Essay number one of Unto This Last. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Unto This Last, four essays on the first principles of political economy by John Ruskin. Essay number one, The Roots of Honor. Among the delusions which at different periods have possessed themselves of the minds of large masses of the human race, perhaps the most curious, certainly the least creditable, is the modern so-called science of political economy based on the idea that an advantageous code of social action may be determined irrespectively of the influence of social affection. Of course as in the instances of alchemy, astrology, witchcraft, and other such popular creeds, political economy has a plausible idea at the root of it. The social affections, says the economist, are accidental and disturbing elements in human nature. But avarice and desire of progress are constant elements. Let us eliminate the inconstance and considering the human being merely as a covetous machine, examined by what laws of labor, purchase, and sale the greatest accumulative results in wealth, is obtainable. Those laws once determined it will be for each individual afterwards to introduce as much of the disturbing affectionate element as he chooses, and to determine for himself the result on the new conditions supposed. This would be a perfectly logical and successful method of analysis if the accidentals afterwards to be introduced were of the same nature as the powers first examined. Supposing a body in motion to be influenced by constant and inconstant forces, it is usually the simplest body, it is usually the simplest way of examining its course to trace it first under the persistent conditions and afterwards introduce the causes of variation. But the disturbing elements in the social problem are not of the same nature as the constant ones, they alter the essence of the creature under examination. The moment they are added, they operate not mathematically but chemically introducing conditions which render all our previous knowledge unavailable. We made learned experiments upon pure nitrogen and have convinced ourselves that it is a very manageable gas, but behold the thing which we have practically to deal with is its chloride and this the moment we touch it on our established principles sends us and our apparatus through the ceiling. Observe I neither impune nor doubt the conclusion of the science if its terms are accepted. I am simply uninterested in them as I should be in those of a science of gymnastics which assumed that men had no skeletons. It might be shown on that supposition that it would be advantageous to roll the students up into pellets, flatten them into cakes or stretch them into cables, and that when these results were affected the reinsertion of the skeleton would be attended with various inconveniences to their constitution. The reasoning might be admirable, the conclusions true, and the science deficient only in applicability. Modern political economy stands on a precisely similar basis. Assuming not that the human being has no skeleton, but that it is all skeleton, it founds an ausfin theory of progress on this negation of soul, and having shown the utmost that may be made of bones and constructed a number of interesting geometrical figures with the death's head and humor eye, successfully proves the inconvenience of the reappearance of a soul among these corpuscular structures. I do not deny the truth of this theory, I simply deny its applicability to the present phase of the world. This inapplicability has been curiously manifested during the embarrassment caused by the late strikes of our workmen. Here occurs one of the simplest cases in a pertinent and positive form of the first vital problem which political economy has to deal with, the relation between employer and employed. And at a severe crisis when lives and multitudes and wealth and masses are at stake, the political economists are helpless, practically mute. No demonstrable solution of the difficulty can be given by them, such as may convince or calm the opposing parties. Obstinently, the masters take one view of the matter, obstinately, the operatives another, and no political science can set them at one. It would be strange if it could, it being not by science of any kind that men were ever intended to be set at one. Disputent after disputant, vainly strives to show that the interests of the masters are, or are not, antagonistic to those of the men. None of the pleaders ever seeming to remember that it does not absolutely, or always follow, that the person must be antagonistic because their interests are. If there is only a crust of bread in the house, and mother and children are starving, their interests are not the same. If the mother eats it, the children want it.  Yet it does not necessarily follow that there will be antagonism between them, that they will fight for the crust, and that the mother being strongest will get it and eat it. Neither, in any other case, whatever the relations of the person may be, can it be assumed for certain that because their interests are diverse, they must necessarily regard each other with hostility, and use violence or cunning to obtain the advantage. Even if this were so, and it were as just, as it is convenient to consider men as actuated by no other moral influences than those which affect rats or swine, the logical conditions of the question are still indeterminable. It can never be shown generally, either that the interests of master and labor are alike or that they are opposed, for according to circumstances they may be either. It is indeed always the interest of both that the work should be rightly done, and adjust price obtained for it. But in the division of profits, the gain of the one may or may not be the loss of the other. It is not the master's interest to pay wages so low, as to leave the men sickly and depressed, nor the workman's interest to be paid high wages if the smallness of the master's profit hinders him from enlarging his business or conducting it in a safe and liberal way. A stoker ought not to desire high pay if the company is too poor to keep the engine wheels and repair. And the varieties of circumstances which influence these reciprocal interests are so endless that all endeavor to deduce rules of action from balance of expediency is in vain. And it is meant to be in vain for no human actions were ever intended by the maker of men to be guided by balances of expediency, but by balances of justice. He has therefore rendered all endeavors to determine expediency futile forevermore. No man ever knew or can know what will be the ultimate result to himself or to others of any given line of conduct.  And all of us may know also that the consequences of justice will be ultimately the best possible, both to others and ourselves, though we can neither say what is best or how it is likely come to pass. I have said balances of justice meaning in the term justice to include affection, such affection as one man owes to another. All right relations between master and operative and all their best interests ultimately depend on these. We shall find the best and simplest illustration of the relations of master and operative in the position of domestic servants. We will suppose that the master of a household desires only to get as much work out of his servants as he can at the rate of wages he gives. He never allows them to be idle feeds them as poorly and lodges them as ill as they will endure. And in all things pushes his requirements to the exact point beyond which he cannot go without forcing the servant to leave him. In doing this, there is no violation on his part of what is commonly called justice. He agrees with the domestic for his whole time at service and takes them the limits of hardship in treatment being fixed by the practice of other masters in his neighborhood, that is to say by the current rate of wages for domestic labor. If the servant can get a better place, he is free to take one and the master can only tell what is the real market value of his labor by requiring as much as he will give. This is the political economical view of the case, according to the doctors of that science who assert that by this procedure, the greatest average of work will be obtained from the servant and therefore the greatest benefit to the community and through the community by reversion to the servant himself. That, however, is not so. It would be so if the servant were an engine of which the motive power was steam, magnetism, gravitation, or any other agent of calculable force. But he being on the contrary, an engine whose motive power is a soul, the force of this very peculiar agent as an unknown quantity enters into all the political economists equations without his knowledge and falsifies every one of their results. The largest quantity of work will not be done by this curious engine for pay or under pressure or by help of any kind of fuel which may be supplied by the cauldron. It will be done only when the motive force that is to say the will or spirit of the creature is brought to its greatest strength by its own proper fuel, namely by the affections. It may indeed happen and does happen often that if the master is a man of sense and energy, a large quantity of material work may be done under mechanical pressure enforced by strong will and guided by wise method. Also it may happen and does happen often that if the master is indolent and weak, however good-natured, a very small quantity of work and that bad may be produced by the servant's undirected strength and contemptuous gratitude. But the universal law of the matter is that assuming any given quantity of energy and sense in master and servant, the greatest material result obtainable by them will be not through antagonism to each other, but through affection for each other, and that if the master instead of endeavoring to get as much work as possible from the servant seeks rather to render his appointed and necessary work beneficial to him and to forward his interests in all just and wholesome ways, the real amount of work ultimately done, or of good rendered, by the person so cared for will indeed be the greatest possible. Observe, I say, of good rendered, for a servant's work is not necessarily or always the best thing he can give his master. But good of all kinds, whether in material service, in protective watchfulness of master's interest and credit, or in joyful readiness to seize unexpected and irregular occasions of help. Nor is this one wit less generally true because indulgence will be frequently abused and kindness met with ingratitude, for the servant who gently treated is ungrateful, treated urgently, will be revengeful, and the man who is dishonest to a liberal master will be injurious to an unjust one. In any case, and with any person, this unselfish treatment will produce the most effective return. Observe, I am here considering the affections wholly as a mode of power, not at all as things in themselves desirable or noble, or in any other way abstractly good. I look at them simply as an anomalous force, rendering every one of the ordinary political economists, calculations nougatory. While, even if he desired to introduce this new element into his estimates, he has no power of dealing with it. For the affections only become a true mode of power when they ignore every other motive and condition of political economy. Treat the servant kindly with the idea of turning his gratitude to account, and you will get, as you deserve, no gratitude nor any value for your kindness, but treat him kindly without any economical purpose, and all economical purposes will be answered. In this, as in other matters, whosoever will save his life shall lose it. Who loses it shall find it. Note one, the difference between the two modes of treatment, and between their effective material results, may be seen very accurately by a comparison of the relations of Esther and Charlie in Bleak House, with those of Miss Brass and Marchioness in Master Humphrey's Clock. The essential value and truth of Dickens' writings have been unwisely lost sight of by many thoughtful persons, merely because he presents his truth with some color of caricature. Unwisely because Dickens' caricature, though often gross, is never mistaken, allowing