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THE POLITICAL ECONOxMY OF ART. 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2016 
 
 https://archive.org/details/politicaleconomy00rusk_0 
 
THE 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY 
 
 OF 
 
 ART: 
 
 BEING THE SUBSTANCE (WITH ADDITIONS) OF TWO 
 LECTURES 
 
 DELIVERED AT MANCHESTER, JULY IOtii and 13th, 1857. 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN RUSKIN, M.A., 
 
 AUTHOR OF “ MODERN PAINTERS,” “ ELEMENTS OF DRAMHNG,” 
 “lectures on ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING,” 
 
 ETC. ETC. 
 
 NEW YORK ; 
 
 WILEY & HALS TED, 
 
 No. 851 BROAD WA'T, 
 
 1 8 5 8 . 
 
m' 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAOR 
 
 Lecture I. 11 
 
 1. Discoveiy 24 
 
 2. Application 30 
 
 Lecture II 50 
 
 3. Accumulation 50 
 
 4. Distribution * . . . 11 
 
 Addenda 95 
 
 Note 1. — “ Fatherly Authority 95 
 
 “ 2. — “ Right to Public Support ” 99 
 
 “ 3. — “ Trial Schools ” * . . 4 . . . . 104 
 
 “ 4. — “ Public Favour ” . 4 110 
 
 “ 5. — “ Invention of new wants ” ...... Ill 
 
 “ 6. — “ Economy of Literature ” 113 
 
 “ 7. — “ Pilots of the State ” 115 
 
 “ 8. — “ Silk and Purple ” 110 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 The greater part of the following treatise remains in the exac 
 form in which it was read at Manchester ; but the more familiar 
 passages of it, which were trusted to extempore delivery, have been 
 since written with greater explicitness and fulness than I could 
 give them in speaking ; and a considerable number of notes are 
 added, to explain the points which could not be sufficiently con- 
 sidered in the time I had at my disposal in the lecture-room. 
 
 Some apology may be thought due to the reader, for an en- 
 deavour to engage his attention on a subject of which no profound 
 study seems compatible with the work in which I am usually em- 
 ployed. But profound study is not, in this case, necessary cither 
 to writer or reader, while accurate study, up to a certain point, is 
 necessary for us all. Political economy means, in plain English, 
 nothing more than “ citizens’ economy and its first principles 
 ought, therefore, to be understood by all who mean to take the 
 responsibility of citizens, as those of household economy by all 
 who take the responsibility of householders. Nor are its first 
 principles in the least obscure : they are, many of them, disagreeable 
 
viii 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 in their practical requirements, and people in general pretend that 
 they cannot understand, because they are unwilling to obey them ; 
 or rather, by habitual disobedience, destroy their capacity of un- 
 derstanding them. But there is not one of the really great prin- 
 ciples of the science which is either obscure or disputable — which 
 might not be taught to a youth as soon as he can be trusted with 
 an annual allowance, or to a young lady as soon as she is of age to 
 bo taken into counsel by the housekeeper. 
 
 I might, with more appearance of justice, be blamed for think- 
 ing it necessary to enforce what everybody is supposed to know. 
 But this fault will hardly be found with me, while the commercial 
 events recorded daily in our journals, and still more the explana- 
 tions attempted to be given of them, show that a large number of 
 our so-called merchants are as ignorant of the nature of money as 
 they are reckless, unjust, and unfortunate in its employment. 
 
 The statements of economical principle given in the text, though 
 I know that most, if not all, of them are accepted by existing au- 
 thorities on the science, are not supported by references, because I 
 have never read any author on political economy, except Adam 
 Smith, twenty years agOk Whenever I have taken up any modern 
 book upon this subject, I have usually found it encumbered with 
 iiHjuirics into accidental or minor commercial results, for the pursuit 
 of whicli an ordinary reader could have no leisure, and, by the 
 complication of which, it seemed to me, the authors themselves had 
 been not unfrequently prevented from seeing to the root of the 
 business. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 ix 
 
 Finally, if the reader should feel inclined to blame me for too 
 sanguine a statement of future possibilities in political practice, let 
 him consider how absurd it would have appeared in the days of 
 Edward I. if the present state of social economy had been then 
 predicted as necessary, or even described as possible. And I be- 
 lieve the advance from the days of Edward I. to our own, great as 
 it is confessedly, consists, not so much in what we have actually 
 accomplished, as in what we are now enabled to conceive. 
 
rOLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 LKCTURE I. 
 
 Among the various characteristics of the age in which wc live, 
 as compared with other ages of this not yet very experienced 
 world, one of the most notable appears to me to be the just 
 and wholesome contempt in which we hold poverty. I repeat, the 
 just and wholesome contempt ; though I see that some of my hear- 
 ers look surprised at the expression. I assure them, I use it in 
 sincerity; and I should not have ventured to ask you to listen 
 to me this evening, unless I had entertained a profound respect 
 for wealth — true wealth, that is to say; for, of course, we ought 
 to respect neither wealth nor anything else that is false of its 
 kind: and the distinction between real and false wealth is one 
 of the points on which I shall have a few words presently to 
 say to you. But true wealth I hold, as I said, in great honour ; 
 and sympathize, for the most part, with that extraordinary feel- 
 ing of the present age which publicly pays this honour to riches. 
 I cannot, however, help noticing how extraordinary it is, and how 
 this epoch of ours differs from all bygone epochs in having no 
 philosophical nor religious worshippers of the ragged godship of 
 poverty. In the classical agesj not only were there people who 
 voluntarily lived in tubs, and who used gravely to maintain the 
 superiority of tub-life to town-life, but the Greeks and Latins 
 
12 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 [lect. I. 
 
 seem to have looked on these eccentric, and I do not scruple 
 to say, absurd people, with as much respect as we do upon large 
 capitalists and landed proprietors ; so that really, in those days, no 
 one could be described as purse proud, but only as empty-purse 
 proud. And no less distinct than the honour which those curious 
 Greek people pay to their conceited poor, is the disrespectful man- 
 ner in which they speak of the rich ; so that one cannot listen 
 long either to them, or to the Roman writers who imitated them, 
 Avithout finding oneself entangled in all sorts of plausible absurdi- 
 ties ; hard upon being convinced of the uselessness of collecting 
 that heavy yellow substance which we call gold, and led generally 
 to doubt all the most established maxims of political economy. Nor 
 are matters much better in the middle ages. For the Greeks and 
 Romans contented themselves with mocking at rich people, and 
 constructing merry dialogues between Charon and Diogenes or 
 Menippus, in which the ferrymen and the cynic rejoiced together 
 as they saw kings and rich men coming down to the shore of 
 Acheron, in lamenting and lamentable crowds, casting their 
 crowns into the dark waters, and searching, sometimes in vain, for 
 the last coin out of all their treasures that could ever be of use to 
 them. But these Pagan views of the matter were indulgent, 
 compared with those which were held in the middle ages^ 
 when wealth seems to have been looked upon by the best of men 
 not only as contemptible, but as criminal. The purse round the 
 neck is, then, one of the principal signs of condemnation in the 
 pictured inferno; and the Spirit of Poverty is reverenced with 
 subjection of heart, and faithfulness of affection, like that of a 
 loyal knight for his lady, or a loyal subject for his queen. 
 And truly, it rcquii-cs some boldness to quit ourselves of these 
 feelings, and to confess their partiality or their error, which, 
 nevertheless, we are certainly bound to do. For wealth is simply 
 one of the greatest powers which can be entrusted to human 
 liands : a power, not indeed to be envied, because it seldom 
 
LECT. I.] POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. IS 
 
 makes us happy; but still less to be abdicated or despised; 
 while, in these days, and in this country, it has become a 
 power all the more notable, in that the possessions of a rich man 
 are not represented, as they used to be, by wedges of gold or 
 coffers of jewels, but by masses of men variously employed, over 
 whose bodies and minds the wealth, according to its direction, 
 exercises harmful or helpful influence, and becomes, in that alter- 
 native, Mammon either of Unrighteousness or of Righteousness. 
 
 Now, it seemed to me that since, in the name you have given 
 to this great gathering of British pictures, you recognise them as 
 Treasures — that is, I suppose, as part and parcel of the real wealth 
 of the country — you might not be uninterested in tracing certain 
 commercial questions connected with this particular form of 
 w^ealth. Most persons express themselves as surprised at its 
 quantity ; not having known before to what an extent good art 
 had been accumulated in England ; and it will, therefore, I should 
 think, be held a worthy subject of consideration, what are the 
 political interests involved in such accumulations ; what kind of 
 labour they represent, and how this labour may in general be 
 applied and economized, so as to produce the richest results. 
 
 Now, you must have patience with me, if in approaching the 
 specialty of this subject, I dwell a little on certain points of 
 general political science already known or established : for though 
 thus, as I believe, established, some which I shall have occasion to 
 rest arguments on are not yet by any means universally accepted ; 
 and therefore, though I will not lose time in any detailed defence 
 of them, it is necessary that I should distinctly tell you in what 
 form I receive, and wdsh to argue from them ; and this the more, 
 because there may perhaps be a part of my audience who have 
 not interested themselves in political economy, as it bears on 
 ordinaiy fields of labour, but may yet wish to hear in what way 
 its principles can be applied to Art. I shall, therefore, take leave 
 to trespass on your patience with a few elementary statements in 
 
POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 14 
 
 [lect. I. 
 
 tlie outset, and with the expression of some general principles, 
 here and there, in the course of our particular inquiry. 
 
 To begin, then, with one of these necessary truisms: all 
 economy, whether of states, households, or individuals, may be 
 defined to be the art of managing labour. The world is so regu- 
 lated by the laws of Providence, that a man’s labour, well applied, 
 is always amply suflScient to provide him during his life with all 
 things needful to him, and not only with those, but with many 
 pleasant objects of luxury ; and yet farther, to procure him large 
 intervals of healthful rest and serviceable leisure. And a nation’s 
 labour, well applied, is in like manner amply sufficient to provide 
 its whole population with good food and comfortable habitation ; 
 and not with those only, but with good education besides, and 
 objects of luxury, art treasures, such as these you have around you 
 now. But by those same laws of Nature and Providence, if the 
 labour of the nation or of the individual be misapplied, and much 
 more if it be insufiScient, — if the nation or man be indolent and 
 unwise, — suffering and want result, exactly in proportion to the 
 indolence and improvidence, — to the refusal of labour, or to the 
 misapplication of it. Wherever you see want, or misery, or degra- 
 dation, in this world about you, there, be sure, either i/idustry has 
 been wanting, or industry has been in error. It is not accident, it 
 is not Ilcaven-commanded calamity, it is not the original and ine- 
 vitable evil of man’s nature, which fill your streets with lamen- 
 tation, and your graves with prey. It is only that, when there 
 should have been providence, there has been waste ; when there 
 should have been labour, there has been lasciviousness; and wilful- 
 ncss, when there should have been subordination.’ 
 
 Now, we have warped the word “ economy” in our English 
 language into a meaning which it has no business whatever to 
 bear. In our use of it, it constantly signifies merely sparing or 
 
 * Proverbs xiii. 23, “ Much food is in the tillage of the poor, but there is 
 that is destroyed for want of judgment.” 
 
LECT. I.J POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 15 
 
 saving; economy of money means saving money — economy of 
 time, sparing time, and so on. But that is a wholly barbarous use 
 of the word — barbarous in a double sense, for it is not English, 
 and it is bad Greek ; barbarous in a treble sense, for it is not 
 English, it is bad Greek, and it is worse sense. Economy no more 
 means saving money than it means spending money. It means, 
 the administration of a house; its stewardship; spending or saving 
 that is, whether money or time, or anything else, to the best pos- 
 sible advantage. In the simplest and clearest definition of it, 
 economy, whether public or private, means the wise management 
 of labour ; and it means this mainly in three senses : namely, first, 
 applying your labour rationally ; secondly, preserving its produce 
 carefully ; lastly, distributing its produce seasonably. 
 
 I say first, applying your labour rationally ; that is, so as to ob- 
 tain the most precious things you can, and the most lasting things, 
 by it : not growing oats in land where you can grow wheat, nor 
 putting fine embroidery on a stuff that will not wear. Secondly, 
 preserving its produce carefully ; that is to say, laying up your 
 wheat wisely in storehouses for the time of famine, and keeping 
 your embroidery watchfully from the moth ; and lastly, distribut- 
 ing its produce seasonably; that is to say, being able to carry your 
 corn at once to the place where the people are hungry, and your 
 embroideries to the places where they are gay ; so fulfilling in all 
 ways the Wise Man’s description, whether of the queenly house- 
 wife or queenly nation : “ She riseth while it is yet night, and 
 giveth meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens. She 
 maketh herself coverings of tapestry, her clothing is silk and pur- 
 ple. Strength and honour are in her clothing, and she shall 
 rejoice in time to come.” 
 
 Now, you will observe that in- this description of the perfect 
 economist, or mistress of a household, there is a studied expres- 
 sion of the balanced division of her care between the two great 
 objects of utility and splendour ; in her right hand, food and flax, 
 
16 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 [lect. I. 
 
 for life and clothing ; in her left hand, the purple and the needle- 
 work, for honour and for beauty. All perfect housewifery or 
 national economy is known by these two divisions; wherever 
 either is wanting, the economy is imperfect. If the motive of pomp 
 prevails, and the care of the national economist is directed only to 
 the accumulation of gold, and of pictures, and of silk and marble, 
 you know at once that the time must soon come when all these 
 treasures shall be scattered and blasted in national ruin. If, on 
 the contrary, the element of utility prevails, and the nation dis- 
 dains to occupy itself in any wise with the arts of beauty or 
 delight, not only a certain quantity of its energy calculated for 
 exercise in those arts alone must be entirely wasted, which is bad 
 economy, but also the passions connected with the utilities of pro- 
 perty become morbidly strong, and a mean lust of accumulation, 
 merely for the sake of accumulation, or even of labour, merely for 
 the sake of labour, will banish at least the serenity and the morality 
 of life, as completely, and perhaps more ignobly, than even the lavish- 
 ness of pride, and the lightness of pleasure. And similarly, and 
 much more visibly, in private and household economy, you may 
 judge always of its perfectness by its fair balance between the use 
 and the pleasure of its possessions. You will see the wise cottager’s 
 garden trimly divided between its well-set vegetables, and its fragrant 
 flowers ; you will see the good housewife taking pride in her pretty 
 table-cloth, and her glittering shelves, no less than in her well- 
 dressed dish, and her full storeroom ; the care in her countenance 
 will alternate with gaiety ; and though you will reverence her in 
 her seriousness, you will know her best by her smile. 
 
 Now, as you will have anticipated, I am going to address you, 
 on this and our succeeding evening, chiefly on the subject of that 
 economy which relates rather to the garden than the farm-yard. 
 I shall ask you to consider with me the kind of laws by which we 
 shall best distribute the beds of our national garden, and raise in it 
 the sweetest succession of trees pleasant to the sight, and (in no 
 
LECT. I.] 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 17 
 
 forbidden sense) to be desired to make us wise. But, before pro- 
 ceeding to open this specialty of our subject, let me pause for a few 
 moments to plead with you for the acceptance of that principle of 
 government or -authority which must be at the root of all economy, 
 whether for use or for pleasure. I said, a few minutes ago, that a 
 nation’s labour, well applied, was amply sufficient to provide its 
 whole population with good food, comfortable clothing, and pleasant 
 luxury. But the good, instant, and constant application is every- 
 thing. We must not, when our strong hands are thrown out of 
 work, look wildly about for want of something to do with them. 
 If ever we feel that want, it is a sign that all our household is out 
 of order. Fancy a farmer’s wife, to whom one or two of her ser- 
 vants should come at twelve o’clock at noon, crying that they had 
 got nothing to do ; that they did not know what to do next : and 
 fancy still farther, the said farmer’s wife looking hopelessly about 
 her rooms and yard, they being all the while considerably in dis- 
 order, not knowing where to set the spare hand-maidens to work, 
 and at last complaining bitterly that she had been obliged to give 
 them their dinner for nothing. That’s the type of the kind of 
 political economy we practise too often in England. Would you 
 not at once assert of such a mistress that she knew nothing of her 
 duties ? and would you not be certain, if the household were 
 rightly managed, the mistress would be only too glad at any mo- 
 ment to have the help of any number of spare hands ; that she 
 would know in an instant what to set them to ; — in an instant what 
 part of to-morrow’s work might be most serviceably forwarded, 
 what part of next month’s work most wisely provided for, or what 
 new task of some profitable kind undertaken ? and when the eve- 
 ning came, and she dismissed her servants to their recreation or 
 their rest, or gathered them to the reading round the work-table, 
 under the eaves in the sunset, would you not be sure to find that 
 none of them had been overtasked by her, just because none had 
 been left idle ; that everything had been accomplished because all 
 
]8 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. [lECT. I. 
 
 had been employed ; that the kindness of the mistress had aided 
 licr presence of mind, and the slight labour had been entrusted to 
 the weak, and the formidable to the strong ; and that as none had 
 been dishonoured by inactivity, so none had been broken by toil ? 
 
 Now, the precise counterpart of such a household would be 
 seen in a nation in which political economy was rightly under- 
 stood. You complain of the difficulty of finding work for your 
 men. Depend upon it the real difficulty rather is to find men for 
 your work. The serious question for you is not how many you 
 have to feed, but how much you have to do ; it is our inactivity, 
 not our hunger, that ruins us : let us never fear that our servants 
 should have a good appetite — our wealth is in their strength, not 
 in their starvation. Look around this island of yours, and see 
 what you have to do in it. The sea roars against your harbour- 
 less cliffs — you have to build the breakwater, and dig the port of 
 refuge ; the unclean pestilence ravins in your streets — you have to 
 bring the full stream from the hills, and to send the free winds 
 through the thoroughfare ; the famine blanches your lips and eats 
 away your flesh — you have to dig the moor and dry the marsh, to 
 bid the morass give forth instead of engulphing, and to wring the 
 lioney and oil out of the rock. These things, and thousands such, 
 we have to do, and shall have to do constantly, on this great farm 
 of ours ; for do not suppose that it is anything else than that. - 
 ITecisely the same laws of economy wliich apply to the cultiva- 
 tion of a farm or an estate apply to the cultivation of a province 
 or of an island. AVhatcver rebuke you would address to the im- 
 pi-ovidcnt master of an ill-managed patrimony, precisely that re- 
 buke we should address to ourselves, so far as we leave our popu- 
 lation in idleness and our country in disorder. What would you 
 say to the lord of an estate who complained to you of his poverty 
 and disabilities, and, when you pointed out to him that his land 
 was half of it overrun with weeds, and that his fences were all in 
 ruin, and that his cattle-sheds were roofless, and his labourers ly- 
 
j'*;cT. I.] 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 19 
 
 ing under the hedges faint for want of food, he answered to you 
 that it would ruin him to weed his land or to roof his sheds — 
 that those were too costly operations for him to undertake, and 
 that he knew not how to feed his labourers nor pay them? Would 
 you not instantly answer, that instead of ruining him to weed his 
 fields, it would save him ; that his inactivity was his destruction, 
 and that to set his labourers to work was to feed them ? Now, 
 you may add acre to acre, and estate to estate, as far as you like, 
 but you will never reach a compass of ground which shall escape 
 from the authority of these simple laws. The principles which 
 are right in the administration of a few fields, are right also in the 
 administration of a great country from horizon to horizon : idle- 
 ness does not cease to be ruinous because it is extensive, nor labour 
 to be productive because it is universal. 
 
 Nay, but you reply, there is one vast difference between the 
 nation’s economy and the private man’s : the farmer has full au- 
 thority over his labourers ; he can direct them to do what is 
 needed to be done, whether they like it or not ; and he can turn 
 them away if they refuse to work, or impede others in their 
 working, or are disobedient, or quarrelsome. There is this great 
 difference ; it is precisely this difference on which I wish to fix 
 your attention, for it is precisely this difference which you have to 
 do away with. We know the necessity of authority in farm, or 
 in fleet, or in army ; but we commonly refuse to admit it in Ihe 
 body of the nation. Let us consider this point a little. 
 
 In the various awkward and unfortunate efforts which the 
 French have made at the development of a social system, they 
 liave at least stated one true principle, that of fraternity or brother- 
 hood. Do not be alarmed ; they got all wrong in their experi- 
 ments, because they quite forgot that this fact of fraternity implied 
 another fact quite as important — that of paternity, or fatherhood. 
 That is to say, if they were to regard the nation as one family, 
 the condition of unity in that family consisted no less in their hav- 
 
20 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. [LECT. I. 
 
 ing a Lead, or a father, than in their being faithful and affection- 
 ate members, or brothers. But we must not forget this, for we 
 have long confessed it with our lips, though we refuse to confess 
 it in our lives. For half an hour every Sunday we expect a 
 man in a black gown, supposed to be telling us truth, to address 
 us as brethren, though we should be shocked at the notion of any 
 brotherhood existing among us out of church. And we can 
 hardly read a few sentences on any political subject without run- 
 ning a chance of crossing the phrase “ paternal government,” 
 though we should be utterly horror-struck at the idea of govern- 
 ments claiming anything like a father’s authority over us. Now, 
 I believe those two formal phrases are in both instances perfectly 
 binding and accurate, and that the image of the farm and its ser- 
 vants which I have hitherto used, as expressing a wholesome 
 national organization, fails only of doing so, not because it is too 
 domestic, but because it is not domestic enough ; because the real 
 type of a well-organized nation must be presented, not by a farm 
 cultivated by servants who wrought for hire, and might be turned 
 away if they refused to labour, but by a farm in which the master 
 was a father, and in which all the servants were sons ; which im- 
 plied, therefore, in all its regulations, not merely the order of expe- 
 diency, but the bonds of affection and responsibilities of relation- 
 ship ; and in which all acts and services were not only to be sweet- 
 ened by brotherly concord, but to be enefored by fatherly authority.^ 
 Observe, I do not mean in the least that we ought to place such 
 an authority in the hands of any one person, or of any class, or 
 body of persons. But I do mean to say that as an individual who 
 conducts himself wisely must make laws for himself which at 
 some time or other may appear irksome or injurious, but which, 
 precisely at the time they appear most irksome, it is most neces- 
 sary he should obey, so a nation which means to conduct itself 
 
 See note 1st, in Addenda, 
 
LECT. I.] POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 21 
 
 wisely, must establish authority over itself, vested either in kings, 
 councils, or laws, which it must resolve to obey, even at times 
 when the law or authority appears irksome to the body of the 
 people, or injurious to certain masses of it. And this kind of 
 national law has hitherto been only judicial ; contented, that is, 
 with an endeavour to prevent and punish violence and crime ; but, 
 as we advance in our social knowledge, we shall endeavour to 
 make our government paternal as well as judicial ; that is, to 
 establish such laws and authorities as may at once direct us in our 
 occupations, protect us against our follies, and visit us in our dis- 
 tresses : a government which shall repress dishonesty, as now it 
 punishes theft ; which shall show how the discipline of the masses 
 may be brought to aid the toils of peace, as discipline of the masses 
 has hitherto knit the sinews of battle ; a government which shall 
 have its soldiers of the ploughshare as well as its soldiers of the 
 sword, and which shall distribute more proudly its golden crosses 
 of industry — golden as the glow of the harvest, than now it grants 
 its bronze crosses of honour — bronzed with the crimson of blood. 
 
