commands of its rulers, I will obey the laws of the Society called
    of St. George, into which I am this day received; and the orders of
    its masters, and of all persons appointed to be in authority under
    its masters, so long as I remain a Companion, called of St. George.

I will not enter in the present letter on any notice of the terms of
this creed and vow; nor of the grounds which many persons whose help I
sincerely desire, may perceive for hesitation in signing it—further
definitions of its meaning will be given as occasion comes; nor shall I
ever ask any one to sign it whom I do not know to be capable of
understanding and holding it in the sense in which it is meant I
proceed at once to define more explicitly those laws of the Company of
St. George to which it refers, and which must, at least in their power,
be known before they can be vowed fealty to.

The object of the Society, it has been stated again and again, is to
buy land in England; and thereon to train into the healthiest and most
refined life possible, as many Englishmen, Englishwomen, and English
children, as the land we possess can maintain in comfort; to establish,
for them and their descendants, a national store of continually
augmenting wealth; and to organize the government of the persons, and
administration of the properties, under laws which shall be just to
all, and Secure in their inviolable foundation on the Law of God.

“To buy land,” I repeat, or beg it; but by no means to steal it, or
trespass on it, as I perceive the present holders of the most part of
it are too ready to do, finding any bits of road or common which they
can pilfer unobserved. Are they quite mad, then; and do they think the
monster mob, gaining every day in force and knowledge, will let their
park walls stand much longer, on those dishonest terms? Doubtful enough
their standing is, even on any terms!

But our St. George’s walls will be more securely founded, on this wise.
The rents of our lands, though they will be required from the tenantry
as strictly as those of any other estates, will differ from common
rents primarily in being lowered, instead of raised, in proportion to
every improvement made by the tenant; secondly, in that they will be
entirely used for the benefit of the tenantry themselves, or better
culture of the estates, no money being ever taken by the landlords
unless they earn it by their own personal labour.

For the benefit of the tenantry, I say; but by no means, always, for
benefit of which they can be immediately conscious. The rents of any
particular farmer will seldom be returned to him in work on his own
fields, or investment in undertakings which promote his interest. The
rents of a rich estate in one shire of England may be spent on a poor
one in another, or in the purchase of wild ground, anywhere, on which
years of labour must be sunk before it can yield return; or in
minerals, or Greek vases, for the parish school. Therefore with the use
made of the rents paid, the tenantry will have no practical concern
whatever; they will only recognise gradually that the use has been
wise, in finding the prices of all serviceable articles diminishing,
and all the terms and circumstances of their, lives indicative of
increased abundance. They will have no more right, or disposition, to
ask their landlord what he is doing with the rents, than they have now
to ask him how many race-horses he keeps—or how much he has lost on
them. But the difference between landlords who live in Piccadilly, and
spend their rents at Epsom and Ascot, and landlords who live on the
grounds they are lords of, and spend their rents in bettering it, will
not be long in manifesting itself to the simplest minded tenantry; nor,
I believe, to the outside and antagonist world.

Sundry questions lately asked me by intelligent correspondents as to
the intended relations of the tenantry to the Society, may best be
answered by saying simply what I shall do, if ever the collected wealth
of the Company enables me to buy an estate for it as large as I could
have bought for myself, if I had been a railroad contractor.

Of course I could not touch the terms of the existing leases. The only
immediate difference would be, the definitely serviceable application
of all the rents, as above stated. But as the leases fell in, I should
offer renewal of them to the farmers I liked, on the single condition
of their complying with the great vital law of the St. George’s
Company,—“no use of steam power, nor of any machines where arms will
serve;” allowing such reduction of rent as should fully compensate them
for any disadvantage or loss which they could prove they incurred under
these conditions. I should give strict orders for the preservation of
the existing timber; see that the streams were not wantonly polluted,
and interfere in nothing else.

Such farms as were thrown up by their tenants, rather than submit to
these conditions, I should be in no haste to re-let; but put land
agents on them to cultivate them for the Society in the best manner,
and sell their produce;—as soon as any well recommended tenant offered
for them, submitting to our laws, he should have them for fixed rent.
Thus I should give room for development of whatever personal faculty
and energy I could find, and set, if successful, more easily followed
example. Meantime my schools and museums, always small and instantly
serviceable, would be multiplying among the villages,—youth after youth
being instructed in the proper laws of justice, patriotism, and
domestic happiness;—those of the Companions who could reside on the
lands would, each on his own farm, establish entirely strict obedience
to the ultimate laws determined upon as necessary:—if these laws are
indeed, as I do not doubt but that sincere care can make them,
pleasantly tenable by honest humanity, [61] they will be gradually
accepted voluntarily by the free tenants; and the system is as certain
to extend itself, on all sides, once seen to be right, as the branches
of an oak sapling.

While, therefore, I am perfectly content, for a beginning, with our
acre of rocky land given us by Mrs. Talbot, and am so little impatient
for any increase that I have been quietly drawing ragged-robbin leaves
in Malham cove, instead of going to see another twenty acres promised
in Worcestershire,—I am yet thinking out my system on a scale which
shall be fit for wide European work. Of course the single Master of the
Company cannot manage all its concerns as it extends. He must have, for
his help, men holding the same relation to him which the Marshals of an
army do to its General;—bearing, that is to say, his own authority
where he is not present; and I believe no better name than ‘Marshal’
can be found for these. Beneath whom, there will again be the
landlords, resident each in his own district; under these, the land
agents, tenantry, tradesmen, and hired labourers, some of whom will be
Companions, others Retainers, and others free tenants: and outside all
this there will be of course an irregular cavalry, so to speak, of more
or less helpful friends, who, without sharing in the work, will be glad
to further it more or less, as they would any other benevolent
institution.

The law that a Companion shall derive no profit from his companionship
does not touch the results of his own work. A Companion farmer will
have the produce of his farm as much as a free tenant; but he will pay
no dividends to the Companions who are not farmers.

The landlords will in general be men of independent fortune, who,
having gifts and ingenuity, choose to devote such gifts to the service
of the Society; the first condition of their appointment to a lordship
will be that they can work as much better than their labourers at all
rural labour as a good knight was wont to be a better workman than his
soldiers in war. There is no rule of supremacy that can ever supersede
this eternal, natural, and divine one. Higher by the head, broader in
the shoulders, and heartier in the will, the lord of lands and lives
must for ever be, than those he rules; and must work daily at their
head, as Richard at the trenches of Acre.

And what am I, myself then, infirm and old, who take, or claim,
leadership even of these lords? God forbid that I should claim it; it
is thrust and compelled on me—utterly against my will, utterly to my
distress, utterly, in many things, to my shame. But I have found no
other man in England, none in Europe, ready to receive it,—or even
desiring to make himself capable of receiving it. Such as I am, to my
own amazement, I stand—so far as I can discern—alone in conviction, in
hope, and in resolution, in the wilderness of this modern world. Bred
in luxury, which I perceive to have been unjust to others, and
destructive to myself; vacillating, foolish, and miserably failing in
all my own conduct in life—and blown about hopelessly by storms of
passion—I, a man clothed in soft raiment,—I, a reed shaken with the
wind, have yet this Message to all men again entrusted to me: “Behold,
the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Whatsoever tree therefore
bringeth not forth good fruit shall be hewn down, and cast into the
fire.”

This message, yet once more; and, more than message, the beginning of
the acts that must fulfil it. For, long since, I have said all that
needs to be said,—all that it was my proper charge and duty to say. In
the one volume of ‘Sesame and Lilies’—nay, in the last forty pages of
its central address to Englishwomen—everything is told that I know of
vital truth, everything urged that I see to be needful of vital
act;—but no creature answers me with any faith or any deed. They read
the words, and say they are pretty, and go on in their own ways. And
the day has come for me therefore to cease speaking, and begin doing,
as best I may; though I know not whether shall prosper, either this or
that.

And truly to all wholesome deed here in England, the chances of
prosperity are few, and the distinctness of adversity only conquerable
by fixed imagination and exhaustless patience—‘Adversis rerum
immersabilis undis.’ The wisest men join with the fools, and the best
men with the villains, to prevent, if they may, any good thing being
done permanently—nay, to provoke and applaud the doing of consistently
evil things permanently. To establish a national debt, and in the most
legal terms—how easy! To establish a national store, under any legal or
moral conditions of perpetuity—how difficult! Every one calls me mad
for so much as hoping to do so. ‘This looks like a charity, this
educating of peasants,’ said the good lawyer, who drew up the already
published conditional form of association. ‘You must not establish a
fund for charity; it is sure to lead to all sorts of abuses, and get
into wrong hands.’

Well, yes—it in merely human probability may. I do verily perceive and
admit, in convinced sorrow, that I live in the midst of a nation of
thieves and murderers; [62] that everybody around me is trying to rob
everybody else; and that, not bravely and strongly, but in the most
cowardly and loathsome ways of lying trade; that ‘Englishman’ is now
merely another word for black-leg and swindler; and English honour and
courtesy changed to the sneaking and the smiles of a whipped pedlar, an
inarticulate Autolycus, with a steam hurdy-gurdy instead of a voice. Be
this all so; be it so to the heart’s content—or liver and gall’s
content—of every modern economist and philosopher. I yet do verily
trust that out of this festering mass of scum of the earth, and
miserable coagulation of frog-spawn soaked in ditch-water, I can here
and there pluck up some drowned honour by the locks, and leave written
orders for wholesome deed, and collected monies for the doing thereof,
which will be obeyed and guarded after I am gone; and will by no means
fall into the power of the mendicant tribe who, too cowardly and
heartless to beg from the face of the living, steal the alms of the
dead, and unite the apparently inconsistent characters of beggar and
thief, seasoning the compound with sacrilege.

Little by little, if my life is spared to me, therefore, (and if I die,
there will I doubt not be raised up some one else in my room)—little by
little, I or they will get monies and lands together; handful gleaned
after handful; field joined to field, and landmarks set which no man
shall dare hereafter remove. And over those fields of ours the winds of
Heaven shall be pure; and upon them, the work of men shall be done in
honour and truth.

In such vague promise, I have for the most part hitherto spoken, not
because my own plans were unfixed, but because I knew they would only
be mocked at, until by some years of persistence the scheme had run the
course of the public talk, and until I had publicly challenged the
denial of its principles in their abstract statement, long enough to
show them to be invincible. Of these abstract principles, the
fifteenth, sixteenth, twentieth, twenty-second and twenty-third letters
in ‘Time and Tide,’ express all that is needful; only, in the years
that have passed since they were written, the ‘difficulties’ stated in
the seventeenth chapter have been under constant review by me; and of
the ways in which I mean to deal with them it is now time to speak.

Let us understand then, in the outset, the moral difference between a
national debt and a national store.

A national debt, like any other, may be honestly incurred in case of
need, and honestly paid in due time. But if a man should be ashamed to
borrow, much more should a people; and if a father holds it his honour
to provide for his children, and would be ashamed to borrow from them,
and leave, with his blessing, his note of hand, for his grandchildren
to pay, much more should a nation be ashamed to borrow, in any case, or
in any manner; and if it borrow at all, it is at least in honour bound
to borrow from living men, and not indebt itself to its own unborn
brats. If it can’t provide for them, at least let it not send their
cradles to the pawnbroker, and pick the pockets of their first
breeches.

A national debt, then, is a foul disgrace, at the best. But it is, as
now constituted, also a foul crime. National debts paying interest are
simply the purchase, by the rich, of power to tax the poor. Read
carefully the analysis given of them above, Letter VIII., p. 7.

The financial operations of the St. George’s Company will be the direct
reverse of these hitherto approved arrangements. They will consist in
the accumulation of national wealth and store, and therefore in
distribution to the poor, instead of taxation of them; and the fathers
will provide for, and nobly endow, not steal from, their children and
children’s children.

My readers, however, will even yet, I am well aware, however often I
have reiterated the statement to them, be unable to grasp the idea of a
national store, as an existing possession. They can conceive nothing
but a debt;—nay, there are many of them who have a confused notion that
a debt is a store!

The store of the St. George’s Company, then, is to be primarily of
food; next, of materials for clothing and covert; next, of books and
works of art,—food, clothes, books, and works of art being all good,
and every poisonous condition of any of them destroyed. The food will
not be purveyed by the Borgia, nor the clothing dyed by Deianira, nor
the Scriptures written under dictation of the Devil instead of God.

The most simply measurable part of the store of food and clothing will
be the basis of the currency, which will be thus constituted.

The standard of value will be a given weight or measure of grain, wine,
wool, silk, flax, wood, and marble; all answered for by the government
as of fine and pure quality, variable only within narrow limits.