for this manner of telling them the things he tells us are always true. I wish that he could think it right to limit his brilliant exaggeration to works written only for public amusement, and when he takes up a subject of high national importance, such as which he handled in hard times, that he would use severe and more accurate analysis. The usefulness of that work, to my mind, in several respects the greatest he has written, is with many persons seriously diminished because Mr. Boundary is a dramatic monster instead of a characteristic example of a worldly master, and Stephen Blackpool a dramatic perfection instead of a characteristic example of an honest workman. But let us not lose the use of Dickens' wit and insight because he chooses to speak in a circle of stage fire. He is entirely right in his main drift and purpose in every book he's written, and all of them, but especially hard times, should be studied with close and earnest care by persons interested in social questions. They will find much that is partial, and because partial apparently unjust. But if they examine all the evidence on the other side which Dickens seems to overlook, it will appear after all their trouble that his view was finally the right one, grossly and sharply told. End of note one. The next clearest and simplest example of relation between master and operative is that which exists between the commander of a regiment and his men. Supposing the officer only desires to apply the rules of discipline so as with least trouble to himself to make the regiment most effective he will not be able by any rules or administration of rules on this selfish principle to develop the full strength of his subordinates. If a man of sense and firmness he may as the former instance produce a better result than would be obtained by the irregular kindnesses of a weak officer, but let the sense and firmness be the same in both cases and assuredly the officer who has the most direct personal relations with his men, the most care for their interests, and the most value for their lives will develop their effective strength through their affection for his own purpose and trust in his character to a degree wholly unattainable by other means. This law applies still more stringently as the numbers concerned are larger. A charge may often be successful, though the men dislike their officers. A battle has rarely been won unless they love their general. Passing from these simple examples to the more complicated relations existing between a manufacturer and his workman we are met first by certain curious difficulties resulting apparently from a harder and colder state of moral elements. It is easy to imagine an enthusiastic affection existing among soldiers for the colonel. Not so easy to imagine an enthusiastic affection among cotton spinners for the proprietor of the mill. A body of man associated for purposes of robbery, as a highland clan in ancient times, shall be animated by perfect affection, and every member of it be ready to lay down his life for the life of his chief. But a band of men associated for purposes of legal production and accumulation is usually animated, it appears, by no such emotions, and none of them are an anywise willing to give his life for the life of his chief. Not only are we met by this apparent anomaly in moral matters, but by others connected with it in administration of system. For a servant or a soldier is engaged at a definite rate of wages for a definite period, but a workman at a rate of wages variable according to the demand for labor, and with the risk of being at any time thrown out of his situation by chance of trade. Now as under these contingencies no action of the affections can take place, but only an explosive action of disaffections, two points, offer themselves for consideration in the matter. The first, how far the rate of wages may be so regulated as not to vary with the demand for labor. The second, how far it is possible that bodies of workmen may be engaged and maintained at such fixed rate of wages, whatever the state of trade may be, without enlarging or diminishing their number, so as to give them permanent interest in the establishment with which they are connected, like that of the domestic servants in an old family, or an esprit de corps, like that of the soldiers in a crack regiment. The first question is, I say, how far it may be possible to fix the rate of wages irrespectively of demand for labor. Perhaps one of the most curious facts in the history of human error is the denial by the common political economists of the possibility of thus regulating wages, while for all the important and much of the unimportant labor on earth wages are already so regulated. We do not sell our prime ministership by Dutch auction nor on the decease of a bishop, whatever may be the general advantages of simony, do we yet offer his diocese to the clergymen who will take the episcopacy at the lowest contract. We, with exquisite sagacity of political economy, do indeed sell commissions, but not openly, general ships. Sick, we do not inquire for a physician who takes less than a guinea. Litigious, we never think of reducing six and eight pence to four and six pence. Caught in a shower, we do not canvass the cabman, to find one who values his driving at less than six pence mile. It is true that in all these cases there is, and in every conceivable case there must be, ultimate reference to the presumed difficulty of the work, or number of candidates for the office. If it were thought that the labor necessary to make a good physician would be gone through by a sufficient number of students with the prospect of only a half guinea fees, public consent would soon withdraw the unnecessary half guinea. In this ultimate sense the price of labor is indeed always regulated by the demand for it, but so far as the practical and immediate administration of the matter is regarded the best labor always has been, and is, as all labor ought to be, paid by an invariable standard. What, the reader perhaps answers amazingly, pay good and bad workmen alike? Certainly. The difference between one's prelates sermons and his successors, or between one physician's opinion and another's, is far greater as respects the qualities of mind involved, and far more important in result to you personally than the difference between good and bad laying of bricks, though that is greater than most people suppose. Yet you pay with equal fee contentedly the good and the bad workmen upon your soul, and the good and bad workmen upon your body. Much more may you pay contentedly with equal fees the good and bad workmen upon your house. Nay, but I choose my physician and my clergyman, thus indicating my sense of the quality of their work. By all means, also choose your bricklayer. That is the proper reward of the good workmen to be chosen. The natural and right system respecting all labor is that it should be paid at a fixed rate, but the good workmen employed and the bad workmen unemployed. The false unnatural and destructive system is when the bad workmen is allowed to offer his work at half price, and either take the place of the good or force him by his competition to work for an inadequate sum. This equality of wages then, being the first object toward which we have to discover the directest available road. The second is, as above stated, that of maintaining constant numbers of workmen in employment. Whatever may be the accidental demand for the article they produce. I believe the sudden and extensive inequalities of demand, which necessarily arise in the mercantile operations of an active nation, constitute the only essential difficulty which has to be overcome in a just organization of labor. The subject opens into too many branches to admit of being investigated in a paper of this kind, but the following general facts bearing on it may be noted. The wages which enable any workmen to live are necessarily higher if his work is liable to intermission than if it is assured and continuous. And however severe the struggle for work may become, the general law will always hold that men must get more daily pay if, on the average, they can only calculate on work three days a week, then they would require, if they were, sure of work six days a week. Supposing that a man cannot live on less than a shilling a day, his seven shillings he must get, either for three days violent work or six days deliberate work. The tendency of all modern mercantile operations is to throw both wages and trade into the form of the lottery, and to make the workmen's pay depend on intermittent exertion and the principal's profit on dexterously used chance. In what partial degree I repeat this may be necessary in consequence of the activities of modern trade, I do not hear investigate, contending myself with the fact that in its fatalist aspects it is assuredly unnecessary and results merely from love of gambling on the part of the masters and from ignorance and sensuality in the men. The masters cannot bear to let any opportunity of gain escape them and frantically rush at every gap and breach in the walls of fortune, raging to be rich and affronting with impatient covetousness every risk of ruin, while the men prefer three days violent labor and three days of drunkenness to six days of moderate work and wise rest. There is no way in which a principal who really desires to help his workmen may do it more effectually than by checking these disorderly habits both in himself and them. Keeping his own business operations on a scale which will enable him to pursue them securely not yielding to temptations of precarious gain and at the same time leading his workmen into regular habits of labor and life, either by inducing them rather to take low wages in the form of fixed salary than high wages. Subject to the chance of there being thrown out of work or if this be impossible by discouraging the system of violent exertion for nominally high day wages and leading the men to take lower pay for more regular labor. In effecting any radical changes of this kind doubtless there would be great inconvenience and loss incurred by all the originators of a movement. That which can be done with perfect convenience and without loss is not always the thing that most needs to be done or which we are most imperatively required to do. I have already alluded to the difference hitherto existing between regiments of men associated for purposes of violence and for purposes of manufacture in that the former appear capable of self- sacrifice the latter not which singular fact is the real reason of the general loneness of estimate in which the profession of commerce is held as compared with that of arms. Philosophically it does not at first sight appear reasonable many writers have endeavored to prove it unreasonable that a peaceable and rational person whose trade is buying and selling should be held in less honor than an unpeaceable and often irrational person whose trade is slaying. Nevertheless the consent of mankind has always in spite of the philosophers given precedence to the soldier and this is right. For the soldier's trade verily and essentially is not slaying but being slain this without well knowing its own meaning the world honors it for. A bravo's trade is slaying but the world has never respected bravos more than merchants the reason it honors the soldier is because he holds his life at the service of the state reckless he may be fond of pleasure or adventure all kinds of bimotives and mean impulses may have determined the choice of his profession and may affect to all appearance exclusively his daily conduct in it but our estimate of him is based on this ultimate fact of which we are well assured that put him in a fortress breach with all the pleasures of the world behind him and only death and his duty in front of him he will keep his face to the front and he knows that his choice may be put to him at any moment and has beforehand taken his part virtually takes such part continually does in reality die daily not less is the respect we pay to the lawyer and physician founded ultimately on their self-sacrifice whatever the learning or acuteness of a great lawyer our chief respect for him depends on our belief that set in a judge's seat he will strive to judge justly come