Kitabı oku: «The Harvest of Ruskin», sayfa 5

Both passed through the fires which try faith; and there are reasons for believing in both cases that what might have been a happy marriage was frustrated by want of conventional orthodoxy. So that they both suffered for the cause of truth in the hardest of all ways. Each of them had only six or seven years of married life, and neither left any children.

Strangely enough, also, Mill was forty-one when his Principles of Political Economy was written, and Ruskin at forty-one brought out his papers in the Cornhill, under the title of Unto This Last, which are his counterblast to Mill.

Each of them found it necessary in later life to recant some of their earlier teaching, and each faithfully did so. Mill gave up the Wages Fund Theory he had learnt from his father, and Ruskin scatters the later editions of his earlier works with notes denouncing the dogmatic evangelicalism which runs through them, which he had learnt from his mother.

So, in tragic conflict, these two men are before us. Not that Mill ever replied. He died in 1872, and during his lifetime he could afford to ignore the eccentricities of an unstable genius, at whom all sober people smiled in pity. But now I would fain even for Mill’s sake reconcile them. You have true tragedy, not when right meets wrong, the noble the ignoble, but when two principles, both noble, are brought into a conflict they cannot avoid – Mill, the Liberal, the rationalist, with his watchwords of equality, liberty and a free chance for all – and Ruskin the Conservative, the indignant enemy of mechanical progress, speaking ever of order and obedience, reverence and graded ranks: – Mill, a servant of present humanity, with but a faint critical hold on the Unseen; Ruskin, emotional and inspired, who not seldom would fain call down fire from heaven on Mill’s newly enfranchised citizens, because they blasphemed.

So that I conclude that scholastic Economics is a reliable, useful scientific enquiry, forming a basis for the very same practical aims which Ruskin has set us striving for, and written by men who loved their fellows and were conspicuous examples of uprightness and benevolence, truth-keeping and friends of their kind.

We know how unscrupulous men of business used their conclusions, particularly those conclusions which have not stood the test of criticism, as a sort of textbook of oppression, as giving a scientific necessity for starvation, and so excusing hardness of heart. That this was so, must be Ruskin’s excuse for declaring war upon the economists. But it was a war wholly unnecessary; it clouded his prophecy with confused issues, and it laid the Master himself among the wounded.

It will be necessary, in order properly to express the scope of Political Economy, to examine more fully its definition of the two factors whose action and reaction upon one another form the subject matter of the science. These two factors are Man and Wealth. What is Man as an economic being? What is the “economic man”?

He is assumed by Mill and others⁶⁰ as a being who considers his own side of a bargain only, who in all contracts will do the best he can for himself, and who, in the use of his capital, and the direction of his labour, is influenced by an intelligent and passionless eye to his own interests. He has no regard for custom, or public opinion, or compassion, or resentment, or personal partiality, or class prejudice.

Mill does not pretend that this person actually exists; but that the tendency of things is as though he did exist; and that it is most easy to assume his existence, and after that recognize the qualifications which other parts of human nature require us to put in, just as in mechanics we calculate what would happen if surfaces were smooth, and then allow for friction afterwards.

Ruskin’s criticisms are not always fair. He writes:

“Political Economy, being a science of wealth, must be a science respecting human capacities and dispositions. But moral considerations have nothing to do with political economy (says Mill). Therefore, moral considerations have nothing to do with human capacities and dispositions.”⁶¹

Perhaps the logical fallacy is not very obvious, but it is there. Human capacities and dispositions touch moral considerations on one side, and they touch political economy on the other. But these two need not therefore be connected. Because a man has two relations, as a citizen and as a father, and because the state does not bring up his children, and the two relations are separate, we must not argue that the man has nothing to do with his family, because the state, with which he is also connected, has nothing to do with it. All this wrong criticism was produced by the obvious remark of Mill, that the ethical character of a taste for diamonds is not the economist’s affair.

