FOOTNOTES:

[53] That of Messrs. Ruskin, Telford Domecq, in which Mr. Ruskin's father, "who began life as a wine-merchant" ("Fors Clavigera," Letter 10, p. 5, 1871), had been a partner.

[54] See § 41 of "The Crown of Wild Olive," p. 50 of the 1873 edition. "None of the best head-work in art, literature, or science, is ever paid for.... It is indeed very clear that God means all thoroughly good work and talk to be done for nothing."

[55] "Yes. But, generally speaking, rules are beneficial; hence, generally speaking, justice is a good thing in fact. A state of society might be imagined in which it would be a hideously bad thing."—(Foot-note answer of the Gazette.)

[From "The Pall Mall Gazette," May 22, 1865.]
WORK AND WAGES.

To the Editor of "The Pall Mall Gazette."

Sir: I have long delayed my reply to your notes on my last letter; partly being otherwise busy—partly in a pause of surprise and doubt how low in the elements of ethics we were to descend.

Let me, however, first assure you that I heartily concur in your opening remarks, and shall be glad to spare useless and avoid discourteous words. When you said, in your first reply to me, that my letter embodied fallacies which appeared to you pernicious in the highest degree, I also "could not consider this sort of language well judged." When you called one of your own questions an answer, and declared it to be "simple and perfectly conclusive," I thought the flourish might have been spared; and for having accused you of writing carelessly, I must hope your pardon; for the discourtesy, in my mind, would have been in imagining you to be writing with care.

For instance, I should hold it discourteous to suppose you unaware of the ordinary distinction between law and equity: yet no consciousness of such a distinction appears in your articles. I should hold it discourteous to doubt your acquaintance with the elementary principles laid down by the great jurists of all nations respecting Divine and Human law; yet such a doubt forces itself on me if I consider your replies as deliberate. And I should decline to continue the discussion with an opponent who could conceive of justice as (under any circumstances) "an hideously bad thing," if I did not suppose him to have mistaken the hideousness of justice, in certain phases, to certain persons, for its ultimate nature and power.

There may be question respecting these inaccuracies of thought; there can be none respecting the carelessness of expression which causes the phrases "are" and "ought to be" to alternate in your articles as if they were alike in meaning.

I have permitted this, that I might see the course of your argument in your own terms, but it is now needful that the confusion should cease. That wages are determined by supply and demand is no proof that under any circumstances they must be—still less that under all circumstances they ought to be. Permit me, therefore, to know the sense in which you use the word "ought" in your paragraph lettered b, page 832[56] (second column), and to ask whether the words "due," "duty," "devoir," and other such, connected in idea with the first and third of the "præcepta juris" of Justinian, quoted by Blackstone as a summary of the whole doctrine of law (honeste vivere,—alterum non lædere,—suumque cuique tribuere), are without meaning to you except as conditions of agreement?[57] Whether, in fact, there be, in your view, any honos, absolutely; or whether we are to launch out into an historical investigation of the several kinds of happiness enjoyed in lives of rapine, of selfish trade, and of unselfish citizenship, and to decide only upon evidence whether we will live as pirates, as pedlers, or as gentlemen? If so, while I shall be glad to see you undertake, independently, so interesting an inquiry, I must reserve my comments on it until its close.

But if you admit an absolute idea of a "devoir" of one man to another, and of every honorable man to himself, tell me why you dissent from my statement of the terms of that debt in the opening of this discussion. Observe, I asked for no evangelical virtue of returning good for evil: I asked only for the Sinaitic equity of return in good for good, as for Sinaitic equity of return in evil for evil. "Eye for eye," "tooth for tooth"—be it so; but will you thus pray according to the lex talionis and not according to the lex gratiæ? Your debt is on both sides. Does a man take of your life, you take also of his. Shall he give you of his life, and will you not give him also of yours? If this be not your law of duty to him, tell me what other there is, or if you verily believe there is none.

But you ask of such repayment, "Who shall determine how much?"[58] I took no notice of the question, irrelevant when you asked it; but in its broad bearing it is the one imperative question of national economy. Of old, as at bridge-foot of Florence, men regulated their revenge by the law of demand and supply, and asked in measureless anger, "Who shall determine how much?" with economy of blood, such as we know. That "much" is now, with some approximate equity, determined at the judgment-seat, but for the other debt, the debt of love, we have no law but that of the wolf, and the locust, and the "fishes of the sea, which have no ruler over them." The workmen of England—of the world, ask for the return—as of wrath, so of reward by law; and for blood resolutely spent, as for that recklessly shed; for life devoted through its duration, as for that untimely cast away; they require from you to determine, in judgment, the equities of "Human Retribution."

I am, Sir, your faithful servant,
J. Ruskin.[59]
May 20, 1865.