Essays on political economy : being a sequel to papers which appeared in the 'Cornhill Magazine' / by John Ruskin.

  • John Ruskin
Date:
1862[-1863]
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Essays on political economy : being a sequel to papers which appeared in the 'Cornhill Magazine' / by John Ruskin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    This Epitaph or That. 1863.] a moment’s breath, at the peril of his breath for ever, from amidst the cities which you have crushed into masses of corruption. When you know how to build cities, and how to rule them, you will be able to breathe in their streets, and the ‘excursion’ will be the afternoon’s walk or game in the fields round them. Long ago, Claudian’s peasant of Verona knew, and we must yet learn, in his fasliion, the difference between via and vita. ‘ But nothing of this work will pay?’ No; no more than it pays to dust your rooms, or wasli your doorsteps. It will pay; not at first in currency, but in that which is the end and the source of currency,—in life; (and in currency richly afterwards). It will pay in that which is more than life,—in ‘ God’s first creature, winch was light,’ whose true price has not yet been reckoned in any currency, and yet into the image of which all wealth, one way or other, must be cast. For your riches must either be as tho lightning, which, begot but in a cloud, Though shining bright, and speaking loud, Whilst it begins, concludes its violent race ; And, where it gilds, it wounds the place; or else as tho lightning of the sacred sign, which shines from one part of the heaven to tho other. There is no other choice; you must either take dust for deity, spectre for pos- session, fettered dream for life, and for epitaph, this reversed verse of the great Hebrew hymn of economy (Psalm cxii.):—‘ He hath gathered together, he hath stripped the poor, his iniquity remaineth for ever.’ Or else, having the sun of justice to shine on you, and the sincere substance of good in your posses- sion, and the pure law and liberty of life within you, leave men to write this better legend over your grave:— ■ He hath dispersed abroad. He hath given to the poor. His right- eousness remaineth for ever.’ The present paper completes the definitions necessary for future service. The next in order will be the first chapter of the body of the work. These introductory essays are as yet in imperfect form; I suffer them to appear, though they were not intended for immediate publication, for the sake of such chance service as may be found in them. But hoping afterwards to enlarge and illustrate them with fuller notes, I have too much spared at present the labour, always very irksome to me, of press correction; some amusing arrangements of type have resulted, such as the rare Greek metre in which Xenophon —sent as I thought in unmistakeable manuscript, but without sufficient warning of his prosaic character—appears in p. 268. ‘ Phantasm, or of wealth,’ for ‘ or phantasm of wealth,’ in the second column of the same page; ‘ learning’ for ‘ leaning,’ said of fShylock’s speech, p. 754; ‘toecarien’ for ‘ soccorrien,’ p. 749; (I forgot to compare Virgil’s ‘qua: maxima turba’ with Dante’s ‘ gente troppa,’ quoted just before;) and ‘ avayintvou ’ for ‘ wvofxaKfvai,' p. 755, are perhaps worth note for correction. ‘ Taking daguerreotypes,’ instead of ‘ daguerreotyping,’ in p. 745, line 2 from bottom, will make the sentence grammar ; and I ought to have written * drachma ’ instead of ‘ stater ’ two lines before; for though Aristophanes, in the celebrated passage of the Clouds, which best illus- trates the point in question, speaks of gold, the Attic silver was the true standard when the state was prospering. The first note in p. 755 is misplaced ; it belongs to the tenth line from the bottom of the second column in that page; and it requires a word or two in further illustration. The derivation of words is like that of rivers; there is one real source, usually small, unlikely, and difficult to find, far up among the hills ; then, as the word flows on and comes into service, it takes in the force of other words from other sources, and becomes itself quite another word—even more than one word, after the junction—a word as it were of many waters, sometimes both sweet and bitter. Thus the whole force of our English ‘charity’ depends on the guttural in ‘charis’ getting confused with the c of the Latin ‘carus;’ thenceforward throughout the middle ages, the two ideas ran on together, and both got confused with St. Paul’s aydir-rj. which expresses a different idea in all sorts of ways; our ‘ charity ’ having not only brought in the entirely foreign sense of almsgiving, but lost the essential sense of contentment, and lost much more in getting too far away from the ‘ charis ’ of the final Gospel benedictions. Por truly it is fine Christianity we have come to, which professing to expect the perpetual grace of its rounder, has not itself grace enough to save it from overreaching its friends in sixpenny bargains; and which, supplicating evening and morning the forgiveness of its own debts,