The scheme was not easy to apprehend; it was essentially different from anything then known, though superficially like several bankrupt Utopias.  Ruskin did not want to found a phalanstery, or to imitate Robert Owen or the Shakers.  That would have been practicable—­and useless.

He wanted much more.  He aimed at the gradual introduction of higher aims into ordinary life:  it giving true refinement to the lower classes, true simplicity to the upper.  He proposed that idle hands should reclaim waste lands; that healthy work and country homes should be offered to townsfolk who would “come out of the gutter.”  He asked land-owners and employers to furnish opportunities for such reforms;—­which would involve no elaborate organization nor unelastic rules;—­simply the one thing needful, the refusal of Commercialism.

As before, he scorned the idea that real good could be done by political agitation.  Any government would work, he said, if it were an efficient government.  No government was efficient unless it saw that every one had the necessaries of life, for body and soul; and that every one earned them by some work or other.  Capital—­that is, the means and material of labour, should therefore be in the hands of the Government, not in the hands of individuals:  this reform would result easily and necessarily from the forbidding of loans on interest.  Personal property would still be in private hands; but as it could not be invested and turned into capital, it would necessarily be restricted to its actual use, and great accumulation would be valueless.

This is, of course, a very sketchy statement of the ground-work of “Fors,” but to most readers nowadays as comprehensible as, at the time of its publication, it was incomprehensible.  For when, long after “Fors” had been written, Ruskin found other writers advocating the same principles and calling themselves Socialists, he said that he too was a Socialist.

But the Socialists of various sects have complicated, and sometimes confused, their simple fundamental principles with various ways and means; to which he could not agree.  He had his own ways and means.  He had his private ideals of life, which he expounded, along with his main doctrine.  He thought, justifiably, that theory was useless without practical example; and so he founded St. George’s Company (in 1877 called St. George’s Guild) as his illustration.

The Guild grew out of his call, in 1871, for adherents:  and by 1875 began to take definite form.  Its objects were to set the example of a common capital as opposed to a National debt, and of co-operative labour as opposed to competitive struggle for life.  Each member was required to do some work for his living—­without too strict limits as to the kind—­and to practice certain precepts of religion and morality, broad enough for general acceptance.  He was also required to obey the authority of the Guild, and to contribute a tithe of his income to a common fund,