factories, to be
likewise owned by the Guild and worked by members--using water power in
preference to steam (steam at first not forbidden)--and making the lives
of the people employed as well spent as might be, with a fair wage,
healthy work, and so forth. The loss on starting was to be made up from
the Guild store, but it was anticipated that the honesty of the goods
turned out would ultimately make such enterprises pay, even in a
commercial world. Then, for the people employed and their families,
there would be places of recreation and instruction, supplied by the
Guild, and intended to give the agricultural labourer or mill-hand,
trained from infancy in Guild schools, some insight into Literature,
Science and Art--and tastes which his easy position would leave him free
to cultivate.

So far the plan was simple. It was not a _colony_--but merely the
working of existing industries in a certain way. Anticipating further
development of the scheme, Ruskin looked forward to a guild coinage, as
pretty as the Florentines had; a costume as becoming as the Swiss: and
other Platonically devised details, which were not the essentials of the
proposal, and never came into operation. But some of his plans were
actually realised.

The chief objects of "St. George" come under three heads, as we have
just noticed: agricultural, industrial, and educational. The actual
schools would not be needed until the farms and mills had been so far
established as to secure a permanent attendance. But meanwhile provision
was being made for them, both in literature and in art. The "Bibliotheca
Pastorum," was to be a comprehensive little library--far less than the
100 books of the _Pall Mall Gazette_--and yet bringing before the St.
George's workman standard and serious writing of all times. It was to
include, in separate volumes, the Books of Moses and the Psalms of David
and the Revelation of St. John. Of Greek, the Economist of Xenophon, and
Hesiod, which Ruskin undertook to translate into prose. Of Latin the
first two Georgics and sixth AEneid of Virgil, in Gawain Douglas'
translation. Dante; Chaucer, excluding the "Canterbury Tales"--but
including the "Romance of the Rose"; Gotthelf's "Ulric the Farmer," from
the French version which Ruskin had loved ever since his father used to
read it him on their first tours in Switzerland; and an early English
history by an Oxford friend. Later were published Sir Philip Sidney's
psalter, and Ruskin's ow