FORS CLAVIGERA LETTER 78 COMMISSARIAT1 VENICE, 20th November, 1876. 1. THE day on which this letter will be published will, I trust, be the first of the seventh year of the time during which I have been permitted, month by month, to continue the series of Fors Clavigera. In which seventh year I hope to gather into quite clear form the contents of all the former work; closing the seventh volume with accurate index of the whole. These seven volumes, if I thus complete them, will then be incorporated as a single work in the consecutive series of my books. 3 If I am spared to continue the letters beyond the seventh year, their second series will take a directly practical character, giving account of, and directing, the actual operations of St. George's Company; and containing elements of instruction for its schools, the scheme of which shall be, I will answer for it, plainly enough, by the end of this year, understood. For, in the present volume,' I intend speaking directly, in every letter, to the Yorkshire 1 [See below, $ 9.] On this subject, see below, p. 166.] [Letters 85-96 (No. 85 being the first of the eighth year) were called "New Series" see the Bibliographical Note (above, p. xxx.).] 4 ["But I did not say 'If the Lord will,' and the answer was an entirely unexpected one."-MS. note by Author in his copy. He refers to the illnesses which made the last volume of Fors intermittent, and prevented him from carrying out the intentions stated in the text, which, moreover, were somewhat modified in a later Letter (see below, p. 138).] 5 [Of the original edition, Letters 73-84.] operatives, and answering every question they choose to put to me,-being very sure that they will omit few relevant ones. 2. And first they must understand one more meaning I have in the title of the book. By calling it the "Nail bearer," I mean not only that it fastens in sure place the truths it has to teach (January, 18721), but also, that it nails down as on the barn-door of our future homestead, for permanent and picturesque exposition, the extreme follies of which it has to give warning: so that in expanded heraldry of beak and claw, the spread, or split, harpies and owls of modern philosophy may be for evermore studied, by the curious, in the parched skins of them. For instance, at once, and also for beginning of some such at present needful study, look back to Letter 44, §§ 2, 3,2 wherein you will find a paragraph thus nailed fast out of the Pall Mall Gazette-a paragraph which I must now spend a little more space of barn-door in delicately expanding. It is to the following effect (I repeat, for the sake of readers who cannot refer to the earlier volumes): "The wealth of this world may be practically' regarded as infinitely great. It is not true that what one man appropriates becomes thereby useless to others; and it is also untrue that force or fraud, direct or indirect, are the principal, or indeed that they are at all common or important, modes of acquiring wealth." You will find this paragraph partly answered, though but with a sneer, in the following section, § 4; but I now take it up more seriously, for it is needful you should see the full depth of its lying. 3. The "wealth of this world" consists, broadly, in its healthy food-giving land, its convenient building land, its useful animals, its useful minerals, its books, and works of art.3 The healthy food-giving land, so far from being infinite, is, in fine quality, limited to narrow belts of the globe. 1 [Letter 13, § 4 (Vol. XXVII. p. 231; and compare Letter 60, § 2 (Vol. XXVIII. p. 463).] [Vol. XXVIII. pp. 126-128.] [Compare A Joy for Ever, §§ 144 seq. (Vol. XVI. pp. 129 seq.).] What properly belongs to you as Yorkshiremen is only Yorkshire. You, by appropriating Yorkshire, keep other people from living in Yorkshire. The Yorkshire squires say the whole of Yorkshire belongs to them, and will not let any part of Yorkshire become useful to anybody else, but by enforcing payment of rent for the use of it; nor will the farmers who rent it allow its produce to become useful to anybody else but by demanding the highest price they can get for the same. The convenient building land of the world is so far from being infinite, that, in London, you find a woman of eightand-twenty paying one-and-ninepence a week for a room in which she dies of suffocation with her child in her arms (Fors, December, 18721); and, in Edinburgh, you find people paying two pounds twelve shillings a year for a space nine feet long, five broad, and six high, ventilated only by the chimney (Fors, April, 1874; and compare March, 1873 2). 