 I have not, of course, time to insist on the nature or details of 
 government of this kind ; only I wish to plead for your several 
 and future consideration of this one truth, that the notion of 
 Discipline and Interference lies at the very root of all human pro- 
 gress or power ; that the “ Let alone” principle is, in all things 
 which man has to do with, the principle of death ; that it is ruin 
 to him, certain and total, if he lets his land alone — if he lets his 
 fellow-men alone — if he lets his own soul alone. That his whole 
 life, on the contrary, must, if it is healthy life, be continually one 
 of ploughing and pruning, rebuking and helping, governing and 
 punishing ; and that therefore it is only in the concession of some 
 great principle of restraint and interference in national action that 
 he can ever hope to find the secret of protection against national 
 degradation. I believe that the masses have a right to claim edu- 
 cation from their government ; but only so far as they acknow- 
 
22 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 [lect. I. 
 
 ledge the duty of yielding obedience to their government. I 
 believe they have a right to claim employment from their govern- 
 ors ; but only so far as they yield to the governor the direction 
 and discipline of their labour ; and it is only so far as they grant 
 to the men whom they may set over them the father’s authority 
 to check the childishness of national fancy, and direct the way- 
 wardness of national energy, that they have a right to ask that 
 none of their distresses should be unrelieved, none of their weak- 
 nesses unwatched; and that no grief, nor nakedness, nor peril 
 should exist for them, against which the father’s hand was not 
 outstretched, or the father’s shield uplifted.^ 
 
 Now, I have pressed this upon you at more length than is need- 
 ful or proportioned to our present purposes of inquiry, because I 
 would not for the first time speak to you on this subject of politi- 
 cal economy without clearly stating what I believe to be its 
 first grand principle. But its bearing on the matter in hand is 
 chiefly to prevent you from at once too violently dissenting 
 from me when what ,I may state to you as advisable economy 
 in art appears to imply too much restraint or interference with the 
 freedom of the patron or artist. We are a little apt, though on 
 
 ' Compare Wordsworth’s Essay on the Poor-Law Amendment Bill. I 
 quote one important passage : — But, if it be not safe to touch the abstract 
 question of man’s right in a social state to help himself even in the last ex- 
 tremity, may wo not still contend for the duty of a Christian government, 
 standing in loco parentis towards all its subjects, to make such effectual provi- 
 sion that no one shall bo in danger of perishing either through the neglect or 
 harslincss of its legislation ? Or, waiving this, is it not indisputable that the 
 claim of the State to the allegiance, involves the protection of the subject? 
 And, as all rights in one party impose a correlative duty upon another, it fol- 
 lows that tlio right of the State to require the services of its members, even 
 to the jeoparding of their lives in the common defence, establishes a right in 
 the people (not to bo gainsaid by utilitarians and economists) to public sup- 
 port when, from any cause, they may bo unable to support themselves.” — 
 (See note 2nd, in Addenda.) 
 
LECT. I.] POLITICAL ECONOMY OP ART. 23 
 
 the whole a prudent nation, to act too immediately on our 
 impulses, even in matters merely commercial; much more in 
 those involving continual appeals to our fancies. How far, there- 
 fore, the proposed systems or restraints may be advisable, it is for 
 you to judge ; only I pray you not to be offended with them 
 merely because they are systems and restraints. Do you at all 
 recollect that interesting passage of Carlyle, in which he com- 
 pares, in this country and at this day, the understood and 
 commercial value of man and horse ; and in which he wonders 
 that the horse, with its inferior brains and its awkward hoofiness, 
 instead of handiness, should be always worth so many tens or 
 scores of pounds in the market, while the man, so far from always 
 commanding his price in the market, would often be thought to 
 confer a service on the community by simply killing himself out 
 of their way? Well, Carlyle does not answer his own question, 
 because he supposes we shall at once see the answer. The value 
 of the horse consists simply in the fact of your being able to put 
 a bridle on him. The value of the man consists precisely in the 
 same thing. If you can bridle him, or which is better, if he can 
 bridle himself he will be a valuable creature directly. Otherwise, 
 in a commercial point of view, his value is either nothing, or acci- 
 dental only. Only, of course, the proper bridle of man is not a 
 leathern one ; what kind of texture it is rightly made of, we find 
 from that command, “Be ye not as the horse or as the mule 
 which have no understanding, whose mouths must be held in 
 with bit and bridle.” You are not to be without the reins, 
 indeed ; but they are to be of another kind ; “ I will guide thee 
 with mine Eye.” So the bridle of man is to be the Eye of God ; 
 aud if he rejects that guidance, then the next best for him is the 
 horse’s and the mule’s, which have no understanding; and if 
 he rejects that, and takes the bit fairly in his teeth, then there 
 is nothing more left for him than the blood that comes out of the 
 city, up to the horsebridles. 
 
24 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 [lect. I. 
 
 Quitting, however, at last these general and serious laws of 
 government — or rather bringing them down to our own business 
 in hand — we have to consider three points of discipline in that 
 particular branch of human labour which is concerned, not w^ith 
 procuring of food, but the expression of emotion; we have to 
 consider respecting art; first, how to apply our labour to it; then, 
 how to accumulate or preserve the results of labour ; and then, 
 how to distribute them. But since in art the labour which we 
 have to employ is the labour of a particular class of men — men 
 who have special genius for the business, we have not only 
 to consider how to apply the labour, but first of all how to 
 produce the labourer ; and thus the question in this particu- 
 lar case becomes fourfold : first, how to get your man of 
 genius ; then, how to employ your man of genius ; then, how 
 to accumulate and preserve his work in the greatest quantity; 
 and lastly, how to distribute his work to the best national advan- 
 tage. Let us take up these questions in succession. 
 
 I. Discovery. — How are we to get our men of genius : that is 
 to say, by what means may we produce among us, at any given 
 time, the greatest quantity of effective art-intellect? A wide ques- 
 tion, you say, involving an account of all the best means of art 
 education. Yes, but I do not mean to go into the consideration of 
 those ; I want only to state the few principles which lie at the 
 foundation of the matter. Of these, the first is that you have 
 always to find your artist, not to make him ; you can’t manufacture 
 him, any more than you can manufacture gold. You can find 
 liim, and refine him : you dig him out as he lies nugget-fashion in 
 the mountain-stream ; you bring him home ; and you make him 
 into current coin, or household plate, but not one grain of him can 
 you originally produce. A certain quantity of art-intellect is born 
 annually in every nation, greater or less according to the nature 
 and cultivation of the nation, or race of men ; but a perfectly fixed 
 
LECT. I.] 
 
 I. DISCOVERY. 
 
 25 
 
 quantity amiualh^, not increasable by one grain. You may lose 
 it, or you may gatlier it; you may let it lie loose in the ravine, 
 and buried in the sands, or you may make kings’ thrones of it, and 
 overlay temple gates with it, as you choose ; but the best you cp.n 
 do with it is always merely sifting, melting, hammering, purifying 
 — never creating. And there is another thing notable about this 
 artistical gold ; not only is it limited in quantity, but in use. You 
 need not make thrones or golden gates with it unless you like, but 
 assuredly you can’t do anything else with it. You can’t make 
 knives of it, nor armour, nor railroads. The gold won’t cnt you, 
 and it won’t carry you : put it to a mechanical use, and you destroy 
 it at once. It is quite true that in the greatest artists, their proper 
 artistical faculty is united with every other ; and you may make 
 use of the other faculties, and let the artistical one lie dormant. 
 For aught I know there may be two or three Leonardo da Vincis 
 employed at this moment in your harbours and railroads : but you 
 are not employing their Leonardesque or golden faculty there, you 
 are only oppressing and destroying it. And the artistical gift in 
 average men is not joined with others ; your born painter, if you 
 don’t make a painter of him, won’t be a first-rate merchant, or 
 lawyer ; at all events, whatever he turns out. his own special gift 
 is unemployed by you ; and in no wise helps him in that other 
 business. So here you have a certain quantity of a particular sort 
 of intelligence, produced for you annually by providential laws, 
 which you can only make use of by setting it to its own proper 
 work, and which any attempt to use otherwise involves the 
 dead loss of so much human energy. Well then, supposing we 
 wish to employ it, how is it to be best discovered and re- 
 fined. It is easily enough discovered. To wish to employ 
 
 it is to discover it. All that you need is, a school of trial* in 
 every important town, in which those idle farmers’ lads whom 
 their masters never can keep out of mischief, and those stupid 
 
 Sec note Ocl, in Addenda. 
 2 
 
26 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. [lECT. I. 
 
 tailors’ ’prentices who are always stitching the sleeves in wrong 
 way upwards, may have a try at this other trade ; only this school 
 of trial must not he entirely regulated by formal laws of art 
 education, but must ultimately be the workshop of a good master 
 painter, who will try the lads with one kind of art and another, 
 till he finds out what they are fit for. Next, after your trial 
 school, you want your easy and secure employment, which is the 
 matter of chief importance. For, even on the present system, the 
 boys who have really intense art capacity, generally make painters 
 of themselves ; but then, the best half of their early energy is 
 lost in the battle of life. Before a good painter can get employ- 
 ment, his mind has always been embittered, and his genius dis- 
 torted. A common mind usually stoops, in plastic chill, to what- 
 ever is asked of it, and scrapes or daubs its way complacently into 
 public favour.’ But your great men quarrel with you, and you 
 revenge yourselves by starving them for the first half of theii 
 lives. Precisely in the degree in which any painter possesses 
 original genius, is at present the increase of moral certainty that 
 during his early years he will have a hard battle to fight ; and 
 that just at the time when his conceptions ought to be full and 
 happy, his temper gentle, and his hopes enthusiastic — just at that 
 most critical period, his heart is full of anxieties and household 
 cares ; he is chilled by disappointments, and vexed by injustice; 
 he becomes obstinate in his errors, no less than in his virtues, 
 and the arrows of his aims arc blunted, as the reeds of his trust 
 are broken. 
 
 Wluit we mainly want, therefore, is a means of sufficient and 
 unagitated employment : not holding out great prizes for which 
 young painters are to scramble ; but furnishing all with adequate 
 support, and opportunity to display such power as they possess 
 without rejection or mortification. I need not say that the best 
 
 See note 4th, in Addenda. 
 
LECT. I.] 
 
 I. DISCOVERY. 
 
 2Y 
 
 field of labour of tbis kind would be presented by the constant 
 progress of public works involving various decorations ; and we 
 will presently examine what kind of public works may thus, ad- 
 vantageously for the nation, be in constant progress. But a more 
 important matter even than this of steady employment, is the 
 kind of criticism with which you, the public, receive the works of 
 the young men submitted to you. You may do much harm by 
 indiscreet praise and by indiscreet blame ; but remember, the 
 chief harm is always done by blame. It stands to reason that a 
 young man’s work cannot be perfect. It must be more or less 
 ignorant ; it must be more or less feeble ; it is likely that it may 
 be more or less experimental, and if experimental, here and there 
 mistaken. If, therefore, you allow yourself to launch out into 
 sudden barking at the first faults you see, the probability is that 
 you are abusing the youth for some defect naturally and inevitably 
 belonging to that stage of his progress ; and that you might just 
 as rationally find fault with a child for not being as prudent as a 
 privy councillor, or with a kitten for not being as grave as a cat. 
 But there is one fault which you may be quite sure is unnecessary, 
 and therefore a real and blameable fault : that is haste, involving 
 negligence. Whenever you see that a young man’s work is either 
 bold or slovenly, then you may attack it firmly ; sure of being 
 right. If his work is bold, it is insolent ; repress his insolence : 
 if it is slovenly, it is indolent ; repress his indolence. So long as 
 he works in that dashing or impetuous way, the best hope for him 
 is in your contempt : and it is only by the fact of his seeming not 
 to seek your approbation that you may conjecture he deserves it. 
 
 But if he does deserve it, be sure that you give it him, else you 
 not only run a chance of driving him from the right road by want 
 of encouragement, but you deprive yourselves of the happiest pri- 
 vilege you will ever have of rewarding his labour. For it is only 
 the young who can receive much reward from men’s praise : the 
 old^ when they are great, get too far beyond and above you to 
 
28 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 [lect. I. 
 
 care what you think of them. You may urge them then with 
 pympatliy, and surround them then with acclamation ; hut they 
 will doubt your pleasure, and despise your praise. You might 
 have cheered them in their race through the asphodel meadows 
 of their youth ; you might have brought the proud, bright scarlet 
 into their faces, if you had but cried once to them “Well done,” 
 as they dashed up to the first goal of their early ambition. But 
 now, their pleasure is in memory, and their ambition is in heaven. 
 They can be kind to you, but you never more can be kind to 
 tlicm. You may be fed with the fruit and fulness of their old 
 age, but you were as the nipping blight to them in their blossom- 
 ing, and your praise is only as the warm winds of autumn to the 
 dying branches. 
 
 There is one thought still, the saddest of all, bearing on this 
 withholding of early help. It is possible, in some noble natures, 
 that the warmth and the affections of childhood may remain un- 
 chillcd, though unanswered; and that the old man’s heart may 
 still be capable of gladness, when the long-withheld sympathy is 
 given at last. But in these noble natures it nearly always hap- 
 pens, that the chief motive of earthly ambition has not been to 
 give delight to themselves, but to their parents. Every noble 
 yf)nth looks back, as to the chiefest joy which this world’s honour 
 ever gave him, to the moment when first he saw his father’s eyes 
 flash with pride, and his mother turn away her head, lest ho 
 should take her tears for tears of sorrow. Even the lover’s joy, 
 whcui sonic worthiness of his is acknowledged before his mistress, 
 is not so great as that, for it is not so pure — the desire to exalt 
 himself in her eyes mixes with that of giving her delight ; but he 
 does not need to exalt himself in his parents’ eyes : it is with the 
 pure hope of giving them pleasure that he comes to tell them 
 what he has done, or what has been said of him ; and therefore 
 lie has a purer pleasure of his own. And this purest and best of 
 rewards you keep from liim if you can: you feed him in his 
 
LECT. I.] 
 
 I. DISCOVERY. 
 
 29 
 
 tender youth with ashes and dishonour ; and then you come to 
 him, obsequious, but too late, with your sh'arp laurel crown, the 
 dew all dried from off its leaves ; and you thrust it into his languid 
 hand, and he looks at you wistfully. What shall he do with it ? 
 What can he do, but go and lay it on his mother’s grave ? 
 
 Thus, then, you see that you have to provide for your young 
 men : first, the searching or discovering school ; then the calm 
 employment ; then the justice of praise : one thing more you have 
 to do for them in preparing them for full service — namely, to 
 make, in the noble sense of the word, gentlemen of them ; that is 
 to say, to take care that their minds receive such training, that in 
 all they paint they shall see and feel the noblest things. I am 
 sorry to say, that of all parts of an artist’s education this is the 
 most neglected among us ; and that even where the natural taste 
 and feeling of the youth have been pure and true, where there 
 Avas the right stuff in him to make a gentleman of, you may too 
 frequently discern some jarring rents in his mind, and elements of 
 degradation in his treatment of s*ubject, owing to want of gentle 
 training, and of the liberal influence of literature. This is quite 
 visible in our greatest artists, even in men like Turner and Gains- 
 borough ; w'hile in the common grade of our second-rate painters 
 the evil attains a pitch which is far too sadly manifest to need my 
 dwelling upon it. Now, no branch of art economy is more im- 
 portant than that of making the intellect at your disposal pure as 
 Avell as powerful ; so that it may always gather for you the sweet- 
 est and fairest things. The same quantity of labour from the same 
 man’s hand, will, according as you have trained him, produce a 
 lovely and useful work, or a base and hurtful one ; and depend 
 upon it, whatever value it may possess, by reason of the painter’s 
 skill, its chief and final value, to any nation, depends upon its 
 being able to exalt and refine, as well as to please ; and that the 
 picture which most truly deserves the name of an art-treasure, is 
 that which has been painted by a good man. 
 
30 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 LECT. I. 
 
 You cannot but see bow far this would lead, if I were to 
 enlarge upon it. I must take it up as a separate subject some 
 otlier time : only noticing at present that no money could be 
 better spent by a nation than in providing a liberal and disci- 
 plined education for its painters, as they advance into tlie critical 
 period of tbeir youth ; and that also, a large part of their power 
 during life depends upon the kind of subjects which you, the pub- 
 lic, ask them for, and therefore the kind of thoughts with which 
 you require them to be habitually familiar. I shall have more to 
 say on this head when we come to consider what employment 
 they should have in public buildings. 
 
 There are many other points of nearly as much importance as 
 these, to be explained with reference to the development of 
 genius ; but I should have to ask you to come and hear six lec- 
 tures instead of two if I were to go into their detail. For in- 
 stance, I Lave not spoken of the way in which you ought to look 
 for those artificers in various manual trades, who, without possess- 
 ing the order of genius which you would desire to devote to 
 liigber purposes, yet possess wit, and humour, and sense of colour, 
 and fancy for form — all commercially valuable as quantities of 
 intellect, and all more or less expressible in the lower arts of iron- 
 work, pottery, decorative sculpture, and such like. But these 
 details, interesting as they are, I must commend to your own con- 
 sideration, or leave for some future inquiry. I want just now 
 only to set the bearings of the entire subject broadly before you, 
 with enough of detailed illustration to make it intelligible ; and 
 therefore 1 must quit the first head of it here, and pass to the 
 second, namely, how best to employ the genius we discover. A 
 cei'tain quantity of able hands and heads being placed at our dis- 
 posal, w'hat shall we most advisably set them upon ? 
 
 TT. Application. — Tliere are three main points the economist 
 lias to attend to in this. 
 
LECT. I.] 
 
 II. APPLICATION. 
 
 31 
 
 First, To set liis men to various work. 
 
 Secondly, To easy work. 
 
 Thirdly, to lasting work, 
 
 I shall briefly touch on the first two, for I want to arrest your 
 attention on the last 
 
 I say first, to various work. Supposing you have two men of 
 equal power as landscape painters — and both of them have an 
 hour at your disposal. You would not set them both to paint the 
 same piece of landscape. You would, of course, rather have two 
 subjects than a repetition of one. 
 
 Well, supposing them sculptors, will not the same rule hold ? 
 You naturally conclude at once that it will ; but you will have 
 hard work to convince your modern arcliitects of that. They 
 
 will put twenty men to work, to carve twenty capitals ; and all 
 shall be the same. If I could show you the architects’ yards in 
 England just now, all open at once, perhaps you might see a 
 thousand clever men, all employed in carving the same design. 
 Of the degradation and deathfulness to the art-intellect of the 
 country involved in such a habit, I have more or less been led to 
 speak before now; but I have not hitherto marked its definite 
 tendency to increase the price of worh^ as such. When men arc 
 employed continually in carving the same ornaments, they get 
 into a monotonous and methodical habit of labour — precisely cor- 
 respondent to that in which they would break stones, or paint 
 liouse-walls. Of course, what they do so constantly, they do 
 easily ; and if you excite them temporarily by an increase of 
 wages you may get much work done by them in a little time. 
 But, unless so stimulated, men condemned to a monotonous exer- 
 tion, work — and always, by the laws of human nature, must 
 work — only at a tranquil rate, not producing by any means a 
 maximum result in a given time. But if you allow them to vary 
 their designs, and thus interest their heads and hearts in what 
 they are doing, you will find them become eager, first, to get their 
 
32 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. [lECT. I, 
 
 ideas expressed, and tlien to finish the expression of them ; and 
 the moral energy thus brought to bear on the matter quickens, 
 and therefore cheapens, the production in a most important 
 degree. Sir Thomas Deane, the architect of the new Museum at 
 (dxford, told me, as I passed through Oxford on m}^ way here, that 
 he found that, owing to this cause alone, capitals of various design 
 could be executed cheaper than capitals of similar design (the 
 amount of hand labour in each being the same) by about 30 per 
 cent. 
 
 AVell, that is the first way, then, in which you will employ your 
 intellect well ; and the simple observance of this plain rule of po- 
 litical economy will effect a noble revolution in your architecture, 
 such as you cannot at present so much as conceive. Then the 
 second way in which we are to guard against waste is by setting 
 our men to the easiest, and therefore the quickest, work which 
 will answer the purpose. Marble, for instance, lasts quite as long 
 as granite, and is much softer to work ; therefore, when you get 
 hold of a good sculptor, give him marble to carve — not granite. 
 That, you say, is obvious enough. Yes; but it is not so obvious 
 how much of your workmen’s time you waste annually in making 
 them cut glass, after it has got hard, when you ought to make 
 them mould it while it is soft. It is not so obvious how much 
 expense you waste in cutting diamonds and rubies, which are the 
 hardest tilings you can find, into shapes that mean nothing, when 
 the same men might be cutting sandstone and freestone into 
 shapes that mean something. It is not so obvious how much of 
 the aibists’ time in Italy you waste, by forcing them to make 
 wi-etched little pictures for you out of crumbs of stone glued 
 together at enormous cost, when the tenth of the time would 
 make good and noble pictures for you out of water-colour. I 
 couhl go on giving you almost numberless instances of this great 
 commercial mistake; but I should only weary and confuse you. 
 I therefore commend also this head of our subject to your own 
 
LECT. I.] 
 
 II, APPLICATION. 
 
 33 
 
 meditation, and proceed to the last I named — the last I shall task 
 your patience with to-night. You know we are now considering 
 how to apply our genius ; and we were to do it as economists, in 
 three ways : — 
 
 To various work ; 
 
 To easy work ; 
 
 To lasting work. 
 
 This lasting of the work, then, is our final question. 
 
 Many of you may, perhaps, remember that Michael Angelo was 
 once commanded by Pietro di Medici to mould a statue out of 
 snow, and that he obeyed the command.* I am glad, and we 
 have all reason to be glad, that such a fancy ever came into the 
 mind of the unworthy prince, and for this cause : that Pietro di 
 Medici then gave, at the period of one great epoch of consum- 
 mate power in the arts, the perfect, accurate, and intensest possible 
 type of the greatest error which nations and princes can commit, 
 respecting the power of genius entrusted to their guidance. You 
 had there, observe, the strongest genius in the most perfect obe- 
 dience ; capable of iron independence, yet wholly submissive to the 
 patron’s will ; at once the most highly accomplished and the most 
 original, capable of doing as much as man could do, in any direc- 
 tion that man could ask. And its governor, and guide, and 
 patron sets it to build a statue in snow — to put itself into the ser- 
 vice of annihilation — to make a cloud of itself, and pass away from 
 the earth. 
 
 Now this, so precisely and completely done by Pietro di Medici, 
 is what w'c are all doing, exactly in the degree in which we direct 
 the genius under our patronage to work in more or less perish- 
 able materials. So far as we induce painters to work in fading 
 colours, or architects to build with imperfect structure, or in 
 any other way consult only immediate ease and cheapness in the 
 
 * See the noble passage on tliis tradition in “Casa Guidi Windows.” 
 
34 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 [lect. I. 
 
 production of what we want, to the exclusion of provident thought 
 as to its permanence and serviceahleness in after ages ; so far we 
 are forcing our Michael Angelos to carve in snow. The first duty 
 of the economist in art is, to see that no intellect shall thus glitter 
 merely in the manner of hoar-frost ; but that it shall be well vitri- 
 fied, like a painted window, and shall be set so between shafts of 
 stone and bands of iron, that is shall bear the sunshine upon it, 
 and send the sunshine through it, from generation to generation. 
 
 I can conceive, however, some political economist to interrupt 
 me here, and say, “ If you make your art wear too well, you will 
 soon have too much of it ; you will throw your artists quite out of 
 work. Better allow for a little wholesome evanescence — benefi- 
 cent destruction : let each age provide art for itself, or we shall 
 soon have so many good pictures that we shall not know what to 
 do with them.” 
 
 Remember, my dear hearers, who are thus thinking, that politi- 
 cal economy, like every other subject, cannot be dealt with effec- 
 tively if we try to solve two questions at a time instead of one. It 
 is one question, how to get plenty of a thing ; and another, 
 whether plenty of it will be good for us. Consider these two 
 mattei-s separately; never confuse yourself by interweaving one 
 with the other. It is one question, how to treat your fields so as 
 to get a good harvest ; another, whether you wish to have a good 
 liarvest, or would rather like to keep up the price of corn. It is 
 one (piestion, how to graft your trees so as to grow most apples ; 
 and quite another, whether having such a heap of apples in the 
 storeroom will not make them all rot. 
 
