however, a separate report will be given to its members in the course of this year,' and continued as need is.

2

16. Many well-meaning and well-wishing friends outside the Guild, and desirous of entrance, have asked for relaxation of the grievous law concerning the contribution of the tithe of income. Which the Master is not, however, in the least minded to relax; nor any other of the Guild's original laws, none of which were set down without consideration, though this requirement of tithe does indeed operate as most stiff stockade, and apparently unsurmountable hurdle-fence, in the face of all more or less rich and, so to speak, overweighted, well-wishers. For I find, practically, that fifty pounds a year can often save me five -or at a pinch, seven-of them; nor should I be the least surprised if some merry-hearted apprentice lad, starting in life with a capital of ten pounds or so, were to send me one of them, and go whistling on his way with the remaining nine. But that ever a man of ten thousand a year should contrive, by any exertion of prudence and self-denial, to live upon so small a sum as nine thousand, and give one thousand to the poor,-this is a height of heroism wholly inconceivable to modern pious humanity.

17. Be that as it may, I am of course ready to receive subscriptions for St. George's work from outsiders—whether zealous or lukewarm-in such amounts as they think fit: and at present I conceive that the proposed enlargements of our museum at Sheffield are an object with which more frank sympathy may be hoped than with the agricultural business of the Guild. Ground I have, enough-and place for a pleasant gallery for such students as Sheffield may send up into the clearer light; *—but I don't choose to

* An excellent and kind account of the present form and contents of the Museum will be found in the last December number of Cassell's Magazine of Art.8

[The "Master's Report" was, however, not issued till 1881: see Vol. XXX.] That is, in the case of full "Companions:" see above, p. 182. Subsequently, however, the "stockade" was removed: see Vol. XXX. p. 47.]

3 [By Edward Bradbury, vol. iii. pp. 57-60.]

sell out any of St. George's stock for this purpose, still less for the purchase of books for the Museum, and yet there are many I want, and can't yet afford. Mr. Quaritch, for instance, has a twelfth-century Lectionary, a most precious MS., which would be a foundation for all manner of good learning to us: but it is worth its weight in silver, and inaccessible for the present. Also my casts from St. Mark's, of sculptures never cast before, are lying in lavender -or at least in tow-invisible and useless, till I can build walls for them: and I think the British public would not regret giving me the means of placing and illuminating these rightly. And, in fine, here I am yet for a few years, I trust, at their service-ready to arrange such a museum for their artizans as they have not yet dreamed of;-not dazzling nor overwhelming, but comfortable, useful, and-in such sort as smoke-cumbered skies may admit,―beautiful; though not, on the outside, otherwise decorated than with plain and easily-worked slabs of Derbyshire marble, with which I shall face the walls, making the interior a working man's Bodleian Library, with cell and shelf of the most available kind, undisturbed, for his holiday time. The British public are not likely to get such a thing done by any one else for a time, if they don't get it done now by me, when I'm in the humour for it. Very positively I can assure them of that; and so leave the matter to their discretion.

Many more serious matters, concerning the present day, I have in mind-and partly written, already; but they must be left for next Fors, which will take up the now quite imminent question of Land, and its Holding, and Lordship.

[This Lectionary was ultimately bought by Ruskin, out of the funds of the St. George's Guild, for the Sheffield Museum ("Master's Report," 1884, § 5): see Vol. XXX., where also (in the Catalogue of the Museum) the casts from St. Mark's are described.]

"YEA, THE WORK OF OUR HANDS, ESTABLISH THOU IT"

LETTER 89

WHOSE FAULT IS IT?1

TO THE TRADES UNIONS OF ENGLAND 2

BEAUVAIS, August 31, 1880.

1. MY DEAR FRIENDS,-This is the first letter in Fors which has been addressed to you as a body of workers separate from the other Englishmen who are doing their best, with heart and hand, to serve their country in any sphere of its business, and in any rank of its people. I have never before acknowledged the division, (marked, partly in your own imagination, partly in the estimate of others, and of late, too sadly, staked out in permanence by animosities and misunderstandings on both sides,) between you, and the mass of society to which you look for employment. But I recognize the distinction to-day, moved, for one thing, by a kindly notice of last Fors, which appeared in the Bingley Telephone of April 23rd of this year; saying, "that it was to be wished I would write more to and for the workmen and workwomen of these

[For the title, see § 10 (p. 408).]

