The Harvest of Ruskin

2. I trust in the nobleness of human nature, in the majesty of its faculties, the fulness of its mercy, and the joy of its love.

I will strive to love my neighbour as myself, and even when I cannot, will act as if I did.

3. I will labour, with such strength and opportunity as God gives me, for my own daily bread: and all that my hand finds to do, I will do with my might.

4. I will not deceive, nor cause to be deceived, any human being for my gain or pleasure; nor hurt, nor cause to be hurt, any human being for my gain or pleasure: nor rob, nor cause to be robbed, any human being for my gain or pleasure.

5. I will not kill or hurt any living creature needlessly, nor destroy any beautiful thing, but will strive to save and comfort all gentle life, and guard and perfect all natural beauty upon the earth.

6. I will strive to raise my own body and soul daily into higher powers of duty and happiness; not in rivalship or contention with others, but for the help, delight and honour of others, and for the joy and peace of my own life.

7. (On loyalty to the laws.)

8. (On loyalty to the Guild.)

As an organization this little realm within the realm came to very little. It needed advertisement, propagandism, somebody to preach it, and to organize it. The prophet at Brantwood wrote about it to the then very limited audience of Fors, and there propaganda ended. There were about forty-two Companions of St. George altogether at one time; and the Master was autocratic and irregular through ill health. Some land at Abbeydale, Sheffield, was taken, and a settlement of Socialists attempted without success. George Baker presented a woodland tract of fifteen acres at Bewdley; Mrs. Talbot some cliff-like land and cottages at Barmouth; and a small holding on the Yorkshire coast at Claughton, near Whitby, was acquired. The land cultivation came to very little.

The land at Abbeydale is now a successful market garden with a residence, let to a tenant in the usual way. A house has been built within recent years on the land at Bewdley, and part, if not all, of it is at last in cultivation by a Liverpool couple tired of town life. Mrs. Talbot’s representative manages the cottages at Barmouth on the lines of an ordinary good landlord. We have sold the bit of Yorkshire moorland, long troublesome. After delays and legal difficulties, George Baker, a Quaker alderman of Birmingham, who had been co-trustee of the properties, and had borne much of the business burden of it from the beginning, was made Master, and a few new members were enrolled by invitation. The Guild has held of late years a number of annual meetings, at Oxford, Coniston, Sheffield, Bewdley, London, Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham, which were delightful social occasions, and which transacted the business of the properties, and made grants from the income, which, apart from subscriptions, is between one and two hundred pounds a year, mostly representing Ruskin’s own gifts. The grants go as a rule to literary, agricultural or other purposes on the Master’s lines. On the death of Mr. Baker the Mastership was accepted by Mr. George Thomson, of Huddersfield, the forerunner, under Ruskin’s guidance, of the profit-sharing movement in this country. He resigned, through failing health, in 1920, and Mr. H. E. Luxmoor, of Eton, was appointed. Mr. William Wardle, of 4 Olive Lane, Wavertree, Liverpool, is the Hon. Sec. Two members represent the Guild on the Committee of the Sheffield Corporation which has charge of the Ruskin Museum in Meersbrook Park. This Museum is the property of the Guild on permanent loan to the Corporation of Sheffield who maintain it. It is indeed among the Guild properties the one really valuable concrete survival of the labour and enthusiasm of the founder. It is one of the very lovely things of the whole world, with its concentrated charm and delicate fineness.

These details about the present day of small things, about this remnant of an ancient hope, are not themselves important, but may not be without interest to some of the many thousand readers of Fors Clavigera. Those letters are full more of promise and of postponement than of achievement or permanently established method; and the rather wilful and fantastic adventures of a mind that was seldom at rest, often overflow into the monthly budget without as much repression as a sober systematizer would have exercised, but with endless delight.

