by this process you will gradually come to attach less weight to your own ‘Thus I thought’ at other times. You will begin to perceive that what you thought was a matter of no serious importance; – that your thoughts on any subject are not perhaps the clearest and wisest that could be arrived at thereupon: – in fact, that unless you are a very singular person, you cannot be said to have any ‘thoughts’ at all; that you have no materials for them, in any serious matters; – no right to ‘think’ but only to try to learn more of the facts. 

• Most probably all your life (unless, as I said, you are a singular person) you will have no legitimate right to an ‘opinion’ on any business, except that instantly under your hand. What must of necessity be done, you can always find out, beyond question, how to do. Have you a house to keep in order, a commodity to sell, a field to plough, a ditch to cleanse? There need be no two opinions about these proceedings; it is at your peril if you have not much more than an ‘opinion’ on the way to manage such matters. And also, outside of your own business, there are one or two subjects on which you are bound to have but one opinion. 

• Respecting religions, governments, sciences, arts, you will find that, on the whole, you can know NOTHING, – judge nothing; that the best you can do, even though you may be a well-educated person, is to be silent, and strive to be wiser every day, and to understand a little more of the thoughts of others, which so soon as you try to do honestly, you will discover that the thoughts even of the wisest are very little more than pertinent questions. 

• Most men’s minds are indeed little better than rough heath wilderness, neglected and stubborn, partly barren, partly overgrown with pestilent brakes, and venomous, wind-sown herbage of evil surmise; that the first thing you have to do for them, and yourself, is eagerly and scornfully to set fire to this; burn all the jungle into wholesome ash-heaps, and then plough and sow…All the true literary work before you, for life, must begin with obedience to that order, ‘Break up your fallow ground, and sow not among thorns. 

• We are only human in so far as we are sensitive, and our honour is precisely in proportion to our passion. 

• You can talk a mob into anything; its feelings may be – usually are – on the whole, generous and right; but it has no foundation for them, no hold of them; you may tease or tickle it into any, at your pleasure; it thinks by infection, for the most part, catching an opinion like a cold, and there is nothing so little that it will not roar itself wild about, when the fit is on; – nothing so great but it will forget in an hour, when the fit is past. 

• No nation can last, which has made a mob of itself, however generous at heart. It must discipline its passions, and direct them, or they will discipline it, one day, with scorpion whips. Above all, a nation cannot last as a money-making mob: it cannot with impunity, – it cannot with existence, – go on despising literature, despising science, despising art, despising nature, despising compassion, and concentrating its soul on Pence. 

• No book is worth anything which is not worth much; nor is it serviceable, until it has been read, and re-read, and loved, and loved again; and marked, so that you can refer to the passages you want in it, as a soldier can seize the weapon he needs in an armoury, or a housewife bring the spice she needs from her store. 

• A consuming white leprosy of new hotels and perfumers’ shops. 

• You have, indeed, men among you who do not; by whose work, by whose strength, by whose life, by whose death, you live, and never thank them. Your wealth, your amusement, your pride, would all be alike impossible, but for those whom you scorn or forget. The policeman, who is walking up and down the black lane all night to watch the guilt you have created there; and may have his brains beaten out, and be maimed for life, at any moment, and never be thanked; the sailor wrestling with the sea’s rage; the quiet student poring over his book or his vial; the common worker, without praise, and nearly without bread, fulfilling his task as your horses drag your carts, hopeless, and spurned of all: these are the men by whom England lives.

• Having no true business, we pour our whole masculine energy into the false business of money-making.

• Chalmers, at the end of his long life, having had much power with the public, being plagued in some serious matter by a reference to ‘public opinion,’ uttered the impatient exclamation, ‘The public is just a great baby!’ And the reason that I have allowed all these graver subjects of thought to mix themselves up with an inquiry into methods of reading, is that, the more I see of our national faults or miseries, the more they resolve themselves into conditions of childish illiterateness and want of education in the most ordinary habits of thought. It is, I repeat, not vice, not selfishness, not dullness of brain, which we have to lament; but an unreachable schoolboy’s recklessness, only differing from the true schoolboys in its incapacity of being helped, because it acknowledges no master. 