 Now, therefore, that we are talking only about grafting and 
 growing, pray do not vex yourselves with thinking what you are 
 to do with the pippins. It may be desirable for us to have much 
 art, or little — we will examine that by and by; but just now, let 
 us keep to the simple consideration how to get plenty of good art if 
 we want it. Berhaps it might bo just as well that a man of mode- 
 
LECT. I.] 
 
 II. APPLICATION. 
 
 35 
 
 rate income should be able to possess a good picture, as that any 
 work of real merit should cost 500/. or 1000/.; at all events, it 
 is certainly one of the branches of political economy to ascertain 
 how, if we like, we can get things in quantities — plenty of corn, 
 plenty of wine, plenty of gold, or plenty of pictures. 
 
 It has just been said, that the first great secret is to produce work 
 that wdll last. Now, the conditions of work lasting are twofold : 
 it must not only be in materials that wdll last, but it must be itself 
 of a quality that wdll last — it must be good enough to bear the test 
 of time. If it is not good, we shall tire of it quickly, and throw 
 it aside — we shall have no pleasure in the accumulation of it. So 
 that* the first question of a good art-economist respecting any work 
 is, Will it lose its flavour by keeping ? It may be very amusing 
 nowq and look much like a work of genius. But what will be its 
 value a hundred yeais hence ? 
 
 You cannot always ascertain this. You may get what you fancy 
 to be w^ork of the best quality, and yet find to your astonishment 
 that it w'on’t keep. But of one thing you may be sure, that art 
 which is produced hastily will also perish hastily ; and that what 
 is cheapest to you now, is likely to be dearest in the end. 
 
 I am sorry to say, the great tendency of this age is to expend its 
 genius in perishable art of this kind, as if it were a triumph to 
 burn its thoughts away in bonfires. There is a vast quantity of 
 intellect and of labour consumed annually in our cheap illustrated 
 publications ; you triumph in them ; and you think it so grand a 
 thing to get so many woodcuts for a penny. Why, woodcuts? 
 penny and all, are as much lost to you as if you had invested your 
 money in gossamer. More lost, for the gossamer could only tickle 
 your face, and glitter in your eyes ; it could not catch your feet 
 and trip you up : but the bad art can, and does ; for you can’t like 
 good woodents as long as you look at the bad ones. If "we were 
 at this moment to come across a Titian woodcut, or a Durer wood- 
 cut, we should not like it — those of us at least who are accustomed 
 
36 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 LECT. I. 
 
 to the cheap work of the day. We don’t like, and can’t like, that 
 long ; hut when we are tired of one bad cheap thing, we throw it 
 aside and buy another bad cheap thing ; and so keep looking at 
 bad things all our lives. Now, the very men who do all that quick 
 bad work for us are capable of doing perfect work. Onl)q perfect 
 Avork can’t be hurried, and therefore it can’t be cheap beyond a 
 certain point. But suppose you pay twelve times as much as you 
 do now, and you have one Avoodcut for a shilling instead of twelve ; 
 and the one Avoodcut for a shilling is as good as art can be, so that 
 you Avill never tire of looking at it ; and is struck on good paper 
 Avith good ink, so that you will never wear it out by handling it ; 
 Avhile you are sick of your penny each cuts by the end of the week, 
 and have torn them mostly in half too. Isn’t your shilling’s worth 
 the best bargain ? 
 
 It is not, hoAvever, only in getting prints or woodcuts of the best 
 kind that you Avill practise economy. There is a certain quality 
 about an original drawing Avhich you cannot get in a woodcut, and 
 the best part of the genius of any man is only expressible in ori- 
 ginal Avork, Avhether Avith pen and ink — pencil or colours. This is 
 not ahvays the case ; but in general the best men are those who 
 can only express themselves on paper or canvass : and you will, 
 therefore, in the long run, get most for your money by buying 
 original Avork ; proceeding on the principle already laid down, that 
 the best is likely to bo the cheapest in the end. Of course, original 
 Avoik cannot be produced under a certain cost. If you Avant a 
 man to make you a draAving Avhich takes him six days, you must, 
 at all events, keep him for six days in bread and water, fire and 
 lodging ; that is the loAvest price at Avhich he can do it for you, but 
 that is not very dear : and the best bargain Avhich can possibly be 
 made honestly in art — the very ideal of a cheap purchase to the 
 purchaser — is the original AVork of a great man fed for as many 
 days as are necessary on bread and water, or perhaps we may say 
 Avitli as many onions as Avill keep him in good humour. That is 
 
II. APPLICATION. 
 
 37 
 
 LEOT. I.J 
 
 the way by which you will always get most for your money ; no 
 mechanical multiplication or ingenuity of commercial arrangements 
 will ever get you a better penny’s worth of art than that. 
 
 Without, however, pushing our calculations quite to this prison- 
 discipline extreme, w^e may lay it down as a rule in art-economy, 
 that original work is, on the whole, cheapest and best worth having. 
 But precisely in proportion to the value of it as a production, 
 becomes the importance of having it executed in permanent mate- 
 rials. And here we come to note the second main error of the 
 day, that we not only ask our workmen for bad art, but we make 
 them put it into bad substance. We have, for example, put a great 
 quantity of genius, within the last twenty years, into water-colour 
 drawing, and we have done this with the most reckless disregard 
 whether either the colours or the paper will stand. In most instan- 
 ces, neither will. By accident, it may happen that the colours in 
 a given drawing have been of good quality, and its paper uninjured 
 by chemical processes. But you take not the least care to ensure 
 these being so; I have myself seen the most destructive changes 
 take place in water-colour drawings within twenty years after they 
 were painted ; and from all I can gather respecting the recklessness 
 of modern paper manufacture, my belief is, that though you may 
 still handle an Albert Durer engraving, two hundred years old, 
 fearlessly, not one-half of that time will have passed over your 
 modern water-colours, before most of them will be reduced to mere 
 white or brown rags ; and your descendants, twitching them con- 
 temptuously into fragments between finger and thumb, will mutter 
 against you, half in scorn and half in anger, “Those wretched 
 nineteenth century people ! they kept vapouring and fuming about 
 the w^orld, doing what they called business, and they couldn’t make 
 a sheet of paper that wasn’t rotten.” And note that this is no 
 unimportant portion of your art economy at this time. Your 
 water-colour painters are becoming every day capable of express- 
 ing greater and better things; and their material is especially 
 
38 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OP ART. 
 
 [lect. I, 
 
 adapted to the turn of your best artists’ minds. The value which 
 you could accumulate in work of this kind would soon become a 
 most important item in the national art-wealth, if only you would 
 take the little pains necessary to secure its permanence. I am 
 inclined to think, myself, that water-colour ought not to be used 
 on paper at all, but only on vellum, and then, if properly taken 
 care of, the drawing would be almost imperishable. Still, paper is 
 a much more convenient material for rapid work; and it is an 
 infinite absurdity not to secure the goodness of its quality, when 
 we could do so without the slightest trouble. Among the many 
 favours which I am going to ask from our paternal government 
 when we get it, will be that it will supply its little boys with good 
 paper. You have nothing to do but to let the government esta- 
 blish a paper manufactory, under the superintendence, of any of our 
 leading chemists, who should be answerable for the safety and 
 completeness of all the processes of the manufacture. The 
 government stamp on the corner of your sheet of drawing-paper, 
 made in the perfect way, should cost you a shilling, which would 
 add something to the revenue ; and when you bought a water- 
 colour drawing for fifty or a hundred guineas, you would have 
 merely to look in the corner for your stamp, and pay your extra 
 shilling for the security that your hundred guineas were given 
 really for a drawing, and not for a coloured rag. There need be 
 no monopoly or restriction in the matter; let the paper manu- 
 facturers compete with the government, and if people like to save 
 their shilling, and take their chance, let them; only, the artist and 
 pm-chaser might then be sure of good material, if they liked, and 
 now they cannot be. 
 
 I should like also to have a government colour manufactory; 
 though that is not so necessary, as the quality of colour is more 
 within the artist’s power of testing, and I have no doubt that any 
 painter may get permanent colour from the respectable manufac- 
 turers, if he chooses. 1 will not attempt to follow the subject out 
 
LECT. I.] 
 
 II. APPLICATION. 
 
 39 
 
 at all as it respects architecture, and our methods of modern 
 building ; respecting which I have had occasion to speak before 
 now. 
 
 But I cannot pass without some brief notice our habit — con- 
 tinually, as it seems to me, gaining strength — of putting a large 
 quantity of thought and work, annually, into things which are 
 either in their nature necessarily perishable, as dress ; or else into 
 compliances with the fashion of the day, into things not necessarily 
 perishable, as plate. I am afraid almost the first idea of a young rich 
 couple setting up house in London, is, that they must have new 
 plate. Their father’s plate may be very handsome, but the fashion 
 is changed. They will have a new service from the leading manu- 
 facturer, and the old plate, except a few apostle spoons, and a cup 
 which Charles the Second drank a health into their pretty ances- 
 tress, is sent to be melted down, and made up with new fiourishes 
 and fresh lustre. Now, so long as this is the case — so long, ob- 
 serve, as fashion has influence on the manufacture of plate — so 
 long you cannot have a goldsmiths art in this country. Do you 
 suppose any workman worthy the name will put his brains into a 
 cup or an urn, which he knows is to go to the melting pot in half 
 a score years ? He will not ; you don’t ask or expect it of him. 
 You ask of him nothing but a little quick handicraft — a clever 
 twist of a handle here, and a foot there, a convolvulus from the 
 newest school of design, a pheasant from Landseer’s game cards ; 
 a couple of sentimental figures for supporters, in the style of the 
 signs of insurance offices, then a clever touch with the burnisher, 
 and there’s your epergne, the admiration of all the footmen at the 
 wedding-breakfast, and the torment of some unfortunate youth 
 w’ho cannot see the pretty girl opposite to him, through its tyran- 
 nous branches. 
 
 But you don’t suppose that thai!s goldsmith’s work? Gold- 
 smith’s work is made to last, and made with the men’s whole 
 heart and soul in it; true goldsmith’s work, when it exists, is 
 
40 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. [lECT. I. 
 
 generally tlie means of education of the greatest painters and 
 sculptors of the day. Francia was a goldsmith ; Francia was not 
 his own name, but that of his master the jeweller ; and he signed 
 his pictures almost always, “ Francia, the goldsmith,” for love of 
 his master ; Ghirlandajo was a goldsmith, and was the master of 
 Michael Angelo ; Verrocchio was a goldsmith, and was the master 
 of Leonardo da Vinci. Ghiberti was a goldsmith, and beat out 
 the bronze gates which Michael Angelo said might serve for gates 
 of Paradise. ^ But if ever you want work like theirs again, you 
 must keep it, though it should have the misfortune to become old 
 fashioned. You must not break it up, nor melt it any more. 
 There is no economy in that ; you could not easily waste intellect 
 more grievously. Nature may melt her goldsmith’s work at every 
 sunset if she chooses ; and beat it out into chased bars again at 
 every sunrise ; but you must not. The way to have a truly noble 
 service of plate, is to keep adding to it, not melting it. At every 
 marriage, and at every birth, get a new piece of gold or silver if 
 you will, but with noble workmanship on it, done for all time, and 
 put it among your treasures ; that is one of the chief things which 
 gold was made for, and made incorruptible for. When we know 
 a little more of political economy, we shall find that* none but par-'' 
 tially savage nations need, imperatively, gold for their currency f 
 but gold has been given us, among other things, that we might 
 put beautiful work into its imperishable splendour, and that the 
 
 * Several reasons may account for the fact that goldsmith’s work is so 
 wholesome for young artists; first, that it gives great firmness of hand to 
 deal for some time with a solid substance ; again, that it induces caution and 
 steadiness — a boy trusted with chalk and paper suffers an immediate temp- 
 tation to scrawl upon it and play with it, but he dares not scrawl on gold, 
 and he cannot play with it; and, lastl}^, that it gives great delicacy and pre- 
 cision of touch to work upon minute forms, and to aim at producing richness 
 and finish of design correspondent to the preciousuess of the material. 
 
 ’ See note in Addenda on the nature of property. 
 
LECT. I.] 
 
 II. APPLICATION. 
 
 41 
 
 artists who have the most wilful fancies may have a material which 
 will drag out, and beat out, as their dreams require, and will hold 
 itself together with fantastic tenacity, whatever rare and delicate 
 service they set it upon. 
 
 So here is one branch of decorative art in which rich people 
 may indulge themselves unselfishly ; if they ask for good art in it, 
 they may be sure in buying gold and silver plate that they are 
 enforcing useful education on young artists. But there is another 
 branch of decorative art in which I am sorry to say we cannot, at 
 least under existing circumstances, indulge ourselves, with the hope 
 of doing good to anybody, I mean the great and subtle art of dress. 
 
 And here I must interrupt the pursuit of our subject for a mo- 
 ment or two, in order to state one of the principles of political 
 economy, which, though it is, I believe, now sufficiently under- 
 stood and asserted by the leading masters of the science, is not yet, 
 I grieve to say, acted upon by the plurality of those who have the 
 management of riches. Whenever we spend money, we of course 
 set people to work : that is the meaning of spending money ; we 
 may, indeed, lose it without employing anybody ; but, whenever 
 we spend it, we set a number of people to work, greater or less, 
 of course, according to the rate of wages, but, in the long run, 
 proportioned to the sum we spend. Well, your shallow people, 
 because they see that however they spend money they are always 
 employing somebody, and, therefore, doing some good, think and 
 say to themselves, that it is all one how they spend it — that all 
 their apparently selfish luxury is, in reality, unselfish, and is doing 
 just as much good as if they gave all their money away, or per- 
 haps more good ; and I have heard foolish people even declare it 
 as a principle of political economy, that whoever invented a new 
 want^ conferred a good on the community. I have not words 
 strong enough — at least I could not, without shocking you, use 
 
 ^ See note 5tli in Addenda, 
 
42 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 [lect. I. 
 
 the words which would be strong enough — to express my estimate 
 of the absurdity and the mischievousness of this popular fallacy. 
 So, puttiug a great restraint upon myself, and using no hard words, 
 I will simply try to state the nature of it, and the extent of its 
 influence. 
 
 Granted, that whenever we spend money for whatever purpose, 
 we set people to work ; and passing by, for the moment, the 
 question whether the work we set them to is all equally healthy 
 and good for them, we will assume that whenever we spend a 
 guinea we provide an equal number of people with healthy main- 
 tenance for a given time. But, by the way in which we spend it, 
 we entirely direct the labour of those people during that given 
 time. We become their masters or mistresses, and we compel 
 them to produce, within a certain period, a certain article. Now, 
 that article may be a useful and lasting one, or it may be a useless 
 and perishable one — it may be one useful to the Avhole community, 
 or useful only to ourselves. And our selfishness and folly, or our 
 virtue and prudence, are shown, not by our spending money, but 
 by our spending it for the wrong or the right thing ; and we are wise 
 and kind, not in maintaining a certain number of people for a given 
 period, but only in requiring them to produce, during that period, 
 the kind of things which shall be useful to society, instead of those 
 which are only useful to ourselves. 
 
 Tims, for instance : if you are a young lady, and employ a cer- 
 tain number of sempstresses for a given time, in making a given 
 number of simple and serviceable dresses, suppose, seven; of which 
 you can wear one yourself for half the winter, and give six away 
 to poor girls who have none, you are spending your money unself- 
 ishly. But if you employ the same number of sempstresses for the 
 same number of days, in making four, or five, or six beautiful 
 flounces for your own ball-dress — flounces which will clothe no 
 one but yourself, and which you will yourself be unable to wear 
 at more than one ball — you are employing your money selfishly. 
 
LECT. I.] 
 
 II. APPLICATION. 
 
 43 
 
 You have maintained, indeed, in each case, the same number of 
 people ; but in the one case you have directed their labour to the 
 service of the community ; in the other case you have consumed 
 it wholly upon yourself. I don’t say you are never to do so ; I 
 don’t say you ought not sometimes to think of yourselves onl}', 
 and to make yourselves as pretty as you can ; only do not confuse 
 coquettishness with benevolence, nor cheat yourselves into think- 
 ing that all the finery you can wear is so much put into the 
 hungry mouths of those beneath you : it is not so ; it is what you 
 yourselves, whether you will or no, must sometimes instinctively 
 feel it to be— it is what those who stand shivering in the streets, 
 forming a line to watch you as you step out of your carriages, 
 hmw it to be ; those fine dresses do not mean that so much 
 has been put into their mouths, but that so much has been 
 taken out of their mouths. The real politico-economical signifi- 
 cation of every one of those beautiful toilettes, is just this ; that 
 you have had a certain number of people put for a certain number 
 of days wholly under your authority, by the sternest of slave- 
 masters, — hunger and cold ; and you have said to them, “ I will 
 fee‘d you, indeed, and clothe you, and give you fuel for so many 
 days ; but during those days you shall work for me only : your 
 little brothers need clothes, but you shall make none for them : 
 vour sick friend needs clothes, but you shall make none for her : 
 vou vourself will soon need another, and a warmer dress ; but you 
 shall make none for yourself. You shall make nothing but lace 
 and roses for me ; for this fortnight to come, you shall work at 
 the patterns and petals, and then I will crush and consume them 
 awav in an hour.” You will perhaps answer — “ It may not be 
 particularly benevolent to do this, and we won’t call it so ; but at 
 anv rate we do no wrong in taking their labour when we pay 
 them their wages : if we pay for their work we have a right to 
 it.” No ; — a thousand times no. The labour which you have 
 paid for, does indeed become, by the act of purchase, your own 
 
44 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 [lect. I. 
 
 labour : you have bought tbe bands and the time of those work- 
 ers ; they are, by right and justice, your own hands, your own 
 time. But, have you a right to spend your own time, to work 
 with your own hands, only for your own advantage ? — much 
 more, when, by purchase, you have invested your own person 
 with the strength of others ; and added to your own life, a part 
 of the life of others? You may, indeed, to a certain extent, use 
 their labour for your delight; remember, I am making no gene- 
 ral assertions against splendour of dress, or pomp of accessaries 
 of life ; on the contrary, there are many reasons for thinking that 
 we do not at present attach enough importance to beautiful dress, 
 as one of the means of influencing general taste and character. 
 But I do say, that you must weigh the value of what you ask 
 these workers to produce for you in its own distinct balance ; that 
 on its own worthiness or desirableness rests the question of your 
 kindness, and not merely on the fact of your having employed 
 people in producing it : and I say farther, that as long as there 
 are cold and nakedness in the land around you, so long there 
 can be no question at all but that splendour of dress is a crime. 
 In due time, when we have nothing better to set people to work 
 at, it may be right to let them make lace and cut jewels ; but, as 
 long as there arc any who have no blankets for their beds, and 
 no rags for their bodies, so long it is blanket-making and tailoring 
 we must set people to work at — not lace. 
 
 And it would be strange, if at any great assembly which, while 
 it dazzled the young and the thoughtless, beguiled the gentler 
 hearts that beat beneath the embroidery, with a placid sensation 
 of luxurious benevolence — as if by all that they wore in wayward- 
 ness of beauty, comfort had been first given to the distressed, and 
 aid to the indigent ; it would be strange, I say, if, for a moment, 
 the spirits of Truth and of Terror, which walk invisibly among the 
 masques of the earth, would lift the dimness from our erring' 
 thoughts, and show us how — inasmuch as the sums exhausted for 
 
LECT. I.] 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 45 
 
 that magnificence would have given hack the failing breath to 
 many an unsheltered outcast on moor and street — they who wear 
 it have literally entered into partnership with Death ; and dressed 
 themselves in his spoils. Yes, if the veil could be lifted not only 
 from your thoughts, but from your human sight, you would see — 
 the angels do see — on those gay white dresses of yours, strange 
 dark spots, and crimson patterns that you knew not of — spots of 
 the inextinguishable red that all the seas cannot wash away ; yes, 
 and among the pleasant flowers that crown your fair heads, and 
 glow on your wreathed hair, you would see that one weed was 
 always twisted which no one thought of — the grass that grows on 
 graves. 
 
 It was not, however, this last, this clearest and most appal- 
 ling view of our subject, that I intended to ask you to take this 
 evening ; only it is impossible to set any part of the matter in its 
 true light, until we go to the root of it. But the point which it 
 is our special business to consider is, not whether costliness of 
 dress is contrary to charity ; but whether it is not contrary to 
 mere worldly wisdom : whether, even supposing we knew that 
 splendour of dress did not cost suffering or hunger, we might 
 not put the splendour better in other things than dress. And, 
 supposing our mode of dress were really graceful or beautiful, 
 this might be a very doubtful question; for I believe true 
 nobleness of dress to be an important means of education, as it 
 certainly is a necessity to any nation which wishes to possess living 
 art, concerned with portraiture of human nature. No good his- 
 torical painting ever yet existed, or ever can exist, where the 
 dresses of the people of the time are not beautiful : and had it 
 not been for the lovely and fantastic dressing of the 13th to 
 the 16th centuries, neither French, nor Florentine, nor Venetian 
 art could have risen to anything like the rank it reached. Still, 
 even then, the best dressing was never the costliest; and its effect 
 depended much more on its beautiful and, in early times, 
 
46 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 LECT. I. 
 
 modest, arrangement, and on the simple and lovely masses of its 
 colour, than on gorgeousness of .clasp or embroidery. Whether 
 Ave can ever return to any of those more perfect types of form 
 is questionable ; but there can be no question, that all the 
 money we spend on the forms of dress at present worn, is, so 
 i'ar as any good purpose is concerned, wholly lost. Mind, in 
 saying this, I reckon among good purposes the purpose which 
 young ladies are said sometimes to entertain — of being mar- 
 I’ied ; but they would be married quite as soon (and probably 
 to wiser and better husbands) by dressing quietly as by dressing 
 brilliantly ; and I believe it would only be needed to lay fairly 
 and largely before them the real good which might be effected 
 by the sums they spend in toilettes, to make them trust at once 
 only to their bright eyes and braided hair for all the mischief 
 they have a mind to. I wish we could, for once, get the 
 statistics of a London season. There was much complaining talk 
 in Parliament last week of the vast sum the nation has given for 
 the best Paul Veronese in Venice — £14,000 : I wonder what the 
 nation meanwhile has given for its ball-dresses ! Suppose we could 
 sec the London milliners’ bills, simply for unnecessary breadths of 
 slip and flounces, from April to July ; I wonder whether £14,000 
 would cover them. But the breadths of slip and flounces are by 
 this time as much lost and vanished as last year’s snow; only they 
 have done less good : but the Paul Veronese will last for centuries, 
 if we take care of it ; and yet we grumble at the price given for 
 the painting^ while no one grumbles at the price of pride. 
 
 Time docs not permit me to go into any farther illustration of 
 the various modes in which we build our statue out of snow, and 
 waste our labour on things that vanish. I must leave you to fol- 
 low out the subject for yourselves, as I said I should, and proceed, 
 in our next lecture, to examine the two other branches of our sub- 
 ject, namely, how to accumulate our art, and how to distribute it. 
 But, in closing, as we have been much on the topic of good 
 
LECT. I.J 
 
 II. APPLICATION. 
 
 47 
 
 government, both of ourselves and others, let me just give you 
 one more illustration of what it means, from that old art of which, 
 next evening, I shall try to convince you that the value, both 
 moral and mercantile, is greater than we usually suppose. 
 