It is only as a first approximation, then, that economics postulates the monster known as the economic man; cold, calculating, well informed, shrewd, selfish with the unthinking uniformity of a machine. It is perhaps clearer to say that it can take account only of such motives as are sufficiently regular and predictable to be worth so much in money. Some unselfish actions are of that kind, such as a man’s service to his children, or if he be a Highlander to his third cousin; and we can predict certain of his regular subscriptions. The Law of Supply and Demand applies to ministers and missionaries and hospital nurses, though their payment is all from charitable gifts. To some extent the Charity Fund is a steady sum in any nation. It could be predicted that when the national War Fund was absorbing large sums, other charities, particularly London charities, would suffer; and such has been the case. The same phenomenon occurred to a less degree when General Booth was raising his Darkest England Fund. Here is a charitable motive steady enough to be measurable.

It is not assumed here, as so constantly asserted by Ruskin, that men are and must be treated as rogues. The argument of Ruskin was that the qualifications to be introduced into problems due to the fact that man is not an economic man, are not like allowances for friction, or other mechanical matters, but are organic and revolutionary. The right reply probably is that sometimes this is so, but far more generally not so.

When remarkable instances of unselfishness occur outside the family circle, where the economist expects and allows for them, they are told as instances of the unexpected. When the newspaper boys near the Mansion House are found giving an undisturbed beat to a lame boy who could not compete with them in running to customers, and refuse to sell a paper there, the admiring customer concludes his beautiful and kindly story by asking how many business men round the Mansion House would leave a rival in possession because of his weakness?

The definition of Wealth must now be considered. Mill defines it as consisting of “All useful and agreeable things which possess exchangeable value.”

He decides to include in the wealth of a country such personal qualities, skill, energy, perseverance, as tend to make the man who possesses them industrially more valuable. A skilled cotton spinner is a greater national asset than a labourer; a skilled medical man who can restore to labourers their industrial efficiency, is also national wealth, a utility embodied in a person; but a gifted preacher, whose message may even make a man a less keen producer of wealth than he was before, would not be an instance of national wealth, unless he made, as he might, a drunkard or a loafer into a regular wage earner. So the actor, or the singer, or the orator, unless their work ultimately produces material goods, is not to be counted wealth in economics. There is evidently the usual difficulty about drawing the line.

What is more, the most precious parts of character are excluded from national wealth in the economic sense. Wealth, that is, is taken to mean property, and not, more generally, the means of true well-being. Again, the most necessary things are from their abundance not wealth. Air, sunshine, and water are not wealth where and when they are given profusely by nature; though they are the most needful supports to life. But air which has to be pumped in by a ventilating fan has cost something, and is wealth; sunshine which has passed through a coal measure and is brought to our firegrates on a winter’s night is wealth, water turned on at our taps is wealth for which we pay a water-rate. We may come to import oxygen into our halls and theatres and lecture rooms, perhaps even into our cellar workrooms, and then it too will have a price and an economic value.

There is clearly room for much difference of opinion in detail here. And yet it will be plain to all that the subject matter of a science must be limited; we must know when our studies begin and end. It is not demoralization which makes an economist deny holiness to be wealth, it is a classification of sciences. Holiness is not matter either, nor electricity, nor gas; it does not come into Physics any more than into Economics. It comes into Ethics and Theology and practical Politics, and it is the most important thing in the world. It may be true, as Ruskin urges, that wealth is not any good to a miser or a spendthrift or a rogue; that it is often I11th rather than Wealth, if it makes its user soft and slack and selfish, or proud and cruel. But nevertheless, it is an object of desire, of human motive; and that is enough for the economist.

The mistake of the early economists before John S. Mill was in not recognizing, however, the reaction of man’s possession of wealth upon his conduct as a producer; how high wages might be remunerative, if they increased efficiency, and big fortunes wasted if they increased idleness. We really have to treat two factors, each of which is, in the language of Mathematics, an implicit function of the other – or, if that does not make it more clear – each of which acts upon and is acted upon by the other. The early economists lived in the age when steam engines and electric telegraphs were great and new achievements, when Chemistry was being reborn in the atomic theory, and Joule was proving the great generalization of the conservation of energy. They treated their subject – man in business – as if he were matter; whereas he has biological characteristics, and is modifiable and can modify his environment. Our age, on the contrary, is concerned with the modification of characteristics under environment. It is the age of Darwin. Biological evolution is seen to govern the growth of men and societies; and these, in writings of the dominant school of thinkers since Herbert Spencer, are seen to follow biological laws of growth. The Economic man is no exception.