The grain will be either wheat, oats, barley, rice, or maize; the wine
of pure vintage, and not less than ten years old; [63] the wool, silk,
and flax of such standard as can be secured in constancy; the wood,
seasoned oak and pine; and for fuel in log and faggot, with finest wood
and marble for sculpture. The penny’s worth, florin’s worth, ducat’s
worth, and hundred ducats’ worth of each of these articles will be a
given weight or measure of them, (the penny roll of our present
breakfast table furnishing some notion of what, practically, the grain
standard will become.) Into the question of equivalent value I do not
enter here; it will be at once determined practically as soon as the
system is in work. Of these articles the government will always have in
its possession as much as may meet the entire demand of its currency in
circulation. That is to say, when it has a million in circulation, the
million’s worth of solid property must be in its storehouses: as much
more as it can gather, of course; but never less. So that, not only,
for his penny, florin, ducat, or hundred-ducat note, a man may always
be certain of having his pound, or ton, or pint, or cask, of the thing
he chooses to ask for, from the government storehouses, but if the
holders of the million of currency came in one day to ask for their
money’s worth, it would be found ready for them in one or other form of
those substantial articles. Consequently, the sum of the circulating
currency being known, the minimum quantity of store will be known. The
sum of the entire currency, in and out of circulation, will be given
annually on every note issued (no issues of currency being made but on
the first day of the year), and in each district, every morning the
quantities of the currency in and out of circulation in that district
will be placarded at the doors of the government district bank.

The metallic currency will be of absolutely pure gold and silver, and
of those metals only; the ducat and half-ducat in gold, the florin,
penny, halfpenny, and one-fifth of penny in silver; the smaller coins
being beat thin and pierced, the halfpenny with two, the one-fifth of
penny with five, apertures. [64] I believe this double-centime will be
as fine a divisor as I shall need. The florin will be worth tenpence;
the ducat, twenty florins.

The weight of the ducat will be a little greater than that of the
standard English sovereign, and, being in absolutely pure gold, it will
be worth at least five-and-twenty shillings of our present coinage. On
one of its sides it will bear the figure of the archangel Michael; on
the reverse, a branch of Alpine rose; above the rose-branch, the words
‘Sit splendour’; [65] above the Michael, ‘Fiat voluntas’; under the
rose-branch, ‘sicut in cœlo’; under the Michael, ‘et in terrâ,’ with
the year of the coinage: and round the edge of the coin, ‘Domini.’

The half-ducat will bear the same stamp, except that while on the ducat
the St. Michael will be represented standing on the dragon, on the
half-ducat he will be simply armed, and bearing St. George’s shield.

On the florin, the St. George’s shield only; the Alpine rose on all
three.

On the penny, St. George’s shield on one side, and the English daisy on
the other, without inscription. The pierced fractional coins will only
bear a chased wreathen fillet, with the required apertures in its
interstices.

There will be considerable loss by wear on a coinage of this pure
metal; but nothing is so materially conducive to the honour of a state
in all financial function as the purity of its coinage; and the loss
will never, on the whole currency, equal annually the tenth part of the
value of the gunpowder spent at present in salutes or fireworks; and,
if a nation can afford to pay for loyal noise and fancies in fire, it
may also, and much more rationally, for loyal truth and beauty in its
circulating signs of wealth. Nor do I doubt that a currency thus
constituted will gradually enter into European commerce, and become
everywhere recognised and exemplary.

Supposing any Continental extension of the Company itself took place,
its coinage would remain the same for the ducat, but the shield of the
State or Province would be substituted for St. George’s on the minor
coins.

There will be no ultimate difficulty in obtaining the bullion necessary
for this coinage, for the State will have no use for the precious
metals, except for its currency or its art. An Englishman, as he is at
present educated, takes pride in eating out of a silver plate, and in
helping out of a silver tureen the richest swindlers he can ask to
dinner. The Companions of St. George may drink out of pewter, and eat
off delft, but they will have no knaves for guests, though often
beggars; and they will be always perfectly well able to afford to buy
five or ten pounds’ worth of gold and silver for their pocket change;
and even think it no overwhelming fiscal calamity if as much even as
ten shillings should be actually lost in the year, by the wear of it;
seeing that the wear of their dinner napkins will be considerably
greater in the same time. I suppose that ten pounds’ worth of bullion
for the head of each family will amply supply the necessary quantity
for circulation; but if it should be found convenient to have
fifteen—twenty—or fifty pounds in such form, the national store will
assuredly in time accumulate to such desirable level. But it will
always be a matter of absolute financial indifference, what part of the
currency is in gold and what in paper; its power being simply that of a
government receipt for goods received, giving claim to their return on
demand. The holder of the receipt may have it, if he likes, written on
gold instead of paper, provided he bring the gold for it to be written
on; but he may no more have a bar of gold made into money than a roll
of foolscap, unless he brings the goods for which the currency is the
receipt. And it will therefore, by St. George’s law, be as much forgery
to imitate the national coin in gold, as in paper.

Next to this store, which is the basis of its currency, the government
will attend to the increase of store of animal food—not mummy food, in
tins, but living, on land and sea; keeping under strictest overseership
its breeders of cattle, and fishermen, and having always at its command
such supply of animal food as may enable it to secure absolute
consistency of price in the main markets. In cases when, by any disease
or accident, the supply of any given animal food becomes difficult, its
price will not be raised, but its sale stopped. There can be no evasion
of such prohibition, because every tradesman in food will be merely the
salaried servant of the Company, and there will be no temptation to it,
because his salary will be the same, whether he sells or not. Of all
articles of general consumption, the government will furnish its own
priced standard; any man will be allowed to sell what he can produce
above that standard, at what price he can get for it; but all goods
below the government standard will be marked and priced as of such
inferior quality;—and all bad food, cloth, or other article of service,
destroyed. And the supervision will be rendered simple by the fewness
of the articles permitted to be sold at all; for the dress being in all
classes as determined as the heraldry of coronets, and for the most
part also rigorously simple, and all luxurious living disgraceful, the
entire means of domestic life will be within easy definition.

Of course the idea of regulating dress generally will be looked upon by
the existing British public as ridiculous. But it has become ridiculous
because masters and mistresses attempt it solely for their own pride.
Even with that entirely selfish end, the natural instinct of human
creatures for obedience, when in any wholesome relations with their
superiors, has enabled the masters to powder their coachmen’s wigs, and
polish their footmen’s legs with silk stockings; and the mistresses to
limit their lady’s maids, when in attendance, to certain styles of cap.

Now as the dress regulations of the St. George’s Company will be quite
as much for the pride of the maid as the mistress, and of the man as
the master, I have no fear but they will be found acceptable, and
require no strictness of enforcement. The children of peasants, though
able to maintain their own families, will be required to be as clean as
if they were charity-boys or girls; nobody will be allowed to wear the
cast clothes of other people, to sell or pawn their own, or to appear
on duty, agricultural or whatever other it may be, in rags, any more
than the Horse Guards or the Queen’s dairy-maids are now; also on
certain occasions, and within such limits as are needful for good
fellowship, they will be urged to as much various splendour as they can
contrive. The wealth of the peasant women will be chiefly in hereditary
golden ornaments of the finest workmanship; and in jewellery of uncut
gems—agates only, or other stones of magnitude, being allowed to be
cut, and gems of large size, which are worth the pains, for their
beauty; but these will be chiefly used in decorative architecture or
furniture, not in dress. The dress of the officers of the Company will
be on all occasions plainer than that of its peasants; but hereditary
nobles will retain all the insignia of their rank, the one only
condition of change required on their entering the St. George’s Company
being the use of uncut jewels, and therefore—seldom of diamonds. [66]

The next main staple of the Company’s store will be its literature.

A chosen series of classical books will be placed in every village
library, in number of copies enough to supply all readers; these
classics will be perfectly printed and perfectly bound, and all in one
size of volume, unless where engravings need larger space: besides
these village libraries, there will be a museum in every district,
containing all good ancient books obtainable: gradually, as the design
expands itself, and as time passes on, absorbing, by gift, or purchase,
the contents of private libraries, and connecting themselves with
similarly expanding museums of natural history. In all schools, the
books necessary for their work will be given to the pupils; and one of
their earliest lessons will be the keeping of them clean and orderly.

By ordering of Fors, I went only this last month to see the school in
which Wordsworth was educated. It remains, as it was then, a school for
peasant lads only; and the doors of its little library, therefore, hang
loose on their decayed hinges; and one side of the schoolroom is
utterly dark—the window on that side having been long ago walled up,
either ‘because of the window tax, or perhaps it had got broken,’
suggested the guardian of the place.

Now it is true that this state of things cannot last long; but the cure
will be worse than the disease. A fit of reactionary vanity and folly
is sure to seize the village authorities; that old schoolroom, with its
sacred associations, will be swept from the hillside, and a grand piece
of Birmingham Gothic put up, with a master from Kensington, and
enforced weekly competitive examination in Sanscrit, and the Binomial
Theorem.

All that the school wants is, hinges to its library doors as good as
every shop in the street has to its shutters; the window knocked
through again where it was originally; the books whose bindings are
worn out, rebound, and a few given (in addition to those on the
subjects of arithmetic and grammar), which the boys may rather ask
leave to read, than take opportunity to throw into corners.

But the ten or twenty pounds needed for this simple reformation could,
I suppose, at present, by no persuasion nor argument be extracted from
the united pockets of the gentlemen of the neighbourhood. Meantime,
while the library doors flap useless on their hinges, the old country
churchyard is grim with parallelograms of iron palisade, enforced
partly to get some sacred market for the wares of the rich ironmongers
who are buying up the country; and partly to protect their valuable
carcases in their purtrefying pride. Of such iron stores the men of St.
George’s Company, dead, will need none, and living, permit none. But
they will strictly enforce the proper complement of hinges to their
school-library doors.

The resuscitation of the, at present extinct, art of writing being
insisted upon in the school exercises of the higher classes, the
libraries will be gradually enriched with manuscripts of extreme
preciousness. A well-written book is as much pleasanter and more
beautiful than a printed one as a picture is than an engraving; and
there are many forms of the art of illumination which were only in
their infancy at the time when the wooden blocks of Germany abolished
the art of scripture, and of which the revival will be a necessary
result of a proper study of natural history.

In next Fors, I shall occupy myself wholly with the subject of our Art
education and property; and in that for December, I hope to publish the
legal form of our constitution revised and complete. The terminal
clauses respecting the Companions’ right of possession in the lands
will be found modified, or in great part omitted, in the recast deed;
but I am neither careful nor fearful respecting the terms of this
instrument, which is to be regarded merely as a mechanical means of
presently getting to work and having land legally secured to us. The
ultimate success or failure of the design will not in the least depend
on the terms of our constitution, but on the quantity of living honesty
and pity which can be found, to be constituted. If there is not
material enough out of which to choose Companions, or energy enough in
the Companions chosen to fill the chain-mail of all terms and forms
with living power, the scheme will be choked by its first practical
difficulties; and it matters little what becomes of the very small
property its promoters are ever likely to handle. If, on the contrary,
as I believe, there be yet honesty and sense enough left in England to
nourish the effort, from its narrow source there will soon develop
itself a vast Policy, of which neither I nor any one else can foresee
the issue, far less verbally or legally limit it; but in which,
broadly, by the carrying out of the primally accepted laws of Obedience
and Economy, the Master and Marshalls will become the Ministry of the
State, answerable for the employment of its revenues, for its relations
with external powers, and for such change of its laws as from time to
time may be found needful: the Landlords will be the resident
administrators of its lands, and immediate directors of all labour,—its
captains in war, and magistrates in peace: the tenants will constitute
its agricultural and military force, having such domestic and
acquisitive independence as may be consistent with patriotic and kindly
fellowship: and the artists, schoolmen, tradesmen, and inferior
labourers, will form a body of honourably paid retainers, undisturbed
in their duty by any chance or care relating to their means of
subsistence.

NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.

Mem. for Professor Ruskin.

The following is taken from the ‘Edinburgh Courant’ of 2nd inst.:—

‘The “Nautical Magazine” leads off with a bold and original article,
the second of a series, on the somewhat startling subject of “The
Commercial Value of Human Life,” in which it states that human life has
its commercial value, and that “those who bring forward its sacredness
as a plea for protective legislation of any and every kind are assuming
not only a false position, but a position that is likely to work a
serious injury upon the country at large.” An elaborate discussion of
“The Plimsoll Protest,” and a description of the “Inman Line” of
steamers, with the usual technical matter, make up an unusually
interesting number.’

What can this mean? Does it point to something still more brutal than
the ‘carnivorous teeth’ theory? [67]

Submitted, with much respect, to Mr. Ruskin, for the Notes and
Correspondence in ‘Fors’—if deemed admissible.

    J. M.                                          4th September, 1875.

A peculiarly sad instance of death from lead-poisoning was investigated
this week before Dr. Hardwicke, at an inquest held in London. The
deceased, Mary Ann Wilson, only three weeks ago went to work at a
white-lead factory. After being there two or three days she felt the
effects of lead-poisoning, which turned her lips blue. Subsequently the
neighbours found her lying on the floor in convulsions, and in a dying
state; and the next day she died from congestion of the brain, and
disease of the chest organs, consequent on the evil effects of her
employment. The coroner recommended that persons who follow this
employment should drink diluted sulphuric acid, to counteract the
action of the poison.—Birmingham Daily Post, Sept. 2, 1875.

FORS CLAVIGERA.

LETTER LIX.

                                         Herne Hill, 3rd October, 1875.

The day before yesterday I went with a young English girl to see her
nurse; who was sick of a lingering illness during which, with kindliest
intent, and sufficient success, (as she told me,) in pleasing her,
books had been chosen for her from the circulating library, by those of
her pious friends whose age and experience qualified them for such
task.

