“The first reason for all wars and for the necessity of national defences, is that the majority of persons, high and low, in all European nations, are Thieves, and in their hearts, greedy of their neighbours’ goods, land, and fame. But besides being Thieves they are also fools, and have never yet been able to understand that if Cornishmen want pippins cheap, they must not ravage Devonshire—that the prosperity of their neighbours is in the end, their own also; and the poverty of their neighbours, by the communism of God, becomes in the end, their own.” “And the guilty Thieves of Europe, the real sources of all deadly war in it, are the Capitalists—that is to say, people who live by percentages on the labour of others, instead of by fair wages for their own.”[110]

“There is no physical crime at this day, so far beyond pardon—so without parallel in its untempted guilt, as the making of war-machinery, and invention of mischievous substance. Two nations may go mad, and fight like harlots—God have mercy on them:—you, who hand them carving knives off the table, for leave to pick up a dropped sixpence, what mercy is there for you?”[111]

“The men who have been killed within the last two months, and whose work, and the money spent in doing it, have filled Europe with misery which fifty years will not efface, had they been set at the same cost to do good instead of evil, and to save life instead of destroying it, might by this 10th January, 1871, have embanked every dangerous stream at the roots of the Rhine, the Rhone, and the Po, and left to Germany, to France and to Italy, an inheritance of blessing for centuries to come—they and their families living all the while in brightest happiness and peace. And now! Let the Red Prince look to it: red inundation bears also its fruit in time.”[112]

He calls War “the moral organization of massacre, and the mechanical reduplication of ruin.”[113] “All the cruellest wars inflicted, all the basest luxuries grasped by the idle classes, are thus paid for by the poor a hundred times over” (in interest on debt).[114]

Thus Ruskin is to be found among the Peace advocates—uttering indeed the characteristic refrain of Christianity, and saying emphatically in Fors, in so many words, that we are not to avenge injuries. Yet he was altogether out of sympathy with the ordinary channels of such advocacy. Liberalism he loathed, democracy he utterly disbelieved in, John Bright was the object of his occasional angry or contemptuous reference; anything that savoured of Manchester was condemned as tainted with political economy; the British aristocrats, the present ones, not ones selected on new principles of excellence, but even the ones we have, were to be the leaders of a regenerated England, and fathers of the Fatherland. Liberty was a red rag to him; he preferred the servitude of the shepherd dog to the freedom of the buzzing gnat:—and so he experienced the awkwardness felt by those who, having on some issue joined the party of reaction, have yet within them their old reforming zeal: for in reality Ruskin was an enlightened Socialist philanthropist.

For these reasons I fear that his peace influence has been very much neutralized and wasted; and therefore I have had peculiar pleasure in bringing it out in this chapter.

All these extracts make it clear that the writer’s hatred of modern war waged by multitudes of conscript or other soldiers, machine guns, and chemical explosives, was a constant horror to him; and that his sentimental admiration for the feudal and Greek chivalry was an academic and otiose emotion, figuring appropriately as a propitiatory exordium to the young warriors of Woolwich, but otherwise not an influential part of his thoughts.

Nevertheless Ruskin was a devotee of the nobler type of imperialism. He lived before the sordidness of “Empire,” and its taproot in High Commerce and Finance, had become as plain as they are to-day; and before the series of wars of Empire-building had culminated in the struggle for power in the Near East, power whose pursuit formed the principal motive for the Great World War. The Inaugural Lecture at Oxford is the central expression of this imperialism, in its concluding paragraphs. There are kindred passages in The Crown of Wild Olive.[115] A Knight’s Faith, the Life of Sir Herbert Edwardes of the Punjab, is written in the noblest imperialist vein. In this, though not in his economic teaching in general, Ruskin falls under the sentimental glamour of popular phrases, and loses touch with reality.

CHAPTER IX
MACHINERY

RUSKIN, as we have seen, was both a Conservative and a constructive Socialist. He hated the industrial developments which he saw around him—that which was called progress he saw to be full of evil, and he wanted to undo it. That made him a Conservative. But he had his own line of development, which was an idealized feudalism. What is there for us to learn now from either of these teachings, the negative Conservative cry against steam power and railways and bicycles, the positive advance towards Guild Socialism?