of it what may could we suppose that he would take bribes and use his acuteness and legal knowledge to give plausibility to iniquitous decisions no degree of intellect would win for him our respect nothing will win it short of our tacit conviction that in all important acts of his life justice is first with him his own interest second in the case of a physician the ground of the honor we render him is clear still whatever his science we would shrink from him in horror if we found him regard his patients merely as all subjects to experiment upon much more if we found that receiving bribes from persons interested in their deaths he was using his best skill to give poison in the mask of medicine finally the principle holds with utmost clearness as it respects clergyman no goodness of disposition will excuse want of science in a physician or shrewdness in an advocate but a clergyman even though his power of intellect be small is respected on the presumed ground of his unselfishness and serviceableness now there can be no question that the tact foresight decision and other mental powers required for the successful management of a large mercantile concern if not such as could be compared with those of a great lawyer general or divine would at least match the general conditions of mind required in the subordinate officers of a ship or of a regiment or in the curate of a country parish if therefore all the efficient members of the so-called liberal professions are still somehow in public estimate of honor preferred before the head of a commercial firm the reason must lie deeper than in the measurement of their several powers of mind and the essential reason for such preference will be found to lie in the fact that the merchant is presumed to act always selfishly his work may be very necessary to the community but the motive of it is understood to be wholly personal the merchant's first object in all his dealings must be the public believe to get as much for himself and leave as little to his neighbor or customer as possible enforcing this upon him by political statute as the necessary principle of his action recommending it to him on all occasions and themselves reciprocally adopting it proclaiming vociferously for law of the universe that a buyer's function is to cheapen and a seller's to cheat the public nevertheless involuntarily condemn the man of commerce for his compliance with their own statement and stamp him forever is belonging to an inferior grade of human personality this they will find eventually they must give up doing they must not cease to condemn selfishness but they will have to discover a kind of commerce which is not exclusively selfish or rather they will have to discover that there never was or can be any other kind of commerce that this which they have called commerce was not commerce at all but cozening and that a true merchant differs as much from a merchant according to laws of modern political economy as the hero of the excursion from otolikus they will find that commerce is an occupation which gentlemen will every day see more need to engage in rather than in the business of talking to men or slaying them that in true commerce as in true preaching or true fighting it is necessary to admit the idea of occasional voluntary loss that six pence's have to be lost as well as lives under the sense of duty that the market may have its martyrdoms as well as the pulpit and trade its heroisms as well as war may have in the final issue must have and only has not had yet because men of heroic temper have always been misguided in their youth into other fields not recognizing what is in our days perhaps the most important of all fields so that while many a jealous person loses his life in trying to teach the form of a gospel very few will lose a hundred pounds in showing the practice of one the fact is that people never have had clearly explained to them the true functions of a merchant with respect to other people I should like the reader to be very clear about this five great intellectual professions relating to daily necessities of life have hitherto existed three exist necessarily in every civilized nation the soldier's profession is to defend it the pastors to teach it the physicians to keep it in health the lawyers to enforce justice in it the merchants to provide for it and the duty of all these men is on due occasion to die for it on due occasion namely the soldier rather than leave his post in battle the physician rather than leave his post in plague the pastor rather than teach falsehood the lawyer rather than countenance injustice the merchant what is his due occasion of death it is the main question for the merchant as for all of us for truly the man who does not know when to die does not know how to live observe the merchant's function or manufacturers for in a broad sense in which it is here used the word must be understood to include both is to provide for the nation it is no more his function to get profit for himself out of that provision than it is a clergyman's function to get his stipend this stipend is a due and necessary adjunct but not the object of his life if he be a true clergyman any more than his fee or honorarium is the object of life to a true physician neither is his fee the object of life to a true merchant all three if true men have a work to be done irrespective of fee to be done even at any cost or for quite the contrary of fee the pastor's function being to teach the physicians to heal and the merchants as I have said to provide that is to say he has to understand to their very root the qualities of the thing he deals in and the means of obtaining or producing it and he has to apply all his sagacity and energy to the producing or obtaining it in perfect state and distributing it at the cheapest possible price where it is most needed and because the production or obtaining of any commodity involves necessarily the agency of many lives and hands the merchant becomes in the course of his business the master and governor of large masses of men in a more direct though less confessed way than a military officer or pastor so that on him falls in great part the responsibility for the kind of life they lead and it becomes his duty not only to be always considering how to produce what he sells in the purest and cheapest forms but how to make the various employments involved in the production or transference of it most beneficial to the men employed and as into these two functions requiring for their right exercise the highest intelligence as well as patience kindness and tact the merchant is bound to put all his energy so for their just discharge he is bound as soldier or physician is bound to give up if need be his life in such a way as it may be demanded of him two main points he has in his providing function to maintain first his engagements faithfulness to engagements being the real root of all possibilities in commerce and secondly the perfectness and purity of the thing provided so that rather than fail in any engagement or consent to any deterioration adulteration or unjust and exorbitant price of that which he provides he is bound to meet furiously any form of distress poverty or labor which may through maintenance of these points come upon him again in his office as governor of the man employed by him the merchant or manufacturer is invested with a distinctly paternal authority and responsibility in most cases a youth entering a commercial establishment is withdrawn altogether from home influence his master must become his father else he has for practical and constant help no father at hand in all cases the master's authority together with the general tone and atmosphere of his business and the character of the man with whom the youth is compelled in the course of it to associate have more immediate and pressing weight than the home influence and will usually neutralize it either for good or evil so that the only means which the master has of doing justice to the man employed by him is to ask himself sternly whether he is dealing with such subordinate as he would with his own son if compelled by circumstances to take such a position supposing the captain of a frigate saw it right or were by any chance obliged to place his own son in the position of a common sailor as he would then treat his son he is bound always to treat every one of the men under him so also supposing the master of a manufacturing saw it right or were by any chance obliged to place his own son in the position of an ordinary workman as he would then treat his son he is bound always to treat every one of his men this is the only effective true or practical rule which can be given on this point of political economy and as the captain of a ship is bound to be the last man to leave his ship in case of wreck and to share his last crust with the sailors in case of famine so the manufacturer in any commercial crisis or distress is bound to take the suffering of it with his men and even to take more of it for himself than he allows his men to feel as a father would in a famine shipwreck or battle sacrifice himself for his son all which sounds very strange the only real strangeness in the matter being nevertheless that it should so sound for all this is true and that not partially nor theoretically but everlastingly and practically all other doctrine than this respecting matters political being false impremises absurd in deduction and impossible in practice consistently with any progressive state of national life all the life which we now possess as a nation showing itself in the resolute denial and scorn by a few strong minds and faithful hearts of the economic principles taught to our multitudes which principles so far as accepted lead straight to national destruction respecting the modes and forms of destruction to which they lead and on the other hand respecting the further practical working of true polity I hope to reason farther in a following paper end of essay one unto this last essay two of unto this last this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer visit LibriVox.org this reading by Karl Manchester 2007 unto this last four essays on the first principles of political economy by John Ruskin essay two the veins of wealth the answer which would be made by any ordinary political economist to the statements contained in the preceding paper is in few words as follows quote it is indeed true that certain advantages of a general nature may be obtained by the development of social affections but political economists never professed nor professed to take advantages of a general nature into consideration our science is simply the science of getting rich so far from being a fallacious or visionary one it is found by experience to be practically effective persons who follow its precepts do actually become rich and persons who disobey them become poor every capitalist of Europe has acquired his fortune by following the known laws of our science and increases his capital daily by an adherence to them it is vain to bring forward tricks of logic against the force of accomplished facts every man of business knows by experience how money is made and how it is lost end quote pardon me men of business do indeed know how they themselves made their money or how on occasion they lost it playing a long-practiced game they are familiar with the chances of its cards and can rightly explain their losses and gains but they neither know who keeps the bank of the gambling house nor what other games may be played with the same cards nor what other losses and gains far away among the dark streets are essentially though invisibly dependent on theirs in the lighted rooms they have learned a few and only a few of the laws of mercantile economy but not one of those of political economy primarily which is very notable and curious I observe that men of business rarely know the meaning of the word rich at least if they know they do not in their reasonings allow for the fact that it 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 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 economists sense is therefore equally and necessarily the art of keeping your neighbour poor I would not contend in this matter and rarely in any matter for the acceptance of terms but I wish the reader clearly