In the early hopeful days, when there floated before Ruskin’s imagination the conception of an influential and numerous body of Companions of the Guild, comprising the moral and intellectual aristocracy of the country, he laid his plans on large lines. In the Master’s Report for 1881 he wrote that he expected “the Guild to extend its operations over the Continent of Europe and number its members ultimately by myriads”; which in the mouth of a Greek scholar means accurately by tens of thousands. He instructed the Companions to read no newspapers until he should be able to found a newspaper fit for them to read, an instruction which his most devout follower has never obeyed. Moreover there was to be an authorized list of books which alone might be read, of which Bibliotheca Pastorum was the first part. This is perhaps the most erratic of all the proposals which crossed his mind.

He also criticized the coinage of the country, and insisted that there should be under the rule of St. George sovereigns called ducats, of pure gold, a metal which is of itself quite unsuited for use as coinage, and needs to be hardened by alloy before it is fit for the purposes of the mint. Then the shilling was to be called a florin and was to be divided into ten pence. This copying of the coins of Florence in the middle ages, which as Ruskin once said to me, gave her merchants credit in the time of Edward I, cannot be considered seriously; indeed, these fanciful commands can only be matter for regret. There can be but one coinage in a country, even if the Guild of St. George had become a large institution. So late as 1884 Mr. Ruskin told a party of us at Brantwood that the St. George’s Company was going to issue coins of pure gold.

Rents, payable of course to the State, were to be one-tenth of the produce. Now rents cannot with any justice be settled that way. The farmer who farms poor land should be as well off and get as good a return for his labour as he who farms rich land. Under ordinary competition things turn out that way. All farmers in theory, and approximately in practice, receive the same return for labour and capital applied to land, and the margin goes to the landlord as rent.

Ruskin’s system is known as the metayer system, only that half, not one-tenth of, the profits usually go to the landlord. It is an old-fashioned, primitive, and uneconomic system, and is used in Italy, Portugal, on the Danube, in Russia, and over about one-seventh of France. At the time of the French Revolution, Arthur Young found seven-eighths of France managed in this way. It is suited for small holdings; but it discourages intensive culture, for it would be no use for a metayer tenant to spend £1 in increasing his product by £2, if half of the £2 went to the landlord. Ruskin liked it because it made a friendly co-operation between landlord and tenant. There was never any clash of interests, and the tenant was never under real hardship. It is morally a much more attractive plan. It bars any keen competition between tenants and it leads to permanency of tenure.

Throughout Ruskin’s proposals for reform we shall nearly always find in each something fanciful and dainty, but impracticable – a sort of pretty decoration tacked on in gaiety of heart, in the spirit of Gothic ornamentation. But if we knock off his little pinnacles, and deny ourselves the glow of his stained glass windows, we shall generally find a commodious and serviceable erection of constructive reform left. In fact, he turns out to have been on the main stream of progress, though pleading all the time that he was harking back to a happier past. His agricultural and business proposals contained fruitful elements, appearing ahead of their time; events from many sides have proved how illuminating his suggestions were.

Ruskin, as we have noted, would limit all incomes at the top by slicing off the superfluity and giving a title instead. In occult ways, unfortunately, peerages and baronetcies and knighthoods do come about by the sacrifice of cash; and in more open and creditable form the graduated income tax, the super-tax, and the steeply rising death duties are partial measures in the same direction.

There is perhaps nothing more fanciful in Ruskin’s reconstruction of Society than his marriage regulations, laid down in Time and Tide, and mentioned in the last chapter. We have not yet put Cupid into harness to this extent, but the popular interest and concern about the propagation of the unfit and the feeble-minded, and in general the attention which is being paid to heredity and the interest in eugenics, are all in the direction laid down by Ruskin in a thorough-going shape, fearless as the schemes of childhood. By feeding school children and by doctoring them the State supplements the weakness of the homes. In many unfamiliar forms the work of St. George goes on.

