The Harvest of Ruskin

by John W. Graham

THE controversy between Ruskin and the orthodox Political Economists of his time was central in his career, and has occupied a prominent place in the thought of the last sixty years. Either Ruskin’s teaching or that of Mill and his colleagues, or that of both, has been clouded with uncertainty and so has lost force. If it should be found, as I shall try to show, that there was no real ground for the controversy at all—that it was all due to misapprehension, to mere ambiguity in a term, it will reinforce the conclusions of the economists in their modern revised form, add cogency to the teaching of Ruskin, and clear away storm clouds which have done great harm. The mistake arose through a wrong conception by Ruskin of the scope of Economics—of what its teachers were after.

Political Economy has always been treated by careful writers as the science of human action with regard to the acquisition and use of property. This is a pure science. It is a branch of applied psychology. It measures motives, and analyses the action of buyers and sellers with a view to finding out what men in business will normally do, and how values of land, labour, capital and commodities are determined. This does not open any question of right or wrong, any question of oppression or starvation, of luxury, vanity or pride. This is as cold-blooded, as purely intellectual and critical an inquiry as the study and measurement of electrical currents; what produces them, conducts them, wastes or scatters them. An electrician will show how a telephone may be made, he will invent it, and he will explain it; but it is no business of his to ask whether courtesy and good feeling or profanity and fraud will characterize the messages which will go over his instrument. That is not his business as a scientist, though the use of his own telephone is his business as a man.

Now this is a perfectly intelligible, it may be a perfectly blameless, and, at first sight, a probably useful branch of inquiry. It separates off from the great mass of human actions a definite field; it omits the motive of religion, the motive of love, and the motive of self-denying service, outside service for the family for whom the man under discussion is economically responsible.

Concerning it, we must ask three questions:

1. Is this separation practicable, and in consequence are the results true or approximately true?

2. Under what limitations is it useful to make such a separation, and what real guidance to conduct, if any, follows?

3. Afterwards we will inquire to what extent the political economists have rigidly confined themselves to theory, and having found that they did not, when they went over into practical advice we will ask whether they were deluded by the results they had reached within their limits, and whether they hastily assumed that they had found a more complete guide to human action than they had.

Is then the separation of dealings which can be expressed in terms of money from the other dealings of life sufficiently possible to make a science of those dealings? Are they predictable, given the circumstances? Will like causes produce like results? Is the motive measured by money sufficiently separable from other motives, to be treated by itself?

We must at once admit that such separation cannot be absolute; that affection, pity, charity, habit, ignorance, legislative restriction, public spirit, prevent the individual from always acting according to his economic interests. He does not always buy in the cheapest shop; he grumbles but helps a struggling neighbour by his custom, and puts up for some time with an inferior article. He goes on using old machinery for want of knowledge or of a progressive mind. He keeps on an old hand for the sake of the past. Still, in the long run, these qualifications to the general law do not survive. In general, men in the large may be trusted to do that which it is their economic interest to do, within such lines of honesty as are ratified by law, or of honour as are regarded by public opinion. Competition, that is, is the general rule in business; and we shall not go far wrong in assuming it as the method in vogue in Europe and America, unless some special feature of monopoly or legislative Protection or trade combination supersedes it.

This is not the same as saying that it is always right to follow the lines of pure competition. We must at all points check the tendency to pass from the indicative to the imperative mood, from a science to an art; from what will raise our profits to what is our duty in our business.