Manchester. Please tell Mr. Simon I begged of John to spare his brain and write nothing for a year or two, but he said it only amused him and gave no thought, as it was a subject long thought of. I had two reasons to wish him not to write, for I fear his Political Economy was at fault; but I am charmed with the paper, and it can do no harm. The Times says Dr. Guthrie and my son are in Political Economy mere innocents, and I suppose we shall have the slaughter of the innocents, but I am glad to see such Political Economy. The tone is high, and our tone in the city is much too low."

"CALVERLEY HOTEL, TUNBRIDGE WELLS, "21st August, 1860.

"The August and September numbers of Cornhill Magazine have articles of John's on Political Economy, which have brought a shower of abuse on him from the Saturday Review and Scotsman. They are not bad, for all that, and it is rather amusing to see the commotion they make; perhaps I should have preferred his not meddling with Political Economy for a while! They will mistake him for a Socialist-or Louis Blanc or Mr. Owen of Lanark."

"DENMARK HILL, 25th October, 1860.

"I send you the Cornhill Magazine, finding John's paper liked by Mr. Simon. Early in July, John sent me from abroad his first paper, kindly saying I might suppress it if the publishing it would annoy me.

"I sent to Smith & Co., saying I thought them twelve of the most important pages I had ever read.

"Immediately on seeing them in print, Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh, a good writer and able reviewer, wrote to me, wondering I had published the article, and saying the Scotsman had fallen on this unlucky paper. I replied I meant to publish any more that might come, let Scotch or English reviews say what they might; and I am glad these speculations have gone out, though I confess to have suffered more uneasiness about his newspaper letters on Politics and his papers on Political Economy than about all his books. These Political and Political Economical papers throw up a coarser and more disagreeable dust about one. The wrath of the Manchester School will be delivered in worse terms than the anger of certain Schools of Painting."

These shrewd apprehensions were abundantly fulfilled. The publication of the papers in the Cornhill Magazine raised a storm of indignant protest; even a theological heresy-hunt could not have been more fast and furious. The essays were declared to be "one of the

1

most melancholy spectacles, intellectually speaking, that we have ever witnessed." "The series of papers in the Cornhill Magazine," wrote another critic,2 "throughout which Mr. Ruskin laboured hard to destroy his reputation, were to our mind almost painful. It is no pleasure to see genius mistaking its power, and rendering itself ridiculous." The papers were described by the Saturday Review as "eruptions of windy hysterics," "absolute nonsense," "utter imbecility," "intolerable twaddle”; the author was "a perfect paragon of blubbering"; his "whines and snivels" were contemptible; the world was not going to be "preached to death by a mad governess"; after which quiet and measured criticisms the Reviewer proceeded, with an amusing lack of humour, to declare that it was "an act of condescension," on his part, "to argue at all with a man who can only write in a scream." The last passage of the book in particular-which the author himself regarded as the best he had ever written-filled the Saturday Reviewer with indignant disgust. "Even more repulsive," he said, “is the way in which Mr. Ruskin writes of the relations of the rich and poor." It was incredible that anybody should listen to such appeals, except that "people like for some reason to see a man degrade himself." Ruskin himself was not a man to be brow-beaten by such bludgeoning; but the attack was carried, in newspapers all over the country, into a more vulnerable quarter. What did Thackeray mean by committing himself to such nonsense? What was Mr. Smith thinking of when he admitted into a magazine, which had still to establish itself in popular favour, such loud attacks on the popular creed? The blow went home; and after three of the essays had been published, the conductors of the Cornhill Magazine bowed before the storm. Ruskin afterwards told the story in the Preface to Munera Pulveris (see below, p. 143), where he describes how the editor's sentence of excommunication was conveyed "with great discomfort to himself, and many apologies to me." Though the editor was the vehicle of communication, it appears from the Memoir of Mr. George Smith that the edict was the publisher's. Ruskin's papers were "seen," we are told, "to be too deeply tainted with socialistic heresy to conciliate subscribers," and Mr. Smith decided to stop so

4

1 Literary Gazette, November 3, 1860.

2 H. H. Lancaster, at p. 299 of the book cited in Vol. VII. p. lxvi. n.

3 See, for instance, the Manchester Examiner and Times, October 2, 1860: "For some inscrutable reason, which must be inscrutably satisfactory to his publishers, Mr. Thackeray has allowed," etc., etc.; and the Scotsman, August 9: "If Mr. Thackeray had not failed to feel ashamed to print such frenzies," etc., etc.