One of these volumes chancing to lie on the table near me, I looked
into it, and found it to be ‘Stepping Heavenward;’—as far as I could
make out, a somewhat long, but not unintelligent, sermon on the text of
Wordsworth’s ‘Stepping Westward.’ In the five minutes during which I
strayed between the leaves of it, and left the talk of my friend with
her nurse to its own liberty, I found that the first chapters described
the conversion of an idle and careless young lady of sixteen to a
solemn view of her duties in life, which she thus expresses at the end
of an advanced chapter: “I am resolved never to read worldly books any
more; and my music and drawing I have laid aside for ever.” [68]

The spiritually walled cloister to which this charming child of modern
enlightenment thus expresses her determination to retire, differs, it
would appear, from the materially walled monastic shades of the Dark
Ages, first, by the breadth and magnanimity of an Index Expurgatorius
rising to interdiction of all uninspired books whatever, except
Baxter’s ‘Saint’s Rest,’ and other classics of evangelical theology;
and, secondly, by its holy abhorrence of the arts of picture and song,
which waste so much precious time, and give so much disagreeable
trouble to learn; and which also, when learned, are too likely to be
used in the service of idols; while the skills which our modern gospel
substitutes for both, of steam-whistle, namely, and photograph, supply,
with all that they need of terrestrial pleasure, the ears which God has
redeemed from spiritual deafness, and the eyes which He has turned from
darkness to light.

My readers are already, I hope, well enough acquainted with the
Institutes of the St. George’s Company to fear no monastic restrictions
of enjoyment, nor imperative choice of their books, carried to this
celestially Utopian strictness. And yet, understanding the terms of the
sentence with true and scholarly accuracy, I must, in educational
legislation, insist on the daughters of my Companions fulfilling this
resolution to the letter: “I am resolved never to read worldly books
any more, and my music and drawing I have laid aside for ever.”

“Worldly books”? Yes; very certainly, when you know which they are; for
I will have you to abjure, with World, Flesh, and Devil, the literature
of all the three:—and your music and drawing,—that is to say, all music
and drawing which you have learned only for your own glory or
amusement, and respecting which you have no idea that it may ever
become, in a far truer sense, other people’s music and drawing.

For all the arts of mankind, and womankind, are only rightly learned,
or practised, when they are so with the definite purpose of pleasing or
teaching others. A child dancing for its own delight,—a lamb
leaping,—or a fawn at play, are happy and holy creatures; but they are
not artists. An artist is—and recollect this definition, (put in
capitals for quick reference,)—A PERSON WHO HAS SUBMITTED TO A LAW
WHICH IT WAS PAINFUL TO OBEY, THAT HE MAY BESTOW A DELIGHT WHICH IT IS
GRACIOUS TO BESTOW. [69]

“A painful law,” I say; yet full of pain, not in the sense of torture,
but of stringency, or constraint; and labour, increasing, it may be,
sometimes into aching of limbs, and panting of breasts: but these
stronger yet, for every ache, and broader for every pant; and farther
and farther strengthened from danger of rheumatic ache, and consumptive
pant.

This, so far as the Arts are concerned, is ‘entering in at the Strait
gate,’ of which entrance, and its porter’s lodge, you will find farther
account given in my fourth morning in Florence, which I should like you
to read, as a preparation for the work more explicitly now to be
directed under St. George. The immediate gist of it, for those who do
not care to read of Florence, I must be irksome enough again to give
here; namely, that the word Strait, applied to the entrance into Life,
and the word Narrow, applied to the road of Life, do not mean that the
road is so fenced that few can travel it, however much they wish, (like
the entrance to the pit of a theatre,) [70] but that, for each person,
it is at first so stringent, so difficult, and so dull, being between
close hedges, that few will enter it, though all may. In a second
sense, and an equally vital one, it is not merely a Strait, or narrow,
but a straight, or right road; only, in this rightness of it, not at
all traced by hedges, wall, or telegraph wire, or even marked by posts
higher than winter’s snow; but, on the contrary, often difficult to
trace among morasses and mounds of desert, even by skilful sight; and
by blind persons, entirely untenable, unless by help of a guide,
director, rector, or rex: which you may conjecture to be the reason
why, when St Paul’s eyes were to be opened, out of the darkness which
meant only the consciousness of utter mistake, to seeing what way he
should go, his director was ordered to come to him in the “street which
is called Straight.”

Now, bringing these universal and eternal facts down to this narrow,
straight, and present piece of business we have in hand, the first
thing we have to learn to draw is an extremely narrow, and an extremely
direct, line. Only, observe, true and vital direction does not mean
that, without any deflection or warp by antagonist force, we can fly,
or walk, or creep at once to our mark; but that, whatever the
antagonist force may be, we so know and mean our mark, that we shall at
last precisely arrive at it, just as surely, and it may be in some
cases more quickly, than if we had been unaffected by lateral or
opposing force. And this higher order of contending and victorious
rightness, which in our present business is best represented by the
track of an arrow, or rifle-shot, affected in its course both by
gravity and the wind, is the more beautiful rightness or directness of
the two, and the one which all fine art sets itself principally to
achieve. But its quite first step must nevertheless be in the simple
production of the mathematical Right line, as far as the hand can draw
it; joining two points, that is to say, with a straight visible track,
which shall as nearly as possible fulfil the mathematical definition of
a line, “length without breadth.”

And the two points had better at first be placed at the small distance
of an inch from each other, both because it is easy to draw so short a
line, and because it is well for us to know, early in life, the look of
the length of an inch. And when we have learned the look of our own
English inch, we will proceed to learn the look of that which will
probably be our currency measure of length, the French inch, for that
is a better standard than ours, for European acceptance.

Here, I had made arrangements for the production of a plate, and
woodcut, to illustrate the first steps of elementary design; but the
black-plague of cloud already more than once spoken of (as connected
probably with the diminution of snow on the Alps), has rendered it
impossible for my assistants to finish their work in time. This
disappointment I accept thankfully as the ordinance of my careful and
prudent mistress, Atropos,—the third Fors; and am indeed quickly enough
apprehensive of her lesson in it. She wishes me, I doubt not, to
recognize that I was foolish in designing the intrusion of technical
advice into my political letters; and to understand that the giving of
clear and separate directions for elementary art-practice is now an
imperative duty for me, and that these art-lessons must be in
companionship with my other school books on the Earth and its Flowers.

I must needs do her bidding; and as I gather my past work on rocks and
plants together, so I must, day by day, gather what I now know to be
right of my past work on art together; and, not in sudden thought, but
in the resumption of purpose which I humbly and sincerely entreat my
mistress to pardon me for having abandoned under pressure of extreme
fatigue, I will publish, in the same form as the geology and botany,
what I desire to ratify, and fasten with nails in a sure place, with
instant applicability to school and university exercises, of my former
writings on art. [71]

But this, I beg my readers to observe, will be the seventh large book I
have actually at this time passing through the press; [72] besides
having written and published four volumes of university lectures [73]
in the last six years; every word of them weighed with care. This is
what I observe the ‘Daily Telegraph’ calls giving ‘utterances few and
far between.’ But it is as much certainly as I am able at present to
manage; and I must beg my correspondents, therefore, to have generally
patience with me when I don’t answer their letters by return of post;
and above all things, to write them clear, and in a round hand, with
all the ms and ns well distinguished from us.

The woodcut, indeed, prepared for this Fors was to have been a lesson
in writing; but that must wait till next year, now; meantime you may
best prepare yourself for that, and all other lessons to be given in my
new edition of the Elements of Drawing, by beginning to form your own
cherished and orderly treasures of beautiful art. For although the
greatest treasury in that kind, belonging to St. George’s Company, will
be as often aforesaid public property, in our museums, every
householder of any standing whatever among us will also have his own
domestic treasury, becoming hereditary as accumulative; and accurately
catalogued, so that others may know what peculiar or separate good
things are to be found in his house, and have graciously permitted use
of them if true necessity be.

The basis, however, of such domestic treasury will of course be common
to all; every household having its proper books for religious and
economic service, and its classic authors, and engravings.

With the last we must at present class, and largely use, the more
perishable treasure of good photographs; these, however, I do not doubt
but that modern science will succeed, (if it has not already done so,)
in rendering permanent; and, at all events, permanent copies of many
may soon be placed in all our schools. Of such domestic treasure we
will begin with a photograph of the picture by Fra Filippo Lippi,
representing the Madonna; which picture last year had its place over
the door of the inner room of the Uffizii of Florence, beyond the
Tribune. This photograph can of course eventually be procured in any
numbers; and, assuming that my readers will get one, I shall endeavour
in this and future numbers of Fors, to make it useful to them, and
therefore a treasure. [74]

The first thing you are to observe in it is that the figures are
represented as projecting in front of a frame or window-sill. The
picture belongs, therefore, to the class meant to be, as far as
possible, deceptively like reality; and is in this respect entirely
companionable with one long known in our picture-shops, and greatly
popular with the British innkeeper, of a smuggler on the look-out, with
his hand and pistol projecting over the window-sill. The only
differences in purpose between the painter of this Anglican subject and
the Florentine’s, are, first, that the Florentine wishes to give the
impression, not of a smuggler’s being in the same room with you, but of
the Virgin and Child’s being so; and, secondly, that in this
representation he wishes not merely to attain deceptive reality; but to
concentrate all the skill and thought that his hand and mind possess,
in making that reality noble.

Next, you are to observe that with this unusually positive realism of
representation, there is also an unusually mystic spiritualism of
conception. Nearly all the Madonnas, even of the most strictly
devotional schools, themselves support the child, either on their knees
or in their arms. But here, the Christ is miraculously borne by
angels;—the Madonna, though seated on her throne, worships with both
hands lifted.

Thirdly, you will at first be pained by the decision of line, and, in
the children at least, uncomeliness of feature, which are
characteristic, the first, of purely-descended Etruscan work; the
second, of the Florentine school headed afterwards by Donatello. But it
is absolutely necessary, for right progress in knowledge, that you
begin by observing and tracing decisive lines; and that you consider
dignity and simplicity of expression more than beauty of feature.
Remember also that a photograph necessarily loses the most subtle
beauty of all things, because it cannot represent blue or grey colours,
[75] and darkens red ones; so that all glowing and warm shadows become
too dark. Be assured, nevertheless, that you have in this photograph,
imperfect as it is, a most precious shadow and image of one of the
greatest works ever produced by hand of man: and begin the study of it
piece by piece. If you fancy yourself able to draw at all, you may
begin by practice over and over again the little angular band on the
forehead, with its studs, and the connected chain of pearls. There are
seven pearls and fourteen studs; the fifteenth, a little larger, at the
angle of the transparent cap; and four more, retiring. They are to be
drawn with a fine brush and sepia, measuring the exact length of the
band first; then marking its double curve, depressed in the centre, and
rising over the hair, and then the studs and pearls in their various
magnitudes. If you can’t manage these, try the spiral of the chair; if
not that, buy a penny’s worth of marbles and draw them in a row, and
pick up a snail shell, and meditate upon it, if you have any time for
meditation. And in my Christmas Fors I will tell you something about
marbles, and beads, and coral, and pearls, and shells; and in time—it
is quite possible—you may be able to draw a boy’s marble and a snail’s
shell; and a sea urchin; and a Doric capital; and an Ionic capital; and
a Parthenon, and a Virgin in it; and a Solomon’s Temple, and a Spirit
of Wisdom in it; and a Nehemiah’s Temple, and a Madonna in it.

This photograph, then, is to be our first domestic possession in works
of art; if any difficulty or improper cost occur in attaining it, I
will name another to answer its purpose; but this will be No. 1 in our
household catalogue of reference: which will never be altered, so that
the pieces may always be referred to merely by their numbers.

Of public, or museum property in art, I have this month laid also the
minute foundation, by the purchase, for our schools, of the engravings
named in the annexed printseller’s account. [76]

And respecting the general operation of these schools and of the
museums connected with them, the conclusion, which I am happy to
announce, of the purchase of a piece of ground for the first of them,
for six hundred pounds, requires some small special commentary.

Of such science, art, and literature as are properly connected with
husbandry, (see Note a, p. 210 of this volume,) St. George primarily
acknowledges the art which provides him with a ploughshare,—and if need
still be for those more savage instruments,—with spear, sword, and
armour.

Therefore, it is fitting that of his schools “for the workmen and
labourers of England,” the first should be placed in Sheffield: (I
suppose, originally Sheaf-field; but do not at all rest on that
etymology, having had no time to inquire into it.)

Besides this merely systematic and poetical fitness, there is the
farther practical reason for our first action being among this order of
craftsmen in England; that, in cutler’s ironwork, we have, at this
actual epoch of our history, the best in its kind done by English
hands, unsurpassable, I presume, when the workman chooses to do all he
knows, by that of any living nation.

For these two principal reasons, (and not without further direction
from Fors of a very distinct nature,) I expressed, some time since, my
purpose to place the first museum of the St. George’s Company at
Sheffield.

