legal or just means; in thanking him for which handsome concession, we must at the same time observe that he only gives us another proof of the utter confusion that reigns in his mind as to the nature and objects of Political Economy, which in every line he insists on mixing up with law, politics, morality, or religion. 'It is the privilege of fishes,' he says in one place, 'to live by the laws of demand and supply; but the distinction of humanity to live by the laws of right. And again,-'We have to examine what are the laws of justice respecting payment of labour; no small part, these, of the foundations of all jurisprudence'! But political economy is not jurisprudence, nor is jurisprudence political economy. Even the study of municipal law would be impossible, were it perplexed with discussions on abstract justice, so that we may guess how it must fare with the laws of political economy jumbled up with the same utterly foreign and heterogeneous element. Questions of right and wrong, just and unjust, are questions of morals or religion, no more to be mixed up Iwith the science of wealth than with the art of painting.

6

'Whether wealth be a good or an evil,' says Whately, or each, according to the amount or use of it, on any supposition it is still a matter of importance to examine and carefully arrange the facts relating to the subject, and to reason accurately upon them.' But one science at a time will not content a philosopher of Mr. Ruskin's comprehensive views. All the arts and sciences have, no doubt, their connexions and affinities, but nevertheless it has generally been found a highly convenient practice to treat them apart-morality in one treatise, astronomy in another, physic in a third, and so forth. The subject of wealth has its relationships with morality and politics, but it has its own set of principles, and there is just the same advantage in discussing them separately, as there is in confining a law-book to law, or a medical work to medicine, notwithstanding

that the sciences of health and morality have their points of contact. Had Adam Smith been a writer of Mr. Ruskin's school, he would have hashed up his Theory of the Moral Sentiments with his treatise on The Wealth of the Nations, and in that case we might possibly have found in any of his pages a passage to compete in haziness, if not in splendour, with the following

The rich and the poor have met; God is their maker: The rich and the poor their light.

have met;

God is

They have met.' More literally, have stood in each other's way (obviaverunt). That is to say, as long as the world lasts the action and counter-action of wealth and

poverty, the meeting, face to face, of rich and poor, is just as appointed and necessary law of the world as the flow of stream to sea, or the interchange of power among the electric clouds.

'God is their maker.' But also this action may be either gentle and just, or convulsive and destructive: it may be by rage of devouring flood, or by lapse of serviceable wave; in blackness of thunder-stroke, or continual force of vital fire, soft and shapeable into love syllables from far away. And which of these it shall be depends on both rich and poor knowing that God is their light; that in the misery of human life, there is no other light than this by which they can see each others' faces and live ;-light which is called in another of the books among which the merchant's maxims have been preserved, the sun of justice,' of which it is promised that it shall rise at last with healing' (health-giving or helping, making whole or setting at one) in its wings. For truly this healing is only possible by means of justice; no love, no faith, no hope will do it; men will be unwisely fond, vainly faithful, unless primarily they are just; and the mistake of the best men through generation after generation, has been that great one of thinking to help the poor by almsgiving, and by preaching of patience or of hope, and by every other means, emollient or consolatory, except the one thing which God orders for themjustice. But this justice, with its accompanying holiness or helpfulness, being even by the best men denied in its trial time, is by the mass of men hated wher ever it appears; so that, when the choice was one day fairly put to them, they denied the Helpful One and the Just,

- 1860.]

and desired a murderer, a sedition-raiser, and robber to be granted to them; the murderer instead of the Lord of Life, the sedition-raiser instead of the Prince of Peace, and the robber instead of the. Just Judge of all the world.

This one specimen will amply suffice to illustrate the highest style of the magic-lanthorn school applied to scientific investigation. The passage might evidently as well be Ruskin on Ethics, Ruskin on Divinity, or Ruskin on Electric Clouds and Thunderbolts, as Ruskin on Wages and Profits. How admirably such a strain is adapted to the purposes of scientific precision, close reasoning, and cautious inquiry into homely questions of the greatest moment to society, we need hardly point out.