4. The useful animals of the world are not infinite: the finest horses are very rare; and the squires who ride them, by appropriating them, prevent you and me from riding them. If you and I and the rest of the mob took them from the squires, we could not at present probably ride them; and unless we cut them up and ate them, we could not divide them among us, because they are not infinite. The useful minerals of Yorkshire are iron, coal, and marble,-in large quantities, but not infinite quantities by any means; and the masters and managers of the coal mines, spending their coal on making useless things out of the iron, prevent the poor all over England from having fires, so that they can now only afford close stoves (if those!) (Fors, March, 1873 3). The books and works of art in Yorkshire are not infinite, nor even in England. Mr. Fawkes' Turners are many, but not infinite at all, and as long as they are at Farnley 1 [Letter 24, § 19 (Vol. XXVII. p. 431).] 2 [Letter 40, § 11 (Vol. XXVIII. p. 73), and Letter 27, § 11 (Vol. XXVII. p. 498).] 3 [Letter 27, § 14 (Vol. XXVII. p. 502).] they can't be at Sheffield. My own thirty Turners1 are not infinite, and as long as they are at Oxford, can't be at Sheffield. You won't find, I believe, another such thirteenthcentury Bible as I have given you,' in all Yorkshire; and so far from other books being infinite, there's hardly a woman in England, now, who reads a clean one, because she can't afford to have one but by borrowing. 5. So much for the infinitude of wealth. For the mode of obtaining it, all the land in England was first taken by force, and is now kept by force. Some day, I do not doubt you will yourselves seize it by force. Land never has been, nor can be, got, nor kept, otherwise, when the population on it was as large as it could maintain. The establishment of laws respecting its possession merely defines and directs the force by which it is held: and fraud, so far from being an unimportant mode of acquiring wealth, is now the only possible one; our merchants say openly that no man can become rich by honest dealing. And it is precisely because fraud and force are the chief means of becoming rich, that a writer for the Pall Mall Gazette was found capable of writing this passage. No man could by mere overflow of his natural folly have written it. Only in the settled purpose of maintaining the interest of Fraud and Force; only in fraudfully writing for the concealment of Fraud, and frantically writing for the help of unjust Force, do literary men become so senseless." The wealth of the world is not infinite, then, my Sheffield friends; and moreover, it is most of it unjustly divided, because it has been gathered by fraud, or by dishonest force, and distributed at the will, or lavished by the neglect, of such iniquitous gatherers. And you have to ascertain 1 [Ruskin's collection of Turners was much more numerous (see Vol. XIII. pp. 556-558). He must here refer to those which happened to be in his rooms at Corpus at this time.] 6 [See Letter 70, § 13 (Vol. XXVIII. p. 727).] 3 [Compare Letter 16, § 12 (Vol. XXVII. p. 288).] [Compare Letter 2, § 3 (Vol. XXVII. p. 30).] [Compare Letter 45, § 9 (Vol. XXVIII, p. 152).] Compare below, p. 200.] definitely, if you will be wise Yorkshiremen, how much of it is actually within your reach in Yorkshire, and may be got without fraud, by honest force. Compare Propositions V. and VI., October, 1872.1 6. It ought to be a very pleasant task to you, this ascertaining how much wealth is within your reach in Yorkshire, if, as I see it stated in the article of the Times on Lord Beaconsfield's speech at the Lord Mayor's dinner, quoted in Galignani of the 10th of November, 1876:2 "The immense accession of wealth which this country has received through the development of the railway system and the establishment of free trade, makes the present war expenditure," etc., etc., etc. What it does in the way of begetting and feeding Woolwich Infants is not at present your affair; your business is to find out what it does, and what you can help it to do, in making it prudent for you to beget, and easy for you to feed, Yorkshire infants. 3 But are you quite sure the Times is right? Are we indeed, to begin with, richer than we were? How is anybody to know? Is there a man in Sheffield who can,I do not say, tell you what the country is worth, but even show you how to set about ascertaining what it is worth? The Times way, Morning Post way, and Daily News way of finding out, is an easy one enough, if only it be exact. Look back to Fors of December, 1871, and you will find the Times telling you that "by every kind of measure, 1 [Letter 22, §§ 11, 12 (Vol. XXVII. pp. 379, 380).] 2 Galignani must have been here quoting from some other paper. The passage cited does not occur in the article of the Times, which was by no means sympathetic towards Lord Beaconsfield's speech; in this he said (on the eve of the Constantinople Conference): "Although the policy of England is peace, there is no country so well prepared for war as our own. If she enters into a conflict in a righteous cause, if the contest is one which concerns her liberty, her independence, or her Empire, her resources are, I feel, inexhaustible. She is not a country that, when she enters into a campaign, has to ask herself whether she can support a second or a third campaign."] [See Letter 2, § 20 n. (Vol. XXVII. p. 43).] XXIX. B |