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Updated: October 29, 2025
Nor is it a right principle that charity should be denied to all calamities which are in some degree due to the fault of the sufferer, or which might have been averted by exceptional forethought or self-denial. Some economists write as if a far higher standard of will and morals should be expected among the poor and the uneducated than can be found among the rich.
"Then and later, I, like all people who possess nothing, found that my best visions have come to me while at work on something in which I had wistful faith; and when I lost faith I blindly followed the economists and philosophers who can never know the mystic power of work over the worker. And it may be that herein lies the secret of the philosopher's ignorance and the worker's slavery.
If, on the contrary, the interest of capital is natural, lawful, consistent with the general good, as favourable to the borrower as to the lender, the economists who deny it, the tribunes who traffic in this pretended social wound, are leading the workmen into a senseless and unjust struggle, which can have no other issue than the misfortune of all.
But there is a point the explanation of which I have vainly sought in Say and in the other economists, to wit, how the reality and legitimacy of net product is established. For it is plain that, in order to cause the disappearance of net product, it would suffice to increase the wages of the workmen and the price of the values consumed, the selling-price remaining the same.
Trading is the earthly economists' initial notion, and they start from perplexing and insoluble riddles about exchange value, insoluble because all trading finally involves individual preferences which are incalculable and unique.
What was meat to England was poison to Ireland, and even honest Englishmen, hypnotised by the economists of the day, were unable to perceive this plain truth. Let me give another illustration. The capital exploit of Union Economics was, as has been said, its dealing with the land question, but perhaps its most pathetic fallacy was the policy with which it met the Great Famine.
In trade there was an exchange apparently on equal terms; but the old economists saw a difference in nature between imports and exports; when wool was sold to Flanders gold was received, and remained somewhere in the nation; it formed the national purchasing power, and could hire mercenaries or otherwise command foreign labour and productions.
Ruskin left behind him in his turn two quite separate streams of inspiration. The first and more practical was concerned, like Carlyle's Chartism, with a challenge to the social conclusions of the orthodox economists. He was not so great a man as Carlyle, but he was a much more clear-headed man; and the point and stab of his challenge still really stands and sticks, like a dagger in a dead man.
Will it not indeed be strange if the author of "Othello" and "Hamlet" is destin'd to live in America, in a generation or two, less as the cunning draughtsman of the passions, and more as putting on record the first full expose and by far the most vivid one, immeasurably ahead of doctrinaires and economists of the political theory and results, or the reason-why and necessity for them which America has come on earth to abnegate and replace?
As for the pecuniary difficulty, it was, as the political economists will tell us, only the absence of a medium at the worst: and, in its stead, the master could receive boarding, clothing, and the agricultural products of the country.
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