• Mighty of heart, mighty of mind – ‘magnanimous’ – to be this, is indeed to be great in life; to become this increasingly, is, indeed, to ‘advance in life,’ – in life itself – not in the trappings of it. 

• Old Scythian Custom: When the head of a house died, he was put in his finest dress, set in his chariot, and carried about to his friends’ houses; and each of them placed him at his table’s head, and all feasted in his presence. 

• He only is advancing in life, whose heart is getting softer, whose blood warmer, whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into Living peace. 

• True kings rule quietly, if at all, and hate ruling; too many of them make ‘il gran rifiuto’; and if they do not, the mob, as soon as they are likely to become useful to it, is pretty sure to make its ‘gran rifiuto’ of them. 

• Think what an amazing business that would be! How inconceivable, in the state of our present national wisdom! That we should bring up our peasants to a book exercise instead of a bayonet exercise! – organise, drill, maintain with pay, and good generalship, armies of thinkers, instead of armies of stabbers! – find national amusement in reading-rooms as well as rifle-grounds; give prizes for a fair shot at a fact, as well as for a leaden splash on a target. 

• All unjust war being supportable, if not by pillage of the enemy, only by loans from capitalists, these loans are repaid by subsequent taxation of the people, who appear to have no will in the matter, the capitalists’ will being the primary root of the war; but its real root is the covetousness of the whole nation, rendering it incapable of faith, frankness, or justice, and bringing about, therefore, in due time, his own separate loss and punishment to each person.’ 

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---From Fors Clavigera Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (Published 1871-1884)--- 

• Fors Clavigera consists of 96 open letters addressed ‘to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain’. They were published as monthly periodicals between 1871 and 1878, and then intermittently between 1880 and 1884. 

• All forms of labour are seen as rooted in nature and having a common purpose – that of promoting the wealth that is life. 

• The sickness of modern society is usury, a name Ruskin gives to interest of any kind. The usurer alone is idle. Those who make money out of money, not out of their labour, live off the labour of others. 

• The letters are about work, but work seen in the perspective of human destiny. 

• ‘To do good work, whether we live or die’: The first article of what Ruskin was to call the St George’s vow, set down in Letter 2. The other articles were: (2.) To help other people at [their work], when you can, and seek to avenge no injury. (3.) To be sure you can obey good laws before you seek to alter bad ones. 

• By the time he wrote Fors Clavigera in the 1870s, Ruskin had decided that all gain by means of interest was vicious. 

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Letter 7: Charitas

• We Communists of the old school think that our property belongs to everybody, and everybody’s property to us.

• What Communism is? First, it means that everybody must work in common, and do common or simple work for his dinner; and that if any man will not do it, he must not have his dinner. 

• ‘The chief, and almost the only business of the government, is to take care that no man may live idle, but that every one may follow his trade diligently: yet they do not wear themselves out with perpetual toil from morning till night, as if they were beasts of burden, which, as it is indeed a heavy slavery, so it is everywhere the common course of life amongst all mechanics except the Utopians; but they, dividing the day and night into twenty-four hours, appoint six of these for work, three of which are before dinner and three after; they then sup, and, at eight o’clock, counting from noon, go to bed and sleep eight hours: the rest of their time, besides that taken up in work, eating, and sleeping, is left to every man’s discretion; yet they are not to abuse that interval to luxury and idleness, but must employ it in some proper exercise, according to their various inclinations, which is, for the most part, reading. 

• Consider how few of those that work are employed in labours that are of real service! for we, who measure all things by money, give rise to many trades that are both vain and superfluous, and serve only to support riot and luxury: for if those who work were employed only in such things as the conveniences of life require, there would be such an abundance of them, that the prices of them would so sink that tradesmen could not be maintained by their gains.

• In Utopia; for there, in a great city, and in all the territory that lies round it, you can scarce find five hundred, either men or women, by their age and strength capable of labour, that are not engaged in it! even the heads of government, though excused by the law, yet do not excuse themselves, but work, that, by their examples, they may excite the industry of the rest of the people.’ 