Whereupon, I received a letter, very well and kindly meant, from Mr.
Bragge, offering me space in the existing Sheffield museum for whatever
I chose to put there: Mr. Bragge very naturally supposing that this
would be the simplest mode of operation for me; and the most
immediately advantageous to the town. To that (as I supposed private)
communication I replied, in what I meant to be a private letter; which
letter Mr. Bragge, without asking my permission, read at a public
dinner, with public comment on what he imagined to be the state of my
health.

Now, I never wrote a letter in my life which all the world are not
welcome to read, if they will: and as Fors would have it so, I am glad
this letter was read aloud, and widely circulated: only, I beg Mr.
Bragge and the other gentlemen who have kindly interested themselves in
the existing Sheffield museum to understand that, had I intended the
letter for publicity, it would have been couched in more courteous
terms, and extended into clearer explanation of my singular and
apparently perverse conduct in what I observe the Sheffield press,
since it has had possession of the letter in question, characterizes as
“setting up an opposition museum at Walkley.”

I am glad to find the Sheffield branch of English journalism
reprobating, in one instance at least, the—I had imagined now by all
acclamation, divine—principle of Competition. But surely, the very
retirement to the solitude of Walkley of which the same journalist
complains, might have vindicated St. George’s first quiet effort in his
own work, from this unexpected accusation,—especially since, in so far
as I can assert or understand the objects of either of the supposedly
antagonist showmen, neither Mr. Bragge nor St. George intend taking
shillings at the doors.

Nevertheless, the impression on the mind of the Sheffield journalist
that museums are to be opened as lively places of entertainment, rivals
for public patronage, and that their most proper position is therefore
in a public thoroughfare, deserves on St. George’s part some careful
answer. A museum is, be it first observed, primarily, not at all a
place of entertainment, but a place of Education. And a museum is, be
it secondly observed, not a place for elementary education, but for
that of already far-advanced scholars. And it is by no means the same
thing as a parish school, or a Sunday school, or a day school, or
even—the Brighton Aquarium.

Be it observed, in the third place, that the word ‘School’ means
‘Leisure,’ and that the word ‘Museum’ means ‘Belonging to the Muses;’
and that all schools and museums whatsoever, can only be, what they
claim to be, and ought to be, places of noble instruction, when the
persons who have a mind to use them can obtain so much relief from the
work, or exert so much abstinence from the dissipation, of the outside
world, as may enable them to devote a certain portion of secluded
laborious and reverent life to the attainment of the Divine Wisdom,
which the Greeks supposed to be the gift of Apollo, or of the Sun; and
which the Christian knows to be the gift of Christ. Now, I hear it
continually alleged against me, when I advocate the raising of working
men’s wages, that already many of them have wages so high that they
work only three days a week, and spend the other three days in
drinking. And I have not the least doubt that under St. George’s rule,
when none but useful work is done, and when all classes are compelled
to share in it, wages may indeed be so high, or, which amounts to the
same thing as far as our present object is concerned, time so short,
that at least two, if not three days out of every week, (or an
equivalent portion of time taken out of each day,) may be devoted by
some British workmen—no more to the alehouse, but to, what British
clergymen ought to mean, if they don’t, by the ‘concerns of their
immortal souls,’ that is to say, to the contemplation and study of the
works of God, and the learning that complete code of natural history
which, beginning with the life and death of the Hyssop on the wall,
rises to the knowledge of the life and death of the recorded
generations of mankind, and of the visible starry Dynasties of Heaven.

The workmen who have leisure to enter on this course of study will
also, I believe, have leisure to walk to Walkley. The museum has been
set there, not by me, but by the second Fors, (Lachesis,) on the top of
a high and steep hill,—with only my most admiring concurrence in her
apparent intention that the approach to it may be at once symbolically
instructive, and practically sanitary.

NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.

I. The following communication was sent to me on a post-card, without
the writer’s name; but it is worth notice:—

“‘Ut et corda nostra mandatis tuis dedita.’ If some manuscript Breviary
has omitted ‘dedita,’ it must be by a slip of the pen. The sense surely
is this: that while there is either war or only an evil and deceitful
peace within, self-surrender to the Divine commandments above and
freedom from terror of foes around are alike impossible.

“In the English Prayer-book ‘set’ has the same meaning as in Psalm
lxxviii. ver. 9 (sic: the writer means ver. 8); and the context shows
the ‘rest and quietness’ desired, to be rest and quietness of spirit.”

The ‘context’ cannot show anything of the sort, for the sentence is an
entirely independent one: and the MS. I use is not a Breviary, but the
most perfect Psalter and full service, including all the hymns quoted
by Dante, that I have seen in English thirteenth-century writing. The
omission of the word ‘dedita’ makes not the smallest difference to the
point at issue—which is not the mistranslation of a word, but the
breaking of a clause. The mistranslation nevertheless exists also;
precisely because, in the English Prayer-book, ‘set’ has the same
meaning as in Psalm lxxviii.; where the Latin word is ‘direxit,’ not
‘dedit’; and where discipline is meant, not surrender.

I must reserve my comments on the two most important letters next
following, for large type and more leisure.

II. “I hope that you will live to see Fors and everything printed
without steam: it’s the very curse and unmaking of us. I can see it
dreadfully in every workman that I come across. Since I have been so
happily mixed up with you these eighteen years, great changes have
taken place in workmen. It was beginning fearfully when I last worked
as a journeyman. One instance among many:—The head foreman came to me
at Messrs. Bakers’, and threatened discharge if he caught me using a
hand bow-saw to cut a little circular disc, which I could have done in
ten minutes. I then had to go and wait my turn at the endless steam
saw—or, as commonly called, a band saw. I had to wait an hour and a
half to take my turn: the steam saw did it in perhaps three minutes;
but the head foreman said, ‘We’ve gone to great expense for steam
machinery, and what is the use if we don’t employ it?’ This little
occurrence was by no means uncommon. What workpeople have been brought
to is beyond conception, in tone of feeling and character. Here, as I
have told you, we do all we can ourselves, indoors and out; have no
servant, but make the children do: and because we are living in a
tidy-sized house, and a good piece of ground, the labouring people make
a dead set against us because we are not dependent upon them, and have
even combined to defeat us in getting a charwoman now and then. We
ought, I suppose, to employ two servants, whether we can pay for them
or not, or even obtain them (which we couldn’t). They have been picking
hops here next our hedge: this is done by people in the neighbourhood,
not imported pickers; and their children called over the hedge to ours,
and said, ‘Your mother is not a lady; she don’t keep a servant, but
does the work herself.’ I name this little incident because it seems so
deep.”

III. “My dear Mr. Ruskin,—I write to ask leave to come and enter my
name on the Roll of Companions of the Company of St. George. [77] I
have seen enough and read enough of the pace at which we are going,
more especially in business matters, to make me long to see some effort
made to win back some of the honesty and simplicity of our fathers. And
although I am afraid I can be but of very little use to the Company, I
would gladly do anything that lay within my power; and it would be a
great help to feel oneself associated with others, however feebly, in a
practical work.

“I am trying to carry out what you have taught me in business, where I
can do it. Our trade is dressing and buying and selling leather, etc.,
and making leather belting, hose, and boots. I am trying to the utmost
to make everything as good as it can be made, then to ask a fair price
for it, and resist all attempts to cheapen or depreciate it in any way.
First, because the best thing is, as far as I know, invariably the
‘best value’; secondly, because shoe manufacturing, as now carried on,
is, through the division of labour, a largely mechanical work, (though
far less so than many trades),—and I believe the surest way of
diminishing, as it is surely our duty to do, the amount of all such
work, is to spend no labour, nor allow of its being spent, on any but
the best thing for wear that can be made; and thirdly, because workmen
employed even somewhat mechanically are, I think, far less degraded by
their employment when their work and materials are good enough to
become the subjects of honest pride. You will understand that, being
only in the position of manager of the business, I can only carry out
these ideas to a certain point. Still I have been able to reduce the
amount of what is called ‘fancy stitching’ on parts of boots, on the
stated ground of the injury the work ultimately causes to the
operator’s eyesight. And in the dressing of some descriptions of
leather, where we used to print by machinery an artificial grain on the
skin or hide, we have dispensed with the process, and work up the
natural grain by hand-power.

“And this brings me to the point I want to put to you about the
permitted use of the sewing machine (see Fors XXXIV., p. 30). [78] It
may seem unreasonable, when our firm employs so many. But it seems to
me that the admission of machinery at all is unwise in principle.
Machinery, especially the sewing machine, has demoralized the shoe
trade,—the same I think you would find in all other trades,—notably in
piece-goods for ladies’ dresses—which, owing to the cheapness with
which they can be made up, are far more in number than they could have
been if no sewing machine had been used. And a manufacturer told me,
only the other day, that common piece-goods, both woollen and others,
take as much and generally more labour in making than the best. If all
work required to supply clothing to the race were to be done by hand,
it would be worth no one’s while to make rubbish of any kind,—the work
would be done by fewer people, and all raw material would be cheapened.

“In your advice to a young lady, printed at page 29, Letter XXXIV., in
the third volume of Fors Clavigera, you give her permission to use a
sewing machine. I hope that, on fuller consideration of the subject,
you will advise all who set the weal of their country above their own
convenience, to discontinue its use wherever it can possibly be
dispensed with.

“For the effect of the sewing machine upon the great industries
connected with clothing has been most disastrous.

“Given a certain quantity of cloth, or calico, or leather; and, before
it can be made available as clothing, it must be joined or stitched
together in certain shapes.

“Now so long as this stitching was, of necessity, all done by hand, it
was never worth while, supposing the labour to be paid for at a just
rate, to use any but good materials. A print dress at three-halfpence
per yard, which might wear a week, would cost as much to make as a
dress that would wear a year; and, except for the rich and luxurious,
all extravagance of trimming, and all sewing useless for wear, were
unattainable.

“But with the introduction of the sewing machine a great change took
place. It would be impossible within the limits of a letter to follow
it out in every trade which has felt its influence. But briefly,—when
it was found that the stitching process could be got through, though
less solidly, at a very much reduced cost, it became possible for all
classes to have dresses, clothes, and shoes in far greater number, and
to embody in all kinds of clothing a larger amount of useless and
elaborate work.

“And then arose among manufacturers generally a vigorous
competition,—each one striving, not to make the most enduring and sound
fabric (the best value), but that which, retaining some appearance of
goodness, should be saleable at the lowest price and at the largest
apparent profit.

“The Statutes of the old Trade Guilds of England constantly provide for
the purity of their several manufactures; as did Richard Cœur de Lion,
in his law for the cloth makers, (Fors, Letter III., p. 15,)—on this
thoroughly wise and just ground: namely, that the best cloth, leather,
etc., producible, being accurately the cheapest to the consumer,—the
man who used his knowledge of his trade to make other than the best,
was guilty of fraud. Compare this view of the duty of a manufacturer
with modern practice!

“It may be said that the customer is not cheated; since he knows, when
he buys what is called a cheap thing, that it is not the best. I reply
that the consumer never knows to the full what bad value, or unvalue,
the common article is. And whose fault is it that he buys any but the
best value?

“The answer involves a consideration of the duty and position of the
retailer or middleman, and must be given, if at all, hereafter.

“One might multiply instances to show how this kind of competition has
lowered the standard of our manufactures; but here most readers will be
able to fall back upon their own experience.

“Then these common fabrics require for their production always a larger
amount of labour in proportion to their value,—often actually as much
and sometimes more, than would suffice to make an equal quantity of
material of the best value. So that, roughly, when we demand two common
coats where one good one would serve, we simply require certain of our
fellow-creatures to spend double the necessary time working for us in a
mill. That is, supposing we get the full value out of our two common
coats when we have them: the evil is greater if we fail to do so, and,
to gratify our selfishness or caprice, require three instead of two.
And the question arises,—Is it kind or just to require from others
double the needful quantity of such labour as we would not choose to
undergo ourselves? That it is not Christian so to do, may be learned by
any one who will think out to their far-reaching consequences the words
of our Lord: ‘Therefore ALL THINGS WHATSOEVER ye would that men should
do to you, do ye even so to them.’

“Now the use of the sewing machine has been all in favour of the
‘three-coat’ system, indefinitely multiplied and variously recommended;
and the consequent absorption, year by year, of larger numbers of
persons in mechanical toil; toil of the hands only—numbing to the
brain, and blighting to the heart, or maddening to both.

“So far as the question of clothing is concerned, I would venture to
sum up our duty under present circumstances, broadly, as follows.” [It
can’t possibly be done better.—J. R.]

“Always demand the best materials, and use no more of them than is
necessary to dress yourselves neatly or handsomely, according to your
station in society. Then have these materials made up by hand, if
possible under your own supervision, paying a just price for the
labour. For such ornament as you need to add, remember that it must be
the expression, first of your delight in some work of God’s, and then,
of the human skill that wrought it. This will save you from ever
tampering with the lifeless machine-work; and though you have little
ornament, it will soon be lovely and right.