* See the Dictionary of National Biography, Supplementary Volume I. p. xxvii.

dangerous a contributor.1 The intimation was conveyed to Ruskin after the appearance of the third paper ("Qui Judicatis Terram"): "the Magazine must only admit one Economical Essay more," which, accordingly, he made (by permission) longer than the rest. He gave it a concluding passage, but the reader should remember that the book remains a fragment. Thus in one place he promises a fuller discussion of definitions given only in extremest brevity, and gives the titles of three intended chapters-"Thirty Pieces" (on Price), "Demeter " (on Production), and "The Law of the House" (on Economy).3

To a modern reader, who turns to Ruskin's essays at a time when they have done their work, the excited hostility and violent apprehension caused by their original publication may seem barely intelligible. The heresies have become in part accepted doctrine, and in the remainder the familiar gospel of economic and political schools; if they were "socialistic," did not a distinguished statesman declare, with regard to the tendency of modern legislation, that "we are all socialists now"? But we must judge the matter historically, and put ourselves back to the state of public opinion in 1860, if we would either do justice to Ruskin's editor or appreciate correctly the importance of his own work. The "old" Political Economy was then at the height of its power. It was the established creed, and any man who assailed it was a heretic who could expect no mercy from its ministers. In the present year (1905), if we consider the hostility which Mr. Chamberlain's economic "heresies" have excited, we shall be better able to understand the storm which raged round Ruskin in 1860; though, to avoid misapprehension, it should be added that on the particular issue of Protection versus Free Trade, Ruskin was a pronounced Free Trader.⭑ In 1860, moreover, the "old" Political Economy was something more than a creed-it was an accepted policy. Its abstractions were taken as rules of conduct. It governed not merely the tariff, but served as a standard for statecraft in other directions. The policy of laisser faire was still the accepted rule, and Ruskin was a heretic no less in advocating practical extensions of State interference than in attacking

1 Ruskin's friendly relations with Mr. Smith continued for many years, and a letter to Thackeray of December 21, 1860, shows no sign of vexation with his friend (see the letter reprinted in a later volume of this edition from Mrs. Richmond Ritchie's Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, and Browning, 1892, p. 126).

2 Ruskin had some fears whether it would not prove too strong. "I'm so glad," he wrote to Mr. William Ward on October 1, 1860, "you like those economy papers. The next will be a smasher, I'm only afraid they won't put it in. If they don't, I'll print it separate."

See $59 n.; and compare §§ 77, 84 n. (pp. 81, 104, 113). 4 See below, p. 72 n.

