e did that when minds were so dark that people blinked with
surprise at a light which showed as a social iniquity naked children
crawling with chains about them in the galleries of coal-mines. Was it
really wrong to make children do that? Or was Ruskin only an impossible
idealist? They were the happy years, radiant with the certain knowledge
of the British that the Holy Grail would be recognized immediately it was
seen, for over it would be proudly floating the confirmatory Union Jack.
We had not even begun to suspect that our morals, manners, and laws were
fairly poor compared with the standards of the Mohawks and Mohicans whom
our settlers had displaced in America a century before. And Ruskin told
that Victorian society it had an ugly mind, and did ugly things. When
Ruskin said so, with considerable emotion, Thackeray was so hurt that he
answered as would any clever editor to-day about a contribution which
convinced him that it would make readers angry; he told Ruskin it would
never do. Thackeray's readers, of course, were assured they were the best
people, and that worldly cynic did well to reject Ruskin, and preserve
the _Cornhill Magazine_.

"Ruskin," it says in the introduction to _The Crown of Wild Olive_ which
my little friend reads at school, "is certainly one of the greatest
masters of English prose." That has often been declared. But is he? Or
is our tribute to Ruskin only a show of gratitude to one who revealed to
us the unpleasant character of our national habits when contrasted with a
standard for gentlemen? It ought not to have required much eloquence to
convince us that Widnes is unlovely; the smell of it should have been
enough. It is curious that we needed festoons of chromatic sentences to
warn us that cruelty to children, even when profit can be made of it, is
not right. But I fear some people really enjoy remorseful sobbing. It is
half the fun of doing wrong. Yet I would ask in humility--for it is a
fearful thing to doubt Ruskin, the literary divinity of so many
right-thinking people--whether English children who are learning the
right way to use their language, and the noblest ideas to express, should
run the risk of having Ruskin's example set before them by softhearted
teachers? I think that a parent who knew a child of his, on a certain
day, was to take the example of Ruskin as a prose stylist on the subject
of war, would do well, on moral and aesthetic grounds, to keep his child
away from school