 One of the frescoes by Ambrozio Lorenzetti, in the town-hall 
 of Siena, represents, by means of symbolical figures, the principles 
 of Good Civic Government and of Good Government in general. 
 The figure representing this noble Civic Government is enthroned, 
 and surrounded by figures representing the Virtues, variously sup- 
 porting or administering its authority. Now, observe what work 
 is given to each of these virtues. Three winged ones — Faith, 
 Hope, and Charity — surrounded the head of the figure, not in 
 mere compliance with the common and heraldic laws of prece- 
 dence among Virtues, such as we moderns observe habitually, but 
 with peculiar purpose on the part of the painter. Faith, as thus 
 represented, ruling the thoughts of the Good Governor, does not 
 mean merely religious faith, understood in those times to be neces- 
 sary to all persons — governed no less than governors — but it 
 means the faith which enables work to be carried out steadily, in 
 spite of adverse appearances and expediencies ; the faith in great 
 principles, by which a civic ruler looks past all the immediate 
 checks and shadows that would daunt a common man, knowing 
 that what is rightly done will have a right issue, and holding his 
 way in spite of pullings at his cloak and whisperings in his ear, 
 enduring, as having in him a faith which is evidence of things un- 
 seen. And Hope, in like manner, is here not the heavenward hope 
 which ought to animate the hearts of all men ; but she attends upon 
 Good Government, to show that all such government is expectant as 
 well as conservative ; that if it ceases to be hopeful of better 
 things, it ceases to be a wise guardian of present things : that it 
 ought never, as long as the world lasts, to be wholly content with 
 any existing state of institution or possession, but to be hopeful 
 still of more wisdom and power ; not clutching at it restlessly or 
 
48 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 [lect. I. 
 
 liastily, but feeling that its real life consists in steady ascent from 
 high to higher: conservative, indeed, and jealously conservative 
 of old things, but conservative of them as pillars not as pinnacles 
 — as aids, but not as Idols; and hopeful chiefly, and active, in 
 times of national trial or distress, according to those first and 
 notable words describing the queenly nation. “ She riseth, wKile 
 it is yet nightr And again, the winged Charity which is atten- 
 dant on Good Government has, in this fresco, a peculiar ofiice. 
 Can you guess what? If you consider the character of contest 
 which so often takes place among kings for their crowns, and the 
 selfish and tyrannous means they commonly take to aggrandize or 
 secure their power, you will, perhaps,, be surprised to hear that 
 the ofiice of Charity is to crown the King. And yet, if you think 
 of it a little, you will see the beauty of the thought which sets her 
 in this function : since in the first place, all the authority of a 
 good governor should be desired by him only for the good of his 
 people, so that it is only Love that makes him accept or guard his 
 crown : in the second place, his chief greatness consists in the ex- 
 ercise of this love, and he is truly to be revered only so far as his 
 acts and thoughts are those of kindness; so that Love is the light 
 of his crown, as well as the giver of it : lastly, because his strength 
 depends on the affections of his people, and it is only their love 
 which can securely crown him, and for ever. So that Love is the 
 strength of his crown as well as the light of it. 
 
 Then, surrounding the King, or in various obedience to him, 
 ;ij)[)car the dependent virtues, as Fortitude, Temperance, Truth, 
 and other attendant spirits, of all which I cannot now give ac- 
 count, Avishing you only to notice the one to whom are entrusted 
 the guidance and administration of the public revenues. Can you 
 guess which it is likely to be ? Charity, you would have thought, 
 should have something to do with the business; but not so, for 
 she is too hot to attend carefully to it. Prudence, perhaps, you 
 think of in the next place. No, she is too timid, and loses oppor- 
 
LECT. I.] II. APPLICATION. 49 
 
 tunities in making up her mind. Can it be Liberality then? 
 No : Liberality is entrusted with some small sums ; but she is a 
 bad accountant, and is allowed no important place in the exche- 
 quer. But the treasures are given in charge to a virtue of which 
 we hear too little in modern times, as distinct from others; 
 Magnanimity : largeness of heart : not softness or weakness of 
 heart, mind you — but capacity of heart — the great measuring 
 virtue, which weighs in heavenly balances all that may be given, 
 and all that may be gained ; and sees how to do noblest things in 
 noblest ways : which of two goods comprehends and therefore 
 chooses the greatest : which of two personal sacrifices dares and 
 accepts the largest: which, out of the avenues of beneficence, 
 treads always that which opens farthest into the blue fields of 
 futurity : that character, in fine, which, in those words taken by 
 us at first for the description of a Queen among the nations, looks 
 less to the present power than to the distant promise ; “ Strength 
 and honour are in her clothing, — and she shall rejoice in time 
 
 TO COME.” 
 
 3 
 
50 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OP ART. 
 
 [lECT. II. 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 The heads of our subject which remain for our consideration 
 this evening are, you will remember, the accumulation and the 
 distribution of works of art. Our complete inquiry fell into four 
 divisions — first, how to get our genius ; then, how to apply our 
 genius; then, how to accumulate its results; and lastly, how to 
 distribute them. We considered, last evening, how to discover 
 and apply it ; — we have to-night to examine the modes of its 
 preservation and distribution. 
 
 And now, in the outset, it will be well to face that objection 
 which we put aside a little while ago ; namely, that perhaps it is 
 not well to have a gi’eat deal of good art ; and that it should not 
 be made too cheap. 
 
 ^ Nay,” I can imagine some of the more generous among you, 
 exclaiming, “ we will not trouble you to disprove that objection; 
 of course it is a selfish and base one : good art, as well as other 
 good things, ought to be made as cheap as possible, and put as far 
 as we can within the reach of everybody.” 
 
 Pardon me, I am not prepared to admit that. I rather side 
 with the selfish objectors, and believe that art ought not to be 
 made cheap, beyond a certain point ; for the amount of pleasure 
 that you can receive from any great work, depends wholly on the 
 quantity of attention and energy of mind you can bring to bear 
 upon it. Now, that attention and energy depend much more on 
 the fi-eshness of the thing than you would at all suppose ; unless 
 you very carefully studied the movements of your own minds. If 
 you see things of the same kind and of equal value very fre- 
 
LECT. II.] 
 
 III. ACCUMULATION. 
 
 51 
 
 quently, your reverence for them is infallibly diminished, your 
 powers of attention get gradually wearied, and your interest and 
 enthusiasm worn out ; and you cannot in that state bring to any 
 given work the energy necessary to enjoy it. If, indeed, the 
 question were only between enjoying a great many pictures each a 
 little, or one picture very much, the sum of enjoyment being in 
 each case the same, you might rationally desire to possess rather 
 the larger quantity, than the small ; both because one work of art 
 always in some sort illustrates another, and because quantity 
 diminishes the chances of destruction. But the question is not a 
 merely arithmetical one of this kind. Your fragments of broken 
 admirations will not, when they are put together, make up one 
 Avhole admiration ; two and two, in this case, do not make four, 
 nor anything like four. Your good picture, or book, or work of 
 art of any kind, is always in some degree fenced and closed about 
 with difficulty. You may think of it as of a kind of cocoa-nut, with 
 very often rather an unseemly shell, but good milk and kernel 
 inside. Now, if you possess twenty cocoa-nuts, and being thirsty, 
 go impatiently from one to the other, giving only a single scratch 
 with the point of your knife to the shell of each, you will get no 
 milk from all the twenty. But if you leave nineteen of them 
 alone, and give twenty cuts to the shell of one, you will get 
 through it, and at the milk of it. And the tendency of the 
 human mind is always to get tired before it has made its twenty 
 cuts ; and to try another nut ; and moreover, even if it has per- 
 severance enough to crack its nuts, it is sure to try to eat too 
 many, and so choke itself. Hence, it is wisely appointed for us 
 that few of the things we desire can be had without considerable 
 labour, and at considerable intervals of time. We cannot gene- 
 rally get our dinner without working for it, and that gives us ap- 
 petite for it ; we cannot get our holiday without waiting for it, 
 and that gives us zest for it ; and we ought not to get our picture 
 without paying for it, and that gives us a mind to look at it. 
 
52 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. [lECT. II. 
 
 Nay, I will even go so far as to say, that we ought not to get 
 hooks too cheaply. No book, I believe, is ever worth half so 
 much to its reader as one that has been coveted for a year at a 
 bookstall, and bought out of saved half-pence ; and perhaps a day 
 or two’s fasting. That’s the way to get at the cream of a book. 
 And I should say more on this matter, and protest as energetically 
 as I could against the plague of cheap literature, with which we 
 are just now afflicted, but that I fear your calling me to order, as 
 being unpractical, because I don’t quite see my way at present to 
 making everybody fast for their books. But one may see that a 
 thing is desirable and possible, even though one may not at once 
 know the best way to it — and in my island of Barataria, when I 
 get it well into order, I assure you no book shall be sold for less 
 than a pound sterling ; if it can be published cheaper than that, 
 the surplus shall all go into my treasury, and save my subjects 
 taxation in other directions; only people really poor, who cannot 
 pay the pound, shall be supplied with the books they want for 
 nothing, in a certain limited quantity. I haven’t made up my 
 mind about the number yet, and there are several other points in 
 the system yet unsettled ; when they are all determined, if you 
 will allow me, I will come and give you another lecture, on the 
 political economy of literature.^ 
 
 ^leantime, returning to our immediate subject, I say to my gene- 
 rous hearers, who want to shower Titians and Turners upon us, 
 like falling leaves, “Pictures ought not to be too cheap;” but in 
 much stronger tone I would say to those who want to keep up the 
 prices of pictorial property, that pictures ought not to be too dear, 
 that' is to say, not as dear as they are. For, as matters at present 
 stand, it is wholly impossible for any man in the ordinary circum- 
 stances of English life to possess himself of a piece of great art. 
 A modern drawing of average merit, or a first-class engraving. 
 
 See note 6th in Addenda. 
 
III. ACCUMULATION. 
 
 53 
 
 LECT. II.] 
 
 may perhaps, not without some self-reproach, be purchased out of 
 his savings by a man of narrow income ; but a satisfactory exam- 
 ple of first-rate art — master-hands’ work — is wholly out of his 
 reach. And we are so accustomed to look upon this as the natu- 
 ral course and necessity of things, that we never set ourselves in 
 any wise to diminish the evil ; and yet it is an evil perfectly capa- 
 ble of diminution. It is an evil precisely similar in kind to that 
 which existed in the middle ages, respecting good books, and 
 which everybody then, I suppose, thought as natural as we do now 
 our small supply of good pictures. You could not then study the 
 work of a great historian, or great poet, any more than you can 
 now study that of a great painter, but at heavy cost. If you 
 wanted a book, you had to get it written out for you, or to write 
 it out for yourself. But printing came, and the poor man may 
 read his Dante and his Homer ; and Dante and Homer are none 
 the w^orse for that. But it is only in literature that private per- 
 sons of moderate fortune can possess and study greatness : they 
 can study at home no greatness in art ; and the object of that 
 accumulation which w^e are at present aiming at, as our third 
 object in political economy, is to bring great art in some degree 
 within the reach of the multitude ; and, both in larger and more 
 numerous galleries than "we now possess, and by distribution, 
 according to his wealth and wish, in each man’s home, to render 
 the influence of art somewhat correspondent in extent to that of 
 literature. Here, then, is the subtle balance which your economist 
 has to strike : to accumulate so much art as to be able to give the 
 whole nation a supply of it, according to its need, and yet to regu- 
 late its distribution so that there shall be no glut of it, nor contempt. 
 
 A difficult balance, indeed, for us to hold, if it were left merely 
 to our skill to poise ; but the just point between poverty and pro- 
 fusion has been fixed for us accurately by the wise laws of Provi- 
 dence. If you carefully w^atch for all the genius you can detect, 
 apply it to good service, and then reverently preserve what it pro- 
 
54 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 [lECT. II. 
 
 duces, you will never have too little art ; and if, on the other 
 hand, you never force an artist to work hurriedly, for daily bread, 
 nor imperfectly, because you would rather have showy works than 
 complete ones, you will never have too much. Do not force the 
 multiplication of art, and you will not have it too cheap ; do not 
 wantonly destroy it, and you will not have it too dear. 
 
 “ But who wantonly destroys it ?” you will ask. Why, we all 
 do. Perhaps you thought, when I came to tbis part of our sub- 
 ject, corresponding to that set forth in our housewife’s economy 
 by the “ keeping her embroidery from the moth,” that I was going 
 to tell you only how to take better care of pictures, how to clean 
 them, and varnish them, and where to put them away safely when 
 you went out of town. Ah, not at all. The utmost I have to ask 
 of you is, that you will not pull them to pieces, and trample them 
 under your feet. “ What,” you will say, “ when do we do such 
 things ? Haven’t we built a perfectly beautiful gallery for all the 
 pictures we have to take care of?” Yes, you have, for the pic- 
 tures which are definitely sent to Manchester to be taken care of. 
 But there are quantities of pictures out of Manchester which it is 
 your business, and mine too, to take care of no less than of these, 
 and which we are at this moment employing ourselves in pulling 
 to pieces by deputy. I will tell you what they are, and where 
 they are, in a minute ; only first let me state one more of those 
 main principles of political economy on which the matter hinges. 
 
 I must begin a little apparently wide of the mark, and ask you 
 to reflect if there is any way in which we waste money more in 
 England, than in building fine tombs ? Our respect for the dead, 
 when they 2iVQjust dead, is something wonderful, and the way we 
 show it more wonderful still. We show it with black feathers and 
 black horses ; we show it with black dresses and bright heraldries ; 
 we show it with costly obelisks and sculptures of sorrow, which 
 spoil half of our most beautiful cathedrals. We show it with fright- 
 ful gratings and vaults, and lids of dismal stone, in the midst of the 
 
III. ACCUMULATION. 
 
 55 
 
 LECT. II.] 
 
 quiet grass; and last, not least, we show it by permitting ourselves 
 to tell any number of lies we think amiable or credible, in the epi- 
 taph, This feeling is common to the poor as well as the rich ; 
 and we all know how many a poor family will nearly ruin them- 
 selves, to testify their respect for some member of it in his coffin, 
 whom they never much cared for when he was out of it ; and how 
 often it happens that a poor old woman will starve hei’self to death, 
 in order that she may be respectably buried. 
 
 Now, this being one of the most complete and special ways of 
 wasting money ; — no money being less productive of good, or of 
 any percentage whatever, than that which we shake away from the 
 ends of undertakers’ plumes — it is of course the duty of all good 
 economists, and kind persons, to prove and proclaim continually, 
 to the poor as well as the ricli, that respect for the dead is not 
 really shown by laying great stones on them to tell ns where they 
 are laid ; but by remembering where they are laid without a stone 
 to help us ; trusting them to the sacred grass and saddened flowers ; 
 and still more, that respect and love are shown to them, not by 
 great monuments to them which we build with our hands, but by 
 letting the monuments stand, which they built with their own. 
 And this is the point now in question. 
 
 Observe, there aredwo great reciprocal duties concerning indus- 
 tr}^, constantly to be exchanged between the living and the dead. 
 We, as we live and work, ace to be always thinking of those 
 who are to come after us ; that what we do may be serviceable, as 
 far as we can make it so, to them, as well as to us. Then, when 
 we die, it is the duty of those who come after us to accept this 
 work of oui*s with thanks and remembrance, not thrusting it aside 
 or tearing it down the moment they think they have no use for it. 
 And each generation will only be happy or powerful to the pitch 
 that it ought to be, in fulfilling these two duties to the Past and 
 the Future. Its own work will never be rightly done, even for 
 itself — never good, or noble, or pleasurable to its own eyes — if it 
 
POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 5G 
 
 [lECT. II. 
 
 does not prepare it also for the eyes of generations yet to come. 
 And its own possessions will never be enough for it, and its owm 
 wisdom never enough for it, unless it avails itself gratefully and 
 tenderly of the treasures and the wisdom bequeathed to it by its 
 ancestors. 
 
 For, be assured, that all the best things and treasures of this 
 world are not to be produced by each generation for itself ; but w’e 
 are all intended, not to carve our work in snow that will melt, but 
 each and all of us to be continually rolling a great white gathering 
 snowball, higher and higher — larger and larger — along the Alps of 
 human power. Thus the science of nations is to be accumulative 
 from father to son : each learning a little more and a little more ; 
 each receiving all that was known, and adding its own gain : the 
 history and poetr}^ of nations are to be accumulative ; each genera- 
 tion treasuring the history and the songs of its ancestors, adding 
 its own history and its own songs ; and the art of nations is to be 
 accumulative, just as science and history are ; the work of living 
 men not superseding, but building itself upon the work of the past. 
 Nearly every great and intellectual race of the world has pro- 
 duced, at every period of its career, an art with some peculiar and 
 precious character about it, wholly unattainable by any other race, 
 and at any other time ; and the intention of Providence concern- 
 ing that art, is evidently that it should all grow together into one 
 mighty temple ; the rough stones and the smooth all finding their 
 place, and rising, day by day, in richer and higher pinnacles to 
 lieaven. 
 
 Now, just fancy what a position the world, considered as one 
 great workroom — one great factory in the form of a globe — would 
 have been in by this time, if it had in the least understood this 
 duty, or been capable of it. Fancy what we should have had 
 around us now, if, instead of quarrelling and fighting over their 
 work, the. nations had aided each other in their work, or if even 
 in their conquests, instead of effacing the memorials of those they 
 
III. ACCUMULATION. 
 
 57 
 
 LECT. II.] 
 
 succeeded and subdued, they had guarded the spoils of their vic- 
 tories. Fancy what Europe would be now, if the delicate statues 
 and temples of the Greeks, — if the broad roads and massy walls 
 of the Romans, — if the noble and pathetic architecture of the 
 middle ages, had not been ground to dust by mere human rage. 
 You talk of the scythe of Time, and the tooth of Time : I tell 
 you. Time is scytheless and toothless ; it is we who gnaw like the 
 worm — we who smite like the scythe. It is ourselves who abolish 
 — ourselves who consume : we are the mildew, and the flame, and 
 the soul of man is to its own work as the moth, that frets when it 
 cannot fly, and as the hidden flame that blasts where it cannot 
 illumine. All these lost treasures of human intellect have been 
 wholly destroyed by human industry of destruction ; the marble 
 would have stood its two thousand years as well in the polished 
 statue as in the Parian clift'; but we men have ground it to pow- 
 der, and mixed it with our own ashes. The walls and the ways 
 would have stood — it is we who have left not one stone upon an- 
 other, and restored its pathlessness to the desert ; the great cathe- 
 drals of old religion would have stood — it is we who have dashed 
 down the carved work with axes and hammers, and bid the 
 mountain-grass bloom upon the pavement, and the sea-winds 
 chaunt in the galleries. 
 
 You will perhaps think all this was somehow necessary for the 
 development of the human race. I cannot stay now to dispute 
 that, though I would willingly ; but do you think it is still neces- 
 sary for that development? Do you think that in this nineteenth 
 century it is still necessary for the European nations to turn all 
 the places where their principal art-treasures are into battle- 
 fields ? For that is what they are doing even while I speak ; the 
 great firm of the world is managing its business at this moment, 
 just as it has done in past times. Imagine what would be the 
 thriving circumstances of a manufacturer of some delicate pro- 
 duce — suppose glass, or china — in whose workshop and exhibition 
 
58 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. [lECT. II. 
 
 rooms all the workmen and clerks began fighting at least once a 
 day, first blowing oflf the steam, and breaking all the machinery 
 they could reach ; and then making fortresses of all the cup- 
 boards, and attacking and defending the show-tables, the victori- 
 ous party finally throwing everything they could get hold of out 
 of the window, by way of showing their triumph, and the poor 
 manufacturer picking up and putting away at last a cup here and 
 a handle there. A fine prosperous business that would be, would 
 it not ? and yet that is precisely the way the great manufacturing 
 firm of the world carries on its business. 
 
 It has so arranged its political squabbles for the last six or seven 
 hundred years, that no one of them could be fought out but in the 
 midst of its most precious art ; and it so arranges them to this 
 day. For example, if I were asked to lay my finger, in a map of 
 the world, on the spot of the world’s surface which contained at 
 this moment the most singular concentration of art-teaching and 
 art-treasure, I should lay it on the name of the town of Verona. 
 Other cities, indeed, contain more works of carriageable art, but 
 none contain so much of the glorious local art, and of the springs 
 and sources of art, which can by no means be made subjects of 
 package or porterage, nor, I grieve to say, of salvage. Verona 
 possesses, in the first place, not the largest, but the most perfect 
 and intelligible Roman amphitheatre that exists, still unbroken in 
 circle of step, and strong in succession of vault and arch : it con- 
 tains minor Roman monuments, gateways, theatres, baths, wrecks 
 of temples, which give the streets of its suburbs a character of 
 antiquity unexampled elsewhere, except in Rome itself. But it 
 contains, in the next place, what Rome does not contain — perfect 
 examples of the great twelfth-century Lombardic architecture, 
 which was the root of all the mediaeval art of Italy, without which 
 no Giottos, no Angelicos, no Raphaels would have been possible ; 
 it contains that architecture, not in rude forms, but in the most 
 perfect and loveliest types it ever attained — contains those, not in 
 
III. ACCUMULATION. 
 
 59 
 
 LECT. II.] 
 
 ruins, nor in altered and hardly decipherable fragments, but in 
 churches perfect from porch to apse, with all their carving fresh, 
 their pillars firm, their joints unloosened. Besides these, it 
 includes examples of the great thirteenth and fourteenth-century 
 Gothic of Italy, not merely perfect, but elsewhere unrivalled. At 
 Rome, the Roman — at Pisa, the Lombard, architecture may be 
 seen in greater or in equal nobleness ; but not at Rome, nor Pisa, 
 nor Florence, nor in any city of the world, is there a great medi- 
 aeval Gothic like the Gothic of Verona. Elsewhere, it is either 
 less pure in type or less lovely in completion : only at Verona may 
 you see it in the simplicity of its youthful power, and the tender- 
 ness of its accomplished beauty. And Verona possesses, in the 
 last place, the loveliest Renaissance architecture of Italy, not dis- 
 turbed by pride, nor defiled by luxury, but rising in fair fulfilment 
 of domestic service, serenity of effortless grace, and modesty of 
 home seclusion ; its richest work given to the windows that open 
 on the narrowest streets and most silent gardens. All this she 
 possesses, in the midst of natural scenery such as assuredly exists 
 nowhere else in the habitable globe — a wild Alpine river foaming 
 at her feet, from whose shores the rocks rise in a great crescent, 
 dark with cypress, and misty with olive: inimitably, from before 
 her southern gates, the tufted plains of Italy sweep and fade in 
 golden light ; around her, north and west, the Alps crowd in 
 crested troops, and the winds of Benacus bear to her the coolness 
 of their snows. 
 
 And this is the city — such, and possessing such things as these 
 — at whose gates the decisive battles of Italy are fought continu- 
 ally : three days her towers trembled with the echo of the cannon 
 of Areola ; heaped pebbles of the Mincio divide her fields to this 
 hour with lines of broken rampart, whence the tide of war rolled 
 back to Novara ; and now on that crescent of her eastern cliffs, 
 whence the full moon used to rise through the bars of the 
 cypresses in her burning summer twilights, touching with soft 
 
00 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OE ART. 
 
 [lECT. II. 
 
 increase of silver liglit tlic rosy marbles of ber balconies, along 
 the ridge of that encompassing rock, other circles are increasing 
 now, white and pale ; walled towers of cruel strength, sable- 
 spotted with cannon-courses. I tell you, I have seen, when the 
 thunderclouds came down on those Italian hills, and all their crags 
 were dipped in the dark, terrible purple, as if the winepress of the 
 wu*ath of God had stained their mountain-raiment — I have seen the 
 hail fall in Italy till the forest branches stood stripped and bare as 
 if blasted by the locust ; but the white hail never fell from those 
 clouds of heaven as the black hail will fall from the clouds of hell, 
 if ever one breath of Italian life stirs again in the streets of 
 Verona. 
 