But in his day thought and practice in Social Reform were comparatively uninstructed by experience. One is reminded of his own phrase about Cimabue and Giotto. They uttered “the burning messages of prophecy by the stammering lips of infants.” He goes straight for his object without fear or hesitation, as an inexperienced child will toddle across a crowded street, unfearing because unknowing about the motor cars. Ruskin, for instance, would set the unemployed to reclaim waste lands. To which of us has not that thought come? Here are the men wanting work; here is the land wanting workers. Let us put them together. But experience has shown that the dour nature of the unoccupied land, and the frequently dour nature of the unoccupied men, render such schemes generally hopeless, and at times even scandalous, failures. Land and men are unoccupied because they are hard to occupy, and by putting together waste land and waste men you only double the difficulty of the task. When good workers might make something of bad land, or bad workers of good land, bad workers on bad land are hopeless. Some years ago in the House of Commons in the debate on the Right to Work Bill, Mr. Burns explained amid general agreement the complete failure of relief works, and their tendency rather to increase the evil and waste public resources. Why is the land out of cultivation? For no other reason than that it does not pay to cultivate it. The return will not give a maintenance and pay taxes. We may leave rent out, for landlords would rather have their lands cultivated for no rent than let them lie a waste of weeds. And why are the men not at work? Because in normal times about 40 per cent. of them are unemployable, the degenerates who are such a cause for alarm and concern to the nation. Of the rest, most are unsuited to agricultural work, and only a moderate proportion can be helped in that way. That some tolerable land can be so cultivated, and some industrious unemployed so maintained is true, but it requires the spiritual amalgam of the Salvation Army, or some such body of patient and capable enthusiasts, to solve the difficult problem, for a selected minority of the submerged, on their farm colonies. They are doing the work of St. George.

Above these stricken ones comes the ordinary farm labourer, who is unfortunately migrating to the towns. Him Mr. Ruskin hoped to settle on land. Such a scheme of small holdings, if backed by sufficient capital, worked by experts, and favourably situated for a market, might even in the seventies have succeeded. Of course it would not have had about it all the moral excellences, the grace of character and the charm of nature and art, which delight us so in the St. George’s lands of the future which we read about in Fors. However, Ruskin never concentrated upon it, but spent most of his time and of the resources of the Guild on the Sheffield Museum instead. He did what he found he could do the best. He knew he was leaving great gaps for others to fill up. He says, touchingly, in the Preface to Love’s Meinie in 1881: “It has been, throughout, my trust that if Death should write on these plans of mine ‘What this man began to build he was not able to finish,’ God may also write on them, not in anger, but in aid, ‘A stronger than he cometh.’ ”

But with labour and patience and against strong hostile political forces, the Small Holdings Act has been for some years at work. The obstruction of the squires still renders it useless in many counties, and there can be no more true task for St. George than to support agencies such as the Small Holdings Association. By its means, as a matter of fact, the peasantry is being restored to the land on a proper business basis. Tasks of this magnitude require organization on a large scale, and the payment of proper returns. No social benefit is given by letting some individual hold land at less than its value. The County Councils since the war are engaged upon it. We are now again on the eve of a large settlement of returned soldiers on the land, and of an attempt to brighten the villages.

St. George, again, ordered that the homes of workpeople should be cheerful, that they should have gardens and flowers and sunshine, that the long miserable rows of uniform cottages should be of the past. These things, largely under the inspiration of Ruskin, are being done, in First Garden City at Letchworth, and in such model villages as Bournville, New Earswick, Port Sunlight, the Hampstead suburb, and similar suburbs at Manchester and Hull. But it is all on far too small a scale. The true task of St. George to-day is to strengthen these progressive movements. The growth of the towns since 1871 has made this urban problem the most urgent of all. How many rows of dreadful box homes have been built. The country is being choked by the spreading towns. Purely agricultural colonies are good, but towns cannot be founded without the help of the manufacturers who make a town.