Our great new light differs toto coelo from the Archbishop of Dublin's notions of the way in which a science ought to be treated. 'Nothing tends,' says his Grace, speaking of the very subject before us, more to perplexity and error than the practice of treating several different subjects at the same time, and confusedly, so as to be perpetually sliding from one inquiry to another of a different kind.' This remark occurs in Dr. Whately's Lectures on Political Economy, and serves, therefore, to confirm what we have already said, that Mr. Ruskin's jumble of considerations of justice, and right and wrong, and scriptural and unscriptural, with questions of economical science, is as little original as consistent with common sense. Political economists may well be callous to the reproach of worshipping and preaching Mammon, for the charge, which is the very staple of Mr. Ruskin's lucubrations, is as old as it is ridiculous. He will find it fully discussed and triumphantly disposed of in the Lectures we have quoted, and from which we shall take one or two short passages more, because they utterly demolish the fallacy that runs through every page of Unto this Last, poor as Dr. Whately's style must be confessed to be compared with Mr. Ruskin's impassioned strains.

As for the objection that men are already too eager in the pursuit of wealth,

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and ought not to be encouraged to make it an object of attention, the mistake on which it proceeds is one which you will meet with only in the young (I mean either in years or in character) and which will readily be removed in the case of those who are even moderately attentive and intelligent, Political economy is not the art of enriching an individual, but relates to wealth generally, to that of a nation, and not to that of an individual, except in those cases where his acquisition of it goes to enrich the community. Wealth has no more necessary connexion with the vice of covetousness, than with the virtue of charity. Investigations relative to the nature, production and distribution of wealth, have no greater connexion with sordid selfishness, than the inquiries of the chemist and physiologist respecting the organs and processes of digestion have with gluttonous excess.

The mistake is the result of such complete thoughtlessness that it is scarcely necessary to bestow much pains on its refutation.

And he adds:

If any writer (on this science) does maintain that wealth constitutes the sole

ground of preference of one thing to another, and that happiness is best promoted by sacrificing all other considerations to that of profit, he deserves censure for the doctrine he inculcates; but it is remarkable that this censure will be incurred by a procedure the very opposite of the one complained of. His fault will have been not confining himself to questions relating merely to wealth, but travelling out of his record to decide, and decide erroneously, as to what conduces to public happiness. His proper inquiry was as to the means by which wealth may be preserved or increased; to inquire how far wealth is desirable, is to go out of his province; to represent it as the only thing desirable, is an error, not in Political Economy, but apart from it, and arises from his wandering into extraneous discussions.

As reasonably might a mathematician be upbraided with confining his attention to quantities, or a geologist for sticking to the crust of the earth, as Ricardo or Mill for discussing the laws of wealth without reference to the ten commandments or the cardinal virtues. Mr. Ruskin not merely whips up political economy, morals and piety, into a syllabub or a trifle, but he cannot for one moment use the commonest terms of

the science he presumes to lecture on with ordinary precision. A single instance of his abuse of words will be amply sufficient, for we shall take that of the word 'wealth' itself. He invariably employs it as opposed to poverty, a sense in which it never once enters the vocabulary of the science. The properties of wealth are considered in political economy with no more regard to its amount, than those of a triangle or a circle are in geometry with reference to the actual number of square inches in the diagram. Had Mr. Ruskin only peeped into M. Say's little Catechism of Political Economy, he would have found the following question and answer in the first page

'Pour que les choses que vous avez désignées comme des richesses, meritent ce nom, ne faut-il pas qu'elles soient réunies en certaine quantité?'

'Suivant l'usage ordinaire, on n'appelle richés que les personnes qui possèdent beaucoup de biens; mais lorsqu'il s'agit

d'étudier comme les richesses se forment, se distribuent et se consomment, on nomme également les choses qui méritent ce nom, soit qu'il y en ait beaucoup ou peu, de même qu'un grain de blé est du blé, aussi bien qu'un boisseau rempli de cette deurée.'