John Stuart Mill begins his chapter defining wealth by remarking that everyone has a notion sufficiently correct for common purposes, of what is meant by wealth. This is not his definition; he reaches that later: it is a reasonable introductory remark. But Ruskin assumes that this is his definition, and assails him for his lack of scientific precision and his looseness of thought, as though an astronomer were to begin by saying that everyone has a notion, sufficient for common purposes, of what is meant by a star. The criticism is the more unreasonable, when we find the critic himself doing the very same thing in his famous chapter on “The Nature of Gothic” in The Stones of Venice, in which, at the opening, the remark occurs: “We all have some notion, most of us a very determined one, of the meaning of the term Gothic.” Ruskin goes on to play with the etymology of value;⁶² from valor and valere, meaning that which avails towards life and health; and says true wealth is what tends to life and the increase of its powers, not pearls nor topaz, but air and light and cleanliness. “To be wealthy is to have a large stock of useful articles,” say the economists. What, he asks, is to “have" – has the embalmed body of Carlo Borromeo the golden crosier and the cross of emeralds on its breast? Has a gold-filled belt the man whom it drowns, or has he it? Does not “having” depend on the vital power to use? What, nextly, is “useful”? Persons called wealthy may be inherently incapable of wealth, mere reservoirs in the stream of national produce, if not impediments in its course, and so causing “illth” rather than “wealth.” Therefore the aim and end of Political Economy is to develop moral character and capacity for valiantly using valuables, and the great difficulty is that manly character is apt to suffer from possessing material wealth and also apt to cast it away. Wealth of character and wealth of goods tend to undermine one another.

“In a community regulated by laws of supply and demand but protected from open violence, the persons who become rich are, generally speaking, industrious, resolute, proud, covetous, prompt, methodical, sensible, unimaginative, insensitive and ignorant. The persons who remain poor are the entirely foolish, the entirely wise, the idle, the reckless, the humble, the thoughtful, the dull, the imaginative, the sensitive, the well-informed, the improvident, the irregularly and impulsively wicked, the clumsy knave, the open thief, and the entirely merciful, just and godly person.”⁶³

With one further piece of Ruskin’s teaching on the nature of wealth, I think that the subject will be clear.

“ ‘Rich’ is a relative word implying its opposite ‘poor’ as positively as the word ‘north’ implies its opposite ‘south.’ Men nearly always speak and write as if riches were absolute, and it were possible by following certain scientific precepts (Ruskin’s capital error turns up here), for everybody to be rich. Whereas riches are a power like that of electricity, acting only through inequalities or negations of itself. The force of the guinea you have in your pocket depends wholly on the default of a guinea in your neighbour’s pocket. If he did not want it, it would be of no use to you; the degree of power it possesses depends accurately upon the need or desire he has for it – and the art of making yourself rich, in the ordinary mercantile economist’s sense, is therefore equally and necessarily the art of keeping your neighbour poor.”⁶⁴

This is all true; if by rich we understand, as the use of the word in common practice warrants, relatively wealthy. The possession of money is the possession of an order upon labour; and it is of no use if there is no available labour needing it. Ruskin’s illustration is that of a large landed proprietor who could get no servants to feed his cattle, mine his gold, plough his corn lands, because no one was in want of his wages. He must lead a life of severe and common labour to produce even ordinary comforts, and live in the midst of a waste desert. Therefore, what is meant by making oneself rich is to produce the maximum inequality between ourselves and our neighbours.⁶⁵

Ruskin is grievously unfair in saying that that is the object of mercantile (political) economy; that it is “the science of getting rich.” Such a statement libels both the science and its expounders; and it contains, for Ruskin, an extraordinary looseness in the use of words. There cannot be a science of getting rich, that is an art or a craft. Science is organized knowledge, not practical faculty to do anything or get anything.⁶⁶

