competitive system centers about the idea of wealth, Ruskin tries to find
out what wealth is; and the pith of his teaching is this,--that men are of
more account than money; that a man's real wealth is found in his soul; not
in his pocket; and that the prime object of life and labor is "the
producing of as many as possible full-breathed, bright-eyed, and happy-
hearted human creatures." To make this ideal practical, Ruskin makes four
suggestions: (1) that training schools be established to teach young men
and women three things,--the laws and practice of health, habits of
gentleness and justice, and the trade or calling by which they are to live;
(2) that the government establish farms and workshops for the production of
all the necessaries of life, where only good and honest work shall be
tolerated and where a standard of work and wages shall be maintained; (3)
that any person out of employment shall be received at the nearest
government school: if ignorant he shall be educated, and if competent to do
any work he shall have the opportunity to do it; (4) that comfortable homes
be provided for the sick and for the aged, and that this be done in
justice, not in charity. A laborer serves his country as truly as does a
soldier or a statesman, and a pension should be no more disgraceful in one
case than in the other.

Among Ruskin's numerous books treating of art, we recommend the _Seven
Lamps of Architecture_ (1849), _Stones of Venice_ (1851-1853), and the
first two volumes of _Modern Painters_ (1843-1846). With Ruskin's art
theories, which, as Sydney Smith prophesied, "worked a complete revolution
in the world of taste," we need not concern ourselves here. We simply point
out four principles that are manifest in all his work: (1) that the object
of art, as of every other human endeavor, is to find and to express the
truth; (2) that art, in order to be true, must break away from
conventionalities and copy nature; (3) that morality is closely allied with
art, and that a careful study of any art reveals the moral strength or
weakness of the people that produced it; (4) that the main purpose of art
is not to delight a few cultured people but to serve the daily uses of
common life. "The giving brightness to pictures is much," he says, "but the
giving brightness to life is more." In this attempt to make art serve the
practical ends of life, Ruskin is allied with all the great writers of the
period, who use literature as the instr