and deeply to understand the difference between the two economies to which the terms political and mercantile might not unadvisedly be attached 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 her 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 but mercantile economy the economy of mercus or of pay signifies the accumulation in the hands of individuals of legal or moral claim upon or power over the labour of others every such claim implying precisely as much poverty or debt on one side as it implies riches or right on the other it does not therefore necessarily involve an addition to the actual property or well-being of the state in which it exists but since this commercial wealth or power over labour is nearly always convertible at once into real property while real property is not always convertible at once into power over labour the idea of riches among active men in civilised nations generally refers to commercial wealth and in estimating their possessions they rather calculate the value of their horses and fields by the number of guineas they could get for them than the value of their guineas by the number of horses and fields they could buy with them there is however another reason for this habit of mind namely that an accumulation of real property is of little use to its owner unless together with it he has commercial power over labour thus suppose any person to be put in possession of a larger state of fruitful land with rich beds of gold in its gravel countless herds of cattle in its pastures houses and gardens and storehouses full of useful stores but suppose after all that he could get no servants in order that he may be able to have servants someone in his neighbourhood must be poor and in want of gold or his corn assume that no one is in want of either and that no servants are to be had he must therefore bake his own bread make his own clothes plow his own ground and shepherd his own flocks his gold will be as useful to him as any other yellow pebbles on his estate his stores must rot for he cannot consume them he can eat no more than another man could eat and wear no more than another man could wear he must lead a life of severe and common labour to procure even ordinary comforts he will be ultimately unable to keep either houses in repair or fields in cultivation and forced to content himself with the poor man's portion of cottage and garden in the midst of a desert of wasteland trampled by wild cattle and encumbered by ruins of palaces which he will hardly mock at himself by calling his own the most covetous of mankind would with small exultation I presume accept riches of this kind on these terms what is really desired under the name of riches is essentially power over men in its simplest sense the power of obtaining for our own advantage the labour of servant tradesmen and artist in wider sense authority of directing large masses of the nation to various ends good trivial or hurtful according to the mind of the rich person and this power of wealth of course is greater or less in direct proportion to the poverty of the men over whom it is exercised and in inverse proportion to the number of persons who are as rich as ourselves and who are ready to give the same price for an article of which the supply is limited if the musician is poor he will sing for small pay as long as there is only one person who can pay him but if there be two or three he will sing for the one who offers him the most and thus the power of the riches of the patron always imperfect and doubtful as we shall see presently even when most authoritative depends first on the poverty of the artist and then on the limitation of the number of equally wealthy persons who also want seats at the concert so that as above stated the art of becoming rich in the common sense is not absolutely or finally the art of accumulating much money for ourselves but also of contriving that our neighbours shall have less in accurate terms it is the art of establishing the maximum inequality in our own favour now the establishment of such inequality cannot be shown in the abstract to be either advantageous or disadvantageous to the body of the nation the rash and absurd assumption that such inequalities are necessarily advantageous lies at the root of most of the popular fallacies on the subject of political economy for the eternal and inevitable law in this matter is that the beneficialness of the inequality depends first on the methods by which it was accomplished and secondly on the purposes to which it is applied inequalities of wealth unjustly established have assuredly injured the nation in which they exist during their establishment and unjustly directed injure it yet more during their existence but inequalities of wealth justly established benefit the nation in the course of their establishment and nobly used aid it yet more by their existence that is to say among every active and well-governed people the various strengths of individuals tested by full exertion and specially applied to various need issues in unequal but harmonious results receiving reward or authority according to its class and service footnote I have been naturally asked several times with respect to the sentence in the first of these papers quote the bad workman unemployed end quote but what are you to do with your bad unemployed workman well it seems to me that the question might have occurred to you before your housemaid's place is vacant you give 20 pounds a year two girls come for it one neatly dressed the other dirtily one with good recommendations the other with none you do not under these circumstances usually ask the dirty one if she will come for 15 pounds or 12 and on her consenting take her instead of the well-recommended one still less do you try to beat both down by making them bid against each other till you can hire both one at 12 pounds a year and the other at eight you simply take the one fittest for the place and send away the other not perhaps concerning yourself quite as much as you should with the question which you now impatiently put to me what is to become of her for all that I advise you to do is to deal with workmen as with servants and verily the question is of weight your bad workman idler and rogue what are you to do with him we will consider of this presently remember that the administration of a complete system of national commerce and industry cannot be explained in full detail within the space of 12 pages meantime consider whether there being confessedly some difficulty in dealing with rogues and idlers it may not be advisable to produce as few of them as possible if you examine into the history of rogues you will find that they are as truly manufactured articles as anything else and it is just because our present system of political economy gives so large a stimulus to that manufacture that you may not know it to be a false one we had better seek for a system which will develop honest men than for one which will deal cunningly with vagabonds let us reform our schools and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons end footnote while in the active or ill governed nation the gradations of decay and the victories of treason work out also their own rugged system of subjection and success and substitute for the melodious inequalities of concurrent power the iniquitous dominances and depressions of guilt and misfortune thus the circulation of wealth in a nation resembles that of the blood in the natural body there is one quickness of the current which comes of cheerful emotion or wholesome exercise and another which comes of shame or a fever there is a flush of the body which is full of warmth and life and another which will pass into putrefaction the analogy will hold down even to minute particulars for as diseased local determination of the blood involves depression of the general health of the system all morbid local action of riches will be found ultimately to involve a weakening of the resources of the body politic the mode in which this is produced may be at once understood by examining one or two instances of the development of wealth in the simplest possible circumstances suppose two sailors cast away on an uninhabited coast and obliged to maintain themselves there by their own labour for a series of years if they both kept their health and worked steadily and in amity with each other they might build themselves a convenient house and in time come to possess a certain quantity of cultivated land together with various stores laid up for future use all these things would be real riches or property and supposing the men both to have worked equally hard they would each have right to equal share or use of it their political economy would consist merely in careful preservation and just division of these possessions perhaps however after some time one or the other might be dissatisfied with the results of their common farming and they might in consequence agree to divide the land they had brought under the spade into equal shares so that each might thenceforth work in his own field and live by it suppose that after this arrangement had been made one of them were to fall ill and be unable to work on his land at a critical time say of sowing or harvest he would naturally ask the other to sow or reap for him then his companion might say with perfect justice I will do this additional work for you but if I do it you must promise to do as much for me at another time I will count how many hours I spend on your ground and you shall give me a written promise to work for the same number of hours on mine whenever I need your help and you are able to give it suppose the disabled man's sickness to continue and that under various circumstances for several years requiring the help of the other he on each occasion gave a written pledge to work as soon as he was able at his companion's orders for the same number of hours which the other had given up to him what will the position of the two men be when the invalid is able to resume work considered as a polis or state they will be poorer than they would have been otherwise poorer by the withdrawal of what the sick man's labour would have produced in the interval his friend may perhaps have toiled with energy quickened by the enlarged need but in the end his own land and property must have suffered by the withdrawal of so much of his time and thought from them and the united property of the two men will be certainly less than it would have been if both had remained in health and activity but the relations in which they stand to each other are also widely altered the sick man has not only pledged his labour for some years but will probably have exhausted his own share of the accumulated stores and will be in consequence for some time dependent on the other for food which he can only pay or reward him for by yet more deeply pledging his own labour supposing the written promises to be held entirely valid among civilised nations their validity is secured by legal measures footnote the disputes which exist respecting the real nature of money arise more from the disputants examining its functions on different sides than from any real dissent in their opinions all money properly so called is an acknowledgement of debt but as such it may be either considered to represent the labour and property of the creditor or the idleness and penury of the debtor the intricacy of the question has been much increased by the hitherto unnecessary use of marketable commodities such as gold, silver, salt, shells etc to give intrinsic value or security to currency but the final and best definition of money is that it is a documentary promise ratified and guaranteed by the nation to give or find a certain quantity of labour on demand a man's labour for a day is a better standard of value than a measure of any produce because no produce ever maintains a consistent rate of productivity end footnote the person who had hitherto worked for both might now if he chooses rest altogether and pass his time in idleness not only forcing his companion to redeem all the engagements he had already entered into but exacting from him pledges for further labour to an arbitrary amount for what food he had to advance to him there might not from first to last be the least illegality in the ordinary