How wide is the range of Ruskin’s Economy, how practical its objects, how little of a science it is, how entirely an art, the art of practical government and production, will be further clear from this statement:

“Political economy (the economy of a State or of citizens), consists simply in the production, preservation and distribution, at fittest time and place, of useful or pleasurable things. The farmer who cuts his hay at the right time, the shipwright who drives his bolts well home in sound wood, the builder who lays good bricks in well tempered mortar, the housewife who takes care of her furniture in the parlour and guards against all waste in her kitchen, and the singer who rightly disciplines and never overstrains his voice, are all political economists in the true and final sense; adding continually to the riches and well-being of the nation to which they belong.”⁶⁷

All this is quite true; but not in any sense a rival study to scholastic Economics. The great misfortune is that the atmosphere of controversy and revolt runs through all this glorious gospel, so strong and true in its teachings, so perverse in its criticisms. The sum of the whole doctrine is put in memorable words near the close of Unto This Last:

“There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.”⁶⁸

All railing accusation is out of place. The business of the man whom Ruskin calls the “vulgar economist” is to theorize, his is to edify. The one is the theoretical engineer and surveyor for the house of the state; his part in the ὁικονομἱα is that of a professional consultant. Ruskin is the actual builder; round his guidance sound the clang of hammer and anvil, the actual stonemasons’ and plumbers’ tools; under his eye grow in time the ivy and the flowers; but it is not the business of the architect or surveyor or sanitary engineer to know all about these, still less to keep a supply of them in his office.

The vastness of the task Ruskin had undertaken is now plain to us and was pathetic for him. Munera Pulveris contains the definitions of the new science. No more of it has ever appeared in systematic scientific form. It is touching to find the inspired artist reformer stopped again and again in his great attempt to write a complete guide to public action, by some subject needing special research. “I will treat of this when I come to” coinage or education, or whatever it might be; ever promising, ever hoping, if so be by a tour de force of genius he might storm the city of Mansoul; whereas, it needed all the corps of economic researchers, mining here and there into truth, making a breach here and there into the wall of the unknown, working on Parliamentary Returns and tables of statistics, on records of public registrars and clearing house reports, by patient inquiry to achieve a little at a time. Ruskin wrote for thirty years after the epoch-making date of 1860; and it is even now our task to systematize, if we can, his scattered contributions to practical Economy.

We may be glad, in John Ruskin’s case, as in that of lesser prophets, that the greatness of men is measured, not like chains, by their weakest link, but rather like tides, by the highest they reach.

CHAPTER V
RUSKIN’S RECONSTRUCTION

T HE teaching of Ruskin is generally piecemeal and unsystematic, but, happily, there is one exception to this. In collecting his Cornhill papers for publication as Unto This Last he wrote a Preface summarizing his practical proposals at their “worst.” They are as follows:

1. Government Schools, in certain cases compulsory, wherein a child shall be taught

Compulsory popular education was established ten years after this demand, and it was long overdue. It was quite central in Mill’s programme and in that of the school of Cobden and Bright. Only Herbert Spencer, in obstinate and inflexible individualism, disapproved of State Schools, and only the Anglican and Catholic Churches, in their own interest, blocked the way. As to what is taught there, we are slowly learning Ruskin’s lessons about physical and moral training, and in the continuation schools and the technical schools are advancing to trade instruction also; though we are far behind Munich and other German cities in this regard. More will be found on this on pp. 175-8 in Chap. VI. The recent orders of the Board of Education distinctly recognize some difference of subjects for urban, rural and sea-side children.

2. Government workshops for all articles, in fair competition with private ventures, and turning out nothing that was not genuine and of good quality.

Broadly speaking, this has not matured. Concerning it we may use Ruskin’s own words on the whole scheme: “It is only possible to answer for the final truth of principles, not for the direct success of plans.”⁶⁹ The right attitude, I would suggest, is to develop on practical lines of utility, and have work done by whatever agency does it most effectively. This is Ruskin’s drift. It looks as though municipal milk and beer, municipal houses and coal, as well as heat and light, municipal theatres and opera, and government transport and electrical power, were already with us in idea, if not yet in realization. The method is one for gradual application. Every step will, very properly, be contested. The experience of the transaction of business by Government during the Great War has just now strongly reinforced faith in private enterprise. We should keep an open mind. No high or final principle comes in, and dogma and prejudice are out of place.

