and what he accomplished in the kindred volume, “Munera Pulveris,” which first appeared in “Fraser’s Magazine,” that Ruskin for the time dropped his revelations in art to let a new world of thought into the “dismal science” of political economy, confound its old-time instructors, and gird at the evils of the age,—­the greed, selfishness, and petty bargaining spirit of industrial and commercial life.  Nor in conducting such a crusade as this was Ruskin abandoning his old and less controverted gospel of art.  He was but carrying into new and barren fields the high ideals he had hitherto counselled his age to emulate and heed, and in his sympathy with labor seeking to bring into its world the comeliness of beauty and the cheer of prosperity, comfort, and happiness.  In “Time and Tide” (1867), and more at length in “Fors Clavigera,” Ruskin reiterates his message to labor, to get rid of ever-environing misery by realizing what are the true sources of happiness,—­pleasure in sincere and honest work, inspired by intelligence, culture, religion, and right living.  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