The Harvest of Ruskin

by John W. Graham

The ideals behind the movement are noble—to give the workman a proprietary interest in his work, to break down the pernicious distribution of wealth which economic freedom has brought about, to bring up a healthy and well-bred race, not a well-bred class only, to put public service in place of profit as the motive for labour; to banish the wretched insecurity of unemployment, and take away the bored life of the idle rich; to use the surplus wealth of industry for the education of the whole people and for a full life for all. Nothing less than this is the guerdon of success.

If the Guild is to guarantee a wage to all its workers, well and ill, under good trade and bad, in defiance of changes in demand due to fashion or invention, or to changes in weather or to foreign imports, there will certainly have to be great powers in the Guild for the transfer of labour from where it is not wanted to where it is. Also, seeing that only a certain number of workers are wanted in the pleasanter occupations, some authority in the guilds will have to assign their duty to all labourers, instead of leaving the choice to competition with the sharp tooth of hunger behind it.

The coercion of the idle workman will be quite a large task; for slackness cannot be summarily dealt with as now by dismissal. It is such rocks of human frailty that will be the danger to the navigation of any ordered system. Are all childless women to be made to work for guild wages? Are married and unmarried men to be paid alike? Is any saving to be permitted? What machinery will determine prices, when demand and supply are denied their free play? It is not the place of this book to answer these questions or to pronounce a final opinion. It is enough to see that opinion is strongly tending in this direction, and that it is in the sequence of Fors Clavigera.

That this is, however, the direction of advance, one is led to believe, from the existence of a halfway house. There is in every movement always the moderate mass and the progressive vanguard, and they sometimes turn their guns heartily upon one another. The moderate proposal, the rival to Guild Socialism, is that of the Whitley Councils for bringing in the present capitalist employers and their workmen as collaborators in the conduct of businesses, and as joint constituents of a trade Parliament.

The Builders’ Parliament,[84] or “Industrial Council for the Building Industry,” was the forerunner of the Whitley Councils, but is on more thoroughgoing guild lines. Mr. Malcolm Sparkes, a young director of a carpentry and cabinet-making business in Willesden, was mixed up as an employer in a disastrous building strike in 1914. Hopeless of any solution by hostile and suspicious bodies of organized masters and organized men, never meeting except as opponents, and working by warfare and the balance of power, he conceived the idea of combined councils, representing both sides, meeting periodically to consider the well-being of the industry. Such bodies were not to deal with disputes, but could often avoid them and remove their causes. Above all they would provide a friendly atmosphere. He persuaded the men’s organizations first, and induced them to approach the masters, who responded willingly; and after due debates, and two years’ permeation of opinion in all the bodies concerned, the Builders’ Parliament was constituted. At its sixth quarterly meeting in August, 1919, it passed by an overwhelming majority a report, called the Foster Report, under which masters would become paid officials and capitalists would receive a fixed interest. Mr. Sparkes and the builders, therefore, are using their united organization to prepare the way for the Guild arrangement, and are favourable to it. They have offered the labour to build some thousands of houses to the Corporation of Manchester, if the latter will supply the capital and take the business risk. But the Whitley Council movement has had a wider development, if a less advanced one.

Mr. J. H. Whitley, Chairman of Committees in the House of Commons, and Chairman of a Government Sub-Committee on the relations of employers and employed, read an article by Mr. Sparkes on his scheme in the Venturer for December, 1916, and asked him to prepare a memorandum for him in detail, and to record his progress to date. This memorandum became the basis of the Whitley Report. The Government adopted it and organized under it the Whitley Councils. The day after Mr. Sparkes’s memorandum reached the printers the author was sent to prison as a conscientious objector to military service. He was a Quaker; he had refused an exemption as a works manager in a controlled business; he had resigned his directorship rather than do war work; and now in defiance of an Act of Parliament which granted exemption, the blind hand of the Tribunals and the War Office could do nothing better with this young patriot than to keep him in gaol for two years. He was liberated a little before the others because the King happened to ask for the author of the Whitley Report. This kind of thing gives pause to one’s hopes of better times coming out of the action of the present militarist states. To all these proposals Ruskin ought to be recognized as the idealist forerunner. His guilds of craftsmen, though differently founded, are very much like Mr. Cole’s. The same social message which Oxford sent through Ruskin from Christ Church and Corpus, she now sends through a Fellow of Magdalen. As the consummation of the idealist approaches, it becomes necessary to work the ideas out, and people will listen to the details, indeed will fiercely question them, and demand something practical. But in the history of economic thought, should these ideas become ultimately fruitful, a greater place should be found for the author of Fors than has yet been awarded to him by our writers on Economics. The chief differences between the modern scheme and that of forty years ago is that Ruskin would confiscate nothing, and would not demand, would even object to, a labour monopoly in the hands of the Guilds, which Mr. Cole declares to be a necessity, without which a Guild is not a Guild. It will be for our successors fifty years hence to say on which side wisdom lay.

On one point the age has gone beyond Ruskin. For good or evil we know we have nothing to trust to but Democracy. From the ugliness and gullibility of the democracy the secluded artist shrank, living in beauty and luxury at Oxford or Venice or by the Lake of Coniston. There was excuse, and there is still much excuse, for men of little faith. The democracy can be played upon and excited to war: its ruling puppets dare not take the drink from it even in war time. It has “demanded,” as economists say, our conscienceless and sensational newspapers, and it loves to read them. It needs much education, and particularly it needs what Ruskin hoped for from Education—character and conduct; first, grace and health and beauty of life; and, as chief intellectual prize, a relentless love of truth. Would that everybody would refuse to buy again a paper that had once deceived them, or to vote for a politician once proved untrustworthy.

Reformers, forgetting the dead weight they have to shift, turn their guns on one another. Socialists seem to be most scornful of Liberalism, and particularly of those employers who are generous and public-spirited.

It must be emphasized that Ruskin was an aristocrat in temperament. In fact he repudiated the idea of an equality which did not, he declared, exist. His sections in Munera Pulveris against equal voting and on “natural slavery"—I suppose learnt from Aristotle’s Politics—are clear on this.[85] He did not support negro slavery, but his interests were chiefly taken up with opposing economic slavery at home, or reserving it for the fit people. The whole passage must be read to be understood.

It is now in 1920 nearly fifty years since Fors Clavigera began to come out, and the outlines of St. George’s Guild were drawn. Those who in that decade found a new inspiration and delight in discipleship to him, are now growing elderly; the glory of the early time when Ruskin’s genius was irradiating the pages of Fors with the hope of a kingdom of God to be raised within the kingdom of this world, was in the days of youth, in the spring of aspiration and a not easily bounded hope. We nourished our hearts on godlike food; and we owe our Master an inextinguishable debt. It is often doubtless a thought full of sadness that the tender grace of a day that is dead will never come back to us, in the sober light of long experience in the realm of the commonplace. Our task now is, to gather up in our maturity that which abides; for our days are passing, and though the growth of the kingdom has not been all that we might have hoped, its spirit must still be handed on, and fixed, so far as we can fix it, in the permanent habits of man.