Again, the intention of St. George was to have a happy body of workpeople, loyally co-operating with a superior type of employer, and banishing greedy competition. The surviving remnant of the Guild of St. George has very little in its own power in this way, but amongst the employers who have built these model villages there exists just this kind of relation in manifold ways. And again, it pays. When in the British Association at York the firm of Rowntree and Co. was being commended for the benefits they are giving their workpeople, Mr. Seebohm Rowntree, whose whole heart is in the work, made a speech insisting that it paid them. He did this in order to induce other people to do the same, and to show that it was feasible for the ordinary manufacturer.

Broadly speaking, we may say that what we are all striving for is being done, in ways more wholesale and more complicated than could have been worked out in the seventies. Two generations of social pioneers, thinkers, and experimenters, have been grappling with the problems since then, so that we should not expect precisely the same prescription to be given by the social physician to-day as was given by one of the great pioneers of healing nearly fifty years ago.

The agricultural settlement seems the furthest from practical politics. Nevertheless, a series of enactments since 1881 have established in Ireland that very arrangement of a peasant proprietary paying a fixed rent to the State, which is the essence of Ruskin’s proposal; except that the Irish rents under the Land Purchase Acts are terminable after a period of years; and so rather more easy than Ruskin’s. Presumably, if found successful, the system could be extended. It will certainly occupy the minds of reformers very much during the immediately coming years.

Education was naturally a chief concern with St. George, and it occupies Letter XVI of Time and Tide.88 His schools were to be in the fresh air of the country, and with large playing fields securely their own. “The Laws of Health and exercises enjoined by them” are the first feature of the curriculum; and riding, running, all the honest personal exercises of offence and defence, and music, are to be included under this head. Then come “the mental graces of reverence and compassion, which are to be developed by deliberate and constant exercise," – which means, doubtless, that there is to be no girding at passers-by in the streets, and no rat-catching for amusement. Then, as the bond and guardian of reverence and compassion, comes “the truth of spirit and word, of thought and sight – truth earnest and compassionate, sought for like a treasure, and kept like a crown.” This is to be taught chiefly “by pressing for close accuracy of statement, as a principle of honour and as an accomplishment of language.” There is much sound advice about this in Letter XVI. Then, for the actual curriculum, there come, first, history; and then natural science and mathematics. But there are to be three alternative curricula, one for city children, one for country children, and one for seafaring children. The city children are to study mathematics and the arts, country children, natural history and agriculture, and the future sailors, astronomy, geography, and marine natural history. A beginning of variety of just this kind now exists in the elementary schools, as noted in the last chapter.

After this, all children are to be taught the calling whereby they are to live.

The curious whimsical paradox that reading and writing are to be optional subjects, does not, after such a curriculum, amount to much. It is part of a petulant reaction against merely inferior literary exercise, by a chief craftsman in it; as a professor of music is the first to tell you that it is no use teaching music to those who will do no good with it. Ruskin says that the teaching of the three R’s is of no use to people who will only read rubbish and write falsehood, and, put that way, one is bound to agree.

No school of St. George has ever been begun, though there are schools which have kindred aims. Such schools are away in the country with farm and garden, with little pressure of outside examinations, a varied curriculum, great attention to athletic exercise, to natural science and history, with classics and the study of grammar practically shelved, and the prime concern of the school management the inculcation of reverence and truthfulness and gentleness. The Natural History, the Arts and Handicrafts, the reading aloud and the committing scripture and poetry to memory would be after his own heart.

We recognize in this luminous and suggestive treatment of education that the right note is struck – the basal idea is that “you have not educated a boy when you have taught him to know what he did not know, but to be what he had not been, and to behave as he had not behaved.” And, with the present stiff system and starved appliances, human and material, with which we educate the citizens of the future, what a glorious vision Ruskin’s is, of what that education might so easily be. His protest against the three R’s is merely a humorous outcry against their insufficiency, their mechanical character, and their commercial end. How that much, and that much only, of mental outfit has worked, is printed large in the circulation of Illustrated Bits, Scraps, all sensational evening papers and the Bottomley, Harmsworth and Hulton presses. But clerks and pupil teachers are cheap.