“Above all, never buy cheap ready-made clothing of any kind whatsoever;
it is most of it stained with blood, if you could see it aright. It is
true you may now buy a ‘lady’s costume,’ made up and trimmed by the
sewing machine (guided by a human one), for the sum of two shillings
and fourpence (wholesale), but you had a great deal better wear a sack
with a hole in it.” [Italics mine.—J. R.] “It may be worth while
hereafter to define with some precision what is the best value in
various kinds of goods; Meantime, should it be suggested that machine
sewing is good enough for common materials, or for clothes that you
intend to wear only a few times, and then throw aside, remember you
have no business to buy any but good materials, nor to waste when you
have bought them; and that it is worth while to put solid hand-work
into such.”

(“I use the word ‘value’ for the strength or ‘availing of a thing
towards life.’ See Munera Pulveris, p. 10.”)

IV. With respect to the next following letter—one which I am heartily
glad to receive—I must beg my readers henceforward, and conclusively,
to understand, that whether I print my correspondence in large type, or
small, and with praise of it, or dispraise, I give absolutely no
sanction or ratification whatever to any correspondent’s statements of
fact, unless by express indication. I am responsible for my own
assertions, and for none other; but I hold myself bound to hear, and no
less bound to publish, all complaints and accusations made by persons
supposing themselves injured, of those who injure them, which I have no
definite reason for supposing to be false or malicious, and which
relate to circumstances affecting St. George’s work. I have no other
means of determining their truth, than by permitting the parties
principally concerned to hear them, and contradict them, according to
their ability; and the wish with which my present correspondent’s
letter closes, to be delivered from evil speaking and slandering, (she
seems not quite clearly to understand that the prayer in the Litany is
to be delivered from the guilt of these,—not from their effects,) may,
so far as these affect her own family, be much more perfectly
accomplished by her own statement of their true history, than by any
investigation possible to me of the facts in question. But, as far as
respects the appeal made by her to myself, my answer is simply, that,
whether made by patents, ingenuities, or forges, all fortunes whatever,
rapidly acquired, are, necessarily, ill acquired; and exemplary of
universal ill to all men. No man is ever paid largely for ingenuity; he
can only be paid largely by a tax on the promulgation of that
ingenuity.

Of actual ingenuities, now active in Europe, none are so utterly
deadly, and destructive to all the beauty of nature and the art of man,
as that of the engineer.

And with respect to what my correspondent too truly urges—the shame of
our ancient races in leaving their houses abandoned—it does not make me
look with more comfort or complacency on their inhabitation by men of
other names, that there will soon be left few homes in England whose
splendour will not be a monument at once of the guilt of her nobles,
and the misery of her people.

“Dear Mr. Ruskin,—We have only just read the September number of Fors
Clavigera. My husband is the Ned G—— referred to in the letter you
quote from E. L. Said he, ‘It (i.e., the letter) is not worth notice.’
I replied, ‘In itself perhaps not; but I have known Mr. Ruskin in his
writings many years, and I shall write him to put before him the actual
facts, and request him to withdraw these misstatements.’ The whole
letter is written on the supposition that Mr. Green is an iron king, or
iron lord. No such thing: he is an engineer—quite a different affair;
the maker of a patent which is known all over the world as the ‘Fuel
Economiser.’ He consequently never had a forge, and is indebted to the
use of his intellect and the very clever mechanical genius of his
father for their rise in life, and not merely to toiling half-naked
Britons, as stated. The picture of the forge, with its foul smoke and
sweltering heat and din, is drawn from some other place, and is utterly
unlike the real workshops of E. Green and Son—costly, airy, convenient,
and erected to ensure the comfort of the workpeople, having a handsome
front and lofty interior.

“As to smoke, the whole concern makes no more than, if as much as, an
ordinary dwelling-house; while we suffer too much at Heath from the
town smoke to add to the dense volumes. We have no whistle—some other
place is meant; we were never possessed of a ‘devil,’ American or
English, of any sort. Mr. Green derives no pecuniary benefit from
Wakefield, and but for the attachment of his father and himself to
their birthplace, would long ago have conducted his operations in a
more central spot.

“Several other grave charges are brought against Mr. Green—one so
serious that I am surprised to see it printed: viz., that he rules his
people with an iron hand. That may go with the rest of the ‘iron tale.’
Your correspondent is either very ignorant or wilfully false. No such
assertion can be for a moment sustained, after inquiry is made among
our people; nor by any one in the town could an instance of such be
proved.

“As to the Scotch estate, Mr. Green does not possess one.

“The history of Robin the Pedlar is equally a work of E. L.’s
imagination, although no false shame as to a humble descent has ever
been shown or felt. What! you taunt a man because he and his father
have risen above the state in which they were born by use of the
intellect God gives them? Fie! What sort of encouragement do you give
to the working men to whom you address these letters, when you
insinuate that one sprung from the people has no right to dwell in a
hall or drive a carriage; and broadly hint he is no gentleman, no
scholar, and has nothing to boast of but his money? Come here, and see
if Ned G—— is the sort of man you picture; see the refinement visible
in his idea of art, and which he has tried to impress on others by his
example, and then ask yourself whether you have done well to lend the
sanction of your name to decry, as a mere vulgar parvenu, one who has
done his best to keep a high standard before him.

“As to living at Heath Hall, I ask, Is it a crime to spend your money
in preserving to posterity a beautiful specimen of the house, of the
smaller gentry in Queen Elizabeth’s time, which you only enjoy during a
few years’ lease? A little longer neglect, and this fine old house
would have become a ruin: when we took it, ivy grew inside, and owls
made their nests in what are now guest-chambers.

“No squire has lived here for a century and a quarter; and the last
descendant of the venerated Lady B——, (Dame Mary Bolles, that is,)
utterly refused to reside near so dull a town as Wakefield—preferring
Bath, then at the height of its glory and Beau Nash’s; even before his
time the hereditary squires despised and deserted the lovely place,
letting it to any who would take it. Now it is repaired and restored,
and well worth a visit even from Mr. Ruskin—who, if he is what I
believe him, will withdraw the false imputations which must cause pain
to us and surprise to those who know us. That last little stroke about
bribery betrays E. L.’s disgust, not at the successful man, but at the
Blue Tory. Well! from envy, malice, and all uncharitableness, from
evil-speaking and slandering: Good Lord deliver us!

    “Yours very truly,
        “Mary Green.”

(I make no comments on this letter till the relations of Dame Mary
Bolles have had time to read it, and E. L. to reply.)

V. The following account, with which I have pleasure in printing the
accompanying acknowledgment of the receipt, contains particulars of the
first actual expenditure of St. George’s monies made by me, to the
extent of twenty-nine pounds ten shillings, for ten engravings [79] now
the property of the Company. The other prints named in the account are
bought with my own money, to be given or not given as I think right.
The last five engravings—all by Durer—are bought at present for my
proposed school at Sheffield, with the Melancholia, which I have
already; but if finer impressions of them are some day given me, as is
not unlikely, I should of course withdraw these, and substitute the
better examples—retaining always the right of being myself the ultimate
donor of the two St. Georges, in their finest state, from my own
collection. But these must at present remain in Oxford.

                                               London, October 5, 1875.

John Ruskin, Esq.

                                                    £ s. d.
    St. G.  1.         Apollo and the               1  0  0
                       Python, by Master of
                       the Die
    ,,  ,,  2.         Raglan Castle                3 10  0
    ,,  ,,  3.         Solway Moss                  4  0  0
    ,,  ,,  4.         Hind Head Hill               1 10  0
    ,,  ,,  5, a, b,   Three impressions of         6  0  0
            c.         Falls of the Clyde
                       (£2 each)
    ,,  ,,  6.         Hindoo Worship               2  0  0
    ,,  ,,  7.         Dumblane Abbey               3 10  0
    ,,  ,,  8.         Pembury Mill
    ,,  ,,  9.         Etching of the               2 10  0
                       Severn and Wye
    ,,  ,,  10.        Tenth Plague (of             2  0  0
                       Egypt)
    ,,  ,,  11.        Æsacus and Hesperie          3 10  0
                                                   --------
                                                   29 10  0

            (The above Prints sold at an unusually low
             price, for Mr. Ruskin’s school.)

    J. R.   1.         Sir John Cust                0 10  0
    ,, ,,   2.         Lady Derby                   5  0  0
    ,, ,,   3, 4.      Two Etchings of              8  0  0
                       Æsacus and Hesperie
                       (£4 each)
    ,, ,,   5, 6.      Two Holy Islands (£2         4 12  0
                       6s. each)
    ,, ,,   7.         Etching of Procris           4  4  0
    ,, ,,   8.         Holy Island                  2  6  0
    ,, ,,   9.         The Crypt                    4  4  0
    ,, ,,   10.        The Arvernon                 8  8  0
    ,, ,,   11.        Raglan Castle                7  0  0
    ,, ,,   12.          ,,     ,,                  6  0  0
    ,, ,,   13.          ,,     ,,                  6  0  0
    ,, ,,   14.        Woman at the Tank            7 17  6
    ,, ,,   15.        Grande Chartreuse            8  8  0
                                                  ---------
                                                  101 19  6
                                                  ---------
            Discount (15 per cent.)                10  1  0

    St. G.  16.        Knight and Death            18  0  0
    ,,  ,,  17.        St. George on                3 10  0
                       Horseback
    ,,  ,,  18.        ,,    ,,   ,, Foot           7  0  0
    ,,  ,,  19.        Pilate                       2  0  0
    ,,  ,,  20.        Caiaphas                     3  0  0
                                                 ----------
                                                 £125  8  6

My dear Sir,—It is delightful to do business with you. How I wish that
all my customers were imbued with your principles. I enclose the
receipt, with best thanks, and am

    Yours very sincerely and obliged.
            John Ruskin, Esq.

Of course, original accounts, with all other vouchers, will be kept
with the Company’s registers at Oxford. I do not think it expedient
always to print names; which would look like advertisement.

Respecting the picture by Filippo Lippi, I find more difficulty than I
expected. On inquiring of various dealers, I am asked three shillings
each for these photographs. But as I on principle never use any
artifice in dealing, most tradesmen think me a simpleton, and think it
also their first duty, as men of business, to take all the advantage in
their power of this my supposed simplicity; these photographs are
therefore, I suppose, worth actually, unmounted, about a shilling each;
and I believe that eventually, my own assistant, Mr. Ward, will be able
to supply them, of good impression, carefully chosen, with due payment
for his time and trouble, at eighteenpence each; or mounted, examined
by me, and sealed with my seal, for two shillings and sixpence each. I
don’t promise this, because it depends upon whether the government at
Florence will entertain my request, made officially as Slade Professor
at Oxford, to have leave to photograph from the picture.

At present holding it of more importance not to violate confidence [80]
than to sell photographs cheap, I do not even publish what I have
ascertained, since this note was half written, to be the (actual) trade
price, and I must simply leave the thing in the beautiful complexity of
competition and secretiveness called British Trade; only, at Oxford, I
have so much personal influence with Mr. Davis, in Exeter Street, as
may, I think, secure his obtaining the photographs, for which, as a
dealer combined with other dealers, he must ask three shillings, of
good quality; to him, therefore, at Oxford, for general business, my
readers may address themselves; or in London, to Miss Bertolacci, 7,
Edith Grove, Kensington; and, for impressions certified by me, to Mr.
Ward, at Richmond, (address as above,) who will furnish them,
unmounted, for two shillings each, and mounted, for three. And for a
foundation of the domestic art-treasure of their establishment, I do
not hold this to be an enormous or unjustifiable expense.

FORS CLAVIGERA.

LETTER LX.

I cannot finish the letter I meant for my Christmas Fors; and must
print merely the begun fragment—and such uncrystalline termination must
now happen to all my work, more or less, (and more and more, rather
than less,) as it expands in range. As I stated in last letter, I have
now seven books in the press at once—and any one of them enough to take
up all the remainder of my life. ‘Love’s Meinie,’ for instance, (Love’s
Many, or Serving Company,) was meant to become a study of British
birds, which would have been occasionally useful in museums, carried
out with a care in plume drawing which I learned in many a day’s work
from Albert Durer; and with which, in such light as the days give me, I
think it still my duty to do all I can towards completion of the six
essays prepared for my Oxford schools:—but even the third of these, on
the Chough, though already written and in type, is at pause because I
can’t get the engravings for it finished, and the rest—merely torment
me in other work with the thousand things flitting in my mind, like
sea-birds for whom there are no sands to settle upon.

‘Ariadne’ is nearer its close; but the Appendix is a mass of loose
notes which need a very sewing machine to bring together—and any one of
these that I take in hand leads me into ashamed censorship of the
imperfection of all I have been able to say about engraving; and then,
if I take up my Bewick, or return to my old Turner vignettes, I put my
Appendix off again—‘till next month,’ and so on.

‘Proserpina’ will, I hope, take better and more harmonious form; but it
grows under my hands, and needs most careful thought. For it claims
nothing less than complete modification of existing botanical
nomenclature, for popular use; and in connection with ‘Deucalion’ and
the recast ‘Elements of Drawing,’ is meant to found a system of
education in Natural History, the conception of which I have reached
only by thirty years of labour, and the realization of which can only
be many a year after I am at rest. And yet none of this work can be
done but as a kind of play, irregularly, and as the humour comes upon
me. For if I set myself at it gravely, there is too much to be dealt
with; my mind gets fatigued in half an hour, and no good can be done;
the only way in which any advance can be made is by keeping my mornings
entirely quiet, and free of care, by opening of letters or newspapers;
and then by letting myself follow any thread of thought or point of
inquiry that chances to occur first, and writing as the thoughts
come,—whatever their disorder; all their connection and co-operation
being dependent on the real harmony of my purpose, and the consistency
of the ascertainable facts, which are the only ones I teach; and I can
no more, now, polish or neatly arrange my work than I can guide it. So
this fragment must stand as it was written, and end,—because I have no
time to say more.