the theoretical basis of economic doctrine. The perusal of old speeches can only be recommended to those whom Lord Rosebery has called devotees of "blue-books and cracknel biscuits"; but if a reader will turn to the essay which Matthew Arnold entitled A French Eton, he will find himself among the ideas which an advocate of State action had still to combat in 1864, and by this pleasant exercise will put himself in a position to understand the wrath which Ruskin's earlier essay aroused among the devotees of the established creed. That creed was indeed beginning to be undermined by other agencies; but Ruskin had not followed the rise of the "historical" or "realistic" school of economics in Germany. He even professed, in a rash (and not entirely accurate) avowal of which his critics were not slow to take advantage,2 not to have read the authors whom he was attacking. His assault was entirely independent; and it was as trenchant as it was audacious. Herein was an additional source of aggravation. He was an intruder; let the cobbler stick to his last, and the author of Modern Painters to his art-criticism. What should an artist and a man of letters know of the mysteries of economics? This is a question which, in one form or another, fills a large part of the replies to Ruskin's essays. Yet there is no reason why the exercise of singularly acute powers of analysis in one direction should disqualify a man for their exercise in another, and, moreover, Ruskin had special qualifications for the new task into which he had now thrown himself. There is perhaps no branch of inquiry which more than Political Economy demands great care and skill in the exact use of language-none in which there are more ambiguities and shibboleths to scatter confusion or excite prejudice. Ruskin, though among the most copious and eloquent of writers, was never "intoxicated by the exuberance" of his language; no English writer has ever used words with greater exactness and precision, and this habit was a valuable equipment for sword-exercise among the "masked words" of Political Economy. It should be remembered, too, that though Ruskin's main interests in the earlier portion of his life had been with art, he was familiar from his youth up with the ideas and practice of the mercantile world as they were to be observed in a city merchant's house. And, again, Ruskin claimed with justice 1 On this subject compare what has already been said in the Introduction to The Political Economy of Art, Vol. XVI. pp. xxiv., xxv.

2 See Vol. XVI. pp. 10, 406 n.

3 "Let him make but a very slight change in the title of his papers and it will suit them admirably; let him alter Unto this Last' into 'Beyond the Last.' We never knew a more signal violation of the good old rule, 'Ñe sutor ultra crepidam'" (Fraser's Magazine, November 1860, p. 659).

4 See Sesame and Lilies, § 16 (Vol. XVIII. p. 66.

5 See Ruskin's letter to Dr. John Brown cited below, p. xxxiv.

that his first-hand knowledge of arts and crafts gave him a real insight into the finer qualities of work,' and a considerable advantage over many of the armchair economists; to which it may be added that he had used his opportunities of foreign travel to investigate closely the conditions of agriculture and national life.2

Ruskin, therefore, was by no means so ill equipped as his critics chose to assume, for the warfare which he carried into the camp of the established school of economics. But it is a tradition of criticism that one author should have one subject, and the intrusion of an artcritic into an alien field remained to the end one of the popular counts in the indictment against him. Yet, even in the first fury of reprobation, there were some who feared, while they affected to despise. He is not worth our powder and shot, wrote one of the organs of the established school; yet, if we do not crush him, "his wild words will touch the springs of action in some hearts, and ere we are aware a moral floodgate may fly open and drown us all."3 Only the pen of Ruskin himself could do justice to the horror thus naïvely expressed lest an incursion of moral ideas should drown the whole scheme of the orthodox religion in economics. The fear was to be justified in good time. An estimate of the contribution made by Ruskin to the moralisation of Political Economy belongs to the second part of the Introduction; but the history of the little book, Unto this Last, with which we are here concerned, is itself eloquent on the subject. The essays in the Cornhill Magazine came to an abrupt termination, as we have seen, in November 1860. In June 1862 Ruskin collected them into a volume, with an additional preface. The edition consisted of 1000 copies, and ten years later it was still not exhausted. Ruskin preserved a curious correspondence which he had with Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co. in 1873, when he finally transferred the publication of his books to Mr. George Allen. Among this correspondence is a "List of Mr. Ruskin's Works of which Smith, Elder and Co.

1 See Munera Pulveris, Preface, § 1, and compare note 2 on p. 78, below. "My real forte," he wrote in Fors Clavigera (Letter 19), “is really not description, but political economy."

There are some acute remarks in this sense in Mr. J. A. Hobson's John Ruskin, Social Reformer: "He had spent most of his laborious life in patient detailed observation of nature and the works of men. Both from contemporary observation and from study of history the actual processes by which large classes of goods were produced and consumed were familiar to him. How many of the teachers of Political Economy who have been so scornful of Mr. Ruskin's claims possessed a tithe of this practical knowledge? How many of them had studied the growth of the different arts and handicrafts in the history of nature as he had studied them?" (p. 58, ed. 1898).

3 From a leading article in the Manchester Examiner and Times, October 2,