II. Next to this delightful testimony to my ‘sweet reasonableness,’ here is some discussion of evidence on the other side:—
November 12, 1872.
“To John Ruskin, LL.D., greeting, these.
“Enclosed is a slip cut from the ‘Liverpool Mercury’ of last Friday, November 8. I don’t send it to you because I think it matters anything what the ‘Mercury’ thinks about any one’s qualification for either the inside or outside of any asylum; but that I may suggest to you, as a working-man reader of your letters, the desirability of your printing any letters of importance you may send to any of the London papers, over again—in, say, the space of ‘Fors Clavigera’ that you have set apart for correspondence. It is most tantalizing to see a bit printed like the enclosed, and not know either what is before or after. I felt similar feelings some time ago over a little bit of a letter about the subscription to Warwick Castle.
“We cannot always see the London papers, especially us provincials; and we would like to see what goes on between you and the newspaper world.
“Trusting that you will give this suggestion some consideration, and at any rate take it as given in good faith from a disciple following afar off,
“I remain, sincerely yours.”
The enclosed slip was as follows:—
“Mr. Ruskin’s Tender Point.—Mr. John Ruskin has written a letter to a contemporary on madness and crime, which goes far to clear up the mystery which has surrounded some of his writings of late. The following passage amply qualifies the distinguished art critic for admission into any asylum in the country:—‘I assure you, sir, insanity is a tender point with me.’ ” The writer then quotes to the end the last paragraph of the letter, [[286]]which, in compliance with my correspondent’s wish, I am happy here to reprint in its entirety.
MADNESS AND CRIME.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE ‘PALL MALL GAZETTE.’
Sir,—Towards the close of the excellent article on the Taylor trial in your issue for October 31, you say that people never will be, nor ought to be, persuaded “to treat criminals simply as vermin which they destroy, and not as men who are to be punished.” Certainly not, sir! Who ever talked or thought of regarding criminals “simply” as anything; (or innocent people either, if there be any)? But regarding criminals complexly and accurately, they are partly men, partly vermin; what is human in them you must punish—what is vermicular, abolish. Anything between—if you can find it—I wish you joy of, and hope you may be able to preserve it to society. Insane persons, horses, dogs, or cats, become vermin when they become dangerous. I am sorry for darling Fido, but there is no question about what is to be done with him.
Yet, I assure you, sir, insanity is a tender point with me. One of my best friends has just gone mad; and all the rest say I am mad myself. But, if ever I murder anybody—and, indeed, there are numbers of people I should like to murder—I won’t say that I ought to be hanged; for I think nobody but a bishop or a bank director can ever be rogue enough to deserve hanging; but I particularly, and with all that is left me of what I imagine to be sound mind, request that I may be immediately shot.
I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
J. Ruskin.Corpus Christi College, Oxford, November 2, (1872).
III. I am very grateful to the friend who sends me the following note on my criticism of Dickens in last letter:— [[287]]
“It does not in the least detract from the force of Fors, p. 253, line 18 (November), that there was a real ‘Miss Flite,’ whom I have seen, and my father well remembers; and who used to haunt the Courts in general, and sometimes to address them. She had been ruined, it was believed; and Dickens must have seen her, for her picture is like the original. But he knew nothing about her, and only constructed her after his fashion. She cannot have been any prototype of the character of Miss Flite. I never heard her real name. Poor thing! she did not look sweet or kind, but crazed and spiteful; and unless looks deceived Dickens, he just gave careless, false witness about her. Her condition seemed to strengthen your statement in its very gist,—as Law had made her look like Peter Peebles.
“My father remembers little Miss F., of whom nothing was known. She always carried papers and a bag, and received occasional charity from lawyers.
“Gridley’s real name was Ikey;—he haunted Chancery. Another, named Pitt, in the Exchequer;—broken attorneys, both.”
IV. I have long kept by me an official statement of the condition of England when I began Fors, and together with it an illustrative column, printed, without alteration, from the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ of the previous year. They may now fitly close my four years’ work, of which I have good hope next year to see some fruit.
Mr. Goschen on the Condition of England.—“The nation is again making money at an enormous rate, and driving every kind of decently secure investment up to unprecedented figures. Foreign Stocks, Indian Stocks, Home Railway Shares, all securities which are beyond the control of mere speculators and offer above four per cent. were never so dear; risky [[288]]loans for millions, like that for Peru, are taken with avidity; the cup is getting full, and in all human probability some new burst of speculation is at hand, which may take a beneficial form—for instance, we could get rid of a hundred millions in making cheap country railways with immense advantage—but will more probably turn out to be a mere method of depletion. However it goes, the country is once more getting rich, and the money is filtering downwards to the actual workers. The people, as Mr. Goschen showed by unimpugnable figures, are consuming more sugar, more tea, more beer, spirits, and tobacco, more, in fact, of every kind of popular luxury, than ever. Their savings have also increased, while the exports of cotton, of wool, of linen, of iron, of machinery, have reached a figure wholly beyond precedent. By the testimony of all manner of men—factory inspectors, poor-law inspectors, members of great cities—the Lancashire trade, the silk trade, the flax-spinning trade, the lace trade, and, above all, the iron trade, are all so flourishing, that the want is not of work to be done, but of hands to do it. Even the iron shipbuilding trade, which was at so low a point, is reviving, and the only one believed to be still under serious depression is the building trade of London, which has, it is believed, been considerably overdone. So great is the demand for hands in some parts of the country, that Mr. Goschen believes that internal emigration would do more to help the people than emigration to America, while it is certain that no relief which can be afforded by the departure of a few workpeople is equal to the relief caused by the revival of any one great trade—relief, we must add, which would be more rapid and diffused if the trades’ unions, in this one respect at least false to their central idea of the brotherhood of labour, were not so jealous of the intrusion of outsiders. There is hardly a trade into which a countryman of thirty, however clever, can enter at his own discretion—one of the many social disqualifications which press upon the agricultural labourer. [[289]]
“The picture thus drawn by Mr. Goschen, and truly drawn—for the President of the Poor-Law Board is a man who does not manipulate figures, but treats them with the reverence of the born statist—is a very pleasant one, especially to those who believe that wealth is the foundation of civilization; but yet what a weary load it is that, according to the same speech, this country is carrying, and must carry! There are 1,100,000 paupers on the books, and not a tenth of them will be taken off by any revival whatever, for not a tenth of them are workers. The rest are children—350,000 of them alone—widows, people past work, cripples, lunatics, incapables, human drift of one sort or another, the detritus of commerce and labour, a compost of suffering, helplessness, and disease. In addition to the burden of the State, in addition to the burden of the Debt, which we talk of as nothing, but without which England would be the least-taxed country in the world, this country has to maintain an army of incapables twice as numerous as the army of France, to feed, and clothe, and lodge and teach them,—an army which she cannot disband, and which she seems incompetent even to diminish. To talk of emigration, of enterprise, even of education, as reducing this burden, is almost waste of breath; for cripples do not emigrate, the aged do not benefit by trade, when education is universal children must still be kept alive.”—The Spectator, June 25, 1870.
V. The following single column of the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ has been occasionally referred to in past letters:—