[3] Dear Mr. Ruskin, 8th July, 1876.
I see that you intend to speak on the question of usury in next Fors. Would it not be well, since the Bishops of the Established Church have not a [[253]]word to offer in defence of their conduct, to appeal to some of the other sects that profess to take the teaching of the Bible and of Christ for their guidance? The Wesleyans, for instance, teach that the Bible was given almost verbally by the Spirit of God; and John Wesley says his followers are “to die sooner than put anything in pawn, or borrow and lend on usury.” Perhaps if you were to challenge the President and Conference, and call on them either to state that they do not accept the teaching of Moses, David, and Christ on this matter, or to bring the sin clearly before the minds of the members of their body, you might force the question on the attention of the professedly religious persons in the country.
A Reader of Fors. [↑]
[4] Please, some one, tell me if this something be true, or how far true. [↑]
FORS CLAVIGERA.
LETTER LXIX.
I have just been down to Barmouth to see the tenants on the first bit of ground,—noble crystalline rock, I am thankful to say,—possessed by St. George in the island.
I find the rain coming through roofs, and the wind through walls, more than I think proper, and have ordered repairs; and for some time to come, the little rents of these cottages will be spent entirely in the bettering of them, or in extending some garden ground, fenced with furze hedge against the west wind by the most ingenious of our tenants.
And in connection with this first—however small—beginning under my own eyes of St. George’s work,—(already some repairs had been made by my direction, under the superintendence of the donor of the land, Mrs. Talbot, before I could go to see the place)—I must state again clearly our St. George’s principle of rent. It is taken first as the acknowledgment [[276]]of the authority of the Society over the land, and in the amount judged by the Master to be just, according to the circumstances of the person and place, for the tenant to pay as a contribution to the funds of the Society. The tenant has no claim to the return of the rent in improvements on his ground or his house; and I order the repairs at Barmouth as part of the Company’s general action, not as return of the rent to the tenant. The reader will thus see that our so-called ‘rents’ are in fact taxes laid on the tenants for the advancement of the work of the Company. And all so-called rents are, in like manner, taxes laid on the labourer for the advancement of the work of his landlord. If that work be beneficial, on the whole, to the estate, and of all who live on it, the rents are on a right footing; but if they are abstracted by the landlord to his own private uses, he is merely another form of the old mediæval Knight of Evilstone, living as hawk in eyrie.
It chanced, while I set this work on foot at Barmouth, that a paragraph was sent me out of a Carlisle paper, giving the information that all Lord Lonsdale’s tenants have received notice to quit, that the farms might be re-valued. I requested my correspondent to ascertain for me the manner of the holdings on Lord Lonsdale’s estates;—his reply is the third article in our correspondence this month, and I beg to recommend it to the reader’s most earnest attention. What it says of [[277]]rents, with the exception indicated in my note, is right; and cannot be more tersely or clearly expressed. What it says of ground-produce is only partially right. To discover another America at our own doors would not be any advantage to us;—nor even to make England bigger. We have no business to want England to be bigger, any more than the world to be bigger. The question is not, for us, how much land God ought to have given us; but to fill the land He has given us, with the wisest and best inhabitants we can. I could give a plan, if I chose, with great ease, for the maintenance of a greatly increased quantity of inhabitants, on iron scaffolding, by pulverizing our mountains, and strewing the duly pulverized and, by wise medical geology, drugged, materials, over the upper stages; carrying on our present ingenious manufactures in the dark lower stories. But the arrangement, even if it could be at once achieved, would be of no advantage to England.