sense of the word in the arrangement but if a stranger arrived on the coast at this advanced epoch of their political economy he would find one man commercially rich the other commercially poor he would see perhaps with no small surprise one passing his days in idleness the other labouring for both and living sparely in the hope of recovering his independence at some distant period this is of course an example of only one out of many ways in which inequality of possession may be established between different persons giving rise to the mercantile forms of riches and poverty in the instance before us one of the men might from the first have deliberately chosen to be idle and to put his life in porn for present ease or he might have mismanaged his land and been compelled to have recourse to his neighbour for food and help pledging his future labour for it but what I want the reader to note especially is the fact common to a large number of typical cases of this kind that the establishment of the mercantile wealth which consists in a claim upon labour signifies a political diminution of the real wealth which consists in substantial possessions take another example more consistent with the ordinary course of affairs of trade suppose that three men instead of two formed the little isolated republic and found themselves obliged to separate in order to farm different pieces of land at some distance from each other along the coast each estate furnishing a distinct kind of produce and each more or less in need of the material raised on the other suppose that the third man in order to save the time of all three undertakes simply to superintend the transference of commodities from one farm to the other on condition of receiving some sufficiently remunerative share of every parcel of goods conveyed or of some other parcel received in exchange for it if this carrier or messenger always brings to each estate from the other what is chiefly wanted at the right time the operations of the two farmers will go on prosperously and the largest possible result in produce or wealth will be attained by the little community but suppose no intercourse between the landowners is possible except through the traveling agent and that after a time this agent watching the course of each man's agriculture keeps back the articles with which he has been entrusted until there comes a period of extreme necessity for them on one side or the other and then exacts in exchange for them all that the distressed farmer can spare of other kinds of produce it is easy to see that by ingeniously watching his opportunities he might possess himself regularly of the greater part of the superfluous produce of the other two estates and at last in some year of severest trial or scarcity purchase both for himself and maintain the former proprietors thenceforth as his laborers or servants this would be a case of commercial wealth acquired on the exactest principles of modern political economy but more distinctly even than in the former instance it is manifest in this that the wealth of the state or of the three men considered as a society is collectively less than it would have been had the merchant been content with just a profit the operations of the two agriculturalists have been cramped to the utmost and the continual limitations of the supply of things they wanted at critical times together with the failure of courage consequent on the prolongation of a struggle for mere existence without any sense of permanent gain must have seriously diminished the effective results of their labor and the stores finally accumulated in the merchant's hands will not in any wise be of equivalent value to those which had his dealings been honest would have filled at once the granaries of the farmers and his own the whole question therefore respecting not only the advantage but even the quantity of national wealth resolves itself finally into one of abstract justice it is impossible to conclude of any given mass of acquired wealth merely by the fact of its existence whether it signifies good or evil to the nation in the midst of which it exists its real value depends on the moral sign attached to it just as sternly as that of a mathematical quantity depends on the algebraical sign attached to it any given accumulation of commercial wealth may be indicative on the one hand of faithful industries progressive energies and productive ingenuities or on the other it may be indicative of mortal luxury merciless tyranny ruinous chicane some treasures are heavy with human tears as an ill stored harvest with untimely rain and some gold is brighter in sunshine than in its substance and these are not observed merely moral or pathetic attributes of riches which the seeker of riches may if he chooses despise they are literally and sternly material attributes of riches depreciating or exalting incalculably the monetary significance of the sum in question one mass of money is the outcome of action which has annihilated 10 times as much in the gathering of it such and such strong hands have been paralysed as if they had been numbed by nightshade so many strong men's courage broken so many productive operations hindered this and the other false direction given to labour and lying image of prosperity set up on juror planes dug into seven times heated furnaces that which seems to be wealth may in verity be only the gilded index of far-reaching ruin a wrecker's handful of coin gleaned from the beach to which he has beguiled an argosy a camp follower's bundle of rags unwrapped from the breast of goodly soldiers dead the purchase pieces of potter's fields wherein shall be buried together the citizen and the stranger and therefore the idea that direction can be given for the gaining of wealth irrespectively of the consideration of its moral sources or that any general and technical law of purchase and gain can be set down for national practice is perhaps the most insolently futile of all that ever beguiled men through their vices so far as I know there is not in history record of anything so disgraceful to the human intellect as the modern idea that the commercial text buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest represents or under any circumstances could represent an available principle of national economy buy in the cheapest markets yes but what made your market cheap charcoal may be cheap among your roof timbers after a fire and bricks may be cheap in your streets after an earthquake but fire and earthquakes may not therefore be national benefits sell in the dearest yes truly but what made your market dear you sold your bread well today was it to a dying man who gave his last coin for it and will never need bread more or to a rich man who tomorrow will buy your farm over your head or to a soldier on his way to pillage the bank in which you have put your fortune none of these things you can know one thing only you can know namely whether this dealing of yours is a just and faithful one which is all you need concern yourself about respecting it sure thus to have done your own part in bringing about ultimately in the world a state of things which will not issue in pillage or in death and thus every question concerning these things merges itself ultimately in the great question of justice which the ground being thus far cleared for it I will enter upon the next paper leaving only in this three final points for the reader's consideration it has been shown that the chief value and virtue of money consists in its having power over human beings that without this power large material possessions are useless and to any person possessing such power comparatively unnecessary but power over human beings is attainable by other means than by money as I said a few pages back the money power is always imperfect and doubtful there are many things which cannot be reached with it others which cannot be retained by it many joys may be given to men which cannot be bought for gold and many fidelities found in them which cannot be rewarded with it trite enough the reader thinks yes but it is not so trite I wish it were that in this moral power quite inscrutable and immeasurable though it be there is a monetary value just as real as that represented by more ponderous currencies a man's hand may be full of invisible gold and the wave of it or the grasp shall do more than another's with a shower of bullion this invisible gold also does not necessarily diminish in spending political economists will do well someday to take heed of it though they cannot take measure but father since the essence of wealth consists in its authority over men if the apparent or nominal wealth fail in this power it fails in essence in fact ceases to be wealth at all it does not appear lately in England that our authority over men is absolute the servants show some disposition to rush riotously upstairs under an impression that their wages are not regularly paid we should auger ill of any gentleman's property to whom this happened every other day in his drawing room so also the power of our wealth seems limited as respects the comfort of the servants no less than their quietude the persons in the kitchen appear to be ill dressed squalid half starved one cannot help imagining that the riches of the establishment must be of a very theoretical and documentary character finally since the essence of wealth consists in power over men will it not follow that the nobler and the more in number the persons are over whom it has power the greater the wealth perhaps it may even appear after some consideration that the persons themselves are the wealth that these pieces of gold with which we are in the habit of guiding them are in fact nothing more than a kind of Byzantine harness or trappings very glittering and beautiful in barbaric sight wherewith we bridle the creatures but that if these same living creatures could be guided without the fretting and jingling of the Byzants in their mouths and ears they might themselves be more valuable than their bridles in fact it may be discovered that the true veins of wealth are purple and not in rock but in flesh perhaps even that the final outcome and consummation of all wealth is in the producing as many possible full-breathed bright-eyed and happy-hearted human creatures our modern wealth I think has rather a tendency the other way most political economists appearing to consider the multitudes of human creatures not conducive to wealth or at best conducive to it only by remaining in a dim-eyed and narrow-chested state of being nevertheless it is open I repeat to serious question which I leave to the readers pondering whether among national manufacturers that of souls of a good quality may not at least turn out a quite leadingly lucrative one nay in some far away and yet undreamt of hour I can even imagine that England may cast all thoughts of possessive wealth back to the barbaric nations among whom they first arose and that while the sands of the Indus and adamant of the Golconda may yet stiffen the housings of the charger and flash from the turban of the slave she as a Christian mother may at least attain to the virtues and the treasures of a heathen one and be able to lead forth her sons saying these are my jewels end of essay two essay three of unto this last this is the LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Gesine unto this last four essays on the first principles of political economy by John Ruskin essay three Quijudicates Tarum some centuries before the Christian era a Jew merchant largely engaged in business on the Gold Coast and reported to have made one of the largest fortunes of his time held also in repute for much practical sagacity left among his ledgers some general maxims concerning wealth which have been preserved strangely enough even to our own days they were held in considerable respect by the most active traders of the Middle Ages especially by the Venetians who even went so far in their admiration as to place a statue of the old Jew on the angle of one of their principal public buildings of late years these writings have fallen into disrepute being opposed in every particular to the spirit of modern commerce nevertheless I shall reproduce a passage or two from them here partly because they may interest the reader by their novelty and