The Harvest of Ruskin

by John W. Graham

This treatment of Labour as governed by the same law of supply and demand as commodities, is the only way it can be treated as subject matter of a science dealing with the production, distribution and exchange of wealth. But no one would stop there, shutting his eyes to the fact that behind the labour stands the labourer, a human being, with all the spiritual and emotional gifts and needs of a man. Only military authority treats men so. Even an economist, writing on labour as a commodity, proceeds to explain how it differs from material commodities—how slow is its reaction on the side of supply—how high wages up to a point produce a still higher quality of labour, and so forth. Business management, also, is a commodity subject to the same law, but I have never heard that the General Managers of Railway Companies feel degraded for that reason to the mere level of slaves.

Unluckily the economists, influenced by the poverty that followed the last great war, which ended in 1815, concluded that the unskilled labourer would multiply till his children starved. They saw in fact starvation rampant in England.

This was why Political Economy was called by Carlyle the Dismal Science. But the economists were no more responsible for it than theologians are for the Judgment Day, perhaps much less so. Ruskin believed and hated the doctrine, and so, in fact, was an orthodox Millite. And both he and Mill had their remedies. Mill recommended education, emigration and small families. Ruskin appealed to the state or the gilds. In time Mill came to the same point of view, and died a Socialist. He was able to do this because he was persuaded by Thornton that the Wages Fund theory did not hold; that in fact workers produced their own wages, with the help of some capital to oil the wheels, that is, to fill the gap in time caused by distribution under the machinery of payment. This occurred in 1869 after Munera Pulveris had been published in Fraser’s Magazine in 1862 and 1863, but before it came out in book form in 1872; and it is grievous that these two men did not consciously co-operate. Ruskin’s method of controversy, possibly drove Mill to silence.

The central blast of Ruskin’s attack was against this—ultimately abandoned—doctrine of hopelessness. I do not mean that we may be quite cheerful about free competition in wages; for there are departments of labour so helpless that they cannot obtain a decently living wage.[76] To meet this, choice of employment is necessary, but cannot always be found for physically weak or mentally ill-qualified people. The nation has decided to carry out in specified trades the Ruskinian principle of the fixed living wage, enforced by the Sweated Industries Acts. Under these more and more trades may and will come. The economic storm of the war has broken down the equable course of free competition, and has caused regulation of wages and prices on all sides. We must not speak as if this were a normal development either of socialism or of competition. We have suffered under it as part of the evil of war. The benefits of competition require time, and a fair field for all forces. There will still be much done by provision of alternative employment on the land, by the investment of capital in developing local industries, and indirectly, by housing, education and temperance reform, to diminish the remnant of the helpless victims of sweating. Behind these the nation will probably soon stand, committed to a national minimum in wages and in hours. Above these government minima stand the various Trades Union fixed rules. All are Ruskinian,[77] and Mill would rejoice in them too.

A generation ago a national minimum wage had the support of Socialists of the school of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and of J. A. Hobson.[78] For a long time it was not orthodox. I remember hearing a Professor of Political Economy speaking on this subject twice, at an interval of about ten years. The first time he summed up against it, pointing out how a minimum tended, in Australian experience, to become a maximum, with certificates of invalidism or incapacity easily obtainable to authorize a lower wage. The second time he was for a minimum wage, as what progressive thinkers hoped for. The steps have, of late, become rapid. Miners had their wages fixed by the Government after the Coal Strike of 1912, and again, after the Sankey Commission in 1919. The Railway and Transport Workers are also under Government protection. An international Labour Charter is part of the Peace of Versailles, which must lead to an international minimum. It will be a delicate undertaking to work it out with any completeness. Within a nation the cost of living varies from place to place; the value of money rises and falls as general prices fall or rise. Internationally, between San Francisco, New York, London, Constantinople, and Yokohama, the differences forbid uniformity of wage. Nobody can compel an employer to employ anybody whose work results in no profit. Some people exist who are not worth a minimum wage, unless it is too low to be acceptable. There will have to be provision for these. Pensions for Old Age and invalidity will assume larger proportions. The race will have to worry out this complex tangle of man with his environment. What is clear is that we have reached the Ruskinian standpoint about it.

Fors Clavigera is the most remarkable of the writings of Ruskin. He who has read Fors, or a large part of it, knows Ruskin, and if he loves and reveres the author, has become a Ruskinian. But without reading Fors no man or woman can become a Ruskinian. In it you become intimate with the man. He talks to you like a friend, button-holes you very much as Socrates did, invites you to laugh with him, and join in laughs at himself, tells you all his troubles, and the causes of the ups and downs of his spirits, tells you of his loneliness and his hopes and intentions, shows you his accounts every month, tells you where he has lost money, and to whom he has given it away, lets you see his letters and his replies to them, and holds you, by the personal power of him, while he pours vials of prophetic denunciation upon Society only to be equalled in the pages of the Hebrew Prophets; and then clinches it all with “Mind you, I mean every word of it; no exaggeration here.”

Fors is a book—a message:—it is often playful in style, the matter all scattered. The subject changes from page to page; nothing in it can be referred to without that Queen of Indexes which accompanies it: but the unity of its subject is in the unity of the author. You carry on an idea, cropping up under all sorts of irrelevancies and chance illustrations—and you carry on certain jokes too, or humorous allusions, as we all do in common life. This miscellany, I am persuaded, will attract readers longer than the stately symmetry of Modern Painters, or the laborious detail of the Stones of Venice. Who but Ruskin could have brought thus out of his treasury things new and old?

We shall look in vain for a completely worked out system of business and legislation in Ruskin’s writings. His Utopia is delightfully worked up here and there in detail, but it has great gaps; it often seems to raise more difficulties than it settles; and it is not always consistent with itself.

Indeed, one could not expect completeness or real mastery of the problem, either from the man or from the nature of the subject. From the man, because the prophet and the practical administrator are rarely combined. Comte went into detail, and we do not much value the Positivist detail. The prophet is the man with the clear vision and hot heart. The practical administrator must sit on committees and keep secretaries, and meet deputations; he must check accounts and hold dinner parties. What we desire is that practical men should give ear to the prophet.

Secondly, the subject is too vast and complicated for complete treatment. Great as has been the volume and secure the conviction of the attacks on our present social system, how very little in the way of stable fabric exists to-day in confessed substitution for it. Socialist and Communist colonies have failed through their principles being in advance of the practice of the men who had to pioneer their course. Of the thirty or forty whose history has been collected, most have broken up, a few with profit to the members, but most with loss. Religious communities have, of course, shown the greatest tenacity. The Shakers are now diminishing and discouraged, though they own some of the richest land in America, and are commercially connected with a valuable property besides, known as Mother Siegel’s Syrup. The Doukhobors from Russia now settled in the far West of Canada, have saved themselves by their communism under persecution. They again are bound by a mighty religious bond. But many are being absorbed by the society around, and their primitive faith in their leader Peter Verigin as an incarnation of God, will hardly survive Canadian education. We will not, then, expect to see a complete reconstruction of society. Ruskin’s is most fully worked out in Time and Tide: but Fors is thickly scattered with it too.