                                    Cowley Rectory, 27th October, 1875.

My Christmas letter this year, since we are now definitely begun with
our schooling, may most fitly be on the subject, already opened in Fors
12th, of the Three Wise Men.

‘Three wise men of Gotham,’ I had nearly written; the remembrance of
the very worst pantomime I ever saw, having, from the mere
intolerableness of its stupidity, so fastened itself in my memory that
I can’t now get rid of the ring in my ears, unless I carefully say,
‘Magi,’ instead of ‘wise men.’

Such, practically, is the principal effect of the Sacred Art employed
by England, in the festivity of her God’s birthday, upon the minds of
her innocent children, like me, who would fain see something magical
and pretty on the occasion—if the good angels would bring it us, and
our nurses, and mammas, and governesses would allow us to believe in
magic, or in wisdom, any more.

You would not believe, if they wanted you, I suppose, you wise men of
the west? You are sure that no real magicians ever existed; no real
witches—no real prophets;—that an Egyptian necromancer was only a
clever little Mr. Faraday, given to juggling; and the witch of Endor,
only a Jewish Mrs. Somerville amusing herself with a practical joke on
Saul; and that when Elisha made the axe swim, he had prepared the
handle on the sly—with aluminium? And you think that in this blessed
nineteenth century—though there isn’t a merchant, from Dan to
Beersheba, too honest to cheat, there is not a priest nor a prophet,
from Dan to Beersheba, but he is too dull to juggle?

You may think, for what I care, what you please in such matters, if
indeed you choose to go on through all your lives thinking, instead of
ascertaining. But, for my own part, there are a few things concerning
Magi and their doings which I have personally discovered, by laborious
work among real magi. Some of those things I am going to tell you
to-day, positively, and with entire and incontrovertible knowledge of
them,—as you and your children will one day find every word of my
direct statements in ‘Fors Clavigera’ to be; and fastened, each with
its nail in its sure place.

A. In the first place, then, concerning stars in the east. You can’t
see the loveliest which appear there naturally,—the Morning Star,
namely, and his fellows,—unless you get up in the morning.

B. If you resolve thus always, so far as may be in your own power, to
see the loveliest which are there naturally, you will soon come to see
them in a supernatural manner, with a quite—properly
so-called—‘miraculous’ or ‘wonderful’ light which will be a light in
your spirit, not in your eyes. And you will hear, with your spirit, the
Morning Star and his fellows sing together; also, you will hear the
sons of God shouting together for joy with them; particularly the
little ones,—sparrows, greenfinches, linnets, and the like.

C. You will, by persevering in the practice, gradually discover that it
is a pleasant thing to see stars in the luminous east; to watch them
fade as they rise; to hear their Master say, Let there be light—and
there is light; to see the world made, that day, at the word; and
creation, instant by instant, of divine forms out of darkness.

D. At six o’clock, or some approximate hour, you will perceive with
precision that the Firm over the way, or round the corner, of the
United Grand Steam Percussion and Corrosion Company, Limited, (Offices
London, Paris, and New York,) issues its counter-order, Let there be
darkness; and that the Master of Creation not only at once submits to
this order, by fulfilling the constant laws He has ordained concerning
smoke,—but farther, supernaturally or miraculously, enforces the order
by sending a poisonous black wind, also from the east, of an entirely
corrosive, deadly, and horrible quality, with which, from him that hath
not, He takes away also that light he hath; and changes the sky during
what remains of the day,—on the average now three days out of five,
[81]—into a mere dome of ashes, differing only by their enduring frown
and slow pestilence from the passing darkness and showering death of
Pompeii.

E. If, nevertheless, you persevere diligently in seeing what stars you
can in the early morning, and use what is left you of light wisely, you
will gradually discover that the United Grand Steam Percussion and
Corrosion Company is a company of thieves; and that you yourself are an
ass, for letting them steal your money, and your light, at once. And
that there is standing order from the Maker of Light, and Filler of
pockets, that the company shall not be thieves, but honest men; and
that you yourself shall not be an ass, but a Magus.

F. If you remind the company of this law, they will tell you that
people “didn’t know everything down in Judee,” that nobody ever made
the world; and that nobody but the company knows it.

But if you enforce upon yourself the commandment not to be an ass, and
verily resolve to be so no more, then—hear the word of God, spoken to
you by the only merchant city that ever set herself to live wholly by
His law. [82]

       “I willed, and sense was given to me.
        I prayed, and the Spirit of Wisdom was given to me.
        I set her before Kingdoms and Homes,
        And held riches nothing, in comparison of her.”

That is to say,—If you would have her to dwell with you, you must set
her before kingdoms;—(as, for instance, at Sheffield, you must not
think to be kings of cutlery, and let nobody else in the round world
make a knife but you;)—you must set her before homes; that is to say,
you must not sit comfortably enjoying your own fireside, and think you
provide for everybody if you provide for that:—and as for riches—you
are only to prefer wisdom,—think her, of two good things, the best,
when she is matched with kingdoms and homes; but you are to esteem
riches—nothing in comparison of her. Not so much as mention shall be
made “of coral, nor of pearls, for the price of wisdom is above
rubies.”

You have not had the chance, you think, probably, of making any
particular mention of coral, or pearls, or rubies? Your betters, the
Squires and the Clergy, have kept, if not the coral, at least the
pearls, for their own wives’ necks, and the rubies for their own
mitres; and have generously accorded to you heavenly things,—wisdom,
namely, concentrated in your responses to Catechism. I find St. George,
on the contrary, to be minded that you shall at least know what these
earthly goods are, in order to your despising them in a sensible
manner;—for you can’t despise them if you know nothing about them.

I am going, under His orders, therefore, to give you some topazes of
Ethiopia,—(at least, of the Ural mountains, where the topazes are just
as good,)—and all manner of coral, that you may know what co-operative
societies are working, to make your babies their rattles and necklaces,
without any steam to help them, under the deep sea, and in its foam;
also, out of the Tay, the fairest river of the British Isles, we will
fetch some pearls that nobody shall have drawn short breath for: and,
indeed, all the things that Solomon in his wisdom sent his ships to
Tarshish for,—gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks,—you
shall see in their perfection, and have as much of as St. George thinks
good for you: (only remember, in order to see an ape in perfection, you
must not be an ape yourself, whatever Mr. Darwin may say; but must
admire, without imitating their prehensile activities, nor fancy that
you can lay hold on to the branches of the tree of life with your tails
instead of your hands, as you have been practising lately).

And, in the meantime, I must stop writing, because I’ve to draw a
peacock’s breast-feather, and paint as much of it as I can without
having heaven to dip my brush in. And when you have seen what it is,
you shall despise it—if you can—for heaven itself. But for nothing
less!

My fragment does not quite end here; but in its following statements of
plans for the Sheffield Museum, anticipates more than I think Atropos
would approve; besides getting more figurative and metaphysical than
you would care to read after your Christmas dinner. But here is a piece
of inquiry into the origin of all riches, Solomon’s and our own, which
I wrote in May, 1873, for the ‘Contemporary Review,’ and which, as it
sums much of what I may have too vaguely and figuratively stated in my
letters, may advisably close their series for this year.

It was written chiefly in reply to an article by Mr. Greg, defending
the luxury of the rich as harmless, or even beneficent to the poor. Mr.
Greg had, on his part, been reproving Mr. Goldwin Smith—who had spoken
of a rich man as consuming the means of living of the poor. And Mr.
Greg pointed out how beneficially for the poor, in a thousand channels,
the rich man spent what he had got.

Whereupon I ventured myself to inquire, “How he got it?” and the paper
went on thus,—‘Which is indeed the first of all questions to be asked
when the economical relations of any man with his neighbour are to be
examined.

Dick Turpin is blamed—suppose—by some plain-minded person, for
consuming the means of other people’s living. “Nay,” says Dick to the
plain-minded person, “observe how beneficently and pleasantly I spend
whatever I get!”

“Yes, Dick,” persists the plain-minded person, “but how do you get it?”

“The question,” says Dick, “is insidious, and irrelevant.”

Do not let it be supposed that I mean to assert any irregularity or
impropriety in Dick’s profession—I merely assert the necessity for Mr.
Greg’s examination, if he would be master of his subject, of the manner
of Gain in every case, as well as the manner of Expenditure. Such
accounts must always be accurately rendered in a well-regulated
society.

“Le lieutenant adressa la parole au capitaine, et lui dit qu’il venait
d’enlever ces mannequins, remplis de sucre, de cannelle, d’amandes, et
de raisins secs, à un épicier de Bénavente. Après qu’il eut rendu
compte de son expédition au bureau, les dépouilles de l’épicier furent
portées dans l’office. Alors il ne fut plus question que de se réjouir;
je débutai par le buffet, que je parai de plusieurs bouteilles de ce
bon vin que le Seigneur Rolando m’avoit vanté.”

Mr. Greg strictly confines himself to an examination of the benefits
conferred on the public by this so agreeable festivity; but he must not
be surprised or indignant that some inquiry should be made as to the
resulting condition of the épicier de Bénavente.

And it is all the more necessary that such inquiry be instituted, when
the captain of the expedition is a minion, not of the moon, but of the
sun; and dazzling, therefore, to all beholders. “It is heaven which
dictates what I ought to do upon this occasion,” [83] says Henry of
Navarre; “my retreat out of this city, before I have made myself master
of it, will be the retreat of my soul out of my body. Accordingly, all
the quarter which still held out, we forced,” says M. de Rosny; “after
which the inhabitants, finding themselves no longer able to resist,
laid down their arms, and the city was given up to plunder. My good
fortune threw a small iron chest in my way, in which I found about four
thousand gold crowns.”

I cannot doubt that the Baron’s expenditure of this sum would be in the
highest degree advantageous to France, and to the Protestant religion.
But complete economical science must study the effect of its
abstraction on the immediate prosperity of the town of Cahors; and even
beyond this—the mode of its former acquisition by the town itself,
which perhaps, in the economies of the nether world, may have delegated
some of its citizens to the seventh circle.

And the most curious points, in the modes of study pursued by modern
economical science, are, that while it always waives this question of
ways and means with respect to rich persons, it studiously pushes it in
the case of poor ones; and while it asserts the consumption of such an
article of luxury as wine (to take that which Mr. Greg himself
instances) to be economically expedient, when the wine is drunk by
persons who are not thirsty, it asserts the same consumption to be
altogether inexpedient, when the privilege is extended to those who
are. Thus Mr. Greg dismisses, at page 618, with compassionate disdain,
the extremely vulgar notion “that a man who drinks a bottle of
champagne worth five shillings, while his neighbour is in want of
actual food, is in some way wronging his neighbour;” and yet Mr. Greg
himself, at page 624, evidently remains under the equally vulgar
impression that the twenty-four millions of much thirstier persons who
spend fifteen per cent. of their incomes in drink and tobacco, are
wronging their neighbours by that expenditure.

It cannot, surely, be the difference in degree of refinement between
malt liquor and champagne which causes Mr. Greg’s conviction that there
is moral delinquency and economical error in the latter case, but none
in the former; if that be all, I can relieve him from his embarrassment
by putting the cases in more parallel form. A clergyman writes to me,
in distress of mind, because the able-bodied labourers who come begging
to him in winter, drink port wine out of buckets in summer. Of course
Mr. Greg’s logical mind will at once admit (as a consequence of his own
very just argumentum ad hominem in page 617) that the consumption of
port wine out of buckets must be as much a benefit to society in
general as the consumption of champagne out of bottles; and yet,
curiously enough, I am certain he will feel my question, “Where does
the drinker get the means for his drinking?” more relevant in the case
of the imbibers of port than in that of the imbibers of champagne. And
although Mr. Greg proceeds, with that lofty contempt for the dictates
of nature and Christianity which radical economists cannot but feel, to
observe (p. 618) that “while the natural man and the Christian would
have the champagne drinker forego his bottle, and give the value of it
to the famishing wretch beside him, the radical economist would condemn
such behaviour as distinctly criminal and pernicious,” he would
scarcely, I think, carry out with the same triumphant confidence the
conclusions of the unnatural man and the Anti-Christian with respect to
the labourer as well as the idler; and declare that while the extremely
simple persons who still believe in the laws of nature, and the mercy
of God, would have the port-drinker forego his bucket, and give the
value of it to the famishing wife and child beside him, “the radical
economist would condemn such behaviour as distinctly criminal and
pernicious.”

Mr. Greg has it indeed in his power to reply that it is proper to
economize for the sake of one’s own wife and children, but not for the
sake of anybody else’s. But since, according to another exponent of the
principles of Radical Economy, in the ‘Cornhill Magazine,’ a
well-conducted agricultural labourer must not marry till he is
forty-five, his economies, if any, in early life, must be as offensive
to Mr. Greg, on the score of their abstract humanity, as those of the
richest bachelor about town.