chiefly because they will show him that it is possible for a very practical and acquisitive tradesman to hold through a not unsuccessful career that principle of distinction between well-gotten and ill-gotten wealth which partially insisted on in my last paper it must be our work more completely to examine in this he says for instance in one place the getting of treasures by a lying tongue is a vanity tossed to and fro of them that see death adding in another with the same meaning he has a curious way of doubling his sayings treasures of wickedness profit nothing but justice delivers from death both these passages are notable for their assertion of death as the only real issue and some of attainment by any unjust scheme of wealth if we read instead of lying tongue lying label title pretence or advertisement we shall more clearly perceive the bearing of the words on modern business we usually speak as if death pursued us and we fled from him but that is only so in rare instances ordinarily he masks himself makes himself beautiful all glories not like the king's daughter all glorious within but outwardly his clothing of wrought gold we pursue him frantically all our days he flying or hiding from us our crowning success at three score and ten is utterly and perfectly to seize and hold him in his eternal integrity robes ashes and sting again the merchant says he that oppresses the poor to increase his riches shall surely come to want and again more strongly rob not the poor because he is poor neither oppress the afflicted in the place of business for god shall spoil the soul of those that spoiled them this robbing the poor because he is poor is especially the mercantile form of theft consisting in taking advantage of a man's necessities in order to obtain his labor or property at reduced price the ordinary highway man's opposite form of robbery of the rich because he is rich does not appear to occur so often to hold the old merchant's mind probably because being less profitable and more dangerous than the robbery of the poor it is rarely practiced by persons of discretion but the two most remarkable passages in their deep general significance are the following the rich and the poor have met god is their maker the rich and the poor have met god is their light they have met more literally have stood in each other's way obviament that is to say as long as the world lasts the action and counteraction of wealth and poverty the meeting face to face of rich and poor is just as appointed and necessary a law of that 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 thunderstruck 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 mystery of human life there is no other light than this by which they can see each other's faces and live light which is called in another of the books among which the merchants maxims have been preserved the son of justice footnote more accurately son of justness but instead of the harsh word justness the old english righteousness being commonly employed has by getting confused with godliness or attracting about it various vague and broken meanings prevented most persons from receiving the force of the passages in which it occurs the word righteousness properly refers to the justice of rule or right as distinguished from equity which refers to the justice of balance more broadly righteousness is king's justice and equity judges justice the king guiding or ruling all the judge dividing or discerning between opposites therefore the double question man who made me a ruler or a divider over you thus with respect to the justice of choice selection the feebler and passive justice we have from lego lex legal lawy and loyal and with respect to the justice of rule discretion the stronger and active justice we have from rego rex regal roy and royal end of footnote the son 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 arms giving and by preaching of patience or of hope and by every other means emollient or consolatory except the one thing which god orders for them justice 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 wherever it appears so that when the choice was one day fairly put to them they denied the helpful one and the just footnote in another place written with the same meaning just and having salvation end of footnote and desired a murderer sedition razor and robber to be granted to them the murderer instead of the lord of life the sedition razor instead of the prince of peace and the robber instead of the just judge of all the world i have just spoken of the flowing of streams to the sea as a partial image of the action of wealth in one respect it is not a partial but a perfect image the popular economist thinks himself wise in having discovered that wealth or the forms of property in general must go where they are required that where demand is supply must follow he further declares that this course of demand and supply cannot be forbidden by human laws precisely in the same sense and with the same certainty the waters of the world go where they are required where the land falls the water flows the course neither of clouds nor rivers can be forbidden by human will but the disposition and administration of them can be altered by human forethought whether the stream shall be a curse or a blessing depends upon man's labor and administrating intelligence for centuries after centuries great districts of the world rich in soil and favored in climate have lain desert under the rage of their own rivers not only desert but plague struck the stream which rightly directed would have flowed and soft irrigation from field to field would have purified the air given food to man and beast and carry their burdens for them on its bosom now overwhelms the plain and poisons the wind its breath pestilence and its work famine in like manner this wealth goes where it is required no human laws can withstand its flow they can only guide it but this the lending trench and limiting mound can do so thoroughly that it shall become water of life the riches of the hand of wisdom footnote length of days in her right hand in her left riches and honor end of footnote or on the contrary by leaving it to its own lawless flow they may make it what it has been too often the last and deadliest of national plagues water of Mara the water which feeds the roots of all evil the necessity of these laws of distribution or restraint is curiously overlooked in the ordinary political economists definition of his own science he calls it shortly the science of getting rich but there are many sciences as well as many arts of getting rich poisoning people of large estates was one employed largely in the middle ages adulteration of food of people of small estates is one employed largely now the ancient and honorable highland method of blackmail the more modern and less honorable system of obtaining goods on credit and the other variously improved methods of appropriation which in major and minor scales of industry down to the most artistic pocket picking we owe to recent genius all come under the general head of sciences or arts of getting rich so that it is clear the popular economist in calling his science the science par excellence of getting rich must detach some peculiar ideas of limitation to its character i hope i do not misrepresent him by assuming that he means his science to be the science of getting rich by legal or just means in this definition is the word just or legal finally to stand for it is possible among certain nations or under certain rulers or by help of certain advocates that proceedings may be legal which are by no means just if therefore we leave at last only the word just in that place of our definition the insertion of this solitary and small word will make a notable difference in the grammar of our science for then it will follow that in order to grow rich scientifically we must grow rich justly and therefore know what is just so that our economy will no longer depend merely on prudence but on jurisprudence and that of divine not human law which prudence is indeed of no mean order holding itself as it were high in the air of heaven and gazing forever on the light of the sun of justice hence the souls which have excelled in it are represented by Dante as stars forming in heaven forever the figures of the eye of an eagle they having been in life the discerners of light from darkness or to the whole human race as the light of the body which is the eye while those souls which form the wings of the bird giving power and dominion to justice healing in its wings trace also in light the inscription in heaven delegated justitiam qui judicatis tarum ye who judge the earth give not observe merely love but diligent love to justice the love which seeks diligently that is to say choosingly and by preference to all things else which judging or doing judgment in the earth is according to their capacity and position required not of judges only nor of rulers only but of all men footnote i hear that several of our lawyers have been greatly amused by the statement in the first of these papers that a lawyer's function was to do justice i did not intend it for a jest nevertheless it will be seen that in the above passage neither the determination nor doing of justice are contemplated as functions wholly peculiar to the lawyer possibly the more our standing armies whether of soldiers pastors or legislators the generic term pastor including all teachers and the generic term lawyer including makers as well as interpreters of law can be superseded by the force of national heroism wisdom and honesty the better it may be for the nation end of footnote a truth sorrowfully lost sight of even by those who are ready enough to apply to themselves passages in which christian men are spoken of as called to be saints that is helpful or healing functions and chosen to be kings that is knowing or directing functions the true meaning of these titles having been long lost for the pretenses of unhelpful and unable persons to saintly and kingly character also it's for the ones popular idea that both the sanctity and royalty are to consist in wearing long robes and high crowns instead of in mercy and judgment whereas all true sanctity is saving power as all true royalty is ruling power and injustice is part and parcel of the denial of such power which makes men as the creeping things as the fishes of the sea that have no ruler over them footnote it being the privilege of the fishes as it is of rats and wolves to live by the laws of demand and supply but the distinction of humanity to live by those of right and footnote absolute justice is indeed no more attainable than absolute truth but the righteous man is distinguished from the unrighteous by his desire and hope of justice as the true man from the false by his desire and hope of truth and though absolute justice be unattainable as much justice as we need for all practical use is attainable by all those who make it their aim we have to examine then in the subject before us what are the laws of justice respecting payment of labor no small part these of the foundations of all jurisprudence i reduced in my last paper the idea of money payment to its simplest or radical terms in those terms its nature and the conditions of justice respecting it can be best ascertained money payment as they are stated consists radically in a promise to some person working for us that for the time and labor he spends in our service today we will give or procure equivalent time and labor in his service at any future time when he may demand it footnote it may appear at first that the market price of labor expressed such an exchange but this is a fallacy for the market price is the momentary price of the kind of labor required but the just price is its equivalent of the productive labor of mankind this difference will be analyzed in its place it must be noted also that i speak here only of the exchangeable value of labor not of that of commodities the exchangeable value of a commodity is that of the labor required to produce it multiplied into the force of the demand for it if the value of the labor equals x and the force of demand equals y the exchangeable value for the commodity is x y in which if either x equals zero or y equals zero x y equals zero and footnote if we promise