CHAPTER VI
"THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE" (1865-1866)
Mention has been made of an address to working men at the Camberwell Institute, January 24th, 1865. This lecture was published in 1866, together with two others,[11] under the title of "The Crown of Wild Olive"—that is to say, the reward of human work, a reward "which should have been of gold, had not Jupiter been so poor," as Aristophanes said.
True work, he said, meant the production (taking the word production in a broad sense) of the means of life; every one ought to take some share in it, according to his powers: some working with the head, some with the hands; but all acknowledging idleness and slavery to be alike immoral. And, as to the remuneration, he said, as he had said before in "Unto this Last," Justice demands that equal energy expended should bring equal reward. He did not consider it justice to cry out for the equalization of incomes, for some are sure to be more diligent and saving than others; some work involves a great preliminary expenditure of energy in qualifying the worker, as contrasted with unskilled labour. But he did not allow that the possession of capital entitled a man to unearned increment; and he thought that, in a community where a truly civilized morality was highly developed, the general sense of society would recognise an average standard of work and an average standard of pay for each class.
In the next two lectures he spoke of the two great forms of Play, the great Games of Money-making and War. He had been invited to lecture at Bradford, in the hope that he would give some useful advice towards the design of a new Exchange which was to be built; in curious forgetfulness, it would appear, of his work during the past ten years and more. Indeed, the picture he drew them of an ideal "Temple to the Goddess of Getting-on" was as daring a sermon as ever prophet preached. But when he came to tell them that the employers of labour might be true captains and kings, the leaders and the helpers of their fellow-men, and that the function of commerce was not to prey upon society but to provide for it, there were many of his hearers whose hearts told them that he was right, and whose lives have shown, in some measure, that he did not speak in vain.
Still stranger, to hearers who had not noted the conclusion of his third volume of "Modern Painters," was his view of war, in the address to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, in December 1865. The common view of war as destroyer of arts and enemy of morality, the easy acceptance of the doctrine that peace is an unqualified blessing, the obvious evils of battle and rapine and the waste of resources and life throughout so many ages, have blinded less clear-sighted and less widely-experienced thinkers to another side of the teaching of history, which Ruskin dwelt upon with unexpected emphasis.
But modern war, horrible, not from its scale, but from the spirit in which the upper classes set the lower to fight like gladiators in the arena, he denounced; and called upon the women of England, with whom, he said, the real power of life and death lay, to mend it into some semblance of antique chivalry, or to end it in the name of religion and humanity.
In the New Review for March 1892, there appeared a series of "Letters of John Ruskin to his Secretary," which, as the anonymous contributor remarked, illustrate "Ruskin the worker, as he acts away from the eyes of the world; Ruskin the epistolographer, when the eventuality of the printing-press is not for the moment before him Ruskin the good Samaritan, ever gentle and open-handed when true need and a good cause make appeal to his tender heart; Ruskin the employer, considerate, generous—an ideal master."