ng. What he
desires for the working-man he desires also for his family, and
consequently he urges parents to train their sons and daughters to see
and love the beautiful, to cultivate their higher instincts, and call
forth and feed their souls. In all this there is much helpful, tonic
thought, which the church or the nation, roused to zeal and earnest
activity, might fittingly teach, and so advance the material weal of the
people, extend the area of public enlightenment and morality, and herald
the dawn of a new and higher civilization.

[Footnote 3: Alluding to the quaint title under which these "Cornhill"
essays afterwards appeared,--a title that hints at the gist of the
work,--Mr. Ruskin's biographer tells us that the motto was taken from
Christ's parable of the husbandman and the laborers: "Friend, I do thee
no wrong. Didst thou not agree with me for a penny? Take that thine is,
and go thy way. I will give UNTO THIS LAST even as unto
thee."--Matt. xx. 14.]

Other aspects of Mr. Ruskin's economic gospel are, unfortunately, not so
sane and beneficent. His altruism knows no bounds, as his philanthropy
and zeal have but few restraints. After the fashion of his mentor,
Carlyle, he is carried away by his humanitarianism and his unreserved
acceptance of the doctrine of the equality and brotherhood of man. Hence
come his economic heresies in regard to rent and interest, and capital
and usury, his denunciations of the division of labor, his Tolstoian
impoverishment of himself for the benefit of his fellow-man, and his
dictum that the wealth of the nation should be its own, and not accrue
to the individual. Hence, also, the wholly ideal state of society he
attempted to realize in his communal Guild of St. George, with its rigid
government and restraints upon the personal liberty of its members.
Ideally beautiful, admittedly, was the plan and scheme of the little
state, with its disciplinings, exactions, and devout selective creed.
But the age is a practical, unimaginative one, and whatever compacts men
make, even for their highest welfare, there are, it is to be feared,
few so loyal, tractable, and docile as to place themselves for long
under such tutoring and one-patterned, fashioning forms of co-operative
living. Into whatever millennial state Ruskin sought to usher his little
band of English followers and disciples, one must speak appreciatively
of his motives in projecting the scheme, and of the money and labor he
perso