• Our chief concern is to find out any among us wiser and of better make than the rest, and to get them, if they will for any persuasion take the trouble, to rule over us, and teach us how to behave, and make the most of what little good is in us. 

• The first law of old Communism, respecting work. Then the second respects property, and it is that the public, or common, wealth, shall be more and statelier in all its substance than private or singular wealth; that is to say (to come to my own special business for a moment) that there shall be only cheap and few pictures, if any, in the insides of houses, where nobody but the owner can see them; but costly pictures, and many, on the outsides of houses, where the people can see them…Finally and chiefly, it is an absolute law of old Communism that the fortunes of private persons should be small, and of little account in the State; but the common treasure of the whole nation should be of superb and precious things in redundant quantity, as pictures, statues, precious books; gold and silver vessels, preserved from ancient times; gold and silver bullion laid up for use, in case of any chance need of buying anything suddenly from foreign nations; noble horses, cattle, and sheep, on the public lands; and vast spaces of land for culture, exercise, and garden, round the cities, full of flowers, which, being everybody’s property, nobody could gather; and of birds which, being everybody’s property, nobody could shoot. And, in a word, that instead of a common poverty, or national debt, which every poor person in the nation is taxed annually to fulfil his part of, there should be a common wealth, or national reverse of debt, consisting of pleasant things, which every poor person in the nation should be summoned to receive his dole of, annually.

• Above all things, in what we value most of possessions, pleasant sights, and true knowledge, we cannot relish seeing any pretty things unless other people see them also; neither can we be content to know anything for ourselves, but must contrive, somehow, to make it known to others. 

• We (dark reds) believe that…the people who keep (wealth) all to themselves, and leave the so-called canaille without any, vitiate what they keep by keeping it, so that it is like manna laid up through the night, which breeds worms in the morning…We think virtue diminishes in the honour and force of it in proportion to income, we think vice increases in the force and shame of it, and is worse in kings and rich people than in poor. 

• The first reason for all wars, and for the necessity of national defences, is that the majority of persons, high and low, in all European nations, are Thieves, and, in their hearts, greedy of their neighbours’ goods, land, and fame. 

• ‘Invidia,’ jealousy of your neighbours’ good, has been, since dust was first made flesh, the curse of man; and ‘Charitas,’ the desire to do your neighbour grace, the one source of all human glory, power, and material Blessing. 

• The guilty Thieves of Europe, the real sources of all deadly war in it, are the Capitalists – that is to say, people who live by percentages on the labour of others; instead of by fair wages for their own. 

• An income-tax is the only honest and just one; because it tells on the rich in true proportion to the poor, and because it meets necessity in the shortest and bravest way, and without interfering with any commercial operation…The only honest and wholly right tax is one not merely on income, but property; increasing in percentage as the property is greater. And the main virtue of such a tax is that it makes publicly known what every man has, and how he gets it. 

• The promises I want you to make: 

• You are to do good work, whether you live or die. It may be you will have to die; – well, men have died for their country often, yet doing her no good; be ready to die for her in doing her assured good: her, and all other countries with her. 

• Mind your own business with your absolute heart and soul; but see that it is a good business first. 

• Seek to revenge no injury. 

• Learn to obey good laws; and in a little while you will reach the better learning – how to obey good Men, who are living, breathing, unblinded law; and to subdue base and disloyal ones. 

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Letter 10: The Baron’s Gate Denmark Hill (7 Sep, 1871)

• We have been thinking, perhaps, today, more than we ought of our masters’ faults, – scarcely enough of our own. If you would have the upper classes do their duty, see that you also do yours. 

• A good law is one that holds, whether you recognize and pronounce it or not; a bad law is one that cannot hold, however much you ordain and pronounce it. 