Hitherto Government has controlled and inspected, rather than itself carried on the businesses of the country. Very few things are now left wholly to perfectly free competition. Later on Ruskin gave up Government workshops in favour of businesses owned and managed by Trade Gilds, thus anticipating the sequence of public thought in later years. See below in this Chapter.

3. The unemployed to be taught, or employed at fixed wages, or medically treated, or coerced to painful labour, according to the need of each case.

This close pastoral care by public authority has never yet been realized. It has been left to private philanthropy, guided at one time by the Elberfeld system as practised in the industrial towns on the Rhine. As in manufactures the State has guided and inspected business, rather than conducted it, so its Labour Exchanges and its unemployment allowance and Insurance against sickness have done much to ease and diminish the pain of unemployment. But, of course, this is only a stage in our progress. And the comprehensive lines of Ruskin’s case for the orphans of Great Business may well be earnestly remembered as a standard to work towards. We have at any rate left behind us mere reliance on the terrors of starvation and death as the only spur to industry in the Great Society, as the present world of vast production and exchange has been called.⁷⁰

4. Comfort and home for the old and destitute, free from the slur of the Poor Law.

This has been provided by Old Age Pensions.

Thus Ruskin’s schemes are being or are on the way to be realized, in quite remarkable detail. How much, uttered by leading writers in 1862, remains so fresh as these in 1920? Ruskin proclaimed some truths too early for his peace of mind, but not for the service of men. The characteristic novelty of the proposals was that they were social, not political, though written in a period when political reforms occupied the forefront of progressive thought. They were no doubt a necessary stage. We should not belittle them in disappointment. For without a democratic franchise no social reforms could have been achieved. Ruskin’s proposals are also extremely moderate, and essentially conservative. He declares his disbelief in “the common Socialist idea of the division of property,”⁷¹ though, as land is to be in the hands of those who can use it best, there was to be much compulsory purchase, a practice with which we are increasingly familiar, for housing, for allotments, and for small holdings. Nationalization of railways is definitely part of the programme, as we should expect.⁷²

The most radical change concerned Wages. Ruskin declared that wages should be fixed and steady under the responsibility of either the Government or the Craft Gilds, and should be independent of the number of people competing for work. As usual, he blamed the economists because this was not so in nature, as though physiologists were to blame for indigestion. But, as mere economics, he understood the doctrine, and accepted its truth. He says that the cheapening of bread under the absence of the Corn Laws would cause wages “to fall permanently in precisely the same proportion.”⁷³ That is, he accepted the “supply price” of wages – being the maintenance which the labourer under competition would accept.

The great issue for human welfare was then, and is now, whether there is a supply price for wages above the merest starvation line. Labour, so far, like commodities, has its price determined by the reciprocal action of the buyers and sellers of it. On the side of demand the buyers cannot give more than the value of the product of the last labourer they engage. On the side of supply the labourer would change his trade, or not have children, or not bring up his children to that trade, or he would starve and die, unless he received what he considered a maintenance. This is the supply price. And in any given trade, wages are fixed at the point where demand and supply are both satisfied. Enough labourers are employed to make the least valuable worth the required maintenance and no more. Now the economists, arguing from the phenomena they saw believed, with Malthus, that there was no decent supply price for labour in practice, that people would multiply to the very limit of subsistence. Hence they deduced the terrible doctrine of the Iron Law of Wages, that wages tend to a starvation level, because they thought first that food,⁷⁴ and afterwards that capital,⁷⁵ was fixed at any time, or increased very slowly. Finally, J. S. Mill taught that fluid capital or the Wages Fund, that famous centre of controversy, being fixed, the total capital available for wages had to be divided between an ever multiplying number of wage earners, some of whom were therefore always starving.