 Sad as you will feel this to be, I do not say that you can directly 
 prevent it ; you cannot drive the Austrians ont of Italy, nor pre- 
 vent them from building forts where they choose, but I do say,"* 
 
 * The reader can hardly but remember Mrs. Browning’s beautiful appeal 
 for Italy, made on the occasion of the first great Exhibition of Art in 
 England : — 
 
 0 Magi of the east and of the west, 
 
 Your incense, gold, and m}Trh are excellent! — 
 
 ^Vliat gifts for Christ, then, bring ye with the rest ? 
 
 Your hands have worked well. Is your courage spent 
 In handwork only ? Have you nothing best, 
 
 "W^hich generous souls may perfect and present, 
 
 And He shall thank the givers for ? no light 
 Of teaching, liberal nations, for the poor, 
 
 Who sit in darkness when it is not night ? 
 
 No cure for wicked children? Christ, — no cure. 
 
 No help for women, sobbing out of sight 
 Because men made the laws ? no brothel-lure 
 Burnt out by popular lightnings? Hast thou found 
 No remedy, my England, for such woes? 
 
 No outlet, Austria, for the scourged and bound, 
 
 No call back for the exiled ? no repose, 
 
 Bussia, for knouted Poles worked under ground. 
 
LECT. II.] 
 
 III. ACCUMULATION. 
 
 61 
 
 that yon, and I, and all of us, ought to be both acting and feeling 
 with a full knowledge and understanding of these things, and that, 
 without trying to excite revolutions or weaken governments, we 
 may give our own thoughts and help, so as in a measure to prevent 
 needless destruction. We should do this, if we only realized the 
 thing thoroughly. You drive out day by day through your own 
 pretty suburbs, and you think only of making, with what money 
 you have to spare, your gateways handsomer, and your carriage- 
 drives wdder — and your drawing-rooms more splendid, having a 
 vague notion that you are all the while patronizing and advancing 
 art, and you make no effort to conceive the fact, that within a few 
 hours’ journey of you, there are gateways and drawing-rooms 
 which might just as well be yours as these, all built already; gate- 
 ways built by the greatest masters of sculpture that ever struck 
 marble ; drawing-rooms painted by Titian and Veronese ; and you 
 won’t accept, nor save these as they are, but you will rather fetch 
 the house-painter from over the way, and let Titian and Veronese 
 house the rats. “Yes,” of course, you answer; “we want nice 
 houses here, not houses in Verona. What should we do with 
 houses in Verona?” And I answer, do precisely what you do 
 wuth the most expensive part of your possessions here : take pride 
 in them — only a noble pride. You know w^ell, when you examine 
 
 And gentle ladies bleached among the snows ? 
 
 No mercy for the slave, America ? 
 
 No hope for Rome, free France, chivalric France ? 
 
 Alas, great nations have great shames, I say. 
 
 No pity, 0 world! no tender utterance 
 Of benediction, and prayers stretclied this way 
 For poor Italia, baffled by mischance ? 
 
 0 gracious nations, give some ear to me ! 
 
 You all go to your Fair, and I am one 
 
 Who at the roadside of humanity 
 
 Beseech your alms, — God’s justice to be done. 
 
 So prosper! 
 
62 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. [lECT. II. 
 
 your own liearts, that the greater part of the sums you spend on 
 possessions are spent for pride. Why are your carriages nicely 
 painted and finished outside ? You don’t see the outsides as you 
 sit in them — the outsides are for other people to see. Why are 
 your exteriors of houses so well finished, your furniture so polished 
 and costly, hut for other people to see ? You are just as comfort- 
 able yourselves, writing on your old friend of a desk, with the 
 white cloudings in his leather, and using the light of a window 
 which is nothing but a hole in the brick wall. And all that is 
 desirable to be done in this matter, is merely to take pride in pre- 
 serving great art, instead of in producing mean art ; pride in the 
 possession of precious and enduring things, a little way ofi*, instead 
 of slight and perishing things near at hand. You know, in old 
 English times, our kings liked to have lordships and dukedoms 
 abroad, and why should not you, merchant princes, like to have 
 lordships and estates abroad? Believe me, rightly understood, 
 it would be a prouder, and in the full sense of our English 
 word, more “respectable” thing to be lord of a palace at Ve- 
 rona, or of a cloister full of frescos at Florence, than to have a 
 file of servants dressed in the finest liveries that ever tailor 
 stitched, as long as would reach from here to Bolton : — yes, and a 
 prouder thing to send people to travel in Italy, who would have 
 to say every now and then, of some fair piece of art, “ Ah ! this 
 was kept here for us by the good people of Manchester,” than to 
 bring them travelling all the way here, exclaiming of your various 
 art treasures, “These were brought here for us (not altogether 
 without harm) by the good people of Manchester.” “Ah!” but 
 you say, “the Art Treasures Exhibition will pay; but Veronese 
 palaces won’t.” Pardon me. They would pay, less directly, but 
 far more richly. Do you suppose it is in the long run good for 
 Manchester, or good for England, that the Continent should be in 
 the state it is? Do you think the perpetual fear of revolution, or 
 the perpetual repression of thought and energy that clouds and 
 
LECT. II.] 
 
 III. ACCUMULATION. 
 
 G3 
 
 encumbers the nations of Europe, is eventually profitable for us ? 
 Were we any the better of the course of affairs in ’48 ; or has the 
 stabling of the dragoon horses in the great houses of Italy, any 
 distinct effect in the promotion of the cotton-trade ? Not so. But 
 every stake that you could hold in the stability of the Continent, 
 and every effort that you could make to give example of English 
 habits and principles on the Continent, and every kind deed that 
 you could do in relieving distress and preventing despair on the 
 Continent, would have tenfold reaction on the prosperity of 
 England, and open and urge, in a thousand unforeseen directions, 
 the sluices of commerce and the springs of industry. 
 
 I could press, if I chose, both these motives upon you, of pride 
 and self-interest, with more force, but these are not motives which 
 ought to be urged upon you at all. The only motive that I ought 
 to put before you is simply that it would be right to do this ; that 
 the holding of property abroad, and the personal efforts of English- 
 men to redeem the condition* of foreign nations, are among the 
 most direct pieces of duty which our wealth renders incumbent 
 upon us. I do not — and in all truth and deliberateness I say this 
 — I do not know anything more ludicrous among the self-decep- 
 tions of well-meaning people than their notion of patriotism, as 
 requiring them to limit their efforts to the good of their own 
 country ; — the notion that charity is a geographical virtue, and 
 that what it is holy and righteous to do for people on one bank 
 of a river, it is quite improper and unnatural to do for people on 
 the other. It will be a wonderful thing, some day or other, for 
 the Christian world to remember, that it went on thinking for two 
 thousand years that neighbours were neighbours at Jerusalem, but 
 not at Jericho; a wonderful thing for us English to reflect, in 
 after-years, how long it was before we could shake hands with 
 anybody across that shallow salt wash, which the very chalk-dust 
 of its two shores whitens from Folkstone to Ambleteuse. 
 
 Nor ought the motive of gratitude, as well as that of Mercy, to 
 
64 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 [lECT. II. 
 
 be witlioiit its influence on you, who have been the first to ask to 
 see, and tlie first to show to us, the treasures which this poor lost 
 Italy has given to England. Remember all these things that 
 delight you here were hers — hers either in fact or in teaching ; 
 hers, in fact, are all the most powerful and most touching paintings 
 of old time that now glow upon your walls ; hers in teaching are 
 all the best and greatest of descendant souls — your Reynolds and 
 your Gainsborough never could have painted but for Venice; and 
 the energies which have given the only true life to your existing 
 art were first stirred by voices of the dead, that haunted the 
 Sacred Field of Pisa. 
 
 Well, all these motives for some definite course of action on 
 our part towards foreign countries rest upon very serious facts; 
 too serious, perhaps you will think, to be interfered with ; for we 
 are all of us in the habit of leaving great things alone, as if Pro- 
 vidence would mind them, and attending ourselves only to little 
 things which we know, practically. Providence doesn’t mind unless 
 we do. We are ready enough to give care to the growing of 
 pines and lettuces, knowing that they don’t grow Providentially 
 sweet or large unless we look after them; but we don’t give 
 any care to the good of Italy or Germany, because we think that 
 they will grow Providentially happy without any of our med- 
 dling. 
 
 Let us leave the great things, then, and think of little things; 
 not of the destruction of whole provinces in war, which it may 
 not be any business of ours to prevent ; but of the destruction of 
 poor little pictures in peace, from which it surely would not be 
 much out of our way to save them. You know I said, just now, 
 we were all of us engaged in pulling pictures to pieces by deputy, 
 and you did not believe me. Consider, then, this similitude of 
 ourselves. Suppose you saw (as I doubt not you often do see) a 
 prudent and kind young lady sitting at work, in the corner of a 
 (juict room, knitting comforters for her cousins, and that just out- 
 
LECT. II.] III. ACCUMULATION. 65 
 
 side, in the hall, you saw a cat and her kittens at play among the 
 family pictures ; amusing themselves especially with the best 
 Vandykes, by getting on the tops of the frames, and then scram- 
 bling down the canvasses by their claws ; and on some one’s 
 informing the young lady of these proceedings of the cat and 
 kittens, suppose she answered that it wasn’t her cat, but her 
 sister’s, and the pictures weren’t hers, but her uncle’s, and she 
 couldn’t leave her work, for she had to make so many pairs of 
 comforters before dinner. Would you not say that the prudent 
 and kind young lady was, on the whole, answerable for the addi- 
 tional touches of claw on the Vandykes? Now', that is precisely 
 what w'e prudent and kind English are doing, only on a larger 
 scale. Here we sit in Manchester, hard at work, very properly, 
 making comforters for our cousins all over the world. Just out- 
 side there in the hall — that beautiful marble hall of Italy — the 
 cats and kittens and monkeys are at play among the pictures : I 
 
 assure you, in the course of the fifteen years in which I have 
 been w'orking in those places in which the most precious remnants 
 of European art exist, a sensation, whether I w^ould or no, w'as 
 gradually made distinct and deep in my mind, that I was living 
 arid working in the midst of a den of monkeys ; — sometimes ami- 
 able and affectionate monkeys, with all manner of winning ways 
 and kind intentions ; — more frequently selfish and malicious mon- 
 keys, but, whatever their disposition, squabbling continually about 
 nuts, and the best places on the barren sticks of trees; and 
 that all this monkeys’ den was filled, by mischance, with precious 
 pictures, and the witty and wulful beasts were always wrapping 
 themselves up and going to sleep in pictures, or tearing holes in 
 them to grin through; or tasting them and spitting them out 
 again, or twusting them up into ropes and making swungs of them ; 
 and that sometimes only, by watching one’s opportunity, and bear- 
 ing a scratch or a bite, one could rescue the corner of a Tin- 
 toret, or Paul Veronese, and push it through the bars into a 
 
66 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 [lECT. II. 
 
 place of safety. Literally, I assure you, tliis was, and this is, the 
 fixed impression on my mind of the state of matters in Italy. 
 And see how. The professors of art in Italy, having long fol- 
 lowed a method of study peculiar to themselves, have at last 
 arrived at a form of art peculiar to themselves; very different 
 from that which was arrived at by Correggio and Titian. Natu- 
 rally, the professors like their own form the best; and, as the 
 old pictures are generally not so startling to the eye as the 
 modern ones, the dukes and counts who possess them, and who 
 like to see their galleries look new and fine (and are persuaded 
 also that a celebrated chef-d’oeuvre ought always to catch the eye 
 at a quarter of a mile off), believe the professors who tell them 
 their sober pictures are quite faded, and good for nothing, and 
 should all be brought bright again; and accordingly, give the 
 sober pictures to the professors, to be put right by rules of art. 
 Then, the professors repaint the old pictures in all the princi- 
 pal places, leaving perhaps only a bit of background to set off 
 their own work. And thus the professors come to be generally 
 figured in my mind, as the monkeys who tear holes in the 
 pictures, to grin through. Then the picture-dealers, who live by 
 the pictures, cannot sell them to the English in their old and pure 
 state ; all the good work must be covered with new paint, and var- 
 nished so as to look like one of the professorial pictures in the 
 great gallery, before it is saleable. And thus the dealers come to 
 be imaged, in my mind, as the monkeys who make ropes of 
 the pictures, to swing by. Then, every now and then, in some old 
 stable, or wine-cellar, or timber-shed, behind some forgotten vats 
 or faggots, somebody finds a fresco of Perugino’s or Giotto’s, 
 but doesn’t think much of it, and has no idea of having people 
 coming into his cellar, or being obliged to move his faggots; and 
 so he whitewashes the fresco, and puts the faggots back again ; 
 and these kind of persons, therefore, come generally to be imaged 
 in my mind, as the monkeys who taste the pictures, and spit 
 
LECT. II.] 
 
 III. ACCUMULATION. 
 
 61 
 
 them out, not finding them nice. While, finally, the squabbling 
 for nuts and apples (called in Italy “ bella liberta ”) goes on all 
 day long. 
 
 Now, all this might soon be put an end to, if we English, who 
 are so fond of travelling in the body, would also travel a little in 
 soul : We think it a great triumph to get our packages and our 
 persons carried at a fast pace, but we never take the slightest 
 trouble to put any pace into our perceptions ; we stay usually at 
 home in thought, or if we ever mentally see the world, it is at the 
 old stage-coach or waggon rate. Do but consider what an odd 
 sight it would be, if it were only quite clear to you how things are 
 really going on — how, here in England, we are making enormous 
 and expensive efibrts to produce new art of all kinds, knowing and 
 confessing all the while that the greater part of it is bad, but 
 struggling still to produce new patterns of wall-papers, and new 
 shapes of tea-pots, and new pictures, and statues, and architecture ; 
 and pluming and cackling if ever a tea-pot or a picture has the 
 least good in it ; — all the while taking no thought whatever of the 
 best possible pictures, and statues, and wall-patterns already in 
 existence, which require nothing but to be , taken common care of, 
 and kept from damp and dust : but we let the walls fall that 
 Giotto patterned, and the canvasses rot that Tintoret painted, and 
 the architecture be dashed to pieces that St. Louis built, while we 
 are furnishing our drawing-rooms with prize upholstery, and 
 writing accounts of our handsome warehouses to the country 
 papers. Don’t think I use my words vaguely or generally : I 
 speak of literal facts. Giotto’s frescos at Assisi are perishing at 
 this moment for want of decent care ; Tintoret’s pictures in San 
 Sebastian at Venice, are at this instant rotting piecemeal into grey 
 rags ; St. Louis’s chapel, at Carcassonne, is at this moment lying 
 in shattered fragments in the market-place. And here we are all 
 cawing and crowing, poor little half-fledged daws as we are, about 
 the pretty sticks and wool in our own nests. There’s hardly 
 
C8 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 LECT. II. 
 
 a day passes, when I am at home, but I get a letter from some 
 well-meaning country clergyman, deeply anxious about the state 
 of his parish church, and breaking his heart to get money together 
 that he may hold up some wretched remnant of Tudor tracery, 
 with one niche in the corner and no statue — when all the while 
 the mightiest piles of religious architecture and sculpture that ever 
 the w'orld saw are being blasted and withered away, without one 
 glance of pity or regret. The country clergyman does not care 
 for them — he has a sea-sick imagination that cannot cross channel. 
 What is it to him, if the angels of Assisi fade from its vaults, or 
 the queens and kings of Chartres fall from their pedestals ? They 
 are not in his parish. 
 
 “ What !” you will say, “ are we not to produce any new art, 
 nor take care of our parish churches?” “No, certainly not, until 
 you have taken proper care of the art you have got already, and 
 of the best churches out of the parish. Your first and proper 
 standing is not as churchwardens and parish overseers, in an Eng- 
 lish county, but as members of the great Christian community of 
 Europe. And as members of that community (in which alone, 
 observe, pure and precious ancient art exists, for there is none in 
 America, none in Asia, none in Africa), you conduct yourselves 
 pi’ecisely as a manufacturer would, who attended to his looms, but 
 left his warehouse without a roof. The rain floods your ware- 
 house, the rats frolic in it, the spiders spin in it, the choughs build 
 ill it, the wall-plague frets and festers in it, and still you keep 
 weave, weave, weaving at your wretched webs, and thinking you 
 ai-c growing rich, while more is gnawed out of your warehouse in 
 an hour than you can weave in a twelvemonth. 
 
 Even this similitude is not absurd enough to set us rightly forth. 
 The weaver would, or might, at least, hope that his new woof was 
 as stout as the old ones, and that, therefore, in spite of rain and 
 ravage, he would have something to wrap himself in when he 
 needed it. But our webs rot as we spin. The very fact that we 
 
LECT. II.] 
 
 III. ACCUMULATION. 
 
 69 
 
 despise the great art of the past shows that we cannot produce 
 great art now. If we could do it, we should love it when we saw 
 it done — if 'sve really cared for it, we should recognise it and keep 
 it ; but we don’t care for it. It is not art that we want ; it is 
 amusement, gratification of pride, present gain — anything in the 
 world but art: let it rot, we shall always have enough to talk 
 about and hang over our sideboards. 
 
 You w'ill (I hope) finally ask me what is the outcome of all this, 
 practicable to-morrow morning by us who are sitting here ? These 
 are the main practical outcomes of it : In the first place, don’t 
 grumble when you hear of a new picture being bought by Govern- 
 ment at a large price. There are many pictures in Europe now 
 in danger of destruction which are, in the true sense of the word, 
 priceless ; the proper price is simply that which it is necessary to 
 give to get and to save them. If you can get them for fifty 
 pounds, do ; if not for less than a hundred, do ; if not for less than 
 five thousand, do ; if not for less than twenty thousand, do ; never 
 mind being imposed upon : there is nothing disgraceful in being 
 imposed upon ; the only disgrace is in imposing ; and you can’t 
 in general get anything much worth having, in the way of Conti- 
 nental art, but it must be with the help or connivance of numbers 
 of people, who, indeed, ought to have nothing to do with the 
 matter, but who practically have, and always will have, everything 
 to do with it ; and if you don’t choose to submit to be cheated by 
 them out of a ducat here and a zecchin there, you will be cheated 
 by them out of your picture ; and whether you are most imposed 
 upon in losing that, or the zecchins, I think I may leave you to 
 judge ; though I know there are many political economists, who 
 would rather leave a bag of gold on a garret-table, than give a 
 porter sixpence extra to carry it doAvnstairs. 
 
 Tliat, then, is the first practical outcome of the matter. Never 
 gnimble, but be glad when you hear of a new picture being bought 
 at a large price. In the long run, the dearest pictures are always 
 
10 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART [lECT. II. 
 
 the best bargains ; and, I repeat (for else yon might think I said 
 it in mere hurry of talk, and not deliberately), there are some 
 pictures which are without price. You should stand, nationally, 
 at the edge of Dover cliffs — Shakespeare’s — and wave blank 
 cheques in the eyes of the nations on the other side of the sea, 
 freely offered, for such and snieh canvasses of theirs. 
 
 Then the next practical outcome of it is — Never buy a copy of 
 a picture, under any circumstances whatever. All copies are bad ; 
 because no painter who is worth a straw ever will copy. He will 
 make a study of a picture he likes, for his own use, in his own 
 way ; but he won’t and can’t copy ; whenever you buy a copy, 
 you buy so much misunderstanding of the original, and encourage 
 a dull person in following a business he is not fit for, besides 
 increasing ultimately chances of mistake and imposture, and far- 
 thering, as directly as money can farther, the cause of ignorance 
 in all directions. You may, in fact, consider yourself as having 
 purchased a certain quantity of mistakes ; and, according to your 
 power, being engaged in disseminating them. 
 
 I do not mean, however, that copies should never be made. 
 A certain number of dull persons should always be employed by 
 a Government in making the most accurate -copies possible of all 
 good pictures ; these copies, though artistieally valueless, would be 
 hictorically and documentarily valuable, in the event of the destruc- 
 tion of the original picture. The studies also made by great artists 
 for their own use, should be sought after with the greatest eager- 
 ness; they are often to be bought cheap ; and in eonneetion with 
 mechanical copies, would become veiy precious; tracings from 
 fi’cscos and other large works are all of great value ; for though a 
 tracing is liable to just as many mistakes as a copy, the mistakes 
 in a tracing are of one kind only, which may be allowed for, but 
 the mistakes of a common copyist are of all conceivable kinds : 
 finally, engravings, in so far as they convey certain facts about the 
 pictures, are often serviceable and valuable. I can’t, of course, 
 
LECT. II.] 
 
 IV. DISTRIBUTION. 
 
 11 
 
 enter into details in these matters just now ; only this main piece 
 of advice I can safely give you — never to buy copies of pictures 
 (for your private possession) which pretend to give a facsimile that 
 shall be in any wise representative of, or equal to, the original. 
 Whenever you do so, you are only lowering your taste, and wast- 
 ing your money. And if you are generous and wise, you will be 
 ready rather to subscribe as much as you would have given for a 
 copy of a great picture, towards its purchase, or the purchase of 
 some other like it, by the nation. There ought to be a great 
 National Society instituted for the purchase of pictures ; presenting 
 them to the various galleries in our gi’eat cities, and watching 
 there over their safety : but in the meantime, you can always act 
 safely and beneficially by merely allowing your artist friends to 
 buy pictures for you, when they see good ones. Never buy for 
 yourselves, nor go to the foreign dealers ; but let any painter whom 
 you know be entrusted, when he finds a neglected old picture in 
 an old house, to try if he cannot get it for you ; then, if you like 
 it, keep it ; if not, send it to the hammer, and you will find that 
 you do not lose money on pictures so purchased. 
 
 And the third and chief practical outcome of the matter is this 
 general one : Wherever you go, whatever you do, act more for 
 'preservation and less for production. I assure you, the world is, 
 generally speaking, in calamitous disorder, and just because you 
 have managed to thrust some of the lumber aside, and get an 
 available corner for yourselves, you think you should do nothing 
 but sit spinning in it all day long — while, as householders and 
 economists, your first thought and effort should be, to set things 
 more square all about you. Try to set the ground floors in order, 
 and get the rottenness out of your granaries. Then sit and spin, 
 but not till then. 
 
 IV. Distribution. — And now, lastly, we come to the fourth 
 great head of our inquiry, the question of the wise distribution of 
 
72 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. [lECT. II. 
 
 the art we have gathered and preserved. It must be evident to us, 
 at a moment’s thought, that the way in which works of art are 
 on the whole most useful to the nation to which they belong, 
 must be by their collection in public galleries, supposing those 
 galleries properly managed. But there is one disadvantage 
 attached necessarily to gallery exhibition, namely, the extent of 
 mischief which may be done by one foolish curator. As long as 
 the pictures which form the national wealth are disposed in private 
 collections, the chance is always that the people who buy them will 
 be just the people who are fond of them ; and that the sense of 
 exchangeable value in the commodity they possess, will induce 
 them, even if they do not esteem it themselves, to take such care 
 of it as will preserve its value undiminished. At all events, so 
 long as works of art are scattered throughout the nation, no uni- 
 versal destruction of them is possible ; a certain average only are 
 lost by accidents from time to time. But when they are once 
 collected in a large public gallery, if the appointment of curator 
 becomes in any way a matter of formality, or the post is so lucra- 
 tive as to be disputed by place-hunters, let but one foolish or care- 
 less person get possession of it, and perhaps you may have all your 
 fine pictures repainted, and the national property destroyed, in a 
 month. That is actually the case at this moment in several great 
 foreign galleries. They arc the places of execution of pictures : 
 over their doors you only want the Dantesque inscription, “ Las- 
 ciatc ogni speranza, voi die cutrate.’’ 
 