There is another short sentence in this same page 618, of which it is
difficult to overrate the accidental significance.

The superficial observer, says Mr. Greg, “recollects a text which he
heard in his youth, but of which he never considered the precise
applicability—‘He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath
none.’”

The assumptions that no educated Englishman can ever have heard that
text except in his youth, and that those who are old enough to remember
having heard it, “never considered its precise applicability,” are
surely rash, in the treatment of a scientific subject. I can assure Mr.
Greg that a few grey-headed votaries of the creed of Christendom still
read—though perhaps under their breath—the words which early
associations have made precious to them; and that in the bygone days,
when that Sermon on the Mount was still listened to with respect by
many not illiterate persons, its meaning was not only considered, but
very deliberately acted upon. Even the readers of the ‘Contemporary
Review’ may perhaps have some pleasure in retreating from the sunshine
of contemporary science, for a few quiet moments, into the shadows of
that of the past; and hearing in the following extracts from two
letters of Scott’s (the first describing the manner of life of his
mother, whose death it announces to a friend; the second, anticipating
the verdict of the future on the management of his estate by a Scottish
nobleman) what relations between rich and poor were possible, when
philosophers had not yet even lisped in the sweet numbers of Radical
Sociology.

“She was a strict economist, which she said enabled her to be liberal;
out of her little income of about £300 a year, she bestowed at least a
third in well-chosen charities, and with the rest, lived like a
gentlewoman, and even with hospitality more general than seemed to suit
her age; yet I could never prevail on her to accept of any assistance.
You cannot conceive how affecting it was to me to see the little
preparations of presents which she had assorted for the New Year, for
she was a great observer of the old fashions of her period—and to think
that the kind heart was cold which delighted in all these arts of
kindly affection.”

“The Duke is one of those retired and high-spirited men who will never
be known until the world asks what became of the huge oak that grew on
the brow of the hill, and sheltered such an extent of ground. During
the late distress, though his own immense rents remained in arrears,
and though I know he was pinched for money, as all men were, but more
especially the possessors of entailed estates, he absented himself from
London in order to pay, with ease to himself, the labourers employed on
his various estates. These amounted (for I have often seen the roll and
helped to check it) to nine hundred and fifty men, working at day
wages, each of whom on a moderate average might maintain three persons,
since the single men have mothers, sisters, and aged or very young
relations to protect and assist. Indeed it is wonderful how much even a
small sum, comparatively, will do in supporting the Scottish labourer,
who in his natural state is perhaps one of the best, most intelligent,
and kind-hearted of human beings; and in truth I have limited my other
habits of expense very much since I fell into the habit of employing
mine honest people. I wish you could have seen about a hundred
children, being almost entirely supported by their fathers’ or
brothers’ labour, come down yesterday to dance to the pipes, and get a
piece of cake and bannock, and pence apiece (no very deadly largess) in
honour of hogmanay. I declare to you, my dear friend, that when I
thought the poor fellows who kept these children so neat, and well
taught, and well behaved, were slaving the whole day for eighteen-pence
or twenty-pence at most, I was ashamed of their gratitude, and of their
becks and bows. But after all, one does what one can, and it is better
twenty families should be comfortable according to their wishes and
habits, than that half that number should be raised above their
situation.”

I must pray Mr. Greg farther to observe, if he has condescended to
glance at these remains of almost prehistoric thought, that although
the modern philosopher will never have reason to blush for any man’s
gratitude, and has totally abandoned the romantic idea of making even
so much as one family comfortable according to their wishes and habits,
the alternative suggested by Scott, that half “the number should be
raised above their situation,” may become a very inconvenient one if
the doctrines of Modern Equality and competition should render the
other half desirous of parallel promotion.

It is now just sixteen years since Mr. Greg’s present philosophy of
Expenditure was expressed with great precision by the Common Councilmen
of New York, in their report on the commercial crisis of 1857, [84] in
the following terms:—

“Another erroneous idea is that luxurious living, extravagant dressing,
splendid turn-outs, and fine houses, are the cause of distress to a
nation. No more erroneous impression could exist. Every extravagance
that the man of 100,000 or 1,000,000 dollars indulges in, adds to the
means, the support, the wealth of ten or a hundred who had little or
nothing else but their labour, their intellect, or their taste. If a
man of 1,000,000 dollars spends principal and interest in ten years,
and finds himself beggared at the end of that time, he has actually
made a hundred who have catered to his extravagance, employers or
employed, so much richer by the division of his wealth. He may be
ruined, but the nation is better off and richer, for one hundred minds
and hands, with 10,000 dollars apiece, are far more productive than one
with the whole.”

Now that is precisely the view also taken of the matter by a large
number of Radical Economists in England as well as America; only they
feel that the time, however short, which the rich gentleman takes to
divide his property among them in his own way, is practically wasted;
and even worse, because the methods which the gentleman himself is
likely to adopt for the depression of his fortune will not, in all
probability, be conducive to the elevation of his character. It
appears, therefore, on moral as well as economical grounds, desirable
that the division and distribution should at once be summarily
effected; and the only point still open to discussion in the views of
the Common Councilmen is to what degree of minuteness they would think
it advisable to carry the subsequent subdivision.

I do not suppose, however, that this is the conclusion which Mr. Greg
is desirous that the general Anti-Christian public should adopt; and in
that case, as I see by his paper in the last number of the
‘Contemporary,’ that he considers the Christian life itself virtually
impossible, may I recommend his examination of the manners of the
Pre-Christian? For I can certify him that this important subject, of
which he has only himself imperfectly investigated one side, had been
thoroughly investigated on all sides, at least seven hundred years
before Christ; and from that day to this, all men of wit, sense, and
feeling have held precisely the same views on the subjects of economy
and charity in all nations under the sun. It is of no consequence
whether Mr. Greg chooses the experience of Bœotia, Lombardy, or
Yorkshire, nor whether he studies the relation of each day to its
labour under Hesiod, Virgil, or Sydney Smith. But it is desirable that
at least he should acquaint himself with the opinions of some of these
persons, as well as with those of the Common Councilmen of New York;
for though a man of superior sagacity may be pardoned for thinking,
with the friends of Job, that Wisdom will die with him, it can only be
through neglect of the existing opportunities of general culture that
he remains distinctly under the impression that she was born with him.

It may perhaps be well that, in conclusion, I should state briefly the
causes and terms of the economical crisis of our own day, which has
been the subject of the debate between Mr. Goldwin Smith and Mr. Greg.

No man ever became, or can become, largely rich merely by labour and
economy. All large fortunes (putting treasure-trove and gambling out of
consideration) are founded either on occupation of land, usury, or
taxation of labour. Whether openly or occultly, the landlord,
money-lender, and capital-holding employer, gather into their
possession a certain quantity of the means of existence which other
people produce by the labour of their hands. The effect of this impost
upon the condition of life of the tenant, borrower, and workman, is the
first point to be studied;—the results, that is to say, of the mode in
which Captain Roland fills his purse.

Secondly, we have to study the effects of the mode in which Captain
Roland empties his purse. The landlord, usurer, or labour-master, does
not, and cannot, himself consume all the means of life he collects. He
gives them to other persons, whom he employs in his own behalf—growers
of champagne; jockeys; footmen; jewellers; builders; painters;
musicians; and the like. The diversion of the labour of these persons
from the production of food to the production of articles of luxury is
very frequently, and, at the present day, very grievously, a cause of
famine. But when the luxuries are produced, it becomes a quite separate
question who is to have them, and whether the landlord and capitalist
are entirely to monopolize the music, the painting, the architecture,
the hand-service, the horse-service, and the sparkling champagne of the
world.

And it is gradually, in these days, becoming manifest to the tenants,
borrowers, and labourers, that instead of paying these large sums into
the hands of the landlords, lenders, and employers, that they may
purchase music, painting, etc.; the tenants, borrowers, and workers,
had better buy a little music and painting for themselves! That, for
instance, instead of the capitalist-employer’s paying three hundred
pounds for a full-length portrait of himself, in the attitude of
investing his capital, the united workmen had better themselves pay the
three hundred pounds into the hands of the ingenious artist, for a
painting, in the antiquated manner of Lionardo or Raphael, of some
subject more religiously or historically interesting to them; and
placed where they can always see it. And again, instead of paying three
hundred pounds to the obliging landlord, that he may buy a box at the
opera with it, whence to study the refinements of music and dancing,
the tenants are beginning to think that they may as well keep their
rents partly to themselves, and therewith pay some Wandering Willie to
fiddle at their own doors; or bid some grey-haired minstrel

           “Tune, to please a peasant’s ear,
            The harp a king had loved to hear.”

And similarly the dwellers in the hut of the field, and garret of the
city, are beginning to think that, instead of paying half-a-crown for
the loan of half a fireplace, they had better keep their half-crown in
their pockets till they can buy for themselves a whole one.

These are the views which are gaining ground among the poor; and it is
entirely vain to endeavour to repress them by equivocations. They are
founded on eternal laws; and although their recognition will long be
refused, and their promulgation, resisted as it will be, partly by
force, partly by falsehood, can only take place through incalculable
confusion and misery, recognized they must be eventually; and with
these three ultimate results:—that the usurer’s trade will be abolished
utterly;—that the employer will be paid justly for his superintendence
of labour, but not for his capital; and the landlord paid for his
superintendence of the cultivation of land, when he is able to direct
it wisely;—that both he, and the employer of mechanical labour, will be
recognized as beloved masters, if they deserve love, and as noble
guides when they are capable of giving discreet guidance; but neither
will be permitted to establish themselves any more as senseless
conduits, through which the strength and riches of their native land
are to be poured into the cup of the fornication of its Babylonian
‘City of the Plain.’

So ends my article, and enough said for 1875, I think. And I wish you a
merry Christmas, my masters; and honest ways of winning your meat and
pudding.

NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.

I am busy, and tired, this month; so shall keep my making up of
accounts till January. The gist of them is simply that we have got
£8000 worth of Consols; and we had a balance of £501 7s. at the bank,
which balance I have taken, and advanced another hundred of my own,
making £600, to buy the Sheffield property with: this advance I shall
repay myself as the interest comes in, or farther subscription; and
then use such additional sums for the filling of the museum, and
building a small curator’s house on the ground. But I shall not touch
any of the funded sum; and hope soon to see it raised to £10,000. I
have no word yet from our lawyer about our constitution. The Sheffield
property, like the funded, stands in the names of the Trustees.

I have accepted, out of our forty subscribers, some eight or nine for
Companions, very gratefully. Others wish well to the cause, but dislike
the required expression of creed and purpose. I use no persuasion in
the matter, wishing to have complete harmony of feeling among the
active members of the Society.

E. L.’s courteous, but firm, reply to Mrs. Green’s letter reaches me
too late for examination. In justice to both my correspondents, and to
my readers, I must defer its insertion, in such abstract as may seem
desirable, until next month.

I. Letter from a clergyman, now an accepted Companion. The extract
contained in it makes me wonder if it has never occurred to the Rev.
Dr. Mullens that there should be immediately formed a Madagascar
Missionary Society, for the instruction of the natives of England:—

“My dear Sir,—Apropos of your strictures on usury which have from time
to time appeared in ‘Fors,’ I have thought you would be interested in
the following extract from a recent work on Madagascar, by the Rev. Dr.
Mullens, of the London Missionary Society.

“After describing a ‘Kabáry,’—a public assembly addressed by the
Queen,—in the Betsileo [85] province, he goes on to say: ‘Having
expressed in a clear and distinct voice her pleasure in meeting her
people once more, the Queen uttered several sentences usual to these
assemblies, in which she dwelt upon the close and affectionate
relations subsisting between them and herself. “You are a father and
mother to me: having you, I have all.... And if you confide in me, you
have a father and a mother in me. Is it not so, O ye under heaven?” To
which, with a deep voice, the people reply, “It is so.” Passing at
length to the subject specially before her, the Queen said, “My days in
the South are now few; therefore I will say a word about the Schools.
And I say to you all, here in Betsileo, ... cause your children to
attend the Schools. My desire is, that whether high or low, whether
sons of the nobles, or sons of the judges, or sons of the officers, or
sons of the centurions, your sons and your daughters should attend the
Schools and become lovers of wisdom.” The Prime Minister, then, in the
Queen’s name, addressed the assembly on the subject of usury,—a great
evil among poor nations, and only too common in stages of society like
that in Madagascar,—and said, “Thus saith the Queen: All the usury
exacted by the Hovas from the Betsileo is remitted, and only the
original debt shall remain!’”

    “I am, dear Sir, faithfully yours,
        “Joseph Halsey.”