• Read your Carlyle, then, with all your heart, and with the best of brain you can give; and you will learn from him first, the eternity of good law, and the need of obedience to it: then, concerning your own immediate business, you will learn farther this, that the beginning of all good law, and nearly the end of it, is in these two ordinances, – That every man shall do good work for his bread: and secondly, that every man shall have good bread for his work. But the first of these is the only one you have to think of. If you are resolved that the work shall be good, the bread will be sure. 

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Greek Mythology

• Apollo: The spirit of light and a mountain spirit, because the sun seems first to rise and set upon the hills.

• Athena: The spirit of wisdom in conduct.

• Chameleon: ‘Ground-Lion’- Greek. 

• Hecate: The Greek goddess regarded as the protectress of witches. 

• Hesperides: A group of nymphs who were guardians, with the aid of a watchful dragon, of a tree of golden apples in a garden located beyond the Atlas Mountains at the western border of Oceanus, the river encircling the world. One of the labors of Hercules was to fetch the golden apples. 

• Ixion: King Ixion promised his father-in-law, Deioneus, a valuable present, but did not give it. Deioneus in consequence stole the horses of Ixion, who thereupon invited his father-in-law to a banquet, and threw him into a secret pit, filled with fire. Ixion was unable to obtain expiation from gods or men, till at last Zeus received him in pity and purified him. When Zeus discovered that Ixion planned to seduce his consort, Hera, he shaped a cloud into her image. So, when Ixion tried to embrace her, he clasped nothing. Zeus then punished him by binding him on to a wheel of fire for all eternity.

• Ossa: A high mountain in Thessaly. When the giants wanted to overthrow Zeus, they tried to climb up to heaven by piling Mount Ossa on top of Mount Pelion.

• ‘To pile Ossa on Pelion’ is to add difficulty to difficulty without getting any nearer one’s goal. 

• Tisiphone: One of the Furies, whose duty it was to exact retribution for acts of impiety. 

• Vulcan: The spirit of wisdom in adaptation, or of serviceable labour.

• Tydides & Idomeneus: Greek warrior kings in Homer’s Iliad. Tydides is the patronymic of Diomedes, King of Aetolia. Idomeneus was King of Crete. 

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Biblical Mythology

• Gideon: The Israelite general who subdued the Midianites.

• Nabal: The rich farmer in 1 Samuel xxv who refuses hospitality to King David’s soldiers, although they have protected his land.

• Ophir: Thought to have been on the coast of Yemen (ref 1 Kings ix.26–8). 

• In Matthew xvi.19 Christ chooses St Peter as the ‘rock’ on which the Church shall be built. In other words, from a Roman Catholic point of view, the saint is appointed the first Pope.

• ‘Nebuchadnezzar the king made an image of gold… he set it up in the plain of Dura.’ This was the idol before which Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were burnt alive. Political economy is, similarly, a false god to which living men and women are daily sacrificed.

• The story of Naboth’s vineyard in 1 Kings xxi. Ahab, King of Samaria, covets the vineyard of a man named Naboth who lives near his palace. When Naboth refuses to give it him, the King’s wife Jezebel arranges for him to be falsely accused of blasphemy. He is condemned to death by stoning and Ahab takes possession of the vineyard. Then God sends the prophet Elijah to denounce Ahab and Jezebel with the words: ‘Thus saith the Lord, Hast thou killed, and also taken possession? … In the place where dogs licked the blood of Naboth shall dogs lick thy blood, even thine’ (xxi. 19). In 1 Kings xxii, Ahab is killed and dogs lick his blood. In 2 Kings ix, Jezebel is thrown from a window and dogs eat her flesh.

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Dante’s Inferno

• Geryon: Representing fraud; the winged monster on whose back Dante and Virgil descends from the 7th to the 8th Circle of Hell.

• ‘Gran rifiuto’: ‘The great refusal’; Dante’s famous condemnation of the Pope who resigned his office, typifying all rulers who through weakness fail to exercise their authority and so bring ruin on their subjects. 

• Ice of Caina: The outermost ring of the 9th and last Circle of Hell (Dante, Inferno, xxxii). The last circle consists entirely of ice. It is named after Cain, the first murderer, and is occupied by those who, like Cain, have murdered their own kindred. 

