The Harvest of Ruskin

by John W. Graham

In some ways these two protagonists, both of them among the princes of our race, were strangely alike in their history. Mill, born in 1806, was the elder by thirteen years. Both children were extraordinarily precocious, Mill with his Greek at two, Ruskin with his pencil and his poetry at seven. At sixteen Mill was writing in The Traveller in defence of his father and of Ricardo. From eighteen to twenty he contributed to the Westminster Review and other journals articles on the Game Laws, the Corn Laws, the Law of Libel and on a Paper Currency, and reviews of books on Economics. At this age Ruskin’s poetry was appearing in Friendship’s Garland, and at twenty-four he came out with the first volume of Modern Painters, with a fully developed style made in heaven, and an originality in his art criticism which made him a public man at once. Each of them, after a long and famous literary life, gave the world an autobiography it would not willingly lose.

They were both only sons, brought up with unusual solicitude, close parental control and remarkably severe if loving discipline. Their attachment to and regard for their parents was a great power with both, all their lives. The gravity, earnestness, and deep sense of responsibility taught in childhood never left either of them.

Both passed through the fires which try faith; and there are reasons for believing in both cases that what might have been a happy marriage was frustrated by want of conventional orthodoxy. So that they both suffered for the cause of truth in the hardest of all ways. Each of them had only six or seven years of married life, and neither left any children.

Strangely enough, also, Mill was forty-one when his Principles of Political Economy was written, and Ruskin at forty-one brought out his papers in the Cornhill, under the title of Unto This Last, which are his counterblast to Mill.

Each of them found it necessary in later life to recant some of their earlier teaching, and each faithfully did so. Mill gave up the Wages Fund Theory he had learnt from his father, and Ruskin scatters the later editions of his earlier works with notes denouncing the dogmatic evangelicalism which runs through them, which he had learnt from his mother.

So, in tragic conflict, these two men are before us. Not that Mill ever replied. He died in 1872, and during his lifetime he could afford to ignore the eccentricities of an unstable genius, at whom all sober people smiled in pity. But now I would fain even for Mill’s sake reconcile them. You have true tragedy, not when right meets wrong, the noble the ignoble, but when two principles, both noble, are brought into a conflict they cannot avoid—Mill, the Liberal, the rationalist, with his watchwords of equality, liberty and a free chance for all—and Ruskin the Conservative, the indignant enemy of mechanical progress, speaking ever of order and obedience, reverence and graded ranks:—Mill, a servant of present humanity, with but a faint critical hold on the Unseen; Ruskin, emotional and inspired, who not seldom would fain call down fire from heaven on Mill’s newly enfranchised citizens, because they blasphemed.

So that I conclude that scholastic Economics is a reliable, useful scientific enquiry, forming a basis for the very same practical aims which Ruskin has set us striving for, and written by men who loved their fellows and were conspicuous examples of uprightness and benevolence, truth-keeping and friends of their kind.

We know how unscrupulous men of business used their conclusions, particularly those conclusions which have not stood the test of criticism, as a sort of textbook of oppression, as giving a scientific necessity for starvation, and so excusing hardness of heart. That this was so, must be Ruskin’s excuse for declaring war upon the economists. But it was a war wholly unnecessary; it clouded his prophecy with confused issues, and it laid the Master himself among the wounded.

It will be necessary, in order properly to express the scope of Political Economy, to examine more fully its definition of the two factors whose action and reaction upon one another form the subject matter of the science. These two factors are Man and Wealth. What is Man as an economic being? What is the “economic man”?

He is assumed by Mill and others[60] as a being who considers his own side of a bargain only, who in all contracts will do the best he can for himself, and who, in the use of his capital, and the direction of his labour, is influenced by an intelligent and passionless eye to his own interests. He has no regard for custom, or public opinion, or compassion, or resentment, or personal partiality, or class prejudice.