IV.

LITERATURE AND ECONOMICS.

ONE of the most interesting chapters in the history of English literary thought of the last century is that concerning the reflections of Carlyle and Ruskin on the business methods of the day and their relation to the classical school of political economists. Political economy is, at least in ideal, a science. As formulated by Ricardo and James Mill, its aim was to codify and reduce to order the principles underlying modern business, the rules of the game played in modern industrial nations for the prize of wealth. It did not purport to approve or disapprove necessarily of the moral standards of this game; its intention was to explain the facts as they exist and the principles underlying them. It did not purport to give a full account of modern life. Like all science it was abstract and incomplete, it viewed its subject-matter from one angle merely, it did not attempt to measure the factors which might modify its abstract conclusions in real concrete situations.

Everyone is familiar, in a superficial way at least, with the conceptions of this classical political economy. The desires of man all tend to measure and to express themselves in terms of material wealth. He tends to seek always the greatest possible amount of satisfaction at the least possible expenditure of labor, hence to buy always in

the cheapest market and sell in the dearest. The prices of the various commodities which he buys and sells, including that of his own labor, are regulated automatically by the laws of supply and demand.

For these thinkers man was, from the economic point of view, a buying and selling machine, in constant competition and struggle with other buying and selling machines. Any given economic situation was the resolution of their strife. They admitted freely that, in actual life, other factors sentiment, generosity, nobility, pity, charity -entered in freely to modify the results. But their point was that the way to arrive at a true understanding of any economic situation was to consider first the basic forces of selfishness and greed, measure the fundamental economic strife, and then make such allowance for sentiment as the conditions demanded.

They formulated the conception of the economic man. We have a saying at the present time that corporations have no souls. A large corporation engaged in the business of mining and selling coal is supposed, according to the popular idea, to operate in a perfectly automatic manner. It will pay its miners and workmen as little as they will take, it will sell its coal as high as it can, restrained only by the laws of supply and demand as controlled by itself or presented by competition. Its sole object in business is to make profits, and it does not abate these profits either to help the freezing poor in cities or starving miners' families at the mines. The shareholders may use these profits later for various charitable and philanthropic purposes: the sole concern of the corporation is to make them. The economic man of the classical political economy was like this. He was an abstraction; his buying and selling

characteristics were isolated from the remainder of his nature. The economist said nothing about the real man; he might be good, charitable, kind, or whatever. Only in his business functions he was selfish and indolent, buying as cheap and selling as dear as he could, restrained not by a sense of fairness or justice, but only by competition and the force of the laws of supply and demand. The economist separated the business functions of a human being from the rest of him in order to study those functions clearly, just as the chemist, in order to study the properties of iron, first separates it from the ore in order to simplify his problem and rule out irrelevant factors.

John Ruskin was born in 1819, took his B.A. at Oxford in 1842, published the first four volumes of his bestknown work, Modern Painters, at intervals from 1843 to 1856, and when, about 1857, he turned his attention to political economy he had already won for himself the position of leading art critic of his day. There is no space here to describe his brilliant, erratic, versatile character and talents. Up to 1857 these had chiefly been employed on matters relating to art, and his opinions were so widely accepted as to have great influence on the price of paintings in the market. When he began to write on political economy it was then believed by everyone, as it is by some people still, that he was invading a field which had no connection with his work or abilities, wasting his time, and making himself ridiculous. Nevertheless it is easy to see, at this distance, why his interest in the one subject should lead him to the other. He believed that the value of art lay in its expression of truth, that its end was to serve

life, to make men better and nobler; and it was only natural that he should in his study of it study also the social life which he believed it was the highest mission of art to serve. It was inevitable that he should see that life must first be made possible before it can be made noble. The result was his lifelong interest in the working classes, his manifold and lavish charities in which he dissipated a fortune of nearly half a million dollars, his many Utopian schemes for ideal communities where life should be made. simple and free and work dignified and noble, and, most important result of all, the three or four works which contain his criticism of the then accepted theories of political economy and the ethics of business.

Many of his ideas about economics and social reform Ruskin owed, as he says himself, to the writings and conversation of Carlyle. In many books, most notably perhaps in Past and Present, Carlyle had denounced what he considered to be the causes of the industrial evils of the day. His character is very different from Ruskin's, his thought, on the whole, deeper and truer, but on essential points (in criticism no less than in economics) their ideas tend in much the same direction.

In 1857 Ruskin published in the Cornhill Magazine a series of four very remarkable papers which contain the main points of his attack upon the classical political economy and the mercantile morality it encouraged, and which he later put together in the volume called Unto This Last. The center of his attack was against the conception of the economic man and the ideas of wealth and value implied in that conception. His point, put briefly, was that while a theory of political economy based upon such a conception might be made to conform to the prin

ciples of logic, it had no more validity, as far as its application to life is concerned, than a theory of gymnastics based upon the assumption that men have no skeletons. The soulless economic man had no lessons, he contended, for the real human being. The introduction of soul, of sentiment and human feeling, did not merely modify the results, it changed the problem altogether, as completely as the introduction of a skeleton would change the system of gymnastics. The classical political economy, according to Ruskin, mistook altogether the significance of the actions it attempted to explain. The wealth of a man or of a nation does not proceed from what is sold but from what is consumed; value is not to be measured in terms of supply and demand, but rather in life-producing power. The end of the truly economic administration of the body politic is the production of healthy, happy life, which is the true wealth of individual or nation. Other games for other stakes might perhaps be played with the same cards, but no other game is worth the candle.

The most important element in wealth, according to Ruskin, is the moral element. Money and material goods give one power over labor only in proportion to the inequality of the distribution. At its greatest, such power is vastly inferior to the moral power of the affections. A true vision of the phenomena of business and labor shows the goal of human effort to be the search for life and for life more abundantly. We only falsify the facts when we interpret these efforts as a search for material wealth. It is this false interpretation which has poisoned the sources of our well-being and made money a curse rather than a blessing, set society at civil war when the happiness of all men calls for peace.