• Plutus: The god of Riches; discovered by Dante and Virgil at the brink of the Fourth Circle. He is furious at their intrusion and shouts at them incoherently. When Virgil rebukes him, he falls to the ground. 

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Misc Quotes

As early as 1851, Ruskin expressed his fear of the geologists’ ‘dreadful Hammers’, the clink of which he heard ‘at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses’.

“Ruskin’s paradise is not supernatural. On the contrary, it is nature herself – a nature in which relationships are just and governed by love.”

“Ruskin was long puzzled by Homer’s calling the sea purple; and misled into thinking he meant the colour of cloud shadows on green sea; whereas he really means the gleaming blaze of the waves under wide light. Aristotle’s idea (partly true) is that light, subdued by blackness, becomes red; and blackness heated or lighted, also becomes red. Thus, a colour may be called purple because it is light subdued (and so death is called ‘purple’ or ‘shadowy’ death); or else it may be called purple as being shade kindled with fire, and thus said of the lighted sea; or even of the sun itself, when it is thought of as a red luminary.”

“Ruskin considered advertising as one of the most pernicious features of capitalism and thought it should be banned. In later life he forbade the advertising of his own books.”

“By ‘what a man ought to have for his work’ Ruskin meant the quantity of food and air which will enable a man to perform it without actually losing any of his flesh or his nervous energy. 

“The end of wealth – as common sense should tell us – is not more wealth, but consumption. Mill misses this point because he sees capital as part of the process of production, so not in the same department of the subject as consumption. Most modern economists, following John Maynard Keynes, accept Ruskin’s view of the matter rather than Mill’s.”

“The burden of responsibility lies with the rich for their failure to provide education for the poor.”

“Ruskin habitually takes the family as a model for the just state. In the just state, as in the family, the strong take responsibility for the weak.”

“Ruskin was fascinated by the roots of words. The quest for the ‘original’ meaning of a word is part of his conservatism, for changes in meaning inevitably involve the loss of a purer denotation.”

“In earlier writings Ruskin had gone to some lengths to reassure the public that his ideas entailed neither Socialism nor Communism.”

“The existence of a National Debt in a rich nation seemed to Ruskin a profound condemnation of an economy based on interest.”

“The three theological virtues: Faith, Hope and Charity.”

“About to embark on the Third Crusade, Richard decreed that any of his troops found guilty of theft should be tarred and feathered and put ashore on the first land sighted. Ruskin particularly valued Richard’s laws for a more admirable principle: they classed misrepresentation and deception as forms of theft.”

“That every man shall do… good bread for his work: As so often in Ruskin, the Biblical text behind this is God’s command to Adam: ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.’”

“We had better seek for a system which will develop honest men, than for one which will deal cunningly with vagabonds. Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.”

“All money, properly so called, is an acknowledgment of debt; but as such, it may either be considered to represent the labour and property of the creditor, or the idleness and penury of the debtor.”

“Money is a documentary promise ratified and guaranteed by the nation to give or find a certain quantity of labour on demand.”

“The more our standing armies, whether of soldiers, pastors, or legislators (the generic term ‘pastor’ including all teachers, and the generic term ‘lawyer’ including makers as well as interpreters of law), can be superseded by the force of national heroism, wisdom, and honesty, the better it may be for the nation.”

“The privilege of the fishes, as it is of rats and wolves, to live by the laws of demand and supply; but the distinction of humanity, to live by those of right.”

“The exchangeable value of a commodity is that of the labour required to produce it, multiplied into the force of the demand for it. If the value of the labour = x and the force of demand = y, the exchangeable value of the commodity is xy, in which if either x = 0, or y = 0, xy = 0.”

“I never said that a colonel should have the same pay as a private, nor a bishop the same pay as a curate. Neither did I say that more work ought to be paid as less work (so that the curate of a parish of two thousand souls should have no more than the curate of a parish of five hundred). But I said that, so far as you employ it at all, bad work should be paid no less than good work; as a bad clergyman yet takes his tithes, a bad physician takes his fee, and a bad lawyer his costs.”

