[1094] Especially in that celebrated passage: “It [Political Economy] sounds with Philosophico-Politice-Economic plummet the deep dark sea of troubles, and having taught us rightly what an infinite sea of troubles it is sums up with the practical inference and use of consolation that nothing whatever can be done in it by man, who has simply to sit still and look wistfully to ‘time and general laws,’ and thereupon without so much as recommending suicide coldly takes its leave of us.” (Chartism.)
[1095] “If thou ask again … What is to be done? allow me to reply: By thee, for the present, almost nothing.… Thou shalt descend into thy inner man, and see if there be any traces of a soul there; till then there can be nothing done!… Then shall we discern, not one thing, but, in clearer or dimmer sequence, a whole endless host of things that can be done. Do the first of these.” (Past and Present. Book I. chap. 4.)
[1096] See particularly Fors Clavigera.
[1097] “Why, the four-footed worker has already got all that this two-handed one is clamouring for, and you say it is impossible.” (Carlyle, Past and Present, chap. 3; and see also Chartism, chap. 4.)
[1098] This was the ideal which he had in mind in founding the Guild of St. George. See an article by Professor Marshall, The Social Possibilities of Economic Chivalry, in the Economic Journal, March 1907. There is no reference to Ruskin in it, however.
[1099] When the Christian Socialists in 1854 organised a course of lectures for working men in London Ruskin volunteered to give a few addresses, not on social economics or on history, but on drawing.
[1100] One naturally thinks first of such industrial villages as Bournville and Port Sunlight. But in 1903 an entirely new city of this kind was begun at Letchworth, Herts. The idea has recently undergone a considerable development by a society that owes its inspiration to Ruskin.
[1101] Story of a Horse, in his First Stories (1861).
[1102] See a book entitled Labour, which consists of the meditations of a muzhik called Bondareff upon those words of Genesis, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,” followed by a long commentary by Tolstoy.
[1103] “Pleasure and pain are undoubtedly the ultimate objects of the calculus of economics. To satisfy our wants to the utmost with the least effort, to procure the greatest amount of what is desirable at the expense of the least that is undesirable, in other words, to maximise pleasure, is the problem of economics.” (Stanley Jevons, Theory of Political Economy, p. 40.)