Ruskin’s actual work as a University Professor was notable; and many are the men, now old or gone, whom he influenced at Oxford. To be one of the influences at Oxford or Cambridge is a worthy use of gifts of the highest kind. The present Drawing Schools at Oxford are a monument of his labour and his liberality.

It is easy indeed for the Philistine to laugh at the pageantry of the vision of the England of St. George. There were to be “Marshals” with great districts subject to them, “Landlords,” men of fortune devoting their gifts to the service of the Guild, and owing their lordship to the fact that “they could work as much better than their labourers, as a good knight than his soldiers.” These were all to be called Comites Ministrantes; under them the Comites Militantes were the rank and file of the workers on the Company’s lands. Finally the Comites Consilii, the only class who have materialized, were the companions contributing, but not residing on St. George’s lands.89

To sum up, then, the present public duty of a good Ruskinian:

He will support the labour colonies of the Salvation Army and Small Holdings Associations. He will invest in the stock of Garden City or other Garden Suburbs; he will work for the Minority Report on the Poor Law, and for all plans for strengthening and humanizing Education, for Town Planning and Smoke Abatement. He will labour to extend among the laity the duties of the clergy, and among the clergy the spirit of the layman, he will help all Peace Societies, and labour to promote good understanding with other countries through the League of Nations. He will clip the wings of capital seeking to use the British Flag as a business asset, and he will do this by a capital levy, the super-tax and the Death Duties. He will be a mild and reasonable Socialist, so far as to extend the scope of municipal action as it may be found practicable. He would support the principle of a minimum wage, co-operative partnerships, and collective bargaining; and he would probably give cautiously some power to segregate the feeble-minded. He would provide Art Galleries and Museums housed in noble buildings, and would religiously preserve the surviving beauty of the country side. Two possible changes may be treated at greater length.

I. The higher professional activities may be still further removed from competition and put under salaried service. There will be competition for posts; that is right; but if medical men and lawyers did not depend upon fees, we should be rid of many abuses; and the work would gain in dignity. I believe clergymen, professors and public schoolmasters do as good work as those who follow callings more directly dependent on the casual payments and goodwill of customers. With regard to education, there would be danger of loss as well as of gain, if private schools and private tutors were abolished. They should remain available for those who desire them. There will always be people who demand a special religious atmosphere or who wish to make experiments. And there will be pupils who from bad health, or neglect of early training, could not properly benefit from the schools of the State. It is not necessary that the public body in control should be either the State or the Municipality. In my view, neither the universities nor the public schools would benefit by such a change. Nevertheless, it is becoming increasingly agreed that the nation should shoulder a larger part of the expense, and guarantee the quality of the teaching, more widely and liberally than it does at present. In this connection it is all the more necessary that the State should clear itself of militarism. For if military training were to become compulsory in schools, as is seriously threatened, the nation would be once more as acutely divided about it, as it has been, so long and so disastrously, over denominational schools. We should have conscientious objectors in permanence.

Nor can we proscribe the private practitioner, for the wealthy, if there were any, or for the medically heterodox. Yet, how much bad pretentious work, how much humbug and servility, would be spared to their profession if most of them became public officials, only doctors know.

I am not qualified to say whether the legal profession should be nationalized, nor how much. But things could hardly be in worse case than they are at present, when the worthy members of a necessary profession are regarded by many as little better than birds of prey.

It may be said that modest State salaries would not attract able men into the professions so organized. But if the profits of trade were socialized as proposed, or divided among guild members, there would not be that golden alternative lure.

II. In those matters which are left to the adjustment of free competition, it is necessary that everyone should be in a fair position to bargain, so that there may be no compulsion due to sheer starvation. This requires to be done so carefully that an actual maintenance at a tolerable standard, and permanently available without work, should not be offered to the able-bodied. Two suggestions have been made which are well worth considering.