The Harvest of Ruskin

by John W. Graham

There is clearly room for much difference of opinion in detail here. And yet it will be plain to all that the subject matter of a science must be limited; we must know when our studies begin and end. It is not demoralization which makes an economist deny holiness to be wealth, it is a classification of sciences. Holiness is not matter either, nor electricity, nor gas; it does not come into Physics any more than into Economics. It comes into Ethics and Theology and practical Politics, and it is the most important thing in the world. It may be true, as Ruskin urges, that wealth is not any good to a miser or a spendthrift or a rogue; that it is often I11th rather than Wealth, if it makes its user soft and slack and selfish, or proud and cruel. But nevertheless, it is an object of desire, of human motive; and that is enough for the economist.

The mistake of the early economists before John S. Mill was in not recognizing, however, the reaction of man’s possession of wealth upon his conduct as a producer; how high wages might be remunerative, if they increased efficiency, and big fortunes wasted if they increased idleness. We really have to treat two factors, each of which is, in the language of Mathematics, an implicit function of the other—or, if that does not make it more clear—each of which acts upon and is acted upon by the other. The early economists lived in the age when steam engines and electric telegraphs were great and new achievements, when Chemistry was being reborn in the atomic theory, and Joule was proving the great generalization of the conservation of energy. They treated their subject—man in business—as if he were matter; whereas he has biological characteristics, and is modifiable and can modify his environment. Our age, on the contrary, is concerned with the modification of characteristics under environment. It is the age of Darwin. Biological evolution is seen to govern the growth of men and societies; and these, in writings of the dominant school of thinkers since Herbert Spencer, are seen to follow biological laws of growth. The Economic man is no exception.

John Stuart Mill begins his chapter defining wealth by remarking that everyone has a notion sufficiently correct for common purposes, of what is meant by wealth. This is not his definition; he reaches that later: it is a reasonable introductory remark. But Ruskin assumes that this is his definition, and assails him for his lack of scientific precision and his looseness of thought, as though an astronomer were to begin by saying that everyone has a notion, sufficient for common purposes, of what is meant by a star. The criticism is the more unreasonable, when we find the critic himself doing the very same thing in his famous chapter on “The Nature of Gothic” in The Stones of Venice, in which, at the opening, the remark occurs: “We all have some notion, most of us a very determined one, of the meaning of the term Gothic.” Ruskin goes on to play with the etymology of value;[62] from valor and valere, meaning that which avails towards life and health; and says true wealth is what tends to life and the increase of its powers, not pearls nor topaz, but air and light and cleanliness. “To be wealthy is to have a large stock of useful articles,” say the economists. What, he asks, is to “have"—has the embalmed body of Carlo Borromeo the golden crosier and the cross of emeralds on its breast? Has a gold-filled belt the man whom it drowns, or has he it? Does not “having” depend on the vital power to use? What, nextly, is “useful”? Persons called wealthy may be inherently incapable of wealth, mere reservoirs in the stream of national produce, if not impediments in its course, and so causing “illth” rather than “wealth.” Therefore the aim and end of Political Economy is to develop moral character and capacity for valiantly using valuables, and the great difficulty is that manly character is apt to suffer from possessing material wealth and also apt to cast it away. Wealth of character and wealth of goods tend to undermine one another.

“In a community regulated by laws of supply and demand but protected from open violence, the persons who become rich are, generally speaking, industrious, resolute, proud, covetous, prompt, methodical, sensible, unimaginative, insensitive and ignorant. The persons who remain poor are the entirely foolish, the entirely wise, the idle, the reckless, the humble, the thoughtful, the dull, the imaginative, the sensitive, the well-informed, the improvident, the irregularly and impulsively wicked, the clumsy knave, the open thief, and the entirely merciful, just and godly person.”[63]

With one further piece of Ruskin’s teaching on the nature of wealth, I think that the subject will be clear.

“ ‘Rich’ is a relative word implying its opposite ‘poor’ as positively as the word ‘north’ implies its opposite ‘south.’ Men nearly always speak and write as if riches were absolute, and it were possible by following certain scientific precepts (Ruskin’s capital error turns up here), for everybody to be rich. Whereas riches are a power like that of electricity, acting only through inequalities or negations of itself. The force of the guinea you have in your pocket depends wholly on the default of a guinea in your neighbour’s pocket. If he did not want it, it would be of no use to you; the degree of power it possesses depends accurately upon the need or desire he has for it—and the art of making yourself rich, in the ordinary mercantile economist’s sense, is therefore equally and necessarily the art of keeping your neighbour poor.”[64]

This is all true; if by rich we understand, as the use of the word in common practice warrants, relatively wealthy. The possession of money is the possession of an order upon labour; and it is of no use if there is no available labour needing it. Ruskin’s illustration is that of a large landed proprietor who could get no servants to feed his cattle, mine his gold, plough his corn lands, because no one was in want of his wages. He must lead a life of severe and common labour to produce even ordinary comforts, and live in the midst of a waste desert. Therefore, what is meant by making oneself rich is to produce the maximum inequality between ourselves and our neighbours.[65]

Ruskin is grievously unfair in saying that that is the object of mercantile (political) economy; that it is “the science of getting rich.” Such a statement libels both the science and its expounders; and it contains, for Ruskin, an extraordinary looseness in the use of words. There cannot be a science of getting rich, that is an art or a craft. Science is organized knowledge, not practical faculty to do anything or get anything.[66]

How wide is the range of Ruskin’s Economy, how practical its objects, how little of a science it is, how entirely an art, the art of practical government and production, will be further clear from this statement:

“Political economy (the economy of a State or of citizens), consists simply in the production, preservation and distribution, at fittest time and place, of useful or pleasurable things. The farmer who cuts his hay at the right time, the shipwright who drives his bolts well home in sound wood, the builder who lays good bricks in well tempered mortar, the housewife who takes care of her furniture in the parlour and guards against all waste in her kitchen, and the singer who rightly disciplines and never overstrains his voice, are all political economists in the true and final sense; adding continually to the riches and well-being of the nation to which they belong.”[67]