The Harvest of Ruskin

by John W. Graham

Throughout Ruskin’s proposals for reform we shall nearly always find in each something fanciful and dainty, but impracticable—a sort of pretty decoration tacked on in gaiety of heart, in the spirit of Gothic ornamentation. But if we knock off his little pinnacles, and deny ourselves the glow of his stained glass windows, we shall generally find a commodious and serviceable erection of constructive reform left. In fact, he turns out to have been on the main stream of progress, though pleading all the time that he was harking back to a happier past. His agricultural and business proposals contained fruitful elements, appearing ahead of their time; events from many sides have proved how illuminating his suggestions were.

Ruskin, as we have noted, would limit all incomes at the top by slicing off the superfluity and giving a title instead. In occult ways, unfortunately, peerages and baronetcies and knighthoods do come about by the sacrifice of cash; and in more open and creditable form the graduated income tax, the super-tax, and the steeply rising death duties are partial measures in the same direction.

There is perhaps nothing more fanciful in Ruskin’s reconstruction of Society than his marriage regulations, laid down in Time and Tide, and mentioned in the last chapter. We have not yet put Cupid into harness to this extent, but the popular interest and concern about the propagation of the unfit and the feeble-minded, and in general the attention which is being paid to heredity and the interest in eugenics, are all in the direction laid down by Ruskin in a thorough-going shape, fearless as the schemes of childhood. By feeding school children and by doctoring them the State supplements the weakness of the homes. In many unfamiliar forms the work of St. George goes on.

But in his day thought and practice in Social Reform were comparatively uninstructed by experience. One is reminded of his own phrase about Cimabue and Giotto. They uttered “the burning messages of prophecy by the stammering lips of infants.” He goes straight for his object without fear or hesitation, as an inexperienced child will toddle across a crowded street, unfearing because unknowing about the motor cars. Ruskin, for instance, would set the unemployed to reclaim waste lands. To which of us has not that thought come? Here are the men wanting work; here is the land wanting workers. Let us put them together. But experience has shown that the dour nature of the unoccupied land, and the frequently dour nature of the unoccupied men, render such schemes generally hopeless, and at times even scandalous, failures. Land and men are unoccupied because they are hard to occupy, and by putting together waste land and waste men you only double the difficulty of the task. When good workers might make something of bad land, or bad workers of good land, bad workers on bad land are hopeless. Some years ago in the House of Commons in the debate on the Right to Work Bill, Mr. Burns explained amid general agreement the complete failure of relief works, and their tendency rather to increase the evil and waste public resources. Why is the land out of cultivation? For no other reason than that it does not pay to cultivate it. The return will not give a maintenance and pay taxes. We may leave rent out, for landlords would rather have their lands cultivated for no rent than let them lie a waste of weeds. And why are the men not at work? Because in normal times about 40 per cent. of them are unemployable, the degenerates who are such a cause for alarm and concern to the nation. Of the rest, most are unsuited to agricultural work, and only a moderate proportion can be helped in that way. That some tolerable land can be so cultivated, and some industrious unemployed so maintained is true, but it requires the spiritual amalgam of the Salvation Army, or some such body of patient and capable enthusiasts, to solve the difficult problem, for a selected minority of the submerged, on their farm colonies. They are doing the work of St. George.

Above these stricken ones comes the ordinary farm labourer, who is unfortunately migrating to the towns. Him Mr. Ruskin hoped to settle on land. Such a scheme of small holdings, if backed by sufficient capital, worked by experts, and favourably situated for a market, might even in the seventies have succeeded. Of course it would not have had about it all the moral excellences, the grace of character and the charm of nature and art, which delight us so in the St. George’s lands of the future which we read about in Fors. However, Ruskin never concentrated upon it, but spent most of his time and of the resources of the Guild on the Sheffield Museum instead. He did what he found he could do the best. He knew he was leaving great gaps for others to fill up. He says, touchingly, in the Preface to Love’s Meinie in 1881: “It has been, throughout, my trust that if Death should write on these plans of mine ‘What this man began to build he was not able to finish,’ God may also write on them, not in anger, but in aid, ‘A stronger than he cometh.’ ”

But with labour and patience and against strong hostile political forces, the Small Holdings Act has been for some years at work. The obstruction of the squires still renders it useless in many counties, and there can be no more true task for St. George than to support agencies such as the Small Holdings Association. By its means, as a matter of fact, the peasantry is being restored to the land on a proper business basis. Tasks of this magnitude require organization on a large scale, and the payment of proper returns. No social benefit is given by letting some individual hold land at less than its value. The County Councils since the war are engaged upon it. We are now again on the eve of a large settlement of returned soldiers on the land, and of an attempt to brighten the villages.

St. George, again, ordered that the homes of workpeople should be cheerful, that they should have gardens and flowers and sunshine, that the long miserable rows of uniform cottages should be of the past. These things, largely under the inspiration of Ruskin, are being done, in First Garden City at Letchworth, and in such model villages as Bournville, New Earswick, Port Sunlight, the Hampstead suburb, and similar suburbs at Manchester and Hull. But it is all on far too small a scale. The true task of St. George to-day is to strengthen these progressive movements. The growth of the towns since 1871 has made this urban problem the most urgent of all. How many rows of dreadful box homes have been built. The country is being choked by the spreading towns. Purely agricultural colonies are good, but towns cannot be founded without the help of the manufacturers who make a town.

Again, the intention of St. George was to have a happy body of workpeople, loyally co-operating with a superior type of employer, and banishing greedy competition. The surviving remnant of the Guild of St. George has very little in its own power in this way, but amongst the employers who have built these model villages there exists just this kind of relation in manifold ways. And again, it pays. When in the British Association at York the firm of Rowntree and Co. was being commended for the benefits they are giving their workpeople, Mr. Seebohm Rowntree, whose whole heart is in the work, made a speech insisting that it paid them. He did this in order to induce other people to do the same, and to show that it was feasible for the ordinary manufacturer.

Broadly speaking, we may say that what we are all striving for is being done, in ways more wholesale and more complicated than could have been worked out in the seventies. Two generations of social pioneers, thinkers, and experimenters, have been grappling with the problems since then, so that we should not expect precisely the same prescription to be given by the social physician to-day as was given by one of the great pioneers of healing nearly fifty years ago.

The agricultural settlement seems the furthest from practical politics. Nevertheless, a series of enactments since 1881 have established in Ireland that very arrangement of a peasant proprietary paying a fixed rent to the State, which is the essence of Ruskin’s proposal; except that the Irish rents under the Land Purchase Acts are terminable after a period of years; and so rather more easy than Ruskin’s. Presumably, if found successful, the system could be extended. It will certainly occupy the minds of reformers very much during the immediately coming years.