This treatment of Labour as governed by the same law of supply and demand as commodities, is the only way it can be treated as subject matter of a science dealing with the production, distribution and exchange of wealth. But no one would stop there, shutting his eyes to the fact that behind the labour stands the labourer, a human being, with all the spiritual and emotional gifts and needs of a man. Only military authority treats men so. Even an economist, writing on labour as a commodity, proceeds to explain how it differs from material commodities – how slow is its reaction on the side of supply – how high wages up to a point produce a still higher quality of labour, and so forth. Business management, also, is a commodity subject to the same law, but I have never heard that the General Managers of Railway Companies feel degraded for that reason to the mere level of slaves.

Unluckily the economists, influenced by the poverty that followed the last great war, which ended in 1815, concluded that the unskilled labourer would multiply till his children starved. They saw in fact starvation rampant in England.

This was why Political Economy was called by Carlyle the Dismal Science. But the economists were no more responsible for it than theologians are for the Judgment Day, perhaps much less so. Ruskin believed and hated the doctrine, and so, in fact, was an orthodox Millite. And both he and Mill had their remedies. Mill recommended education, emigration and small families. Ruskin appealed to the state or the gilds. In time Mill came to the same point of view, and died a Socialist. He was able to do this because he was persuaded by Thornton that the Wages Fund theory did not hold; that in fact workers produced their own wages, with the help of some capital to oil the wheels, that is, to fill the gap in time caused by distribution under the machinery of payment. This occurred in 1869 after Munera Pulveris had been published in Fraser’s Magazine in 1862 and 1863, but before it came out in book form in 1872; and it is grievous that these two men did not consciously co-operate. Ruskin’s method of controversy, possibly drove Mill to silence.

The central blast of Ruskin’s attack was against this – ultimately abandoned – doctrine of hopelessness. I do not mean that we may be quite cheerful about free competition in wages; for there are departments of labour so helpless that they cannot obtain a decently living wage.⁷⁶ To meet this, choice of employment is necessary, but cannot always be found for physically weak or mentally ill-qualified people. The nation has decided to carry out in specified trades the Ruskinian principle of the fixed living wage, enforced by the Sweated Industries Acts. Under these more and more trades may and will come. The economic storm of the war has broken down the equable course of free competition, and has caused regulation of wages and prices on all sides. We must not speak as if this were a normal development either of socialism or of competition. We have suffered under it as part of the evil of war. The benefits of competition require time, and a fair field for all forces. There will still be much done by provision of alternative employment on the land, by the investment of capital in developing local industries, and indirectly, by housing, education and temperance reform, to diminish the remnant of the helpless victims of sweating. Behind these the nation will probably soon stand, committed to a national minimum in wages and in hours. Above these government minima stand the various Trades Union fixed rules. All are Ruskinian,⁷⁷ and Mill would rejoice in them too.

A generation ago a national minimum wage had the support of Socialists of the school of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and of J. A. Hobson.⁷⁸ For a long time it was not orthodox. I remember hearing a Professor of Political Economy speaking on this subject twice, at an interval of about ten years. The first time he summed up against it, pointing out how a minimum tended, in Australian experience, to become a maximum, with certificates of invalidism or incapacity easily obtainable to authorize a lower wage. The second time he was for a minimum wage, as what progressive thinkers hoped for. The steps have, of late, become rapid. Miners had their wages fixed by the Government after the Coal Strike of 1912, and again, after the Sankey Commission in 1919. The Railway and Transport Workers are also under Government protection. An international Labour Charter is part of the Peace of Versailles, which must lead to an international minimum. It will be a delicate undertaking to work it out with any completeness. Within a nation the cost of living varies from place to place; the value of money rises and falls as general prices fall or rise. Internationally, between San Francisco, New York, London, Constantinople, and Yokohama, the differences forbid uniformity of wage. Nobody can compel an employer to employ anybody whose work results in no profit. Some people exist who are not worth a minimum wage, unless it is too low to be acceptable. There will have to be provision for these. Pensions for Old Age and invalidity will assume larger proportions. The race will have to worry out this complex tangle of man with his environment. What is clear is that we have reached the Ruskinian standpoint about it.