The Harvest of Ruskin

Competition, outside the guilds or Government shops, is always allowed – “as a safety valve for outlet of irrepressible vice.” He believed in the cutaneous and curable eruption of such, rather than in forcing it into the system of the body politic – a wise and cautious idea, in no way that of a blind optimist. Another reason for this permission of outside competition was to provide scope for erratic ingenuity and original genius, and to conserve individual initiative; also to protect the rights of foreigners trading here. There is also much other sensible elasticity of arrangement hinted at. Honesty, truthfulness, freedom from oppression, some plan by which all the good national elements could become availing instead of being neglected and choked off, these are the objects of his trade guilds. The difficulty of foreign competition at low prices he does not touch, except to anticipate for a far future a similar international guild system.

One can easily see that increased facilities for combination are putting it into the power of combines and trusts to fix qualities and prices in a way the men of 1867 would never have expected. Is it beyond hope that what combinations of capital and management can do, labour combinations may do, for more public ends? Then indeed out of the eater will have come forth meat. “The lion and the bear shall feed,” and the capitalist shall dine like the labourer. “They shall not hurt nor destroy” in all my holy workshops and markets.

One of the most startling, but at the same time, most thought-compelling proposals for the ideal State are Mr. Ruskin’s Bishops. The έπίσκοπος of the New Testament was an Overseer, a man who looked after the members of the Early Church, the agent of their relief, and the supervisor of their conduct. This order of men Ruskin proposes to declericalize and to municipalize. The preaching, we shall remember, is to be separated from pastoral care, and to be done gratuitously by unofficial ministers. This leaves no link between the State and the family; even the action of the Fatherland as a father, now afforded by the State clergy, being done away with. Therefore, over every fifty or a hundred families there is to be elected, for life, a Bishop, who is to be a friendly counsellor, and to keep a record of all notable events – a much extended public registrar. All exceptional treatment which special circumstances may render desirable, any mitigation of ordinary law, is arranged through him. Where law is to be so pervasive, some cushion for its impact would certainly be necessary. He bears to the Government the relation which the Charity Organisation Society bears to the Poor Law Guardians, or an Inebriate Home to the Jail, or (in theory) Equity to Common Law. Thus the terrible loneliness and neglect of the poor, and haunts of undiscovered vice, would no longer be possible. The whole episcopal action was to be elastic, the methods patient, gentle, not compulsory, and not intrusive. The Bishops were to be paid officers, and they had to report to a higher officer called a Duke (Time and Tide, XIII).

We now approach the question of national leadership. So great was Ruskin’s distrust of the People, his hatred of Liberty and Equality, that he fell back upon our Aristocracy, commonplace as he knew it to be, for the power of governance. He is not so far out of our current national habit. We know well that any good, hardworking peer, baronet or landed magnate of good family, has at once a favourable hearing, and possesses by birth an open door to the confidence of the people; and he has only to show that he deserves it, to maintain it with ease. We democrats love a lord. So the Home Office and police work, also the Judgeships and the officering of the citizen army are to be the work of the present landed gentry; the careful husbanding of the nation’s resources in a glorified Board of Trade is to be the work of the present kings of business. The Education Department and the now nonexistent Artistic Department, the Board of Works, together with the few necessary Doctors, and the Musicians, are the third department of upper-class work, to be undertaken by the professional classes. It will be remembered that there are to be no hired soldiers or clergy and very few lawyers.

For the realization of this Utopia, no violence is to be used. As a prophet with an ethical gospel he entirely distrusted methods of physical force, as leaving you in reality just the men you were before, only damaged by the conflict in mind and person and estate. Nor did he, as a Conservative and a believer in continuity, look with favour or hope on a general confiscation bill, abolishing rent and interest. The whole thing had to be done by converting the upper classes, those classes whose glory is in living in comfort and pride served by the labour of others, and whose alienation from the multitude is graven deep into their characters by every one of their cherished habits. We have seen that the landlord would become an annuitant, the parson transformed, the solicitor and the barrister nearly wiped out. Many merchants, most bankers and stockbrokers and all shareholders in banks, if and when interest is abolished, would find themselves without the profits on which, it is to be feared, much of their happiness depends. Some of these persons would become public officers, living on salaries and earning them. Manufacturers would become profit sharers, and be invited to join a Guild. Doubtless the liquor interest would find that it had a stern master, though but little detailed allusion to it is made, and prohibition is not intended.