to give him less labor than he has given us we underpay him if we promise to give him more labor than he has given us we overpay him in practice according to the laws of demand and supply when two men are ready to do the work and only one man wants to have it done the two men underbid each other for it and the one who gets it to do is underpaid but when two men want the work done and there is only one man ready to do it the two men who wanted done overbid each other and the workman is overpaid i will examine these two points of injustice in succession but first i wish the reader to clearly understand the central principle lying between the two of right or just payment when we ask a service of any man he may either give it to us freely or demand payment for it respecting free gift of service there is no question at present that being a matter of affection not of traffic but if he demand payment for it and we wish to treat him with absolute equity it is evident that this equity can only consist in giving time for time strength for strength and skill for skill if a man works an hour for us and we only promise to work half an hour for him in return we obtain an unjust advantage if on the contrary we promise to work an hour and half for him in return he has an unjust advantage the justice consists an absolute exchange or if there be any respect to the stations of the parties it will not be in favor of the employer there is certainly no equitable reason in a man's being poor that if he give me a pound of bread today i should return him less than a pound of bread tomorrow or any equitable reason in a man's being uneducated that if he uses a certain quantity of skill and knowledge in my service i should use a less quantity of skill and knowledge in his perhaps ultimately it may appear desirable or to say the least gracious that i should give and return somewhat more than i received but at present we are concerned on the law of justice only which is that of perfect and accurate exchange one circumstance only interfering with the simplicity of this radical idea of just payment that in as much as labor rightly directed is fruitful just as seed is the fruit or interest as it is called of the labor first given or advanced ought to be taken into account and balanced by an additional quantity of labor in the subsequent repayment supposing the repayment to take place at the end of the year or of any other given time this calculation could be approximately made but as money that is to say cash payment involves no reference to time it being optional with the person paid to spend when he receives at once or after any number of years we can only assume generally that some slight advantage must in equity be allowed to the person who advances the labor so that the typical form of bargain will be if you give me an hour today i will give you an hour and five minutes on demand if you give me a pound of bread today i will give you 17 ounces on demand and so on or that it is necessary for the reader to notice that the amount returned is at least in equity not to be less than the amount given the abstract idea then of just or due wages as respects the laborer is that they will consist in a sum of money which will at any time procure for him at least as much labor as he has given rather more than less and this equity or justice of payment is observe wholly independent of any reference to the number of men who are willing to do the work i want a horse shoe for my horse 20 smiths or 20 000 smiths may be ready to forge it their number does not in one atom's weight affect the question of the equitable payment of the one who does forge it it costs him a quarter of an hour of his life and so much skill and strength of arm to make that horse shoe for me then at some future time i am bound in equity to give a quarter of an hour and some minutes more of my life or of some other persons at my disposal and also as much strength of arm and skill and a little more in making or doing what the smith may have need of such being the abstract theory of just remunerative payment its application is practically modified by the fact that the order for labor given in payment is general while labor received is special the current coin or document is practically an order on the nation for so much work of any kind and this universal applicability to immediate need renders it so much more valuable than special labor can be that an order for a less quantity of this general toil will always be accepted as a just equivalent for a greater quantity of special toil any given craftsman will always be willing to give an hour of his own work in order to receive command over half an hour or even much less of national work this source of uncertainty together with the difficulty of determining the monetary value of skill footnote under the term skill i mean to include the united force of experience intellect and passion in their operation on manual labor and under the term passion to include the entire range and agency of the moral feelings from the simple patience and gentleness of mind which will give continuity and fineness to the touch or enable one person to work without fatigue and with good effect twice as long as another up to the qualities of character which renders science possible the retardation of science by envy is one of the most tremendous losses in the economy of the present century and to the incomunicable emotion and imagination which are the first and mightiest sources of all value in art it is highly singular that political economists should not yet have perceived if not the moral at least the passionate element to be an inextricable quantity in every calculation i cannot conceive for instance how it was possible that mr mill should have followed the true clue so far as to write no limit can be set to the importance even in a purely productive and material point of view of mere thought without seeing that it was logically necessary to add also and of mere feeling and this the more because in his first definition of labor he includes in the idea of it all feelings of disagreeable kind connected with the employment of one's thoughts in a particular occupation true but why not also feelings of an agreeable kind it can hardly be supposed that the feelings which retard labor are more essentially a part of the labor than those which accelerated the first are paid for as pain the second as power the workman is merely indemnified for the first but the second both produce a part of the exchangeable value of the work and materially increase its actual quantity fritz is with us he is worth 50 000 men truly a large addition to the material force consisting however be observed not more in operations carried out on fritz's head than in operations carried out in his army's heart no limit can be set to the importance of mere thought perhaps not may suppose someday it should turn out that mere thought was in itself a recommendable object of production and that all material production was only a step towards this more precious immaterial one end of footnote this source of uncertainty together with the difficulty of determining the monetary value of skill renders the ascertainment even approximate of the proper wages of any given labor in terms of a currency matter of considerable complexity but they do not affect the principle of exchange the worst of the work may not be easily known but it has a worse just as fixed and real as the specific gravity of a substance though such specific gravity may not be easily ascertainable when the substance is united with many others nor is there so much difficulty or chance in determining it as in determining the ordinary maxima and minima of vulgar political economy there are few bargains in which the buyer can ascertain with anything like precision that the seller would have taken no less or the seller acquire more than a comfortable face that the purchaser would have given no more this impossibility of precise knowledge prevents neither from striving to attain the desired point of greatest vexation and injury to the other nor from accepting it for a scientific principle that he is to buy for the least and sell for the most possible so what the real least or most may be he cannot tell in like manner a just person lays it down for a scientific principle that he is to pay a just price and without being able precisely to ascertain the limits of such a price will nevertheless strive to attain the closest possible approximation to them a practically serviceable approximation he can obtain it is easier to determine scientifically what a man ought to have for his work than what his necessities will compel him to take for it his necessities can only be ascertained by empirical but is due by analytical investigation in the one case you try your answer to the sum like a puzzled schoolboy till you find one that fits in the other you bring out your result within certain limits by process of calculation supposing then the just wages of any quantity of given labor to have been ascertained let us examine the first results of just and unjust payment when in favor of the purchaser or employer that is when two men are ready to do the work and only one wants to have it done the unjust purchaser forces the two to bid against each other till he has produced their demand to its lowest terms let us assume that the lowest bidder offers to do the work at half its just price the purchaser employs him and does not employ the other the first or apparent result is therefore that one of the two men is left out of employ or to starvation just as definitely as by the just procedure of giving fair price to the best workman the various writers who endeavage to invalidate the positions of my first paper never saw this and assumed that the unjust hire employed both he employs both no more than the just hire the only difference in the outset is that the just man pays sufficiently the unjust man insufficiently for the labor of the single person employed i say in the outset for this first or apparent difference is not the actual difference by the unjust procedure half the proper price of the work is left in the hands of the employer this enables him to hire another man at the same unjust rate or some other kind of work and the final result is that he has two men working for him at half price and two are out of employ by the just procedure the whole price of the first piece of work goes in the hands of the man who does it no surplus being left in the employer's hands he cannot hire another man for another piece of labor but by precisely so much as his power is diminished the hired workman's power is increased that is to say by the additional half of the price he has received which additional half he has the power of using to employ another man in his service i will suppose for the moment the least favorable though quite probable case that though justly treated himself he yet will act unjustly to his subordinate and hire at half price if he can the final result will then be that one man works for the employer at just price one for the workman at half price and two as in the first case are still out of employ these two as i said before are out of employ in both cases the difference between the just and unjust procedure does not lie in the number of men hired but then the price paid to them and the persons by whom it is paid the central difference that which i want the reader to see clearly is that in the unjust case two men work for one the first hire in the just case one man works for the first hire one for the person hired and so on down or up through the various grades of service the influence being carried forward by justice and arrested by injustice the universal and constant action of justice in this matter is therefore to diminish the power of wealth in the hands of one individual over masses of men and to distribute it through a chain of men the actual power exerted by the wealth is the same in both cases but by injustice it is put all into one man's hands so that he directs at once and with equal force the labor of a circle of men about him by the just procedure he is permitted to touch the nearest only through whom with diminished force modified by new minds the energy of the wealth passes on to others and so till it exhausts itself