 Supposing, however, this danger properly guarded against, as it 
 would be always by a nation which cither knew the value, or 
 understood the meaning, of painting,* arrangement in a public 
 gallery is the safest, as well as the most serviceable, method of 
 
 * It would be a great point gained towards the preservation of pictures if 
 il were made a rule that at every operation they underwent, the exact spots 
 in which they have been re-painted should bo recorded in writing. 
 
LECT. II.] 
 
 IV. DISTRIBUTION. 
 
 13 
 
 exliibitiiig pictures ; and it is the only mode in which their histori- 
 cal value can be brought out, and their historical meaning made 
 clear. But great good is also to be done by encouraging the pri- 
 vate possession of pictures ; partly as a means of study, (much 
 more being always discovered in any work of art by a person who 
 has it perpetually near him than by one who only sees it from 
 time to time,) and also as a means of refining the habits and 
 touchino; the hearts of the masses of the nation in their domestic 
 life. 
 
 For these last purposes the most serviceable art is the living art 
 of the time ; the particular tastes of the people will be best met, 
 and their particular ignorances best corrected, by painters labour- 
 ing in the midst of them, more or less guided to the knowledge of 
 what is wanted by the degree of sympathy with which their work 
 is received. So then, generally, it should be the object of go- 
 vernment, and of all patrons of art, to collect, as far as may be, 
 the works of dead masters in public galleries, arranging them so 
 as to illustrate the history of nations, and the progress and influ- 
 ence of their arts ; and to encourage the private possession of the 
 works of Uvinr/ masters. And the first and best way in which to 
 encourage such private possession is, of course, to keep down the 
 price of them as far as you can. 
 
 I hope there are not a great many painters in the room; if 
 there are, I entreat their patience for the next quarter of an hour : 
 if they will bear with me for so long, I hope they will not, finally, 
 be offended by what I am going to say. 
 
 I repeat, trusting to their indulgence in the interim, that the 
 first object of our national economy, as respects the distribution 
 of modern art, should be steadily and rationally to limit its prices, 
 since by doing so, you will produce two effects ; you will make 
 the painters produce more pictures, two or three instead of one, 
 if they wish to make money ; and you will, by bringing good 
 
 pictures within the reach of people of moderate income, excite the 
 
 4 
 
74 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART» 
 
 [lECT. II. 
 
 general interest of the nation in them, increase a thousandfold the 
 demand for the commodity, and therefore its wholesome and 
 natural production. 
 
 I know how many objections must arise in your minds at this 
 moment to what I say ; but you must be aware that it is not 
 possible for me in an hour to explain all the moral and commercial 
 bearings of such a principle as this. Only, believe me, I do not 
 speak lightly ; I think I have considered all the objections which 
 could be rationally brought forward, though I have time at present 
 only to glance at the main one, namely, the idea that the high 
 i^rices paid for modern pictures are either honourable, or service- 
 able, to the painter. So far from this being so, I believe one of 
 the principal obstacles to the progress of modern art to be the 
 high prices given for good modern pictures. For observe first the 
 action of this high remuneration on the artist’s mind. If he 
 “ gets on,” as it is called, catches the eye of the public, and 
 especially of the public of the upper classes, there is hardly any 
 limit to the fortune he may acquire ; so that, in his early years, 
 his mind is naturally led to dwell on this worldly and wealthy 
 eminence as the main thing to be reached by his art; if he finds 
 that lie is not gradually rising towards it, he thinks there is some- 
 thing wrong in his work ; or, if he is too proud to think that, 
 still the bribe of Avealth and honour warps him from his honest 
 labour into efforts to attract attention; and he gradually loses 
 lioth his power of mind and his rectitude of purpose. This, 
 according to the degTce of avarice or ambition which exists in 
 any painter’s mind, is the necessary influence upon him of the 
 hope of great wealth and reputation. But the harm is still 
 greater, in so far as the possibility of attaining fortune of this kind 
 tempts people continually to become painters who have no real 
 gift for the work; and on whom these motives of mere worldly 
 interest have exclusive influence; — men who torment and abuse 
 the patient workers, eclipse or thrust aside all delicate and good 
 
IV. DISTRIBUTION. 
 
 75 
 
 LECT. II.] 
 
 pictures by their own gaudy and coarse ones, corrupt the taste of 
 the public, and do the greatest amount of mischief to the schools 
 of art in their day which it is possible for their capacities to effect ; 
 and it is quite wonderful how much mischief may be done even 
 by small capacity. If you could by any means succeed in keep- 
 ing the prices of pictures down, you would throw all these dis- 
 turbers out of the way at once. 
 
 You may perhaps think that this severe treatment would do 
 more harm than good, by withdrawing the wholesome element of 
 emulation, and giving no stimulus to exertion ; but I am sorry to 
 say that artists will always be sufficiently jealous of one another, 
 whether you pay them large or low prices ; and as for stimulus to 
 exertion, believe me, no good work in this world was ever done 
 for money, nor while the slightest thought of money affected the 
 painter’s mind. Whatever idea of pecuniary value enters into his 
 thoughts as he works, will, in proportion to the distinctness of its 
 presence, shorten his power. A real painter will work for you 
 exquisitely, if you give him, as I told you a little while ago, bread 
 and water and salt ; and a bad painter will work badly and 
 liastily, though you give him a palace to live in, and a princedom 
 to live upon. Turner got, in his earlier years, half-a-crown a day 
 and his supper (not bad pay, neither) ; and he learned to paint 
 upon that. And I believe that there is no chance of art’s truly 
 flourishing in any country, until you make it a simple and plain 
 business, providing its masters with an easy competence, but rarely 
 with anything more. And I say this, not because I despise the 
 great painter, but because I honour him ; and I should no more 
 think of adding to his respectability or happiness by giving him 
 riches, than, if Shakspeare or Milton were alive, I should think 
 we added to their respectability, or were likely to get better work 
 from them, by making them millionaires. 
 
 But, observe, it is not only the painter himself whom you injure, 
 by giving him too high prices ; you injure all the inferior painters 
 
76 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. [lECT. II. 
 
 of the day. If they are modest, they will be discouraged and 
 depressed by the feeling that their doings are worth so little, com- 
 paratively, in your eyes ; — if proud, all their worst passions will be 
 aroused, and the insult or opprobrium which they will try to cast 
 on their successful rival will not only afflict and wound him, but 
 at last sour and harden him : he cannot pass thraugh such a trial 
 without grievous harm. 
 
 That, then, is the effect you produce on the^ painter of mark, 
 and on the inferior ones of his own standing. But you do worse 
 than this; you deprive yourselves, by what you give for the 
 fashionable picture, of the power of helping the younger men who 
 are coming forward. Be it admitted, for argument’s sake, if you 
 are not convinced by what I have said, that you do no harm to 
 the gi-eat man by paying him well ; yet certainly you do him no 
 special good. His reputation is established, and his fortune made ; 
 he does not care whether you buy or not : he thinks he is rather 
 doing you a favour than otherwise by letting you have one of his 
 pictures at all. All the good you do him is to help him to buy a 
 new pair of carriage horses ; whereas, with that same sum which 
 thus you cast away, you might have relieved the hearts and pre- 
 served the health of twenty young painters; and if among those 
 twenty, you but chanced on one in whom a true latent ^wer had 
 been hindered by his poverty, just consider what a far-branching, 
 far-embracing good you have wrought with that lucky expenditure 
 of yours. I say, “ Consider it” in vain ; you cannot consider it. 
 for you cannot conceive the sickness of the heart with which a 
 young painter of deep feeling toils through his first obscurity; — 
 his sense of the strong voice within him, which you will not 
 hear ; — his vain, fond, wondering witness to the things you will 
 not see; — his far away perception of things that he could accom- 
 plish if he had but peace and time, all unapproachable and vanish- 
 ing from him, because no one will leave him peace or grant him 
 time : all his friends falling back from him ; those whom he would 
 
LECT. II.] IV. DISTRIBUTION. . 77 
 
 most reverently obey rebuking and paralysing him ; and last and 
 worst of all, those who believe in him the most faithfully suffering 
 by him the most bitterly ; — the wife’s eyes, in their sweet ambition, 
 shining brighter as the cheek wastes away ; and the little lips at 
 his side parched and pale which one day, he knows, though he 
 may never see it, will quiver so proudly when they name his name, 
 calling him “ our father.” You deprive yourselves, by your large 
 expenditure for pictures of mark, of the power of relieving and 
 redeeming this distress ; you injure the painter whom you pay so 
 largely ; — and what, after all, have you done for yourselves, or 
 got for yourselves ? It does not in the least follow that the hur- 
 ried work of a fashionable painter will contain more for your 
 money than the quiet work of some unknown man. In all pro- 
 bability, you will find, if you rashly purchase what is popular at a 
 high price, that you have got one picture you don’t care for, for 
 a sum which would have bought twenty you would have delighted 
 in. For remember always that the price of a picture by a living 
 artist, never represents, never can represent, the quantity of labour 
 or value in it. Its price represents, for the most part, the degree 
 of desire which the rich people of the country have to possess it. 
 Once get the wealthy classes to imagine that the possession of 
 pictures by a given artist adds to their “ gentility,” and there is 
 no price which his work may not immediately reach, and for years 
 maintain ; and in buying at that price, you are not getting value 
 for your money, but merely disputing for victory in a contest of 
 ostentation. And it is hardly possible to spend your money in a 
 worse or more wasteful way ; for though you may not be doing it 
 for ostentation yourself, you are, by your pertinacity, nourishing 
 the ostentation of others ; you meet them in their game of wealth, 
 and continue it for them ; if they had not found an opposite 
 player, the game would have been done ; for a proud man can 
 find no enjoyment in possessing himself of what nobody disputes 
 with him. So that by every farthing you give for a picture beyond 
 
V8 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. [lECT. II. 
 
 its fair price — that is to say, the price which will pay the painter for 
 his lime — you are not only cheating yourself and buying vanity, but 
 you are stimulating the vanity of others ; paying, literally, for the 
 cultivation of pride. You may consider every pound that you 
 spend above the just price of a work of art, as an investment in a 
 cargo of mental quick-lime or guano, which, being laid on the 
 fields of human nature, is to grow a harvest of pride. You are in 
 fact ploughing and harrowing, in a most valuable part of your 
 land, in order to reap the whirlwind ; you are setting your hand 
 stoutly to Job’s agriculture, “ Let thistles gro^^r instead of wheat, 
 and cockle instead of barley.’’ 
 
 Well, but you will say, there is one advantage in high prices, 
 which more than counterbalances all this mischief, namely, that 
 by great reward we both urge and enable a painter to produce 
 rather one perfect picture than many inferior ones : and one per- 
 fect picture (so you tell us, and we believe it) is worth a great 
 number of inferior ones. 
 
 It is so ; but you cannot get it by paying for it. A great work 
 is only done when the painter gets into the humour for it, likes his 
 subject, and determines to paint it as well as he can, whether he 
 is paid for it or not ; but bad work, and generally the worst sort 
 of bad work, is done when he is trying to produce a showy pic- 
 tui-e, or one that shall appear to have as much labour in it as shall 
 be wortli a high price."^ 
 
 * "When this lecture was delivered, I gave here some data for approximate 
 estimates of the average value- of good modern pictures of different classes ; 
 hut the subject is too complicated to be adequately treated in writing, with- 
 out introducing more detail than the reader will have patience for. But I 
 may state roughly, that prices above a hundred guineas are in general extra- 
 vagant for water-colours, and above five hundred for oils. An artist 
 almost always docs wrong who puts more work than these prices will remu- 
 nerate him for into anj'- single canvass — his talent would be better employed 
 in painting two pictures than one so elaborate. The water-colour painters 
 
LECT. II.] IV. DISTRIBUTION. ^ 79 
 
 There is, however, another }X)int, and a still more important 
 one, bearing on this matter of purchase, than the keeping down 
 of prices to a rational standard. And that is, that you pay your 
 prices into the hands of living men, and do not pour them into 
 coffins. 
 
 For observe that, as we an^inge our payment of pictures at 
 present, no artist’s work is worth half its proper value while he is 
 alive. The moment he dies, his pictures, if they are good, reach 
 double tlieir former value ; but that rise of price represents simply 
 a profit made by the intelligent dealer or purchaser on his past 
 purchases. So tliat the real facts of the matter are, that the Bri- 
 tish public, spending a certain sum annually in art, determines 
 that, of every thousand it pays, only five hundred shall go to the 
 painter, or shall be at all concerned in the production of art; and 
 that the other five hundred shall be paid merely as a testimonial 
 to the intelligent dealer, who knew what to buy. Now, testimo- 
 nials are very pretty and proper things, within due limits ; but 
 testimonial to the amount of a hundred per cent, on the total 
 expenditure is not good political economy. Do not, therefore, in 
 general, unless you see it to be necessary for its preservation, buy 
 the picture of a dead artist If you'fear that it may be exposed to 
 contempt or ne^ect, buy it ; its price will then, probably, not be 
 high : if you want to put it into a public gallery, buy it; you are 
 .sure, then, that you do not spend your money selfishly : or, if you 
 loved the man’s work while he was alive, and bought it then, buy 
 it also now, if you can see no living work equal to it. But if you 
 did not buy it while the man was living, never buy it after he is 
 
 also are getting into the habit of making their drawings too large, and in a 
 measure attaching their price rather to breadth and extent of touch than to 
 thoughtful labour. Of course marked exceptions occur here and there, as 
 in the case of John Lewis, whose drawings are wrought with unfailing pre- 
 cision throughout, Whatever their scale. Hardly any price can be remune- 
 rative for such work. 
 
80 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 [lECT. II. 
 
 dead : you are then doing no good to him, and you are doing some 
 shame to yourself. Look around you for pictures that you really 
 like, and by buying which you can help some genius yet unpe- 
 rished — that is the best atonement you can make to the one you 
 have neglected — and give to the living and struggling painter at 
 once wages, and testimonial. 
 
 So far then of the motives which should induce us to keep 
 down the prices of modern art, and thus render it, as a private 
 possession, attainable by greater numbers of people than at present. 
 But we should strive to render it accessible to them in other ways 
 also — chiefly by the permanent decoration of public buildings ; 
 and it is in this field that I think we may look for the profitable 
 means of providing that constant employment for young painters 
 of which we were speaking last evening. 
 
 The first and most important kind of public buildings which we 
 are always sure to want, are schools : and I would ask you to con- 
 sider very carefully, whether we may not wisely introduce some 
 great changes in the way of school decoration. Hitherto, as far*" as 
 I know, it has either been so difficult to give all the education we 
 wanted to our lads, that we have been obliged to do it, if at all, 
 with cheap furniture in bare walls ; or else we have considered 
 that cheap furniture and bare walls are a proper part of the means 
 of education ; and supposed that boys learned best when they sat 
 on hard forms, and had nothing but blank plaster about and above 
 them whereupon to employ their spare attention ; also, that it was 
 as well they should be accustomed to rough and ugly conditions 
 of things, pai'tly by way of preparing them for the hardships of 
 life, ami ])artly that there might be the least possible damage done 
 to floors and forms, in the event of their becoming, during the 
 master’s absence, the fiehls or instruments of battle. All this is 
 so far well and necessary, as it relates to the training of country 
 lads, and the first training of boys in general. But there certainly 
 comes a period in the life of a well educated youth, in which one 
 
IV. DISTRIBUTION. 
 
 81 
 
 LECT, II.] 
 
 of the principal elements of his education is, or ought to he, to give 
 him refinement of habits ; and not only to teach him the strong 
 exercises of which his frame is capable, but also to increase his 
 bodily sensibility and refinement, and show him such small mat- 
 ters as the way of handling things properly, and treating them 
 considerately. Not only so, but I believe the notion of fixing the 
 attention by keeping the room empty, is a wholly mistaken one : 
 I think it is just in the emptiest room that the mind wanders most; 
 for it gets restless, like a bird, for want of a perch, and casts about 
 for any possible means of getting out and away. And even if it 
 be fixed, by an effort, on the business in hand, that business 
 becomes itself repulsive, more than it need be, by the vileness of 
 its associations ; and many a study appears dull or painful to a 
 boy, when it is pursued on a blotted deal desk, under a wall with 
 nothing on it but scratches and pegs, which would have been pur- 
 sued pleasantly enough in a curtained corner of his father’s library, 
 or at the lattice window of his cottage. Nay, my own belief is, 
 that the best study of all is the most beautiful ; and that a quiet 
 glade of forest, or the nook of a lake shore, are worth all the 
 schoolrooms in Christendom, when once you are past the multipli- 
 cation table ; but be that as it may, there is no question at all but 
 that a time ought to come in the life of a well trained youth, 
 when he can sit at a writing table without wanting to throw the 
 inkstand at his neighbour ; and when also he will feel more capa- 
 ble of certain efforts of mind with beautiful and refined forms 
 about him than with ugly ones. When that time comes he 
 ought to be advanced into the decorated schools; and this advance 
 ought to be one of the important and honourable epochs of his 
 life. 
 
 I have not time, however, to insist on the mere serviceableness 
 to our youth of refined architectural decoration, as such ; for I 
 want you to consider the probable influence of the particular kind 
 of decoration which I wish you to get for them, namely, historical 
 
82 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. [lECT. II. 
 
 painting. You know we have hitherto been in the habit of con- 
 veying all our historical knowledge, such as it is, by the ear only, 
 never by the eye ; all our notions of things being ostensibly 
 derived from verbal description, not from sight. Now, I have no 
 doubt that, as we grow gradually wiser — and we are doing so 
 every day — we shall discover at last that the eye is a nobler organ 
 than the ear ; and that through the eye we must, in reality, 
 obtain, or put into form, nearly all the useful information we are 
 to have about this world. Even as the matter stands, you will 
 find that the knowledge which a boy is supposed to receive from 
 verbal description is only available to him so far as in any under- 
 hand way he gets a sight of the thing you are talking about. I 
 remember well that, for many years of my life, the only notion I 
 had of the look of a Greek knight was complicated between recol- 
 lection of a small engraving in my pocket Pope’s Homer, and 
 reverent study of the Horse-Guards. And though I believe that 
 most boys collect their ideas from more varied sources, and 
 arrange them more carefully than I did ; still, whatever sources 
 they seek must always be ocular : if they are clever boys, they 
 will go and look at the Greek vases and sculptures in the British 
 Museum, and at the weapons in our armouries — they will see 
 what real armour is like in lustre, and what Greek armour was 
 like in form, and so put a fairly true image together, but still not, 
 in ordinary cases, a very living or interesting one. Now, the use 
 of your decorative painting would be, in myriads of ways, to 
 animate their history for them, and to put the living aspect of 
 j»ast things before their eyes as faithfully as intelligent invention 
 can ; so that the master shall have nothing to do but once to 
 })oint to the schoolroom walls, and for ever afterwards the meaning 
 of any word wonld be fixed in a boy’s mind in the best possible 
 way. Is it a (juestion of classical dress — what a tunic was like, 
 or a chlamys, or a pepliis? At this day, you have to point to 
 some vile woodcut, in the middle of a dictionary page, represent- 
 
LECT. IlJ 
 
 IV. DISTRIBUTION. 
 
 83 
 
 ing the thing hung upon a stick ; hut then, yon would point to a 
 hundred figures, wearing the actual dress, in its fiery colours, in 
 all the actions of various stateliness or strength ; you would under- 
 stand at once how it fell round the people’s limbs as they stood, 
 how it drifted from their shouldei's as they went, how it veiled 
 their faces as they wept, how it covered their heads in the day of 
 battle, yoiv^ if you want to see what a weapon is like, you refer, 
 in like manner, to a numbered page, in which there are spear- 
 heads in rows, and sword-hilts in symmetrical groups; and 
 gradually the boy gets a dim mathematical notion how one 
 scymitar is hooked to the right and another to the left, and one 
 javelin has a knob to it and another none : while one glance at 
 your good picture would show hiii], — and the first rainy afternoon 
 in the schoolroom would for ever fix in his mind, — the look of the 
 sword and spear as they fell or flew ; and how they pierced, or 
 bent, or shattered — how men wielded them, and how men died 
 by them. But far more than all this, is it a question not of 
 clothes or weapons, but of men ? how can we sufficiently estimate 
 the effect on .the mind of a noble youth, at the time when the 
 world opens to him, of having faithful and touching representa- 
 tions put before him of the acts and presences of great men — 
 liow many a resolution, which would alter and exalt the whole 
 course of his after-life, might be formed, when in some dreamy 
 twilight he met, through his own tears, the fixed eyes of those 
 shadows of the great dead, unescapable and calm, piercing to his 
 soul ; or fancied that their lips moved in dread reproof or sound- 
 less exhortation. And if but for one out of many this were true — 
 if yet, in a few, you could be sure that such influence had indeed 
 changed their thoughts and destinies, and turned the eager and 
 reckless youth, who would have cast away his energies on the 
 race-horse or the gambling-table, to that noble life-race, that holy 
 life-hazard, which should win all glory to himself and all good to 
 
POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 84 
 
 [lECT. II. 
 
 his country — would not that, to some purpose, be “political 
 economy of art?” 
 
 And observe, there could be no monotony, no exhaustibleness, 
 in the scenes required to bo thus portrayed. Even if there were, 
 and you wanted for every school in the kingdom, one death of 
 Leonidas; one battle of Marathon; one death of Cleobis and 
 Bito ; there need not therefore be more monotony in your art 
 than there was in the repetition of a given ^^cle of subjects by 
 the religious painters of Italy. But we ought not to admit a cycle 
 at all. For though we had as many great schools as we have 
 great cities (one day I hope we shatl have), centuries of painting 
 would not exhaust, in all the number of them, the noble and 
 pathetic subjects which might be chosen from the history of even 
 one noble nation. But, beside this, you will not, in a little while, 
 limit your youths’ studies to so narrow fields as you do now. 
 There will come a time — I am sure of it — when it will be found 
 that the same practical results, both in mental discipline, and in 
 political philosophy, are to be attained by the accurate study of 
 mediaeval and modern as of ancient history ; and that the facts 
 of mediaeval and modern history are, on the whole, the most im- 
 portant to us. And among these noble groups of constellated 
 schools which I foresee arising in our England, I foresee also that 
 there will be divided fields of thought ; and that while each will 
 give its scholars a great general idea of the world’s history, such 
 as all men should possess — each will also take upon itself, as its 
 own special duty, the closer study of the course of events in some 
 given place or time. It will review the rest of history, but it will 
 exhaust its own special field of it; and found its moral and 
 political teaching on the most perfect possible analysis of the 
 results of human conduct in one place, and at one epoch. And 
 then, the galleries of that school will be painted with the historical 
 scenes belonging to the age which it has chosen for its special 
 studv. 
 
IV. DISTRIBUTION. 
 
 85 
 
 LECT. II.] 
 
 So far, then, of art as you may apply it to that great series of 
 public buildings which you devote to the education of youth. The 
 next large class of public buildings in which we should introduce 
 it, is one which I think a few years more of national progress will 
 render more serviceable to us than they have been lately. I 
 mean, buildings for the meetings of guilds of trades. 
 
 And here, for the last time, I must again interrupt the course 
 of our chief inquiry, in order to state one other principle of 
 political economy, which is perfectly simple and indisputable ; but 
 which, nevertheless, we continually get into commercial embarrass- 
 ments for want of understanding ; and not only so, but suffer 
 much hindrance in our commercial discoveries, because many of 
 our business men do not practically admit it. 
 
