6. I will strive to raise my own body and soul daily into higher powers of duty and happiness; not in rivalship or contention with others, but for the help, delight and honour of others, and for the joy and peace of my own life.
7. (On loyalty to the laws.)
8. (On loyalty to the Guild.)
As an organization this little realm within the realm came to very little. It needed advertisement, propagandism, somebody to preach it, and to organize it. The prophet at Brantwood wrote about it to the then very limited audience of Fors, and there propaganda ended. There were about forty-two Companions of St. George altogether at one time; and the Master was autocratic and irregular through ill health. Some land at Abbeydale, Sheffield, was taken, and a settlement of Socialists attempted without success. George Baker presented a woodland tract of fifteen acres at Bewdley; Mrs. Talbot some cliff-like land and cottages at Barmouth; and a small holding on the Yorkshire coast at Claughton, near Whitby, was acquired. The land cultivation came to very little.
The land at Abbeydale is now a successful market garden with a residence, let to a tenant in the usual way. A house has been built within recent years on the land at Bewdley, and part, if not all, of it is at last in cultivation by a Liverpool couple tired of town life. Mrs. Talbot’s representative manages the cottages at Barmouth on the lines of an ordinary good landlord. We have sold the bit of Yorkshire moorland, long troublesome. After delays and legal difficulties, George Baker, a Quaker alderman of Birmingham, who had been co-trustee of the properties, and had borne much of the business burden of it from the beginning, was made Master, and a few new members were enrolled by invitation. The Guild has held of late years a number of annual meetings, at Oxford, Coniston, Sheffield, Bewdley, London, Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham, which were delightful social occasions, and which transacted the business of the properties, and made grants from the income, which, apart from subscriptions, is between one and two hundred pounds a year, mostly representing Ruskin’s own gifts. The grants go as a rule to literary, agricultural or other purposes on the Master’s lines. On the death of Mr. Baker the Mastership was accepted by Mr. George Thomson, of Huddersfield, the forerunner, under Ruskin’s guidance, of the profit-sharing movement in this country. He resigned, through failing health, in 1920, and Mr. H. E. Luxmoor, of Eton, was appointed. Mr. William Wardle, of 4 Olive Lane, Wavertree, Liverpool, is the Hon. Sec. Two members represent the Guild on the Committee of the Sheffield Corporation which has charge of the Ruskin Museum in Meersbrook Park. This Museum is the property of the Guild on permanent loan to the Corporation of Sheffield who maintain it. It is indeed among the Guild properties the one really valuable concrete survival of the labour and enthusiasm of the founder. It is one of the very lovely things of the whole world, with its concentrated charm and delicate fineness.
These details about the present day of small things, about this remnant of an ancient hope, are not themselves important, but may not be without interest to some of the many thousand readers of Fors Clavigera. Those letters are full more of promise and of postponement than of achievement or permanently established method; and the rather wilful and fantastic adventures of a mind that was seldom at rest, often overflow into the monthly budget without as much repression as a sober systematizer would have exercised, but with endless delight.
In the early hopeful days, when there floated before Ruskin’s imagination the conception of an influential and numerous body of Companions of the Guild, comprising the moral and intellectual aristocracy of the country, he laid his plans on large lines. In the Master’s Report for 1881 he wrote that he expected “the Guild to extend its operations over the Continent of Europe and number its members ultimately by myriads”; which in the mouth of a Greek scholar means accurately by tens of thousands. He instructed the Companions to read no newspapers until he should be able to found a newspaper fit for them to read, an instruction which his most devout follower has never obeyed. Moreover there was to be an authorized list of books which alone might be read, of which Bibliotheca Pastorum was the first part. This is perhaps the most erratic of all the proposals which crossed his mind.
He also criticized the coinage of the country, and insisted that there should be under the rule of St. George sovereigns called ducats, of pure gold, a metal which is of itself quite unsuited for use as coinage, and needs to be hardened by alloy before it is fit for the purposes of the mint. Then the shilling was to be called a florin and was to be divided into ten pence. This copying of the coins of Florence in the middle ages, which as Ruskin once said to me, gave her merchants credit in the time of Edward I, cannot be considered seriously; indeed, these fanciful commands can only be matter for regret. There can be but one coinage in a country, even if the Guild of St. George had become a large institution. So late as 1884 Mr. Ruskin told a party of us at Brantwood that the St. George’s Company was going to issue coins of pure gold.
Rents, payable of course to the State, were to be one-tenth of the produce. Now rents cannot with any justice be settled that way. The farmer who farms poor land should be as well off and get as good a return for his labour as he who farms rich land. Under ordinary competition things turn out that way. All farmers in theory, and approximately in practice, receive the same return for labour and capital applied to land, and the margin goes to the landlord as rent.
Ruskin’s system is known as the metayer system, only that half, not one-tenth of, the profits usually go to the landlord. It is an old-fashioned, primitive, and uneconomic system, and is used in Italy, Portugal, on the Danube, in Russia, and over about one-seventh of France. At the time of the French Revolution, Arthur Young found seven-eighths of France managed in this way. It is suited for small holdings; but it discourages intensive culture, for it would be no use for a metayer tenant to spend £1 in increasing his product by £2, if half of the £2 went to the landlord. Ruskin liked it because it made a friendly co-operation between landlord and tenant. There was never any clash of interests, and the tenant was never under real hardship. It is morally a much more attractive plan. It bars any keen competition between tenants and it leads to permanency of tenure.