If you have ever tried to convince a man by some highly abstruse, or at any rate, long and intricate process of thought, of truths or proposals which upset his whole career, blighted his interests, and wrote him down a useless and pernicious person – if, for instance, you have explained the wickedness and folly of Protection to a friend from Pennsylvania, or the theoretical righteousness of Home Rule to a friend from Belfast, or the innate errors of Vivisection to a physiologist, or discoursed on Homœopathy to your own medical man, you will be able to foresee the blank look of polite indifference with which Ruskin’s schemes would be likely to be received by the Marquis of B. or by the distinguished directors of your bank. Why am I not to make cotton look like silk? will be asked by certain very excellent Lancashire firms. Is shoddy not to continue its useful, if humble career? is the cry of certain parts of the West Riding; and some of the metallic business of Birmingham would be a cause of much searching of heart. And there is not a retired old lady living in her bower of roses from the Lake District to Penzance whose peace of mind and perhaps nourishment of body would not, if interest were truly abolished, cease. I always notice that reformers who would abolish interest do not explain what they would do with the large class of ladies of all ages, and the smaller class of elderly men who, after all, do constitute the greater part of the technically idle class, and who are totally unable to earn a living; since neither the arts of dress nor of graceful conversation have a market value.

It must be plain to us that any wholesale conversion and sudden awakening of the social conscience in Ruskin’s direction is not to be expected. Neither the intellectual conviction, nor the moral power to carry it out if formed, will be produced except in a few instances, here and there. The astonishment and delight with which we hear of the doings of exceptional employers show how rare they are. Every year, of recent years, has seemed darker and darker to some of us, in noting the treatment of public affairs by the wealthy, and the extent to which “Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind.”

Nor is it possible to an employer, even if intellectually convinced and morally sound, to raise his wages much above the rate paid by his competitors, to avoid drawing from the business wherewithal to pay interest on capital, nor, generally, to improve quality, with or without improving price.

We must fall back on legislation, on democratic conviction expressed by the organ of the national will, to bring about any portion of this scheme. We shall have to move all together, if we move at all. Take a comparative trifle, trifling compared to these large proposals – the weekly half-holiday. This can only be taken by all or none of a given trade in a given town; or take the Bank Holidays, popular benefits only to be won on the floor of the House of Commons, and which cost so much effort that a certain worthy banker has been canonized for his labours in obtaining St. Lubbock’s Day. Yet I am of Ruskin’s mind thus far – that any growth of an enlightened moral sentiment will most easily permeate the voting masses from individuals of the educated classes.

Ruskin cherished no delusions about it. He says: “You need not think that even if you obtained a majority of representatives in the existing Parliament, you could immediately compel any system of business, broadly contrary to that now established by custom. If you could pass laws to-morrow, wholly favourable to yourselves, as you might think, because unfavourable to your masters, and to the upper classes of society, the only result would be that the riches of the country would at once leave it, and you would perish in riot and famine. Be assured that no great change for the better can ever be easily accomplished, or quickly; nor by impulsive ill-regulated effort, nor by bad men; nor even by good men, without much suffering.”82

The scheme as a whole has never been systematized, nor worked out in detailed proposals. Still less has it been hinged on to our present social structure. It is a prophetic forecast, an inspiration of genius; it is a bow of glorious hue set in the clouds. When Ruskin wrote his economics the view was that by each man doing the best for himself the general good was automatically best advanced – an unseen hand behind human activities arranged the world’s welfare with nothing but individual selfishness to do it with.

We no longer accept this as a complete account of the matter. We recognize that that would be a wild-wood kind of a cosmic order; and that under it human affairs would be left to the same kind of governance as that of the forest and the jungle. The wolf pack and the wild bramble are all very well in their scale and their place; but for humanity this unrestrained individual luxuriance, with its terrible cost and waste, is now felt by us to be only a first approximation to society. It is the point whence we begin, not the goal we aim for. It is safe and stable as a foundation; it cannot be upset or overthrown, for it is actually itself the ground; and there is nothing to overthrow. Guilds, Monopolies, Trusts, also Governments and Charities are built upon it to regulate it; and they grow, and in time may decay and die, leaving the jungle of free competition to overrun once more the painful clearings. But out of the wilds men have in fact made their lawns and gardens, their orchards and their fields of wheat; they have built them palaces and cities which are permanent and stable enough, though not everlasting. The higher law of civilization is successfully holding at bay the wild tendencies. The millions of stray seeds, the storms of wind and crackings of frost, if let alone, would in time reduce a watering place like Scarborough to a green cliff side; still Scarborough exists and will exist, and justify its existence. Similarly there are limitations, orderly arrangements, which may be put upon the wild nature of economic freedom; and we may make a better world thereby. We all know how much is accepted already in the way of civilized restraint. When Parliament is free to attend to home affairs almost every Act is a regulation or limitation of individual freedom, or it is the taking up by Government of what had been previously left to the individual. The long list of municipal and imperial activities must be too familiar to need repetition here. We are indeed rushing rapidly in that direction. Can we go no further? Are we necessarily at the end just here?

I will try to outline in the following chapter a few ways in which we may. That is, we will test Ruskin by the changes of the last half century and those which are looming near; and see how much of his teaching abides our question.