the immediate operation of justice in this respect is therefore to diminish the power of wealth first in acquisition of luxury and secondly in exercise of moral influence the employer cannot concentrate so multitudinous labor on his own interest nor can he subdue so multitudinous mind to his own will but the secondary operation of justice is no less important the insufficient payment of the group of men working for one places each under a maximum difficulty in rising above his position the tendency of the system is to check advancement but the sufficient or just payment distributed through a descending series of offices or grades of labor footnote I am sorry to lose time by answering however curtly the equivocations of the writers who have sought to obscure the instances given of regulated labor in the first of these papers by confusing kinds ranks and quantities of labor with its qualities I never said that a colonel should have the same pay as a private nor a bishop the same pay as a curate neither did I say that more work ought to be paid as less work so that a curate of a parish of two thousand souls should have no more than the curate of a parish of five hundred but I said that so far as you employ it at all bad work should be paid no less than good work as a bad clergyman yet takes his tithes a bad physician takes his fee and a bad lawyer his costs and this as will be further shown in the conclusion I said and say partly because the best work never was nor ever will be done for money at all but chiefly because the moment people know they have to pay the bad and good alike they will try to discern the one from the other and not use the bad a sagacious writer in the scotsman asks me if I should like any common scribbler to be paid by Mrs Smith elder and co as their good authors are I should if they employed him but would seriously recommend them for the scribbler's sake as well as their own not to employ him the quantity of its money which the country at present invests in scribbling is not in the outcome of it economically spent and even the highly ingenious person to whom this question occurred might perhaps have been more beneficially employed than in printing it end of footnote a descending series of offices or grades of labour gives each subordinated person fair and sufficient means of rising in the social scale if he chooses to use them and thus not only diminishes the immediate power of wealth but removes the worst disabilities of poverty it is on this vital problem that the entire destiny of the labourer is utterly dependent many minor interests may sometimes appear to interfere with it but all branch from it for instance considerable agitation is often caused in the minds of the lower classes when they discover the share which they nominally and to all appearance actually pay out of their wages and taxation I believe 35 or 40 percent this sounds very grievous but in reality the labourer does not pay it but his employer if the workman had not to pay it his wages would be less by just that sum competition would still reduce them to the lowest rate at which life was possible similarly the lower orders agitated for the repeal of the corn laws footnote I have to acknowledge an interesting communication on the subject of free trade from paisley for a short letter from a well-wisher at my thanks I get more due but the Scottish writer will I fear be disagreeably surprised to hear that I am and always have been an utterly fearless and unscrupulous free trader seven years ago speaking of the various signs of infancy in the European mind stones of Venice volume 3 page 168 I wrote the first principles of commerce were acknowledged by the English parliament only a few months ago in its free trade measures and are still so little understood by the million that no nation dares to abolish its custom houses it will be observed that I do not admit even the idea reciprocity let other nations if they like keep their ports shut every wise nation will throw its own open it is not the opening of them but a sudden inconsiderate and blunderingly experimental manner of opening them which does the harm if you have been protecting a manufacturer for a long series of years you must not take the protection off in a moment so as to throw every one of its operatives at once out of employ any more than you must take all its wrappings off a feeble child at once in cold weather though the cummer of them may have been radically injuring its health little by little you must restore it to freedom and to air most people's minds are in curious confusion on the subject of free trade because they supposed to imply enlarged competition on the contrary free trade puts an end to all competition protection among various other mischievous functions endeavors to enable one country to compete with another in the production of an article at a disadvantage when trade is entirely free no country can be competed with in the articles for the production of which it is naturally calculated nor can it compete with any other in the production of articles for which it is not naturally calculated tuscany for instance cannot compete with england and steel nor england with tuscany in oil they must exchange their steel and oil which exchange should be as frank and free as honesty and the sea winds can make it competition indeed arises first and sharply in order to prove which is strongest in any given manufacturer possible to both this point once ascertained competition is at an end end of footnote similarly the lower orders agitated for the repeal of the corn laws thinking they would be better off if bread would cheaper never perceiving that as soon as bread was permanently cheaper wages would permanently fall in precisely that proportion the corn laws were rightly repealed not however because they directly oppressed the poor but because they indirectly oppressed them in causing a large quantity of their labour to be consumed unproductively so also unnecessary taxation oppresses them through destruction of capital but the destiny of the poor depends primarily always on this one question of the duneness of wages their distress irrespectively of that caused by sloth minor error or crime arises on the grand scale from the two reacting forces of competition and oppression there is not yet nor will yet for ages be any real overpopulation in the world but a local overpopulation or more accurately a degree of population locally unmanageable under existing circumstances for want of forethought and sufficient machinery necessarily shows itself by pressure of competition and the taking advantage of this competition by the purchaser to obtain their labour unjustly cheap consummates at once their suffering and his own for in this as I believe in every other kind of slavery the oppressor suffers at last more than the oppressed and those magnificent lines of pope even in all their force fall short of the truth yet to be just to these poor men of pelf each does but hate his neighbour as himself damned to the minds an equal fate betides the slave that digs it and the slave that hides the collateral and reversionary operations of justice in this matter I shall examine here after it being needful first to define the nature of value proceeding then to consider within what practical terms a justice system may be established and ultimately the vexed question of the destinies for the unemployed workmen footnote I should be glad if the reader would first clear the ground for himself so far as to determine whether the difficulty lies in getting the work or getting the pay for it does he consider occupation itself to be an expensive luxury difficult of attainment of which too little is to be found in the world or is it rather that while in the enjoyment even of the most athletic delight men must nevertheless be maintained and this maintenance is not always forthcoming we must be clear on this head before going farther as most people are loosely in the habit of talking of the difficulty of finding employment is it employment that we want to find or support during employment is it idleness we wish to put an end to or hunger we have to take up both questions and succession only not both at the same time no doubt that work as a luxury and a very great one it is indeed at once a luxury and a necessity no man can retain either health of mind or body without it so profoundly do I feel this that as will be seen in the sequel one of the principal objects I would recommend to benevolent and practical persons is to induce which people to seek for a larger quantity of this luxury than they at present possess nevertheless it appears by experience that even this healthiest of pleasures can be indulged into excess and that human beings are just as liable to surf it of labor as to surf it of meat so that as on the one hand it may be charitable to provide for some people lighter dinner at more work for others it may be equally expedient to provide lighter work and more dinner and a footnote less however the reader should be alarmed at some of the issues to which our investigations seem to be tending as if in their bearing against the power of wealth they had something in common with those of socialism I wish him to know in accurate terms one or two of the main points which I have in view whether socialism has made the progress among the army and navy where payment is made on my principles or among the manufacturing operatives who are paid on my opponents principles I leave it to those opponents to ascertain and declare whatever their conclusion may be I think it necessary to answer for myself only this that if there be any one point insisted on throughout my works more frequently than another that one point is the impossibility of equality my continual aim has been to show the eternal superiority of some men to others sometimes even of one man to all others and to show also the advisability of appointing such persons or person to guide to lead or on occasion even to compel and subdue their inferiors according to their own better knowledge and wiser will my principles of political economy were all involved in a single phrase spoken three years ago at Manchester soldiers of the plow share as well as soldiers of the sword and they were all summed in a single sentence in the last volume of modern painters government and cooperation are in all things the laws of life anarchy and competition the laws of death and with respect to the mode in which these general principles affect the secure possession of property so far am I from invalidating such security that the whole gist of these papers will be found ultimately to aim at an extension in its range and whereas it has long been known and declared that the poor have no right to the property of the rich I wish it also to be known and declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor but that the working of the system which I have undertaken to develop would in many ways shorten the apparent and direct though not the unseen and collateral power both of wealth as the lady of pleasure and of capital as the lord of toil I do not deny on the contrary I affirm it in all joyfulness knowing that the attraction of riches is already too strong as their authority is already too weighty for the reason of mankind I said in my last paper that nothing in history had ever been so disgraceful to human intellect as the acceptance among us of the common doctrines of political economy as a science I have many grants for saying this but one of the chief may be given in a few words I know no previous instance in history of nations establishing a systematic disobedience to the first principles of its professed religion the writings which we verbally esteem as divine not only denounce the love of money as the source of all evil and as an idolatry aboard of the deity but declare mammon service to be the accurate and irreconcilable opposition of God's service and whenever they speak of riches absolute and poverty absolute declare woe to the rich and blessing to the poor whereupon we forthwith investigate the science of becoming rich as the shortest road to national prosperity tai christian danera letiope quando si partiranno i due collegi l'uno in eterno rico in hope end of s.a.3 from unto this last recorded by gazine in december 2007