“Tuscany cannot compete with England in steel, nor England with Tuscany in oil. They must exchange their steel and oil. Which exchange should be as frank and free as honesty and the sea-winds can make it.”

“By ‘Skill’ I mean to include the united force of experience, intellect, and passion.”

“The retardation of science by envy is one of the most tremendous losses in the economy of the present century.” 

“All scarcity is a form of monopoly.”

“Economists do not notice that objects are not valued by absolute bulk or weight, but by such bulk and weight as is necessary to bring them into use. They say, for instance, that water bears no price in the market. It is true that a cupful does not, but a lake does; just as a handful of dust does not, but an acre does. And were it possible to make even the possession of a cupful or handful permanent (i.e., to find a place for them), the earth and sea would be bought up by handfuls and cupfuls.”

“Labour which is entirely good of its kind, that is to say, effective, or efficient, the Greeks called ‘weighable,’ or translated usually ‘worthy,’ and because thus substantial and true, they called its price, the ‘honourable estimate’ of it (honorarium): this word being founded on their conception of true labour as a divine thing, to be honoured with the kind of honour given to the gods; whereas the price of false labour, or of that which led away from life, was to be, not honour, but vengeance; for which they reserved another word, attributing the exaction of such price to a peculiar goddess, called Tisiphone, the ‘requiter (or quittance-taker) of death’; a person versed in the highest branches of arithmetic, and punctual in her habits; with whom accounts current have been opened also in modern days.”

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Terminology

• 285 Potable Gold: The term used in alchemy for gold dissolved in nitro-hydrochloric acid; supposed to contain the elixir of life.

• Adamant: Originally used for ‘diamond’. 

• Armstrongs: The popular name for the large-bore ordnance designed by W. G. Armstrong (1810–1900) and used in the Crimean War. 

• Byzants (‘Bezants’): The gold coins struck at Byzantium, were common in England till superseded by the noble, a coin of Edward III. 

• Cantel: A part cut out.

• Catallactics: The science of exchange. 

• Chiaroscuro: The treatment of light and shade in drawing and painting. 

• Dainty: Delicately small and pretty. 

• Dastardly: Wicked and cruel. 

• Debt-Analysis Theory of Currency: All money is an acknowledgment of debt. 

• Economic Man: Mill’s abstract individual who ‘invariably does that by which he may obtain the greatest amount of necessaries, conveniences, and luxuries, with the smallest quantity of labour and physical self-denial with which they can be obtained in the existing state of knowledge’. A man motivated by nothing but the desire for material gain. 

• What Mill’s theory appeared to propose–even if this was in no way his intention–was that society as a whole benefited from the greed and materialism of selfish individuals. 

• Episcopacy: Government of a church by bishops. 

• Full Crimson- Phoenix or Flamingo Color (‘Blue Blood’, ‘True Blue’): Spanish phrases for the old families of Spain who trace their pedigree beyond the time of the Moorish Conquest claiming that they have venas ceruleas, (whereas the blood in the veins of the common people is black). 

• Furrow: A long narrow trench made in the ground by a plow, especially for planting seeds or for irrigation. 

• Golconda: A source of wealth, advantages, or happiness; an ancient Indian fortress, once famous for its diamonds.

• Habet (‘he has it’): ‘He is wounded’; In the Roman circus, when a gladiator was struck down, the crowd would shout this word. 

• Insentient: Incapable of feeling or understanding things; inanimate. 

• Invariable: Never changing. 

• Iron Law of Wages: Guaranteed that wages would be controlled by the cost of living. First hinted at by Smith- there is a natural price for labour: one which enables the worker to subsist but, through the threat of starvation, prevents the working population from increasing or decreasing in number. 

• Ruskin rejects this ‘Iron Law of Wages’ (as it was called). In its place he puts the concept of a just economic return for labour expended.

• Jurisprudence: The theory of philosophy of law; a legal system. 

• Lombards: Germanic invaders who settled in northern Italy and inter-married with the Italian people. 