But it is obvious that to keep Mr. Ruskin to this abstract notion of wealth would be to silence him altogether, for there is no possibility of developing it into a sermon on filthy lucre, a philippic against millionaires, or a system of quasisocialism. Political economy has no knowledge of any such fine people as the Lady of Pleasure,' or the Lord of Toil,' nor has it aught to do with Dives and Lazarus, or the sun of justice,' or the 'saintly and kingly character,' or the 'region of the electric clouds,' or 'forces of vital fire shapeable into love-syllables,' which we suppose we are to accept for a maxim of the science as regenerated by Mr. Ruskin. Of all things we should like to see the City Article in the Times written in this manner, were it but for a day; or what a capital subject it would be for the Civil Service Examiners to give as an exercise of literary ingenuity!

It must be admitted that it was a grand conception to turn political economy into a poem, to sweep the harp to the doctrine of demand and supply, to chant profits, and sing of gluts. Had the same happy thought occurred to Euclid, it would not have been left to Canning to weave the theory of triangles into an amorous tale; the geometer of Alexandria would have borrowed the strains of Sappho to announce his problems, and we might now be melting over parallelograms, and naming the 'Pons Asinorum' the 'Bridge of Sighs.' We could understand an attempt to present economical truths in the form of didactic poetry, in couplets like Hayley's, or, if that were too lowly a muse, as Virgil himself sung the Economy of the Bee-hive; but Unto this Last is a kind of prose-pindaric, it suggests to us the idea of Ossian on fixed and floating capital; or Gray's bard, from his rock, prophesying madly on prices, and striking the deep sorrows of his lyre' to the passionate theme of the wages of labour.

As long as Mr. Ruskin confined his pretensions to teach, within the sphere of those subjects with which his intimate acquaintance is unquestionable, and upon which he has every right to address the public, would he only address it without his habitual arrogance, his style was in some measure germane to his matter; though even in the domain of art, with all its affinity to poetry, it must be of some consequence that ideas should be clearly expressed, and judgments pronounced with temper. The subject of art, nevertheless, it must be acknowledged, abounded with natural temptations to a glowing and discursive pen, and it was often impossible to follow Mr. Ruskin, when he lured us through those amana locorum, over hill and dale, through briar and thicket, often in glorious sunshine, still oftener in clouds and mists, without not only forgiving him for leading us such a Puck's dance, but even thanking him for the wild ramble. We were not curious at such moments to inquire whe

ther it was prose or poesy we had before us, and even when he hurried us, as not uncommonly happened, to the utmost verge of meaning, we felt that we had reached the brink of nonsense by such picturesque paths, that we had as little inclination as breath left us for censure. It was lawful to lose himself, and excusable to bewilder his readers, when his theme led him into the depths of forests, or the recesses of the Alps; he straggled unblamed after a sprig of woodbine, vapoured congenially on mists and exhalations, and foamed and roared with the torrent and the cataract not without a licence from critical laws.

But here we have reached the bounds of toleration. The same discursiveness, the same prolixity, or, if you please, the same beauties and sublimities, are preposterously out of place in the handling of any science, but especially a science requiring the plainest, coolest, and most perspicuous treatment; requiring it almost as much as the exact sciences themselves. 'Dimness' here is also vexation,' and warmth is as ridiculous as in a work on logarithms. But more unpardonable still is the ignorance of which we have convicted Mr. Ruskin, ignorance of the very nature and objects of the science, aggravated by the grossest misrepresentations of its most distinguished cultivators.

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, 'Ne sutor ultra crepidam.'

From those who have called these conceited effusions 'fine writing,' we dissent totally. The finest writing for any science is the most lucid and the most dispassionate. Here we have nothing but obscurity, intemperance, and bombast.

659

At all events, a great authority on style, Quintilian, has left us his judgment of writers of this school, and has not recommended them as models.

Est etiam in quibusdam turba inanium verborum, qui dum communem loquendi morem reformidant, ducti specie nitoris, circumeunt omnia copiosa loquacitate quæ dicere volunt: ipsam deinde illam seriem cum aliâ simili jungentes, micentesque, ultra quam ulla spiritus durare posset, extendunt. In hoc malum etiam a quibusdam laboratur; neque id novum vitium est, cum jam apud Titum Livium inveniam fuisse preceptorem aliquem, qui discipulos obscurare quæ dicerent juberet, Græco verbo utens, σKÓTIσOV!' Unde illa scilicet egregia laudatio: Tanto melior; ne ego quidem intellexi.

