Meanwhile I am glad to know that the tariff question is being discussed in your workshop. The time will come before long when all the working men will see how seriously their employment is threatened, and how necessary it is for them that the Colonial Markets should be kept open. The future of our trade depends on our relations with our kinsfolk across the seas, and if we do not seize the opportunity offered to us by them of increasing our trade with them we may not have another chance, but when we desire it may find that they have ceased to be willing. The Big Loaf cry is a sheer imposture. Nothing that I have proposed would increase the cost of living to any working man, and on the other hand it would give him the certainty of better trade and more employment. Wages, which depend upon employment, would tend to rise, and labour would gain all round.
We have had wonderfully good trade during the last two years, but there are signs approaching at present, and if they are fulfilled and every trade in London suffers from the free import of the surplus of foreign countries, the most bigoted Free Trader will regret that he was not wise in time and content to make preparation against the evil day.
Truly yours,
Joseph Chamberlain.
The "Autograph Fiend" in this case certainly deserves his name. He not only succeeds in obtaining an interesting letter, signed and carefully corrected by an ex-Cabinet Minister, which he is able to convert into five shillings, but he receives with it a promise that the writer will become the godfather of his real or supposed child!
Mr. Ruskin's total lack of sympathy with the autograph-hunter was notorious. He was also known to entertain a strong antipathy to a certain conventicle. The following response to a demand for subscription elicited a very characteristic reply, which was promptly converted into ten pounds. In the presence of such recent examples of successful autograph "draws" as these, there is no need to repeat the old story of the Duke of Wellington's reply to a fictitious demand for the payment of a washer-woman's bill said to be due from Lord Douro.
Mr. John Ruskin to a correspondent:—
I am scornfully amused at your appeal to me, of all people in the world, the precisely less likely to give you a farthing. My first word to all men and boys who care to hear me is, Don't get into debt. Starve and go to heaven—but don't borrow. Try first begging—I don't mind, if it's really needful, stealing. But don't buy things you can't pay for. And of all manner of debtors, pious people building churches they can't pay for, are the most detestable nonsense to me. Can't you preach and pray behind the hedges—or in a sand-pit—or a coal-hole first? And of all manner of churches thus idiotically built, iron churches are the damnablest to me. And of all sects of believers in ruling spirit—Hindoos, Turks, Feather Idolaters, and any Mumbo-jumbo, Log and Fire Worshippers, your modern English Evangelical sect is the most absurd, and entirely objectionable and unendurable to me. All which they might very easily have found out from my books—any other sort of sect would—before bothering me to write to them. Ever, nevertheless, and in all this saying, your faithful servant,
John Ruskin.