• Mammon: Wealth regarded as an evil influence or false object of worship and devotion. It was taken by medieval writers as the name of the devil of covetousness, and revived in this sense by Milton. 

• Mendicant Orders: Franciscans and the Dominicans. 

• Nugatory: Of no value or importance; useless, futile. 

• Oxford Movement: Combined Anglican services with Catholic ritual. 

• Prudence: The quality of being prudent; cautious. 

• Recusant: A person who refuses to submit to an authority or to comply with a regulation. 

• Redgauntlet: The hero of Scott’s novel of the same name, a courageous young knight who undergoes many adventures in 18c Scotland. 

• Trinacrian Legs of Man: The three legs joined together which are the emblem of the Isle of Man. The Earls of Derby were feudal lords of the island. Trinacria was the Latin name for Sicily and means ‘with three promontories’. 

• Tyrian-Red: The ancient city of Tyre was famous for a crimson dye manufactured there; made from mollusks. 

• Upas-Tree: The ‘poison-tree’ of legend, said to originate in Java. 

• Utilitarianism: Founded by Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832); ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation’. 

• Valiant: Possessing or showing courage or determination. 

• Wages-Fund Theory (Mill): Taxation for the support of the poor. 

• Water of Marah: The water which feeds the roots of all evil. 

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People

• Autolycus: A successful robber who had the power of metamorphosing both stolen goods and himself. He had residence on Mount Parnassus and was renowned among men for his cunning and oaths. 

• Caiaphas: The Jewish high priest responsible for the arrest of Jesus. 

• Epaminondas: Theban commander responsible for the defeat of Sparta in 371 BCE An example of heroism against the odds, he was renowned for his nobility of character. 

• Garibaldi: The hero of Italian unification. 

• Johann Tetzel: The papal agent whose sale of indulgences in Germany in 1517 caused Luther to nail his ninety-five theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg. Thus, Tetzel is normally regarded as the immediate cause of the Reformation and the break-up of medieval Christendom. 

• Lycurgus: Legendary law-maker of ancient Sparta.  

• Pope Joan (855-857): According to legend, a woman who reigned as pope for two years during the Middle Ages. Her story first appeared in chronicles in the 13c and subsequently spread throughout Europe. The story was widely believed for centuries, but most modern scholars regard it as fictional. 

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Chronology

• 24 Nov, 1900: Sir Andrew Clark first calls for a ‘living wage’ in the Westminster Gazette.-Unto This Last and Others by Ruskin.

• 1871: Abdication of Napoleon III following the defeat of French forces by the rising German empire. The new national assembly elects Theirs its chief executive and in August, he becomes the first president of the 3rd Republic. Thiers declares he would never be responsible for introducing income tax in France.-Unto This Last and Others by Ruskin.

• Jan, 1871: Defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War. The revolt of the Paris Commune follows; the authority set up by the Commune was predominantly Socialist and Republican in complexion.-Unto This Last and Others by Ruskin.

• 18 Mar- 21 May, 1871: Paris is besieged by troops under orders from the legitimate Versailles government of Louis-Adolphe Thiers to put down the Paris Commune.-Unto This Last and Others by Ruskin.

• 1864: The Polish insurrection is savagely put down by the Russians.-Unto This Last and Others by Ruskin.

• 1861-1864: Max Müller’s lectures on the Science of Language. Müller was a German-born philologist who became a British subject and Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford. He was responsible for making the pioneer discoveries of German philology more widely known in England.-Unto This Last and Others by Ruskin.

• 1861: Discovery of the fossil Archaeopteryx.-Unto This Last and Others by Ruskin.

• 1852-1854: Sir Edward Belcher leads an Arctic Expedition to search for the explorer Sir John Franklin, who was lost attempting to find the NW Passage (Britannica).  

• 1850: The British parliament authorizes municipalities to provide free libraries. By 1860, there were only 23 such libraries in England Wales and in 1870, only 35.-Unto This Last and Others by Ruskin.

• 1850: The Irish Tenant-Rights League is formed after several landlords are murdered by discontented tenants.-Unto This Last and Others by Ruskin.

