It is not the rule of the game, answer the capitalists. Precisely so, and they too are right. But when we wait to see how Ruskin is going to alter it, like all the economic moralists he can give no practical help, but merely suggests that you should select the workman you want, pay him the full regulation wage, and let the other go; or in other words, as he says, pay the same wages to good and bad workmen alike, but employ only the good. And this he thinks could be done if all individuals and classes alike, - whose incomes by his arrangement were definitely fixed for them, - would consent to work as one man for the benefit of the nation as a whole, - much as all the individual bees in a hive work for the good of the swarm - and if the masters would not begin to gamble on their own account the moment that prices began to rise. But unfortunately, like all purely ideal statical constructions which are intended to be fixed and permanent, the amount of pruning and paring necessary to fit the heterogeneous millions of a population into their respective niches, where full justice shall be done to each of them, would involve a limbo for castaways compared with which in range and extent Dante's Inferno of the damned would show as a mere molehill on the landscape.

For without some means of coercing the Population into limits - an unsavoury question which Ruskin was either too delicate or too reticent to tackle - the number of those whom his rejection of the intellectually or morally unfit would require to be chloroformed or otherwise painlessly extinguished, would, if no provision were made for them - and he makes none - choke up the streets of his Utopia to the doors; just as in a hive of bees, where the statical construction of the hive is intended to be fixed and permanent, - and not as with human beings who follow the gleam of a series of dynamic moving ideals which change their nature and character from age to age - the periodical holocaust of the drones is a necessity of the very existence of the hive. But on all this Ruskin is silent; and so, by cutting off quite the most important half of the problem, and the one where all its entanglements and difficulties lie, and from which they are perennially recruited, he left the problem as he found it, still unsolved.

But if we are asked, in turn; - Have Ruskin's labours in the economic field, which he himself prized more highly than all his other work, been altogether in vain, we answer unhesitatingly, by no means. On the contrary, he definitized once and for all the economic moral ideal at which all men should aim, and so quickened the general conscience on a whole region of life which, under the convenient formula of ' business is business/ had practically cut itself off from the other great humanizing and civilizing currents of the world and been left a prey to the wolves; and so helped to bring it into line with the great doctrine of his master Carlyle, and with the permanent laws of all creatures that go in herds; - namely, that nothing can be left to mere laissez-faire or to the unregulated personal and private self-interests of the great body of the herd itself, but that all must depend on those 'great men' in every department who can make their ideas and their wills prevail. But as to how this, again, was to be done on this side of the millennium, Ruskin gives us no hint; and even Carlyle, it will be remembered, had his doubts. - so long as the herd were to have the selection as well as the ratification of these 'great men' in their hands: - inasmuch as they would be sure to elect some 'Bobissimus,' the rich sausage-maker, or some mere man of birth, or sportsman, or frothy stump-orator, as their highest ideal of what their 'heroes' were to be.

The outcome of the work of Ruskin, then, on this subject of Political Economy, when surveyed at a sufficient perspective, is a pure statical Utopia, constructed on a combination of old feudal relations with the mediaeval guild-system of master and workman; - as though the Modern World were a mere decadence, and the gradual evolution of all sides of life, involving infinite complexities of adaptation and management in the handling, a thing unknown. His Utopia differs from that of Rousseau, as we have already said, in loading the possessors of the great instruments needed for the production of wealth, with unequal degrees of value, and in confining; them to entirely different functions, as well as in giving to different kinds of consumption - as of good books versus good wine - unequal degrees of moral worth; instead of beginning as Rousseau did with a mere sand-heap of undifferentiated units called human beings, all equal in value, all more or less interchangeable in function, and all absolutely free to do as they pleased so long as they did not encroach on the equal freedom of others; - and so far was an advance over Rousseau's crude Utopian dream.

It differs from the 'Modern Utopia' of Mr. Wells, on the other hand, in so far as that while both agree that the economic as well as the political world is to be ruled by a special order of men of exceptional ability, Ruskin would give these great ones an economic garniture suitable to their age and position, their dignity, their culture, and their refinement of taste; while Mr. Wells would train them, like Roman Catholic or High Church priests, to habits of a somewhat rigid personal asceticism; but both would give to all men alike equal opportunities to rise to the highest positions, as the Roman Catholic Church originally did, wherever or howsoever born. Both must have a limbo for their derelicts and incapables, but while Ruskin leaves the problem of what is to be done with them altogether in the dark, Mr. Wells would have them packed off to some island in the Southern Seas, or other outlying dependency, there to fight out and solve both the problem of existence in general and of their own economic salvation in particular, for themselves.