4. The natural sources of wealth—land, mines, and waterfalls—and the means of communication should be nationalised.
5. A social hierarchy graded according to the character of the services rendered should be established. The gradation must be accepted in no intolerant spirit, and must be respected by everybody. Chivalry is as necessary in an industrial as in a military society, and a new crusade against Mammonism[1098] should be preached both far and wide.
6. Above all else must come education—not mere instruction. What needs developing above everything is a sense of greatness, a love of beauty, respect for authority, and a passion for self-sacrifice. What especially need acquiring are the faculties of admiration, of hope, and of love.[1099]
Only the last item on the programme seems anywhere near realisation, but that by itself would justify our reference to Ruskin’s scheme. Not only has the suggestion resulted in the creation of working men’s colleges at Oxford and of Ruskin Colleges elsewhere, but it has also given rise to the garden city movement. These new cities are built with the express purpose of relieving the worst features of industrial life, and are so planned as not to interfere in any way either with the beauties of nature or with the health of the citizens.[1100]
Ruskin speaks of himself somewhere as an out-and-out communist, but his communism had also a touch of the aristocrat and the æsthete about it which possibly proved a recommendation in English society. Tolstoy is a much more thoroughgoing communist, and is violently opposed to “that low, bestial instinct which men call the right of private property.”[1101] His cry was “Back to the land,” and the practice of coaration; his ideal the mir. He was not anxious to know that everyone was working at some trade or other, but he thought everyone ought to produce his own food, which is the one inevitable law of human existence. Division of labour, which has been so extravagantly praised by economists, he thought of as a mere machination of the devil enabling men to evade the Divine commandment. At any rate it should only be adopted when the need for it arises, and after consultation with all the parties interested, and not indiscriminately, as is at present the case, with competition, over-production, and crises as the result.[1102]
If we are to take Tolstoy’s words literally, as he suggested we should take Christ’s words, then the society that he dreamt of is very far beyond even the communist ideal. More towns, more commerce, more subdivision of trades, more money, more art for art’s sake—such was to be the economic Nirvana of the communists.
BOOK V: RECENT DOCTRINES
In the earlier sections of this work no special difficulty was experienced in giving the essential traits of the economic thought of each period. But on the threshold of this last book we naturally feel some trepidation. The newer theories can scarcely be said to have fallen into their true perspective, and their full import is not clear to us contemporaries. Here, if anywhere, we shall run the risk of being arbitrary in our choice. It seems to us, however, that the economic thought of the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries reveals at least four dominant tendencies.