• Aug, 1849: Austrian forces return to Venice, crushing the rebellion that ousted them.-Unto This Last and Others by Ruskin.

• 1848: The “Young Ireland” rebellion breaks out; the Irish parliament suspends Habeas Corpus.-Unto This Last and Others by Ruskin.

• 1848: Austrian forces are driven from Venice.-Unto This Last and Others by Ruskin.

• 1847: The Irish Parliament passes a Coercion Act.-Unto This Last and Others by Ruskin.

• 1846: British parliament restricts the laws on the import of corn, lowering the price of corn which had been held artificially high for most of the first half of the 19c.-Unto This Last and Others by Ruskin.

• 1843: Carlyle publishes “Past and Present”, the first of several important Victorian books which criticized the age of industrial progress by contrasting it with idealized medieval societies.-Unto This Last and Others by Ruskin.

• 1834: The New Poor Law is passed by the British government, introducing people to the shame and humiliation associated with corrective workhouses.-Unto This Last and Others by Ruskin.

• 1833: Abolition of the slave trade in British Colonies.-Unto This Last and Others by Ruskin.

• 1832: The British Parliament passes the Great Reform Bill giving the vote to middle class men (leaving working men without it).-Unto This Last and Others by Ruskin.

• 1817: Publication of “The Principals of Political Economy and Taxation” by David Ricardo (1772-1823). Ricardo systematized the laws of cause and effect in the theory, to give it a more scientific finish. His best-known contribution to the debate was the Labour Theory of Value, according to which, differences in the exchange value of commodities are determined by the relative quantities of labour that go into their production and distribution.-Unto This Last and Others by Ruskin.

• 1811: Pierre Louis Dulong devices the first N-trichloride by passing Cl gas through a solution of NH4-chloride in water. Dulong correctly assigned the formula NC3 to the resulting compound; but the experiment cost him an eye and three fingers.-Unto This Last and Others by Ruskin.

• 1807: Abolition of the slave trade in Britain.-Unto This Last and Others by Ruskin.

• 1798: Publication of an Essay on the Principle of Population by T. R. Malthus (1766-1834). He argues that since population increases at a faster rate than the means of subsistence, the latter will control the growth of the former through the agency of starvation.-Unto This Last and Others by Ruskin.

• 1776: Publication of ‘The Wealth of Nations’ by Adam Smith (1723-1790); the first systematic study of the workings of modern economies. Smith’s aim was to examine the causes of economic progress and its effects.-Unto This Last and Others by Ruskin.

• 1774: Publication of the Malefactors’ Bloody Register, a popular chronicle of notorious crimes.-Unto This Last and Others by Ruskin.

• 1651: The Battle of Worcester; pursued by parliamentary troops, King Charles II takes refuge in an oak-tree on the grounds of Boscobel House.-Unto This Last and Others by Ruskin.

• 1535: Execution of Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) for high treason for refusing to assent to the Act of Supremacy, which made Henry VIII supreme head of the Church of England. More was a lawyer, humanist, man of letters, lord chancellor of England, martyr, and saint.-Unto This Last and Others by Ruskin.

• 1516: Publication of More’s Utopia as a satirical work of political speculation. It describes the polity of an imagined country in which goods are held in common, men and women share the same national system of education, and religious difference is tolerated.-Unto This Last and Others by Ruskin.

• 855-857: Reign of Female Pope Joan (Ioannes Anglicus). Her story first appeared in chronicles in the 13c and subsequently spread throughout Europe. The story was widely believed for centuries, but most modern scholars regard it as fictional.-Unto This Last and Others by Ruskin.

• 829: The inhabitants of the Torcello, one of the islands on which the Venetian Rep. was founded, are moved to the present site on the island of Rivus Altus (Rialto).-Unto This Last and Others by Ruskin.

• 421: San Giacomo di Rialto church is founded in the original center of Venice.-Unto This Last and Others by Ruskin.

• 371 BCE: Theban forces led by Epaminondas defeat Sparta.-Unto This Last and Others by Ruskin.

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