 Supposing half a dozen or a dozen men were cast ashore from 
 a wreck on an uninhabited island, and left to their own resources, 
 one of course, according to his capacity, would be set to one 
 business and one to another ; the strongest to dig and to cut wood, 
 and to build huts for the rest : the most dexterous to make shoes 
 out of bark and coats out of skins ; the best educated to look for 
 iron or lead in the rocks, and to plan the channels for the irriga- 
 tion of the fields. But though their labours were thus naturally 
 severed, that small group of shipwrecked men would understand 
 well enough that the speediest progress was to be made by help- 
 ing each other, — not by opposing each other : and they would 
 know that this help could only be properly given so long as they 
 were frank and open in their relations, and the difficulties which 
 each lay under properly explained to the rest. So that any 
 appearance of secresy or separateness in the actions of any of 
 them would instantly, and justly, be looked upon with suspicion 
 by the rest, as the sign of some selfish or foolish proceeding on the 
 part of the individual. If, for instance, the scientific man were 
 found to have gone out at night, unknown to the rest, to alter the 
 sluices, the others would think, and in all probability rightly think, 
 
86 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OP ART. 
 
 [lECT. II. 
 
 that he wanted to get the best supply of water to his own field ; 
 and if the shoemaker refused to show- them where the bark grew 
 which he made the sandals of, they would naturally think, and in 
 all probability rightly think, that he didn’t want them to see how 
 much there was of it, and that he meant to ask from them more 
 corn and potatoes in exchange for his sandals than the trouble of 
 making them deserved. And thus, although each man would 
 have a portion of time to himself in which he was allowed to do 
 what he chose without let or inquiry, — so long as he was working 
 in that particular business which he had undertaken for the com- 
 mon benefit, any secresy on his part would be immediately sup- 
 posed to mean mischief ; and would require to be accounted for, 
 or put an end to : and this all the more because, whatever the 
 work might be, certainly there would be difficulties about it which, 
 when once they were well explained, might be more or less done 
 away with by the help of the rest ; so that assuredly every one of 
 them would advance with his labour not only more happily, but 
 more profitably and quickly, by having no secrets, and by frankly 
 bestowing, and frankly receiving, such help as lay in his way to 
 get or to give. 
 
 And, just as the best and richest result of wealth and happiness 
 to the whole of them, would follow on their perseverance in such 
 a system of frank communication and of helpful labour ; — so pre^ 
 ciscly the worst and poorest result would be obtained by a system 
 of secresy and of enmity ; and each man’s happiness and wealth 
 would assuredly be diminished in proportion to the degree in 
 which jealousy and concealment became their social and economi- 
 cal principles. It would not, in the long run, bring good, but only 
 evil, to the man of science, if, instead of telling openly where he 
 had found good iron, he carefully concealed every new bed of it, 
 that he might ask, in exchange for the rare ploughshare, more 
 C(;rn from the farmer, or in exchange for the rude needle, more 
 labour from the sempstress : and it would not nltiuiately bring 
 
LECT. II.] 
 
 IV. DISTRIBUTION. 
 
 87 
 
 good, but only evil, to the farmers, if they sought to burn each 
 other’s cornstacks, that they might raise the value of tlieir grain, 
 or if the sempstresses tried to break each other’s needles, that each 
 might get all the stitching to herself. 
 
 Now, these laws of human action are precisely as authoritative 
 in their application to the conduct of a million of men, as to that 
 of six or twelve. All enmity, jealousy, opposition, and secresy are 
 wholly, and in all circumstances, destructive in their nature — not 
 productive; and all kindness, fellowship, and communicativeness 
 are invariably productive in their operation, — not destructive ; and 
 the evil principles of opposition and exclusiveness are not ren- 
 dered less fatal, but more fatal, by their acceptance among large 
 masses of men ; more fatal, I say, exactly in proportion as their 
 influence is more secret. For though the opposition does always 
 its own simple, necessary, direct quantity of harm, and withdraws 
 always its own simple, necessary, measurable quantity of wealth 
 from the sum possessed by the community, yet, in proportion to 
 the size of the community, it does another and more refined mis- 
 chief than this, by concealing its own fatality under aspects of mer- 
 cantile complication and expediency, and giving rise to multitudes 
 of false theories based on a mean belief in narrow and immediate 
 appearances of good done here and there by things which have 
 the universal and everlasting nature of evil. So that the time and 
 powers of the nation are wasted, not only in wretched struggling 
 against each other, but in vain complaints, and groundless discou- 
 ragements, and empty investigations, and useless experiments in 
 laws, and elections, and inventions ; with hope always to pull wis- 
 dom through some new-shaped slit in a ballot-box, and to drag 
 prosperity down out of the clouds along some new knot of electric 
 wire ; while all the while Wisdom stands calling at the corners of 
 the streets, and the blessing of heaven waits ready to rain down 
 upon us, deeper than the rivers and broader than the dew, if only 
 we will obey the first plain principles of humanity, and the first 
 
88 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. [lECT. II. 
 
 plain precepts of the skies; “Execute true judgment, and show 
 mercy and compassion, every man to his brother ; and let none of 
 you imagine evil against his brother in your heart.”"^' 
 
 Therefore, I believe most firmly, that as the laws of national 
 prosperity get familiar to us, we shall more and more cast our toil 
 into social and communicative systems ; and that one of the first 
 means of our doing so, will be the re-establishing guilds of every 
 important trade in a vital, not formal, condition ; — that there will 
 be a great council or government house for the members of every 
 trade, built in whatever town of the kingdom occupies itself prin- 
 cipally in such trade, with minor council halls in other cities ; and 
 to each council-hall, officers attached, whose first business may be 
 
 * It would be well if, instead of preaching continually about the doctrine 
 of faith and good works, our clergymen would simply explain to their people 
 a little what good works mean. There is not a chapter in «.ll the book we 
 profess to believe, more specially, and directly written for England, than the 
 second of Habakkuk, and I never in all my life heard one of its practical texts 
 preached from. I suppose the clergymen are aU afraid, and know that their 
 flocks, while they will sit quite politely to hear syllogisms out of the epistle 
 to the Romans, would get restive directly if they ever pressed a practical 
 text homo to them. But we should have no mercantile catastrophes, and no 
 distressful pauperism, if we only read often, and took to heart, those plain 
 words: “Yea, also, because he is a proud man, neither keepeth at home, 
 who enlargeth his desire as hell, and cannot be satisfied, — Shall not all these 
 take up a parable against him, and a taunting proverb against him, and say, 
 
 ‘ Woe to him that incrcaseth that which is not his : and to him that ladeth 
 himself with thick clay.^ ” (What a glorious history, in one metaphor, of the 
 life of a man greedy of fortune.) “Woe to him that coveteth an evil cove- 
 tousness that lie may set his nest on high. Woe to him that buildeth a 
 town with blood, and stablisheth a city by iniquity. Behold, is it not of the 
 Lord of Hosts that tlie people shall labour in the very fire, and the people 
 sliall weary themselves for very vanity.” 
 
 Tlio Americans, wlio have been sending out ships with sham bolt-heads on 
 their timbers, and only half their bolts, may meditate on that “buildeth a 
 town with blood.” 
 
LECT. II.] 
 
 IV. DISTRIBUTION. 
 
 89 
 
 to examine into the circnmstances of every operative, in tliat trade, 
 who chooses to report himself to them when out of work, and to 
 set him to work, if he is indeed able and willing, at a fixed rate of 
 wages, determined at regular periods in the council-meetings ; 
 and whose next duty may be to bring reports before the council 
 of all improvements made in the business, and means of its exten- 
 sion : not allowing private patents of any kind, but making all 
 improvements available to every member of the guild, only allot- 
 ting, after successful trial of them, a certain reward to the inven- 
 tors. 
 
 For these, and many other such purposes, such halls will be 
 again, I trust, fully established, and then, in the paintings and 
 decorations of them, especial effort ought to be made to express the 
 worthiness and honourableness of the trade for whose members 
 they are founded. For I believe one of the worst symptoms of 
 modern society to be, its notion of great inferiority, and ungentle- 
 manliness, as necessarily belonging to the character of a tradesman. 
 I believe tradesmen may be, ought to be — often are, more gentle- 
 men than idle and useless people : and I believe that art may do 
 noble work by recjOi*dtBg in the hall of each trade, the services 
 which men belonging to that trade have done for their country, 
 both preserving the portraits, and recording the important incidents 
 in the lives, of those who have made great advances in commerce 
 and civilization. I cannot follow out this subject, it branches too 
 far, and in too many directions ; besides, I have no doubt you will 
 at once see and accept the truth of the main principle, and be able 
 to think it out for yourselves. I would fain also have said some- 
 thing of what might be done, in the same manner, for almshouses 
 and hospitals, and for what, as I shall try to explain in notes to 
 this lecture, we may hope to see, some day, established with a 
 different meaning in their name than that they now bear — work- 
 houses; but I have detained you too long already, and cannot 
 permit myself to trespass further on your patience except only to 
 
90 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 [lECT. II. 
 
 recapitulate, in closing, the simple principles respecting wealth, 
 which we have gathered during the course of our inquiry ; prin- 
 ciples which are nothing more than the literal and practical accep- 
 tance of the saying, which is in all good men’s mouths ; namely, 
 that they are stewards or ministers of whatever talents are 
 entrusted to them. Only, is it not a strange thing, that while we 
 more or less accept the meaning of that saying, so long as it is 
 considered metaphorical, we never accept its meaning in its 
 own terms ? You know the lesson is given us under the form of a 
 story about money. Money was given to the servants to make use 
 of : the unprofitable servant dug in the earth, and hid his Lord’s 
 money. Well, we, in our poetical and spiritual application of this, 
 say, that of course money doesn’t mean money, it means wit, it 
 means intellect, it means influence in high quarters, it means every- 
 thing in the world except itself. And do not you see what a 
 pretty and pleasant come-off there is for most of us, in this spiritual 
 application? Of course, if we had wit, we would use it for the 
 good of our fellow-creatures. But we haven’t wit. Of course, if 
 we had influence with the bishops, we would use it for the good of 
 the Church ; but we haven’t any influence with the bishops. Of 
 course, if we had political power, we would use it for the good of 
 the nation ; but we have no political power ; we have no talents 
 entrusted to us of any sort or kind. It is true we have a little 
 money, but the parable can’t possibly mean anything so vulgar 
 as money; our money’s our own. 
 
 I believe, if you think seriously of this matter, you will feel that 
 the first and most literal application is just as necessary a one as 
 any other — that the story docs very specially mean what it says — 
 plain money ; and that the reason we don’t at once believe it does 
 so, is a sort of tacit idea that while thought, wit, and intellect, 
 and all power of birtli and position, are indeed given to us, and, 
 therefore, to be laid out for the Giver, — our wealth has not been 
 given to us ; but we have worked for it, and have a right to spend 
 
IV. DISTRIBUTION. 
 
 91 
 
 LECT. II.] 
 
 it as we choose. I think you will find that is the real substance 
 of our understanding in this matter. Beauty, we say, is given by 
 God — it is a talent ; strength is given by God — it is a talent ; po- 
 sition is given by God — it is a talent ; but money is proper wages 
 for our day’s work — it is not a talent, it is a due. We may justly 
 spend it on ourselves, if we have worked for it. 
 
 x\nd there would be some shadow of excuse for this, were it not 
 that the very power of making the money is itself only one of the 
 applications of that intellect or strength which we confess to be 
 talents. Why is one man richer than another? Because he is 
 more industrious, more persevering, and more sagacious. Well, 
 who made him more persevering and more sagacious than others ? 
 That power of endurance, that quickness of apprehension, that calm- 
 ness of judgment, which enable him to seize the opportunities that 
 others lose, and persist in the lines of conduct in which others 
 fail — are these not talents ? — are they not in the present state 
 of the world, among the most distinguished and influential of men- 
 tal gifts ? And is it not wonderful, that while we should be utter- 
 ly ashamed to use a superiority of body, in order to thrust our 
 weaker companions aside from some place of advantage, we 
 unhesitatingly use our superiorities of mind to thrust them back 
 from whatever good that strength of mind can attain. You would 
 be indignant if you saw a strong man walk into a theatre or a 
 lecture-room, and, calmly choosing the best place, take his feeble 
 neighbour by the shoulder, and turn him out of it into the back 
 seats, or the street. You would be equally indignant if you saw a 
 stout fellow thrust himself up to a table where some hungry chil- 
 dren were being fed, and reach his arm over their heads and take 
 their bread from them. But you are not the least indignant if 
 when a man has stoutness of thought and swiftness of capacity, and, 
 instead of being long-armed only, has the much greater gift of 
 being long-headed — you think it perfectly just that he should use 
 his intellect to take the bread out of the mouths of all the other 
 
92 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. [lECT. II. 
 
 men in the town who are of the same trade with him ; or use his 
 breadth and sweep of sight to gather some branch of the com- 
 merce of the country into one great cobweb, of which he is him- 
 self to be the central spider, making every thread vibrate with the 
 points of his claws, and commanding every avenue with the facets of 
 his eyes. You see no injustice in this. 
 
 But there is injustice ; and, let us trust, one of which honour- 
 able men will at no very distant period disdain to be guilty. In 
 some degree, however, it is indeed not unjust ; in some degree it is 
 necessary and intended. It is assuredly just that idleness should be 
 surpassed by energy ; that the widest influence should be possessed 
 by those who are best able to wield it ; and that a wise man, at 
 the end of his career, should be better off than a fool. But for 
 that reason, is the fool to be wretched, utterly crushed down, and 
 left in all the suffering which his conduct and capacity naturally 
 inflict? — Not so. What do you suppose fools were made for? 
 That you might tread upon them, and starve them, and get 
 the better of them in every possible way ? By no means. They 
 were made that wise people might take care of them. That is 
 the true and plain fact concerning the relations of every strong and 
 wise man to the world about him. He has his strength given him, 
 not that he may crush the weak, but that he may support and 
 guide them. In his own household he is to be the guide and the 
 su])[)ort of his children ; out of his household he is still to be the 
 father, that is, the guide and support of the weak and the poor; 
 not merely of the mei-itoriously weak and the innocently poor, but 
 of the guiltily and punishably poor ; of the men who ought to have 
 known better — of the poor who ought to be ashamed of themselves. 
 It is nothing to give pension and cottage to the widow who has 
 lost licr son ; it is nothing to give food and medicine to the work- 
 man wlio has broken his arm, or the decrepit woman wasting in 
 sickness. But it is something to use your time and strength to war 
 with the waywardness and thoughtlessness of mankind ; to keep 
 
IV. DISTRIBUTION. 
 
 93 
 
 LECT. II.] 
 
 the erring workman in your service till yon have made him an 
 unerring one ; and to direct your fellow-merchant to the opportunity 
 which his dulness would have lost. This is much ; but it is yet 
 more, Avhen you have fully achieved the superiority which is due to 
 you, and acquired the wealth which is the fitting reward of your 
 sagacity, if you solemnly accept the responsibility of it, as it is the 
 helm and guide of labour far and near. For you who have it in 
 your hands, are in reality the pilots of the power and effort of the 
 State. It is entrusted to you as an authority to be used for good 
 or evil, just as completely as kingly authority was ever given to a 
 prince, or military command to a captain. And, according to the 
 quantity of it that you have in your hands, you are the arbiters of 
 the will and work of England ; and the whole issue, whether the 
 work of the State shall suffice for the State or not, depends upon 
 you. You may stretch out your sceptre over the heads of the 
 English labourers, and say to them, as they stoop to its waving, 
 “ Subdue this obstacle that has baffled our fathers, put away this 
 plague that consumes our children ; water these dry places, plough 
 these desert ones, carry this food to those who are in hunger; 
 carry this light to those who are in darkness ; carry this life to 
 those who are in death or on the other side you may say to her 
 labourers : “ Here am I ; this power is in my hand ; come, build a 
 mound here for me to be throned upon, high and wide ; come, make 
 crowns for my head, that men may see them shine from far away ; 
 come, weave tapestries for my feet, that I may tread softly on the 
 silk and purple ; come, dance before me, that I may be gay ; and 
 sing sweetly to me, that I may slumber ; so shall I live in joy, and 
 die in honour.” And better than such an honourable death, it 
 were that the day had perished wherein we were born, and the 
 night in which it was said there is a child conceived. 
 
 I trust that in a little while, there will be few of our rich men 
 who, thi-ough carelessness or covetousness, thus forfeit the glorious 
 office which is intended for their hands. I said, just now, that 
 
94 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. [lECT. II. 
 
 wealth ilhiised was as the net of the spider, entangling and 
 destroying : but wealth well used, is as the net of the sacred 
 fisher who gathers souls of men out of the deep. A time will 
 come — I do not think even no\v it is far from us — when this 
 golden net of the world’s wealth will be spread abroad as the 
 flaming meshes of morning cloud are over the sky ; bearing with 
 them the joy of light and the dew of the morning, as well as the 
 summons to honourable and peaceful toil. What less can we hope 
 from your wealth than this, rich men of England, when once you 
 feel fully how, by the strength of your possessions — not, observe, by 
 the exhaustion, but by the administration of them and the power 
 — you can direct the acts, — command the energies — inform the 
 ignorance, — prolong the existence, of the whole human race ; and 
 how, even of worldly wisdom, which man employs faithfully, it is 
 true, not only that her ways are pleasantness, but that her paths are 
 peace ; and that, for all the children of men, as well as for those 
 to whom she is given. Length of days are in her right hand, as in 
 her left hand Riches and Honour ? 
 
ADDENDA. 
 
 95 
 
 ADDENDA. 
 
 !N'ote, p. 20. — “ Fatherly authority.'^’' 
 
 This statement could not, of course, be beard witboiit displeasure 
 by a certain class of politicians ; and in one of the notices of these 
 lectures given in the Manchester journals at the time, endeavour 
 was made to get quit of it by referring to the Divine authority, as 
 the only Paternal power with respect to which men were truly 
 styled “brethren.” Of course it is so, and, equally of course, all 
 human government is nothing else than the executive expression 
 of this Divine authority. The moment government ceases to be 
 the practical enforcement of Divine law, it is tyranny ; and the 
 meaning which I attach to the wmrds, “ paternal government,” is 
 in more extended terms, simply this — “ The executive fulfilment, 
 by formal human methods, of the will of the Father of mankind 
 respecting Ilis children.” I could not give such a definition of 
 Government as this in a popular lecture; and even in written 
 form, it will necessarily suggest many objections, of which I must 
 notice and answer the most probable. 
 
 Only, in order to avoid the recurrence of such tiresome phrases 
 as “it may be answered in the second place,” and “it will be 
 objected in the third place,” &c., I will ask the reader’s leave to 
 arrange the discussion in the form of simple dialogue, letting O. 
 stand for objector, and i?. for response. 
 
 0 . — You define your paternal government to be the executive 
 fulfilment, by formal human methods, of the Divine will. But, 
 assuredly, that' will cannot stand in need of aid or expression from 
 human law^s. It cannot fail of its fulfilment. 
 
 R . — In the final sense it cannot; and in that sense, men who 
 
96 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 arc committing murder and stealing are fulfilling the will of God 
 as much as the best and kindest people in the Avorld. But in the 
 limited and present sense, the only sense with which we have any- 
 thing to do, God’s will concerning man is fulfilled by some men, 
 and thwarted by others. And those men who either persuade or 
 enforce the doing of it, stand towards those who are rebellious 
 against it exactly in the position of faithful children in a family, 
 Avlio, when the father is out of sight, either compel or persuade 
 the rest to do as their father would have them,, were he present; 
 and in so far as they are expressing and maintaining, for the time, 
 the paternal authority, they exercise, in the exact sense in which I 
 mean the phrase to be understood, paternal government over the rest. 
 
 0. — But, if Providence has left a liberty to man in many things 
 in order to prove him, why should human law abridge that liberty, 
 and take upon itself to compel what the great Lawgiver does not 
 compel ? 
 
 R . — It is confessed, in the enactment of any law whatsoever, 
 that human lawgivers have a right to do this. For, if you have 
 no right to abridge any of the liberty Avhich Providence has left 
 to man, you have no right to punish any one for committing mur- 
 der or robbery. You ought to leave them to the punishment of 
 God and Nature. But if you think yourself under obligation to 
 ])unish, as far as human laws can, the violation of the will of God 
 by these great sins, you are certainly under the same obligation to 
 punish, with proportionately less punishment, the violation of His 
 will in less sins. 
 
 0. — No ; you must not attempt to punish less sins by law, 
 because you cannot properly define nor ascertain them. Every- 
 body can determine whether murder has been committed or not,* 
 but you cannot determine how far people have been unjust or 
 cruel in minor matters, and therefore cannot make or execute laws 
 concerning minor matters. 
 
 R . — Tf I propose to you to punish faults which cannot be defined, 
 or to execute laws which cannot be made equitable, reject the 
 laws T pi-oposc. But do not generally object to the principle of law. 
 
 0. — Yes; I generally object to the principle of law as applied 
 to minor things; because, if you could succeed (which you can- 
 
ADDENDA. 
 
 97 
 
 not) in regulating the entire conduct of men by law in little things 
 as well as great, you would take away from Imman life all its pro- 
 bationary character, and render many virtues and pleasures impos- 
 sible. You would reduce virtue to the movement of a machine, 
 instead of the act of a spirit. 
 
 i?. — You have just said, parenthetically, and I fully and will- 
 ingly admit it, that it is impossible to regulate all minor matters 
 by law. Is it not probable, therefore, that the degree in which it 
 is possible to regulate them by it, is also the degree in which it is 
 right to regulate them by it? Or what other means of judgment " 
 will you employ, to separate the things which ought to be for- 
 mally regulated from the things which ought not? You admit 
 that great sins should be legally repressed ; but you say that small 
 sins should not be legally repressed. How do you distinguish 
 between great and small sins ; and how do you intend to deter- 
 mine, or do you in practice of daily life determine, on what occa- 
 sion you should compel people to do right, and on what occasion 
 you should leave them the option of doing wrong ? 
 
 0 . — I think you cannot make any accurate or logical distinc- 
 tion in such matters; but that common sense and instinct have, in 
 all civilized nations, indicated certain crimes of great social harm- 
 fulness, such as murder, theft, adultery, slander, and such like, 
 which it is proper to repress legally ; and that common sense and 
 instinct indicate also the kind of crimes which it is proper for 
 laws to let alone, such as miserliness, ill-natured speaking, and 
 many of those commercial dishonesties which I have a notion you 
 want your paternal government to interfere with. 
 
 R . — Pray do not alarm yourself about what my paternal go- 
 vernment is likely to inteifere with, but keep to the matter in 
 hand. You say that “ common sense and instinct” have, in all 
 civilized nations, distinofuished between the sins that ouo;ljt to be 
 legally dealt with and that ought not. Do you mean that the 
 laws of all civilized nations are perfect? 
 
 0. — Xo ; certainly not. 
 
 R . — Or that they are perfect at least in their discrimination of 
 what crimes they should deal with, and what crimes they should 
 let alone ? 
 
08 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART, 
 
 0. — No ; not exactly. 
 
 R . — What do you mean then ? 
 
 0. — I mean that the general tendency is right in the laws of 
 civilized nations ; and that, in due course of time, natural sense 
 and instinct point out the matters they should he brought to bear 
 upon. And each question of legislation must be made a separate 
 subject of inquiry as it presents itself : you cannot fix any general 
 principles about what should be dealt with legally, and what 
 should not. 
 
 R. — Supposing it to be so, do you think there are any points 
 in which our English legislation is capable of amendment, as it 
 bears on commercial and economical matters, in this present time ? 
 
 0. — Of course I do. 
 
 R. — Well, then, let us discuss these together quietly; and if the 
 points that I want amended seem to you incapable of amendment, 
 or not in need of amendment, say so ; but donh object, at starting, 
 to the mere proposition of applying law to things which have not 
 had law applied to them before. You have admitted the fitness 
 of my expression, “ paternal government it only has been, 
 and remains a question between us, how far such government 
 should extend. Perhaps you would like it only to regulate, among 
 the children, the length of their lessons ; and perhaps I should like 
 it also to regulate the hardness of their cricket-balls : but cannot 
 vou wait quietly till you know what I want it to do, before quar- 
 relling with the thing itself? 
 
