From 1850 onwards, in which year Ruskin made Carlyle’s acquaintance, the former fell under the dominion of these ideas, and began to preach a species of Aristocratic Socialism.[38] He denounced competition and profit-seeking in commerce; the factory system; the capitalistic organisation of industry.  His scheme of a regenerated society, however, was by no means so democratic as that imagined by Morris in “News from Nowhere.”  It was a “new feudalism” with a king at the head of it and a rural nobility of “the great old families,” whose relations to their tenantry are not very clearly defined.[39] Ruskin took some steps towards putting into practice his plans for a reorganisation of labour under improved conditions.  “Fors Clavigera” consisted of a series of letters to workingmen, inviting them to join him in establishing a fund for rescuing English country life from the tyranny and defilement of machinery.  In pursuance of this project, the St. George’s Guild was formed, about 1870, Ruskin devoting to it 7,000 pounds of his own money.  Trustees were chosen to administer the fund; a building was bought at Walkley, in the suburbs of Sheffield, for use as a museum; and the money subscribed was employed in promoting co-operative experiments in agriculture, manufacturing, and education.

In 1848 the widespread misery among the English working class, both agricultural labourers and the operatives in cities, broke out in a startling way in the Chartist movement.  Sympathy with some of the aims of this movement found literary expression in Charles Kingsley’s novels, “Yeast” and “Alton Locke”, in his widely circulated tract, “Cheap Clothes and Nasty”; in his letters in Politics for the People over the signature “Parson Lot”; in some of his ballads like “The Three Fishers”; and in the writings of his friends, F. D. Maurice and Thomas Hughes.  But the Christian Socialism of these Broad Churchmen was by no means of the mediaeval type.  Kingsley was an exponent of “Muscular Christianity.”  He hated the asceticism and sacerdotalism of the Oxford set, and challenged the Tractarian movement with all his might.[40] Neither was this Christian Socialism of a radical nature, like Morris’.  It limited itself to an endeavour to alleviate distress by an appeal to the good feeling of the upper classes; and by setting on foot trade-unions, co-operative societies, and workingmen’s colleges.  Kingsley himself, like Ruskin, believed in a landed gentry; and like both Ruskin and Carlyle, he defended Governor Eyre of Jamaica against the attacks of the radical press.[41]

Ruskin and Morris travelled to Socialism by the pathway of art.  Carlyle had early begun his complaints against the mechanical spirit of the age, and its too great reliance on machinery in all departments of thought and life.[42] But Ruskin made war on machinery for different reasons.  As a lover of the beautiful, he hated its ugly processes and products.  As a student of art, he mourned over the reduction of