CHAPTER VI

RUSKIN’S ECONOMICS TO-DAY

I T is well known that none of the proposals in the Preface to Unto This Last, summarized above, nor all of them together, satisfy the ideas of the most vigorous reformers of the moment. Nothing less than the abolition of all production and distribution for individual profit is believed by many earnest and experienced men to go to the root of our social diseases. On the other hand, State Socialism has fallen into discredit. The experience of Government officials in war time has taken all the gas out of that particular experimental balloon.

Guild Socialism is now the favourite form. Under this the government of the country is to be twofold, from top to bottom. Guilds of producers are to own and run businesses, having eliminated the capitalist as such, and are to be organized into local, county, and national guilds of the workers in that business. Then all the national guilds unite in a Parliament of producers, who govern wages, and, I presume, the import and export trade. Over against this stand our present geographical constituencies and our present Parliament, which is the nation organized as consumers. The State, represented by the present geographically elected Parliament, is to remain supreme, is to be the ultimate owner of the property used by the Guilds, with the right to tax it, by a quit rent. The Guilds are to be the taxable units.83

Rent, interest and profits are to be abolished. No provision for compensation is part of the proposal; but no doubt that would depend upon circumstances, and upon what could be arranged. It would also give rise to much difference of opinion among the advocates of the new order. And much would depend on whether it came gradually and peacefully, by consent – or after a revolutionary general strike – or, again, after civil war. One hears of an intention to respect life interests, but no more. Clearly this issue will subject our people to a political test which may be beyond their strength, and may, if we are not guided by justice and mercy, lead to a generation of violence and the ruin of many hopes.

The ideals behind the movement are noble – to give the workman a proprietary interest in his work, to break down the pernicious distribution of wealth which economic freedom has brought about, to bring up a healthy and well-bred race, not a well-bred class only, to put public service in place of profit as the motive for labour; to banish the wretched insecurity of unemployment, and take away the bored life of the idle rich; to use the surplus wealth of industry for the education of the whole people and for a full life for all. Nothing less than this is the guerdon of success.

If the Guild is to guarantee a wage to all its workers, well and ill, under good trade and bad, in defiance of changes in demand due to fashion or invention, or to changes in weather or to foreign imports, there will certainly have to be great powers in the Guild for the transfer of labour from where it is not wanted to where it is. Also, seeing that only a certain number of workers are wanted in the pleasanter occupations, some authority in the guilds will have to assign their duty to all labourers, instead of leaving the choice to competition with the sharp tooth of hunger behind it.

The coercion of the idle workman will be quite a large task; for slackness cannot be summarily dealt with as now by dismissal. It is such rocks of human frailty that will be the danger to the navigation of any ordered system. Are all childless women to be made to work for guild wages? Are married and unmarried men to be paid alike? Is any saving to be permitted? What machinery will determine prices, when demand and supply are denied their free play? It is not the place of this book to answer these questions or to pronounce a final opinion. It is enough to see that opinion is strongly tending in this direction, and that it is in the sequence of Fors Clavigera.

That this is, however, the direction of advance, one is led to believe, from the existence of a halfway house. There is in every movement always the moderate mass and the progressive vanguard, and they sometimes turn their guns heartily upon one another. The moderate proposal, the rival to Guild Socialism, is that of the Whitley Councils for bringing in the present capitalist employers and their workmen as collaborators in the conduct of businesses, and as joint constituents of a trade Parliament.

The Builders’ Parliament,84 or “Industrial Council for the Building Industry,” was the forerunner of the Whitley Councils, but is on more thoroughgoing guild lines. Mr. Malcolm Sparkes, a young director of a carpentry and cabinet-making business in Willesden, was mixed up as an employer in a disastrous building strike in 1914. Hopeless of any solution by hostile and suspicious bodies of organized masters and organized men, never meeting except as opponents, and working by warfare and the balance of power, he conceived the idea of combined councils, representing both sides, meeting periodically to consider the well-being of the industry. Such bodies were not to deal with disputes, but could often avoid them and remove their causes. Above all they would provide a friendly atmosphere. He persuaded the men’s organizations first, and induced them to approach the masters, who responded willingly; and after due debates, and two years’ permeation of opinion in all the bodies concerned, the Builders’ Parliament was constituted. At its sixth quarterly meeting in August, 1919, it passed by an overwhelming majority a report, called the Foster Report, under which masters would become paid officials and capitalists would receive a fixed interest. Mr. Sparkes and the builders, therefore, are using their united organization to prepare the way for the Guild arrangement, and are favourable to it. They have offered the labour to build some thousands of houses to the Corporation of Manchester, if the latter will supply the capital and take the business risk. But the Whitley Council movement has had a wider development, if a less advanced one.

