MR. RUSKIN'S SOCIAL THEORIES.•
TN the remote days when Modern Painters revealed to England a new literary star on her horizon, Mr. Ruskin was considered primarily as an art critic and as the voice of the rising Pre-
raphaelite school. But of recent years the purely artistic criticism of Mr. Ruskin has given way to what Matthew Arnold would have called a "criticism of life," the artist being blended with, but subordinated to, the ethical re- former. Stones of Venice represented in a very powerful and attractive way this aspect of Mr. Ruskin's work, and what- ever criticism we may make of it, there is no doubt that it remains a source of inspiration and moral power. But Mr.
Ruskin found ethics so closely associated with the work of men's hands, so intimately united with the material con- ditions of life, that he was led to examine the bases of the so-called orthodox economics with a view of discovering whether the accepted doctrines were based on right reason, and whether they led to healthy moral results. He found, as a result of his critical analysis, that they were not so based, and that their moral effects were not generally beneficent. When we recollect that Mazzini declared that Mr. Ruskin possessed the greatest analytic power in Europe, this attitude of his, expressed most fully in Unto this Last, Munera Pulveris, and Fors Clavigera, should have met with respectful treatment even on the part of the most adverse critics. But this was not the case, Mr. Ruskin being treated by those who were content merely to repeat parrot-like the accepted creed as a well-meaning but muddle-headed " crank." That was the notion entertained until about a dozen years ago, since when, however, the new Dictionary of Political Economy has con- sidered Mr. Ruskin's claims to be a serious economist as so valid that it has included a very appreciative article on him in its pages, while a quite important school of economics in America coincides very largely with some at any rate of Mr. Ruskin's fundamental views. We need not, therefore, be surprised when so trained and competent an economist as Mr. Hobson devotes a very thoughtful and interesting treatise to a patient analysis of what it is that Mr. Ruskin has really done in the direction of the solution of economic problems.
Every page in Mr. Hobson's work is worth reading; and whatever our views as to Mr. Ruskin's ideas, nobody can rise from a perusal of this volume without being the better for the study.
While he does not hesitate to criticise, Mr. Hobson in the main vindicates Mr. Ruskin's work as a social and ethical teacher ; and a passage in the preface strikes the leit-motif of the whole book :-
" Mr. Ruskin will rank as the greatest social teacher of his age.
not merely because he has told the las number of important truths upon the largest variety of vital matters, in language of penetrative force, but because he has made the most powerful and the most felicitous attempt to grasp and to express, as a comprehensive whole, the needs of a human society and the pro- cesses of social reform. To assert that he has attained or even approached complete success, either in his delineation of the
• John Ruskin: Soo:O. Reformer. By J. A. Hobron. Loeon : Semeis Nrebet and Co. [ 10s. 6d.] social ideal, or in his estimate of particular measures and more. meats of progress, would be to prefer a foolish claim. But it may be justly said that he has done more than any other En, lishman to compel people to realise the nature of the social problem in its wider related issues affecting every department of life and work, and to enforce the supreme moral obligation of confronting it."
This estimate of Mr. Ruskin's work our author attempts to justify by showing that the great writer has placed political economy on a sounder ethical and scientific foundation than it had before possessed. In doing this Mr. Hobson first defends Mr. Rnekin from the superficial charge of dabbling in matters of which he knew nothing. What did Ricardo or Mill know of factories and inventions ? But Mr. Ruskin had as a matter of fact, studied animal and vegetable life, the structure of the earth, the history of buildings, the growth of arts and handicraft, and a vast number of concrete attualities. Mr. Ruskin's primary indictment of the old economics is that, pretending to be a science, of wealth, it defines wealth as "utilities embodied in material objects" and possessing a money value. Mr. Ruskin devoted much of his work to showing that wealth is "wellbeing," and that it cannot be confined to certain objects measured by money. The old political economy (one may except Adam Smith himself from the charge, spite of the pounding and thumping of Smathianismus by the German Katheder-Sozialist school) had set up a subjective creation known as the "economic man," and had reasoned as to what this hypothetical person would do to ensure his own interests, avarice being a constant, and the social affections inconstant, elements. The latter are to be eliminated from the economic analysis, and men are to be treated as being mainly bent on accumulation. Therefore, contended Mr. Ruskin, the old political economy, while it may be a mere analytic treatment of individual wealth-production, is not, and cannot ever be, a treatment of the whole doctrine of social wellbeing, that is to say, it cannot be a political economy. Aristotle treated ethics, politics, and economics as a great whole, his object being to examine the true nature of a healthy society. This, too, is precisely the task of Mr. Ruskin, who will not allow that man is ever a mere riches. producing animal, or that he is made in a series of water- tight compartments, each of which can be studied absolutely regardless of all the others. That is the fundamental criticism Mr. Ruskin has made of the old Ricardian political economy. The old school had assumed, too, that as the riches-producing animal desired to accumulate, he equally desired to shun work, and to secure by speculation and one• sided bargaining the results of other people's work, as was undeniably the case in the early stages of modern industry. What, indeed, was slavery and the slave trade but an example of this assumed inherent tendency of the " economic man" in its worst form ? Ruskin held that work was proper and normal to man, but that its conditions must imply no mental, moral, or aesthetic degradation. Man was not merely a riches• producing animal, and he was not merely a machine, but human being, " looking before and after."
We can now see the real contribution which, according to his critic, Mr. Ruskin has made to political economy. He has related social efforts to social satisfactions; he has in- sisted on the expression of "cost" and " utility " in truly human terms, and has shown, as Mr. Hobson says, " that both the starting-point and the goal of economic activity is human life, and that all economic terms must be reduced to the standard not of money, but of man." In accomplishing this task, the value of which is recognised by our beet economic thinkers, Mr. Ruskin has fallen into some errors, upon which his critic dwells with much acumen. He has occasionally confused his terms, he has turned his face against some modern methods which, as the Americans say, have "come to stay," and he has misunderstood the function and economic justification of interest. But, in the main, the work of Mr. Ruskin in humanising political economy is in the true line of social progress, and the magnificent manner in which he has presented his theories to the world through the medium of a singularly noble, if not unblemished, style merits our heart- felt obligations. We may add that Mr. Hobson's work is much enriched by an account of the industrial experiments which Mr. Ruskin has encouraged and directed, and to whose furtherance he has made such munificent contributions.
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