The Harvest of Ruskin

by John W. Graham

THE fact that War is the commonest and the most pernicious way of using large masses of capital leads us naturally from Usury to War. Ruskin connects the subject with Capitalism thus:[98]

“Capitalists, when they do not know what to do with their money, persuade the peasants, in various countries, that the said peasants want guns to shoot each other with. The peasants accordingly borrow guns, out of the manufacture of which the capitalists get a percentage, and men of science much amusement and credit. Then the peasants shoot a certain number of each other, until they get tired; and burn each other’s homes down, in various places. Then they put the guns back into towers, arsenals, etc. in ornamental patterns (and the victorious party put also some ragged flags in churches). And then the capitalists tax both annually, ever afterwards, to pay interest on the loan of the guns and gunpowder.”

The horrors of the Franco-German war of 1871, relatively small as they now appear, were a nightmare to him, and cloud the first volume of Fors, which records his current thoughts in that year.

His most prominent utterance is his lecture on “War” delivered to the students at the Engineering College at Woolwich in 1865 and printed in The Crown of Wild Olive. It appears, throughout, to be in praise of war. But we shall see that great deductions are to be made. Nevertheless it begins appallingly enough by stating that all fine arts have been founded in war, and can only be practised by warlike nations. He gives as instances, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. The instances are all fallacious, particularly those of the peace-loving people in the Nile Valley, and the very inartistic Romans. Nor is there any proof that war either caused or aided the artistic faculty of the Greeks. How can there be? The characteristic warrior city—Sparta—was as inartistic as Woolwich. He goes a step further to please his audience of young warrior-students by the strange assertion that “war is the foundation of all the high virtues and faculties of men”: and that, in History, we find coupled together “peace and sensuality, peace and selfishness—peace and death.” “I found that all the great nations learned their truth of word and strength of thought in war: that they were nourished in war, and wasted by peace; taught by war and deceived by peace; trained by war, and betrayed by peace; in a word that they were born in war, and expired in peace.”[99]

Such is the rash and partial generalization of the rhetorician, based on this much of historic truth that the early years of a nation’s life have often been occupied in conflict for safety or empire, and its later, more peaceful and more prosperous years are marked sometimes by the weakening influences of wealth, and end in decay. But it is hard, indeed, impossible I venture to say, to show that the motives or the methods of war are not, from beginning to end, retrograde and barbaric, a harking back to the life of the beast; and not the source of any of these good things named.

But now comes the antidote; after such an exordium, what manner of peace address might he not give to those Woolwich men and they listen?

First he excepts from his approval “the rage of a barbarian wolf flock,” and the “habitual restlessness or rapine of mountaineers,” and “the occasional struggle of a strong, peaceful nation for its life"—a strange exception that—and the “contest of merely ambitious nations for extent of power"—a wide exception that. It leaves him three kinds of beneficial war: war for exercise or play, out of mere high spirits and unused energies of the upper classes—war for aggression against surrounding evil—and wars for defence of noble institutions and pure households.

I. As to wars for pastime, we find that they are to be fought somewhat in the manner of duels or tournaments by the officers; by the idle young men who are too proud for peaceful business, and whose arms and legs want play. There is to be no gathering of peasants to fire into one another; and Carlyle on the thirty peasants from Dumdrudge is helpfully quoted, from Sartor Resartus. The man who could quote that to Woolwich students could do most things with an audience. We next have a little paragraph thrown in on Arbitration. “Grant,” he says sarcastically, “that no law of reason can be understood by nations; no law of justice submitted to by them; and that, while questions of a few acres and of petty cash, can be determined by truth and equity, the questions which are to issue in the perishing or saving of Kingdoms can be determined only by the truth of the sword, and the equity of the rifle.”[100] I doubt if any one has ever had the ear of that audience of thoughtless aspiring soldier students to an Arbitration argument, before or since. He proceeds to wash his hands wholly of modern war.

“If you have to take masses of men from all industrial employment,—to feed them by the labour of others,—to provide them with destructive machines varied daily in national rivalship of inventive cost; if you have to ravage the country which you attack—to destroy, for a score of future years, its roads, its woods, its cities and its harbours; and if, finally, having brought masses of men, counted by hundreds of thousands, face to face, you tear those masses to pieces with jagged shot, and leave the living creatures, countlessly beyond all help of surgery, to starve and parch, through days of torture, down into clots of clay—what book of accounts shall record the cost of your work—what book of judgment sentence the guilt of it?”[101]