FOOTNOTES:
[64] This letter was received from Mr. Ruskin by a gentleman in Manchester, who had forwarded to him a copy of the speech made by Mr. Richard Johnson (President) at the fifty-fourth annual meeting of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, Feb. 1, 1875. Mr. Johnson's address dealt with the immorality of cheapness, the duties of merchants and manufacturers as public servants, and the nobility of trade as a profession which, when rightly and unselfishly conducted, would yield to no other "in the dignity of its nature and in the employment that it offers to the highest faculties of man."
[65] In "Fors Clavigera," March, 1875, Mr. Johnson's speech is named (p. 54) as "the first living words respecting commerce which I have ever known to be spoken in England, in my time," but the discussion of it is postponed.
[From "The Monetary and Mining Gazette," November 13, 1875.]
THE DEFINITION OF WEALTH.
Corpus Christi College, Oxford,
9th November, 1875.
To the Editor of "The Monetary Gazette."
Sir: I congratulate you with all my mind on the sense, and with all my heart on the courage, of your last Saturday's leading article, which I have just seen.[66] You have asserted in it the two vital principles of economy, that society cannot exist by reciprocal pilfering, but must produce wealth if it would have it; and that money must not be lent, but administered by its masters.
You have not yet, however, defined wealth itself, or told the ingenuity of the public what it is to produce.
I have never been able to obtain this definition from economists;[67] perhaps, under the pressure of facts, they may at last discover some meaning in mine at the tenth and eleventh pages of "Munera Pulveris."
I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
J. Ruskin.