2 [525 copies of this Letter were issued free to Trade Unions, each copy being stamped "Trades Union Copy, presented by the Author": see below, § 13. "The most important Fors I have yet written," Ruskin called it in a letter to Miss Beever (September 18); "dainty packets of dynamite" (Hortus Inclusus, 3rd ed., p. 85; reprinted in a later volume of this edition).]

3 [The Bingley Telephone and Airedale Courant. The article contains also the following passage: "John Ruskin appears to run away with the idea that he is not appreciated by working people. We can assure him that he is mistaken in this. We know numbers in our small circle of friends, who look upon him in the light which he would value most, that of a man who loves truth for its own

realms," and influenced conclusively by the fact of your having expressed by your delegates at Sheffield' your sympathy with what endeavours I had made for the founding a Museum there, different in principle from any yet arranged for working men: this formal recognition of my effort, on your part, signifying to me, virtually, that the time was come for explaining my aims to you, fully, and in the clearest terms possible to me.

2. But, believe me, there have been more reasons than I need now pass in review, for my silence hitherto respecting your special interests. Of which reasons, this alone might satisfy you, that, as a separate class, I knew scarcely anything of you but your usefulness, and your distress; and that the essential difference between me and other political writers of your day, is that I never say a word about a single thing that I don't know, while they never trouble themselves to know a single thing they talk of; but give you their own "opinions" about it, or tell you the gossip they have heard about it, or insist on what they like in it, or rage against what they dislike in it; but entirely decline either to look at, or to learn, or to speak, the Thing as it is, and must be.

Now I know many things that are, and many that must be, hereafter, concerning my own class: but I know nothing yet, practically, of yours, and could give you no serviceable advice either in your present disputes with your masters, or in your plans of education and action for yourselves, until I had found out more clearly, what you meant by a Master, and what you wanted to gain either in education or action, and, even farther, whether the kind of

sake, and is a sincere lover of his fellow-men, and who desires in his heart their elevation to a higher plane. We have seen a letter which he once sent to a woolsorter in Cottingley, and he says in it that his correspondent was the first working man who had ever written a letter to him. But John Ruskin must be told that humble working men look upon him as such a great man that it would be presumptuous on their part to do such a thing."]

[The reference is probably to the subscriptions collected for the Museum among the co-operators: see below, p. 415 n.]

2 [Compare above, p. 374.]

person you meant by a Master was one in reality or not, and the things you wanted to gain by your labour were indeed worth your having or not. So that nearly everything hitherto said in Fors has been addressed, in main thought, to your existing Masters, Pastors, and Princes,'not to you, though these all I class with you, if they knew it, as "workmen and labourers," and you with them, you knew it, as capable of the same joys as they, tempted by the same passions as they, and needing, for your life, to recognize the same Father and Father's Law over you all, as brothers in earth and in heaven.

if

3. But there was another, and a more sharply restrictive reason for my never, until now, addressing you as a distinct class;—namely, that certain things which I knew positively must be soon openly debated-and what is more, determined -in a manner very astonishing to some people, in the natural issue of the transference of power out of the hands of the upper classes, so called, into yours,-transference which has been compelled by the crimes of those upper classes, and accomplished by their follies, these certain things, I say, coming now first into fully questionable shape,2 could not be openly announced as subjects of debate by any man in my then official position as one of a recognized body of University teachers, without rendering him suspected and disliked by a large body of the persons with whom he had to act. And I considered that in accepting such a position at all, I had virtually promised to teach nothing contrary to the principles on which the Church and the Schools of England believed themselves-whether mistakenly or not-to have been founded.

The pledge was easy to me, because I love the Church and the Universities of England more faithfully than most churchmen, and more proudly than most collegians; though

1["Masters, being the leaders in your work; Pastors, the teachers of your hearts; Princes, the rulers over them and you."-MS. note by Author in his copy.]

["i.e., shape of which it can be distinctly questioned: is it convenient, tenable, graceful, or the like?"-MS. note by Author in his copy.]