In the mob of empty words,'in the 'going round and round everything he wants to say with interminable loquacity,' - in the passion for meretricious ornament, and the stringing together of long tangled sentences, to the agony of the broken-winded reader -but most of all in the strict obedience to the great rule of composition, Ekórov, Darken! — we have our author's literary portrait drawn as much to the life as if it had been drawn for him, or as if Quintilian had written with Unto this Last before him.

Once, and once only, has Mr. Ruskin written with a commendable brevity, and, wonderful to tell, it was on the very subject of Political Economy. We have it from himself:- My principles of political economy are all involved in a single phrase, spoken three years ago at Manchester-"Soldiers of the Ploughshare as well as Soldiers of the Sword!" Another 'Miraculous Cabinet!' The reader, however, will observe how impartially the author observes the Σκότισον, whether he spreads himself out through a treatise, or concentrates his wisdom in a sentence.

A. Alison's striking portrait of the Marshal who issued orders with rapidity and coup d'oeil,' That exploit of a defunct strategist is, as far as we know, still without a competent expositor: waiting with comfortable faith the advent of such an one, we turn from military to royal characteristics. With exquisite tact and refined taste, Sir A. Alison has thought fit to extend his protection to the highest personages in the realm, and very choice indeed are the flowers of rhetoric, of syntax, and of punctuation, in which their passports to immortality are couched. In the presence chamber of his sovereign Sir A. Alison's acquaintance with so much rank and fashion should have stood him in good stead; but we remark with pain that he bursts through the simplest restraints of decency and grammar. Her Majesty Queen Victoria,

Then an infant in the arms, uniting the courage and spirit of her Plantagenet and Stuart, to the judgment and integrity of her Hanoverian ancestors, has reunited in troubled times all hearts to the throne, and spread through her entire subjects the noble feelings of disinterested loyalty.

Towards her to all that could command respect in the other sex were (sic) united

The gallantry of man
In lovelier woman's cause."

#

Obviously the two ladies of high rank' have been 'awanting' here, and the 'Duke and Earl of —' have been guilty of culpable carelessness. Other pages of this work speak of the Queen in a tone of intense snobbery; it is enough to mark by a note the existence of personalities which it would be impertinent to reproduce. If we quote certain reflections on the

that event inspires Sir A. Alison with a curious outburst. Thus,' he says, 'did the family of SaxeCoburg ascend the throne of England-a memorable event in British annals, when it is recollected that since the Conquest in 1066 only five changes of the reigning family had taken place the Normans, the Plantagenets, the Tudors, the Stuarts, and the Hanoverians. It was reserved for the wisdom of this writer to proclaim the dethronement of the house of Brunswick, and to discover how 'the sceptre passed to a new family.' After putting a verb that should have been singular into the plural, Sir A. Alison thinks fit to write a noun that should have been plural in the singular-Cousin-german by blood, the Queen and the Prince were nearly of the same age, and had been acquainted in their early years.' The mingled majesty and grace' of a 'youthful and beautiful Queen,' who was not only a 'graceful and accomplished horsewoman,' but also conspicuous for 'remarkable talents and patriotic spirit,' are duly pictured by Sir A. Alison, who likewise states that several young princes, attracted by the splendid prize, flocked to England.' All these paragraphs may be consulted with profit by penny-aliners in search of a model for the description of a prize cattleshow. What follows about the Prince Consort is perhaps a plagiary from the sycophantic columns of a county parasite. Sir A. Alison is, as will be seen presently, somewhat lax in his construction of the rule of meum and tuum, so that in this instance black-mail may have been levied on the Court Circular of the Inverary Idiot,' or the 'Lanark Lunatic'

+ Vol. vi. pp. 238, and 388-90.

Vol. vi. p. 391.