II. Useful letter from a friend:—

“You say when I agree in your opinions I may come, but surely you do
not exact the unquestioning and entire submission of the individual
opinion which the most arrogant of churches exacts. [86] With your
leading principles, so far as I am yet able to judge of them, I
entirely and unreservedly agree. I see daily such warped morality, such
crooked ways in the most urgent and important concerns of life, as to
convince me that the axe should be laid to the root of the tree. Mainly
I am disgusted—no more tolerant word will do—with the prevalent tone of
thought in religious matters, and the resulting tortuous courses in
daily work and worship. What a worse than Pagan misconception of Him
whom they ignorantly worship—

        “‘Ille opifex rerum, mundi melioris origo’—

is shown by the mass of so-called religious persons! How scurrilously
the Protestant will rail against Papist intolerance—making his private
judgment of Scripture the infallible rule,—

“‘Blushing not (as Hooker says) in any doubt concerning matters of
Scripture to think his own bare Yea as good as the Nay of all the wise,
grave, and learned judgments that are in the whole world. Which
insolency must be repressed, or it will be the very bane of Christian
Religion.’—(Ecc. Polity, Book II.)

“I believe the St. George’s Company contains the germ of a healthy and
vigorous constitution. I see that you are planting that germ, and
fostering it with all deliberation and cautious directness of advance;
but what Titanic obstacles! It seems to me the fittest plant of this
age to survive, but in the complexities of the struggle for existence,
its rearing must be a Herculean labour. Yet wherein is this age
singular? When was there any time whose sentence we might not write
thus: ‘L’état agité par les brigues des ambitieux, par les largesses
des riches factieux, par la vénalité des pauvres oiseux, par
l’empirisme des orateurs, par l’audace des hommes pervers, par la
faiblesse des hommes vertueux,’ was distracted and disintegrate.

“When I can get better words than my own I like to use them—and it is
seldom I cannot. In the selfish pleasure of writing to you I forget the
tax on your time of reading my vagaries; but I feel a kind of filial
unburdening in writing thus freely. Will that excuse me?

    “Always sincerely and affectionately yours,
        “James Hooper.”

Wood versus Coal.—Subject to such correction as may be due to the
different quantity of carbon contained in a load of wood as in a ton of
coal, the product of the coal-field is seven times as much [of fuel]
per mile, as that of the forest. To produce a yield of fuel equal to
that obtainable from the known coal measures of the world, if worked
with an activity equal to that of our own, seven times the area of
cultivated forest is required. But the actual area, as estimated, is
not seven, but twenty-seven times that of the coal measures. It is thus
four times as important, regarded as a source of fuel. But while the
life of the coal-field has been taken at 150 years, that of the forest,
if rightly cared for, will endure as long as that of the human family.
A wealth such as this is not to be measured in tons of gold.—Edinburgh
Review, p. 375, Oct., 1875.

“I think Sheffield is more likely ‘Schaf-feld’ than Sheaf-field.
‘Sheep-fold,’ the sheltered hollow with moors all round it. I know a
place called ‘Theescombe,’ meaning ‘theaves-combe,’ or ‘young
lambs-combe.’”—Note by a Companion.

NOTES

[1] Seven thousand to St. George’s Company; five, for establishment of
Mastership in Drawing in the Oxford Schools; two, and more, in the
series of drawings placed in those schools to secure their efficiency.

[2] Lamentations v. 13.

[3] As distinguished, that is to say, from other members of the Church.
All are priests, as all are kings; but the kingly function exists
apart: the priestly, not so. The subject is examined at some length,
and with a clearness which I cannot mend, in my old pamphlet on the
‘Construction of Sheepfolds,’ which I will presently reprint. See also
Letter XIII., in ‘Time and Tide.’

[4] I append a specimen of the conduct of the Saints to whom our
English clergymen have delivered the Faith.

[5] The Children’s Prize. No. XII. December, 1873. Price one penny.

[6] Yes, I know that; but am I to be cheerfuller therefore?

[7] I don’t vouch for the particular statements in this letter. It
seems to me incredible that any practical absurdity so great as this
should exist in tenure of property.

[8] I am not sure, after all, that I should like her to know even so
much as this. For on inquiring, myself, into the matter, I find
(Ormerod, quoting Dr. H. Landois) that a humble bee has a drum in its
stomach, and that one half of this drum can be loosened and then drawn
tight again, and that the bee breathes through the slit between the
loose half and tight half; and that in this slit there is a little
comb, and on this comb the humble bee plays while it breathes, as on a
Jew’s harp, and can’t help it. But a honey bee hums with its “thoracic
spiracles,” not with its stomach. On the whole—I don’t think I shall
tell Agnes anything about all this. She may get through her own life,
perhaps, just as well without ever knowing that there’s any such thing
as a thorax, or a spiracle.

[9] “The Insect World.” Cassell, Petter, and Galpin.

[10] Alas, that incredulity, the least amiable of the virtues, should
often be the most serviceable! Here is a pleasant little passage to
fall in with, after Dr. Johnson’s “it is well known”! I find it in
Ormerod, discussing the relative tenability of insects between the
fingers for the study of their voices. “Wasps are obviously ill fitted
for this purpose, and humble bees are no better; they are so strong and
so slippery that they need all our attention to prevent their putting
their long stings through our gloves while we are examining them.”

[11] Foolish of me; a cobweb may be overthrown, but cannot be stung.

[12] His debate with Barnabas, on the occasion of the latter’s visit to
the wounded Joseph, throws some clear light on the questions opened in
Mr. Lyttel’s letter.

[13] Some ambiguity is caused in this passage by the chance of both dog
and boy having the same name, as well as the same instincts.

[14] I don’t put inverted commas to all Mr. Gould’s words, having
necessarily to mix up mine with them in a patchwork manner; but I don’t
know anything worth telling, whatever, about—so much as a sparrow,—but
what he tells me.

[15] Italics mine throughout.

[16] Nowadays the travelling is of course ‘notoriously safe’! but what
shall we say of the banking?

[17] The oldest windmill on record in this country (I speak under
correction) stood in this parish, and was given by Bishop Seffrid to
the see of Chichester about the year 1199. The largest watermill ever
constructed in Sussex was that of Mr. Catt.

[18] Frightened, (I hear it was guessed in a gossiping newspaper,) by
the Shipton accident, and disgusted afterwards by unexpected expenses.
The ingenious British public cannot conceive of anybody’s estimating
danger before accidents as well as after them, or amusing himself by
driving from one place to another, instead of round the Park. There was
some grain of truth in the important rumour, however. I have posted, in
early days, up and down England (and some other countries) not once nor
twice; and I grumbled, in Yorkshire, at being charged twenty-pence
instead of eighteen-pence a mile. But the pace was good, where any
trace of roads remained under casual outcasting of cinders and
brickbats.

[19] “Our Lady’s,” doubtless, once.

[20] I include in my general term ‘mob,’ lords, squires, clergy, parish
beadles, and all other states and conditions of men concerned in the
proceedings described.

[21] They are round at the end, but do not taper.

[22] An Indian one, patiently investigated for me by Mr. Burgess, was
fastened with glue which entirely defied cold water, and yielded only
to the kettle.

[23] She bites them round the edge roughly enough; but pushes them down
with a tucked-up rim, quite tight, like the first covering of a pot of
preserve.

[24] Or in old wood.

[25] He does not give the date.

[26] See my first notice of it in the beginning of the Fors of August
1871; and further account of it in appendix to my Lecture on Glaciers,
given at the London Institution this year.

[27] Will the reader be kind enough, in the last two lines of page 128,
to put, with his pen, a semicolon after “age”, a comma after “unclean,”
and a semicolon after “use”? He will find the sentence thus take a
different meaning.

[28] Isaiah xxviii. 17 and 18.

[29] The whole woodcut is given in facsimile in the fifth part of
‘Ariadne Florentina.’

[30] See ‘Munera Pulveris,’ pp. 99 to 103; and ‘Ariadne Florentina,’
Lecture VI.

[31]            “Narr.
    Fünftausend Kronen wären mir zu Handen.

                Meph.
    Zweibeiniger Schlauch, bist wieder auferstanden?

                Narr.
    Geschieht mir oft, doch nicht so gut als jetzt.

                Meph.
    Du freust dich so, dass dich’s in Schweiss versetzt.

                Narr.
    Da seht nur her, ist das wohl Geldes werth?

                Meph.
    Du hast dafür was Schlund und Bauch begehrt.

                Narr.
    Und kaufen kann ich Acker, Haus, und Vieh?

                Meph.
    Versteht sich! Biete nur, das fehlt dir nie!

                Narr.
    Und Schloss mit Wald und Jagd, und Fischbach?

                Meph.
                                  Traun!
    Ich möchte dich gestrengen Herrn wohl schaun.

                Narr.
    Heute Abend wieg’ ich mich im Grundbesitz. (ab.)

                Meph. (solus.)
    Wer zweifelt noch an unsres Narren Witz!”

[32] I have written it out from a perfect English psalter of early
thirteenth century work, with St. Edward, St. Edmund, and St. Cuthbert
in its calendar; it probably having belonged to the cathedral of York.
The writing is very full, but quick; meant for service more than
beauty; illuminated sparingly, but with extreme care. Its contractions
are curiously varied and capricious: thus, here in the fifth verse, c
in constituisti stands for ‘con’ merely by being turned the wrong way.
I prefer its text, nevertheless, to that of more elaborate MSS., for
when very great attention is paid to the writing, there are apt to be
mistakes in the words. In the best thirteenth-century service-book I
have, ‘tuos’ in the third verse is written ‘meos.’

[33] Compare the ‘Crown of Wild Olive,’ p. 57; and put in the fifth
line of that page, a comma after ‘heaven,’ and in the eighth line a
semicolon after ‘blessing.’

[34] I am sensitive for other writers in this point, my own readers
being in the almost universal practice of choosing any bit they may
happen to fancy in what I say, without ever considering what it was
said for.

[35] Collated out of Sapientia xv. and xvi.

[36] Compare Jeremiah ix. 6; in the Septuagint, τόκος ἐπὶ τόκῳ, καὶ
δόλος ἐπὶ δόλῳ: “usury on usury, and trick upon trick.”

[37] The instinct for the study of parasites, modes of disease, the
lower forms of undeveloped creatures, and the instinctive processes of
digestion and generation, rather than the varied and noble habit of
life,—which shows itself so grotesquely in modern science, is the
precise counterpart of the forms of idolatry (as of beetle and serpent,
rather than of clean or innocent creatures,) which were in great part
the cause of final corruption in ancient mythology and morals.

[38] If my good correspondent will try practically the difference in
the effect on the minds of the next two beggars he meets, between
imputing a penny to the one, and imparting it to the other, he will
receive a profitable lesson both in religion and English.

Of Felix Neff’s influence, past and present, I will take other occasion
to speak.

[39] See the note at p. 151.

[40] Action, observe, I say here; in thought I was too independent, as
I said above.

[41] At least, I think the terms of my letter might have been easily
construed into such recommendation; I fear they were not as clear as
they might have been.

[42] I permit the waste of type, and, it may well be, of my reader’s
patience, involved in reprinting (instead of merely referring to) the
quoted passages and letter, lest it should be thought that I wished to
evade the points, or, by interruption, deaden the eloquence, of the
Birmingham article.

[43] Birmingham accepts, with the child-like confidence due by one able
Editor to another, the report of Brighton. But all Mr. Hansard’s
friends are furious with me for “spreading it;” and I beg at once, on
their authority, to contradict it in all essential particulars; and to
apologize to Mr. Hansard for ever having suspected him of such things.

[44] Moutard—not -arde; but I can’t give better than this English for
it.

[45] Fate, and the good novelist, thus dismiss poor grandmamma in a
passing sentence,—just when we wanted her so much to live a little
longer, too! But that is Fors’s way, and Gotthelf knows it. A bad
novelist would have made her live to exactly the proper moment, and
then die in a most instructive manner, and with pathetic incidents and
speeches which would have filled a chapter.

[46] This paragraph implies, of course, the existence of all modern
abuses,—the story dealing only with the world as it is.

[47] A minute Evangelical fragment—dubitable enough.

[48] Primarily, because it is untrue. The respect of a child for its
parent depends on the parent’s own personal character; and not at all,
irrespective of that, on his religious behaviour. Which the practical
good sense of the reverend novelist presently admits.

[49] We keep the metaphor in the phrase, to ‘give a dressing,’ but the
short verb is better.

[50] Untranslateable.

[51] It was unworthy of Gotthelf to spoil his story by this vulgar
theatrical catastrophe; and his object (namely, to exhibit the
character of Hansli in riches as well as poverty,) does not justify
him; for, to be an example to those in his own position, Hansli should
have remained in it. We will, however, take what good we can get:
several of the points for the sake of which I have translated the whole
story, are in this part of it.

[52] “Fidèle à toute épreuve.”

[53] “Patraque,”—machine out of repair, and useless.

[54] I am reprinting this pamphlet word for word as it was first issued
from the press. Mr. Allen will have it ready for distribution by the
first of September.

[55] Compare my Birmingham correspondent’s opinion of David’s
“twangling on the harp,” page 10, Letter VI.

[56] ‘Sesame and Lilies,’ page 53.

[57] Compare Letter XXIV., page 20; and Dante, Paradiso, xxiv. 16:

           “Cosi, quelle carole differente—
            Mente danzando, della sua ricchezza
            Mi si facean stimar, veloci e lente.”

[58] Compare Letter VIII., p. 16; and Letter IX., p. 17.