Mr. J. H. Whitley, Chairman of Committees in the House of Commons, and Chairman of a Government Sub-Committee on the relations of employers and employed, read an article by Mr. Sparkes on his scheme in the Venturer for December, 1916, and asked him to prepare a memorandum for him in detail, and to record his progress to date. This memorandum became the basis of the Whitley Report. The Government adopted it and organized under it the Whitley Councils. The day after Mr. Sparkes’s memorandum reached the printers the author was sent to prison as a conscientious objector to military service. He was a Quaker; he had refused an exemption as a works manager in a controlled business; he had resigned his directorship rather than do war work; and now in defiance of an Act of Parliament which granted exemption, the blind hand of the Tribunals and the War Office could do nothing better with this young patriot than to keep him in gaol for two years. He was liberated a little before the others because the King happened to ask for the author of the Whitley Report. This kind of thing gives pause to one’s hopes of better times coming out of the action of the present militarist states. To all these proposals Ruskin ought to be recognized as the idealist forerunner. His guilds of craftsmen, though differently founded, are very much like Mr. Cole’s. The same social message which Oxford sent through Ruskin from Christ Church and Corpus, she now sends through a Fellow of Magdalen. As the consummation of the idealist approaches, it becomes necessary to work the ideas out, and people will listen to the details, indeed will fiercely question them, and demand something practical. But in the history of economic thought, should these ideas become ultimately fruitful, a greater place should be found for the author of Fors than has yet been awarded to him by our writers on Economics. The chief differences between the modern scheme and that of forty years ago is that Ruskin would confiscate nothing, and would not demand, would even object to, a labour monopoly in the hands of the Guilds, which Mr. Cole declares to be a necessity, without which a Guild is not a Guild. It will be for our successors fifty years hence to say on which side wisdom lay.

On one point the age has gone beyond Ruskin. For good or evil we know we have nothing to trust to but Democracy. From the ugliness and gullibility of the democracy the secluded artist shrank, living in beauty and luxury at Oxford or Venice or by the Lake of Coniston. There was excuse, and there is still much excuse, for men of little faith. The democracy can be played upon and excited to war: its ruling puppets dare not take the drink from it even in war time. It has “demanded,” as economists say, our conscienceless and sensational newspapers, and it loves to read them. It needs much education, and particularly it needs what Ruskin hoped for from Education – character and conduct; first, grace and health and beauty of life; and, as chief intellectual prize, a relentless love of truth. Would that everybody would refuse to buy again a paper that had once deceived them, or to vote for a politician once proved untrustworthy.

Reformers, forgetting the dead weight they have to shift, turn their guns on one another. Socialists seem to be most scornful of Liberalism, and particularly of those employers who are generous and public-spirited.

It must be emphasized that Ruskin was an aristocrat in temperament. In fact he repudiated the idea of an equality which did not, he declared, exist. His sections in Munera Pulveris against equal voting and on “natural slavery" – I suppose learnt from Aristotle’s Politics– are clear on this.85 He did not support negro slavery, but his interests were chiefly taken up with opposing economic slavery at home, or reserving it for the fit people. The whole passage must be read to be understood.

It is now in 1920 nearly fifty years since Fors Clavigera began to come out, and the outlines of St. George’s Guild were drawn. Those who in that decade found a new inspiration and delight in discipleship to him, are now growing elderly; the glory of the early time when Ruskin’s genius was irradiating the pages of Fors with the hope of a kingdom of God to be raised within the kingdom of this world, was in the days of youth, in the spring of aspiration and a not easily bounded hope. We nourished our hearts on godlike food; and we owe our Master an inextinguishable debt. It is often doubtless a thought full of sadness that the tender grace of a day that is dead will never come back to us, in the sober light of long experience in the realm of the commonplace. Our task now is, to gather up in our maturity that which abides; for our days are passing, and though the growth of the kingdom has not been all that we might have hoped, its spirit must still be handed on, and fixed, so far as we can fix it, in the permanent habits of man.

We Ruskinians are often called sentimental. But it is not sentimental to keep sentiment in its proper place and to have a sane and well directed emotion at our beck when something has to be done. “Sentiment” means ill-directed emotion which slops over. Loyalty is not inconsistent with criticism. It is essential that that which is merely temporary or fanciful in the instructions which run through the pages of Fors should not be insisted upon for ever. Those pages contain many quaint directions untested by experience.

The Guild of St. George was intended to be a company of people who would bind themselves to live in a healthy way, doing harm to no man and no landscape, cultivating land by hand or water power, and contributing to the public and educational work of the Guild, at first, one-tenth of their income; but as this was too much for most people, the amount was left elastic.86

The Creed of St. George is a noble document. It had to be signed by every member of the Guild.87

1. I trust in the Living God, Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things and creatures, visible and invisible.

I trust in the kindness of His Law and the goodness of His work.