 0. — No; I cannot Avait quietly : in fact I don’t see any use in 
 beginning such a discussion at all, because I am quite sure from 
 tlie first, that you want to meddle with things that you have no 
 business with, and to interfere with healthy liberty of action in all 
 soi'ts of ways; and I knoAV that you can’t propose any laws that 
 would be of real use.'^ 
 
 * If llic reader is displeased with me for putting this foolish speech into 
 his mf)uth, T entreat his jjardon ; Init he may be assured that it is a speech 
 which would be made l)y many people, and the substance of which would be 
 tacitly felt by many more, at this i)oint of the discussion. I have really 
 tried, up to this point, to make the objector as intelligent a person as it is 
 po.ssil'le for an author to imagine anybody to be, who differs with him. 
 
ADDENDA. 
 
 99 
 
 R . — If yon indeed know that, yon Avonld be wrong to hear me 
 any farther. But if yon are only in painful doubt about me, which 
 makes yon unwilling to run the risk .of wasting yonr time, I will 
 tell yon beforehand what I really do think abont this same liberty 
 of action, namely, that whenever we can make a perfectly eqnita- 
 ble law abont any matter, or even a law seenring, on the whole, 
 more jnst conduct than nnjnst, we ought to make that law ; and 
 that there will yet, on these conditions, ahvays remain a nnmber 
 of matters respecting which legalism and formalism are impossible ; 
 enough, and more than enough, to exercise all human powers of 
 individual judgment, and afford all kinds of scope to individnal 
 character. I think this ; but of course it can only be proved by 
 separate examination of the possibilities of formal restraint in each 
 given field of action ; and these two lectures arc nothing more 
 than a sketch of snch a detailed examination in one field, namely, 
 that of art. Yon will find, however, one or two other remarks on 
 snch possibilities in the next note. 
 
 Note 2nd, p. 22. — “ Right to piiblic support^ 
 
 It did not' appear to me desirable, in the conrse of the spoken 
 lecture, to enter into details or offer suggestions on the questions 
 of the regulation of labour and distribution of relief, as it would 
 have been impossible to do so without tonching on many dispnted 
 or disputable points, not easily handled before a general audience. 
 Bnt I mnst now supply what is wanting to make my general 
 statement clear. 
 
 I believe, in the first place, that no Christian nation has any 
 business to see one of its members in distress without helping him, 
 though, perhaps, at the same time punishing him : help, of course 
 — in nine cases out of ten — meaning guidance, much more than 
 gift, and, therefore, interference with liberty. When a peasant 
 mother sees one of her carelevss children fall into a ditch, her first 
 proceeding is to pull him out ; her second, to box his ears ; her 
 third, ordinarily, to lead him carefully a little way by the hand, 
 
100 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 or send liim home for the rest of the day. The child usually 
 cries, and very often would clearly prefer- remaining in the ditch ; 
 and if he understood any of the terms of politics, would certainly 
 express resentment at the interference with his individual liberty : 
 but the mother has done her duty. Whereas the usual call of the 
 mother nation to any of her children, under such circumstances, 
 has lately been nothing more than the foxhunter’s, — “ Stay still 
 there ; I shall clear you.” And if we always could clear them, 
 their requests to be left in muddy independenee might be some- 
 times allowed by kind people, or their cries for help disdained by 
 unkind ones. But we can’t clear them. The whole nation is, in 
 fsxct, bound together, as men are by ropes on a glacier — if one 
 falls, the rest must either lift him or drag him along with them^ 
 as dead weight, not without much increase of danger to themselves. 
 And the law of right being manifestly in this, as, whether mani- 
 festly or not, it is always, the law of prudence, the only question 
 is, how this wholesome help and interference are to be adminis- 
 tered. 
 
 The first interference should be in education. In order that 
 men may be able to support themselves when they are grown, 
 their strength must be properly developed while they are young; 
 ,'ind the state should always see to this — not allowing their health 
 to be broken by too early labour, nor their powers to be wasted 
 for want of knowledge. Some questions connected with this 
 matter are noticed farther on under the head “trial schools one 
 point I must notice here, that I believe all youths of whatever 
 rank, ought to learn some manual trade thoroughly ; for it is quite 
 wonderful how much a man’s views of life ai'e cleared by the 
 attainment of the capacity of doing any one thing well with his 
 liands and arms. For a long time, what right life there was in the 
 u))pcr classes of Europe depended in no small degree on the 
 
 * Jt is very curious to watcii the efforts of two shopkeepers to ruin each 
 otlicr, neither having tlie least idea that his mined neighbour must eventually 
 be su{)ported at his own expense, with an increase of poor rates; and that 
 the contest between them is not in reality which shall get everything for 
 liimsclf, but which sliall first take upon himself and his customers the gratui- 
 tous maintenance of tho other’s family. 
 
ADDENDA. 
 
 101 
 
 necessity wliich each man was under of being able to fence ; at 
 this day, the most useful things which boys learn at public schools 
 are, I believe, riding, rowing, and cricketing. But it would be far 
 better that members of Parliament should be able to plough 
 straight, and make a horseshoe, than only to feather oars neatly 
 or point their toes prettily in stirrups. Then, in literary and 
 scientific teaching, the great point of economy is to give the dis- 
 cipline of it through knowledge which will immediately bear on 
 practical life. Our literary w^ork has long been economically 
 useless to us because too much concerned with dead languages ; 
 and our scientific work will yet, for some time, be a good deal lost, 
 because scientific men are too fond or too vain of their systems, 
 and waste the student’s time in endeavouring to give him large 
 views, and make him perceive interesting connections of facts; 
 when there is not one student, no, nor one man, in a thousand, 
 wPo can feel the beauty of a s}"stem, or even take it clearly into 
 his head ; but nearly all men can understand, and most will be 
 interested in, the facts which bear on daily life. Botanists have 
 discovered some wonderful connection between nettles and figs, 
 which a cowboy who will never see a ripe fig in his life need not 
 be at all troubled about ; but it will be interesting to him to know 
 what effect nettles have on hay, and what taste they will give to 
 porridge ; and it will give him nearly a new life if he can be got 
 but once, in a spring-time, to look well at the beautiful circlet of 
 the w'hite nettle blossom, and work out with his schoolmaster the 
 curves of its petals, and the way it is set on its central mast. So, 
 the principle of chemical equivalents, beautiful as it is, matters far 
 less to a peasant boy, and even to most sons of gentlemen, than their 
 knowing how' to find whether the \vater is wholesome in the back- 
 kitchen cistern, or whether the seven-acre field wants sand or chalk. 
 
 Having, then, directed the studies of our youth so as to make 
 them practically serviceable men at the time of their entrance into 
 life, that entrance should always be ready for them in cases where 
 their private circumstances present no opening. There ought to 
 be government establishments for every trade, in which all youths 
 who desired it should be received as apprentices on their leaving- 
 school ; and men thrown out of work received at all times. At 
 
102 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 these government manufactories the discipline should be strict, 
 and the wages steady, not varying at all in proportion to the 
 demand for the article, but only in proportion to the price of food ; 
 the commodities produced being laid up in store to meet sudden 
 demands, and sudden fluctuations in prices prevented : — that gra- 
 dual and necessary fluctuation only being allowed which is pro- 
 perly consequent on larger or more limited supply of raw material 
 and other natural causes. When there was a visible tendency to 
 produce a glut of any commodiliy, that tendency should be checked 
 by directing the youth at the government schools into other 
 trades ; and the yearly surplus of commodities should be the prin- 
 cipal means of government provision for the poor. That provision 
 should be large, and not disgraceful to them. At present there 
 are very strange notions in the public mind respecting the receiv- 
 ing of alms : most people are willing to take them in the form of 
 a pension from government, but unwilling to take them in the form 
 of a pension from their parishes. There may be some reason for this 
 singular prejudice, in the fact of the government pension being 
 usually given as a deflnite acknowledgment of some service done 
 to the country; — but the parish pension is, or ought to be, given 
 precisely on the same terms. A labourer serves his country with 
 his spade, just as a man in the middle ranks of life serves it with 
 his sword, pen, or lancet ; if the service is less, and therefore the 
 wages during health less, then the reward, when health is broken, 
 may be less, but not, therefore, less honourable ; and it ought to 
 be quite as natural and straightforward a matter for a labourer to 
 take his pension from his parish, because he has deserved well of 
 his parish, as for a man in higher rank to take his pension from * 
 his country, because he has deserved well of his country. If there 
 be any disgrace in coming to the parish, because it may imply 
 improvidence in early life, much more is there disgrace in coming 
 to the government ; since improvidence is far less justiflable in a 
 liighly educated tlian in an imperfectly educated man; and far 
 less justiflable in a high rank, where extravagance must have been 
 luxury, than in a low rank, where it may only have been comfort. 
 
 So that the real fact of the matter is, that people will take alms 
 delightedly, consisting of a carriage and footmen, because those 
 
ADDENDA. 
 
 103 
 
 do not look like alms to the people in the street ; but they will 
 not take alms consisting only of bread and water and coals, 
 because everybody would understand what those meant. Mind, 
 I do not want any one to refuse the carriage who ought to have 
 it; but neither do I want them to refuse the coals. I should 
 indeed be sorry if any change in our views on these subjects 
 involved the least lessening of self-dependence in the English 
 mind ; but the common shrinking of men from the acceptance of 
 public charity is not self-dependence, but mere base and selfish 
 pride. It is not that they are unwilling to live at their neighbours’ 
 expense, but that they are unwilling to confess they do ; it is not 
 dependence they wish to avoid, but gratitude. They will take 
 places in which they know there is nothing to be done — they will 
 borrow money they know they cannot repay — they will carry on 
 a losing business with other people’s capital — they will cheat the 
 public in their shops, or sponge on their friends at their houses ; 
 but to say plainly they are poor men, who need the nation’s help, 
 and go into an almshouse — this they loftily repudiate, and virtu- 
 ously prefer being thieves to being paupers. 
 
 I trust that these deceptive efforts of dishonest men to appear 
 independent, and the agonizing efforts of unfortunate men to 
 remain independent, may both be in some degree checked by a 
 better administration and undei*standing of laws respecting the 
 poor. But the ordinances for relief and the ordinances for labour 
 must go together ; otherwise distress caiLsed by misfortune will 
 always be confounded, as it is now, with distress caused by idleness, 
 unthrift, and fraud. It is only when the state watches and guides 
 the middle life of men, that it can, without disgrace to them, pro- 
 tect their old age, acknowledging in that protection that they 
 have done their duty, or at least some portion of their duty, in 
 better days. 
 
 I know well how strange, fanciful, or impracticable these sug- 
 gestions will appear to most of the business men of this day ; men 
 who conceive the proper state of the world to be simply that of a 
 vast and disorganized mob, scrambling each for what he can get, 
 trampling down its children and old men in the mire, and doing 
 what work it finds must be done with any irregular squad of labour- 
 
104 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 ers it can bribe or inveigle together, and afterwards scatter to star- 
 vation. A great deal may, indeed, be done in this way by a nation 
 strong-elbowed and strong-hearted as we are — not easily frightened 
 by pushing, nor discouraged by falls. But it is still not the right 
 way of doing things, for people who call themselves Christians. 
 Every so named soul of man claims from every other such soul, 
 protection and education in childhood — help or punishment in 
 middle life — reward or relief, if needed, in old age ; all of these 
 should be completely and unstintingly given, and they can only be 
 given by the organization of such a system as I have described. 
 
 Note 3rd, p. 25. — “ Trial SchoohT 
 
 It may be seriously questioned by the reader how much of paint- 
 ing talent we really lose on our present system,'^' and how much 
 
 * It will be observed that, in the lecture, it is asswmeJ that works of art are 
 national treasures ; and that it is desirable to withdraw all the hands capable 
 of painting or carving from other employments, in order that they may pro- 
 duce this kind of wealth. I do not, in assuming this, mean that works of art 
 add to the monetary resources of a nation, or form part of its wealth, in the 
 vulgar sense. The result of the sale of a picture in the country itself is 
 merely that a certain sum of money is transferred from the hands of B. the 
 purchaser, to those of A. the producer ; the sum ultimately to be distributed 
 remaining the same, only A. ultimately spending it instead of B., while the 
 labour of A. has been in the meantime withdrawn from productive channels ; 
 ho has painted a picture which nobody can live upon, or live in, when he 
 might have grown corn or built houses : when the sale therefore is effected 
 in the country itself, it does not add to, but diminishes, the monetary resources 
 of the country, except only so far as it may appear probable, on other grounds, 
 that A. is likely to spend the sum ho receives for his picture more rationally 
 and usefully than B. would have spent it. If, indeed, the picture, or otlter 
 work of art, bo sold in foreign countries, either the money or the useful pro- 
 ducts of the foreign country being imported in exchange for it, such sale adds 
 to the monetary resources of the selling, and diminishes those of the purchas- 
 ing nation. But sound political economy, strange as it may at first appear to 
 say so, has nothing whatever to do with separations between national inter- 
 ests. I’olitical economy means the management of the affairs of citizens; and 
 it either regards exclusively the administration of the affairs of one nation, or 
 the administration of the afiairs of the world considered as one nation. So 
 
ADDENDA. 
 
 105 
 
 we should gain by the proposed trial schools. For it might be 
 thought, that as matters stand at present, we have more painters 
 than we ought to have, having so many bad ones, and that all youths 
 who had true painters’ genius forced their way out of obscurity. 
 
 when a transaction between individuals which enriches A., impoverishes B. 
 in precisely the same degree, the sound economist considers it an unproduc- 
 tive transaction between the individuals ; and if a trade between two nations 
 which enriches one, impoverishes the other in the same degree, the sound 
 economist considers it an unproductive trade between the nations. It is 
 not a general question of political economy, but otdy a particular question 
 of local expediency, whether an article in itself valueless, may bear a value 
 of exchange in transactions with some other nation. The economist con- 
 siders only the actual value of the thing done or produced ; and if he sees a 
 quantity of labour spent, for instance, by the Swiss, in producing woodwork 
 for sale to the English, he at once sets the commercial impoverishment of the 
 English purchaser against the commercial enrichment of the Swiss seller ; and 
 considers the whole transaction productive only so far as the woodwork itself is a 
 real addition to the wealth of the world. For the arrangement of the laws of a 
 nation so as to procure the greatest advantages to itself, and leave the smallest 
 advantages to other nations, is not a part of the science of political economy, 
 but merely a broad application of the science of fraud. Considered thus in 
 the abstract, pictures are not an addition to the monetary wealth of the world, 
 except in the amount of pleasure or instruction to be got out of them day by 
 day : but there is a certain protective effect on wealth exercised by works 
 of high art which must always be included in the estimate of their value. 
 Generally speaking, persons who decorate their houses with pictures, will 
 not spend so much money in papers, carpets, curtains, or other expensive and 
 perishable luxuries as they would otherwise. Works of good art, like books, 
 exercise a conservative effect on the rooms they are kept in ; and the wall 
 of the library or picture gallery remains undisturbed, when those of other 
 rooms are re-papered or re-panelled. Of course this effect is still more defi- 
 nite when the picture is on the walls themselves, either on canvass stretched 
 into fixed shapes on their panels, or in fresco ; involving, of course, the pre- 
 servation of the building from all unnecessary and capricious alteration. And 
 generally speaking, the occupation of a large number of hands in painting or 
 sculpture in any nation may be considered as tending to check the disposition 
 to indulge in perishable luxury. I do not, however, in my assumption that 
 works of art are treasures, take much into consideration this collateral mone- 
 tary result. I consider them treasures, merely as a permanent means of 
 pleasure and instruction ; and having at other times tried to show the several 
 ways in which they can please and teach, assume here that they are thus use- 
 fiil ; and that it is desirable to make as many painters as we can. 
 
 6 ^ 
 
100 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OE ART. 
 
 This is not so. It is difficult to analyse the characters of mind 
 which cause youths to mistake their vocation, and to endeavour to 
 become artists, when they have no true artist’s gift. But the fact 
 is, tliat multitudes of young men do this, and that by far the 
 greater number of living artists are men who have mistaken their 
 vocation. The peculiar circumstances of modern life, which exhi- 
 bit art in almost every form to the sight of the youths in our great 
 cities, have a natural tendency to fill their imao-inations with bor- 
 rowed ideas, and their minds with imperfect science ; the mere dis- 
 like of mechanical employments, either felt to be irksome, or 
 believed to be degrading, urges numbers of young men to become 
 painters, in the same temper in which they would enlist or go to 
 sea ; others, the sons of engravers or artists, taught the business of 
 the art by their parents, and having no gift for it themselves, follow 
 it as the means of livelihood, in an ignoble patience ; or, if ambi- 
 tious, seek to attract regard, or distance rivalry, by fantastic, mere- 
 tricious, or unprecedented applications of their mechanical skill ; 
 while finally, many men earnest in feeling, and conscientious in 
 principle, mistake their desire to be useful for a love of art, and 
 their quickness of emotion for its capacit}q and pass their lives in 
 painting moral and instructive pictures, which might almost justify 
 us in thinking nobody could be a painter but a rogue. On the 
 other hand, I believe that much of the best artistical intellect is 
 daily lost in other avocations. Generally, the temper which would 
 make an admirable artist is humble and observant, capable of 
 taking much interest in little things, and of entertaining itself 
 yileasantly in the dullest circumstances. Suppose, added to these 
 characters, a steady conscientiousness which seeks to do its duty 
 wherever it may be placed, and the power, denied to few artistical 
 minds, of ingenious invention in almost any practical department 
 of human skill, and it can hardly be doubted that the very 
 humility and conscientiousness which would have perfected the 
 painter, have in many instances prevented his becoming one; 
 and that in the quiet life of our steady craftsmen — sagacious manu- 
 facturers, and uncom})laining clerks — there may frequently be con- 
 cealed moi'e genius than ever is raised to the direction of our pub- 
 lic works, or to be the maik of our public praises. 
 
ADDENDA. 
 
 107 
 
 It is indeed probable, that intense disposition for art will con- 
 quer tlie most formidable obstacles, if the surrounding circumstances 
 are such as at all to present the idea of such conquest to the mind ; 
 but we have no ground for concluding that Giotto would ever have 
 been more than a shepherd, if Cimabue had not by chance found 
 him drawing; or that among the shepherds of the Apennines there 
 were no other Giottos, undiscovered by Cimabue. We are too 
 much in the habit of considering happy accidents as what are 
 called “ special Providences and thinking that when any great 
 work needs to be done, the man who is to do it will certainly be 
 pointed out by Providence, be he shepherd or sea-boy ; and pre- 
 pared for his w'ork by all kinds of minor providences, in the best 
 possible way. Whereas all the analogies of God’s operations in 
 other matters prove the contrary of this ; we find that “ of 
 thousand seeds, He often brings but one to bear,” often not one ; 
 and the one seed which He appoints to bear is allowed to bear 
 crude or perfect fruit according to the dealings of the husbandman 
 with it. And there cannot be a doubt in the mind of any person 
 accustomed to take broad and logical views of the world’s history, 
 that its events are ruled by Providence in precisely the same man- 
 ner as its harvests ; that the seeds of good and evil are broadcast 
 among men, just as the seeds of thistles and fruits are ; and that 
 according to the force of our industry, and wisdom of our hus- 
 bandry, the ground will bring forth to us figs or thistles. So that 
 wPen it seems needed that a certain work should be done for the 
 world, and no man is there to do it, we have no right to say that 
 God did not wish it to be done ; and therefore sent no man able 
 to do it. The probability (if I wrote my own convictions, I 
 should say certainty) is, that He sent many men, hundreds of men, 
 able to do it; and that we have rejected them, or crushed them ; 
 by our previous folly of conduct or of institution, we have rendered 
 it impossible to distinguish, or impossible to reach them ; and 
 when the need for them comes, and we suffer for the want of 
 them, it is not that God refuses to send us deliverers, and specially 
 appoints all our consequent sufferings ; but that Pie has sent, and 
 we have refused, the deliverers ; and the pain is then wrought out 
 by His eternal law, as surely as famine is wrought out by eternal 
 
108 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 law for a nation which will neither plough nor sow. No less are 
 we in error in supposing, as w’e so frequently do, that if a jinan be 
 found, he is sure to be in all respects fitted for the work to be 
 done, as the key is to the lock : and that every accident w'hich 
 happened in the forging him, only adapted him more truly to the 
 wards. It is pitiful to hear historians beguiling themselves and 
 their readers, by tracing in the early histoiy of great men, the 
 minor circumstances w'hich fitted them for the work they did, 
 w’ithout ever taking notice of the other circumstances wdiich as 
 assuredly unfitted them for it ; so concluding that miraculous in- 
 terposition prepared them in all points for everything, and that 
 they did all that could have been desired or hoped for from them : 
 whereas the certainty of the matter is that, throughout their lives, 
 they w'ere thwarted and corrupted by some things as certainly as 
 they were helped and disciplined by others; and that, in the 
 kindliest and most reverent view which can justly be taken of 
 them, they were but poor mistaken creatures, struggling with a 
 Avorld more profoundly mistaken than they ; — assuredly sinned 
 against, or sinning in thousands of ways, and bringing out at last 
 a maimed result — not what they might or ought to have done, 
 but all that could be done against the world’s resistance, and in 
 spite of their own sorrow'ful falsehood to themselves. 
 
 And this being so, it is the practical duty of a wise nation, first 
 to withdraw, as far as may be, its youth from destructive influ- 
 ences ; — then to tiy its material as far as possible, and to lose the 
 use of none that is good. I do not mean by “ withdrawing from 
 destructive influences” the keeping of youths out of trials; but 
 the kee})ing them out of the ^vay of things purely and absolutely 
 mischievous. 1 do not mean that we should shade our green corn 
 in all heat, and shelter it in all frost, bnt only that we should 
 dyke out the inundation from it, and drive the fowls aw'ay from 
 it. Let your youth labour and suffer ; but do not let it starve, 
 nor steal, nor blaspheme. 
 
 It is not, of course, in my pow'erhereto enter into details of schemes 
 of education ; and it will be long before the results of experiments 
 now in progress will give data for the solution of the most difficult 
 (|uestions connected with the subject, of which the principal one is 
 
ADDENDA. 
 
 109 
 
 the mode in which the chance of advancement in life is to he ex- 
 tended to all, and yet made compatible with contentment in the 
 pursuit of lower avocations by those whose abilities do not qualify 
 them for the higher. But the general principle of trial schools 
 lies at the root of the matter — of schools, that is to say, in which 
 the knowledge offered and discipline enforced shall be all a part 
 of a great assay of the human sonl, and in which the one shall be 
 increased, the other directed, as the tried heart and brain will best 
 bear, and no otherwise. One thing, however, I must say, that in 
 this trial I believe all emulation to be a false motive, and all giv- 
 ing of prizes a false means. All that you can depend upon in a 
 boy, as significative of true power, likely to issue in good fruit, is 
 his will to work for the work’s sake, not his desire to surpass his 
 school-fellows ; and the aim of the teaching you give him ought to 
 be, to prove to him and strengthen in him his own separate gift, 
 not to puff him into swollen rivalry with those who are everlast- 
 ingly greater than he : still less ought you to hang favours and 
 ribands about the neck of the creature who is the greatest, to make 
 the rest envy him. Try to make them love him and follow him, 
 not struggle with him. 
 
 There must, of course, be examination to ascertain and attest 
 both progress and relative capacity ; but our aim should be to make 
 the students rather look upon it as a means of ascertaining their 
 own true positions and powers in the world, than as an arena in 
 which to carry away a present victory. I have not, perhaps, in 
 the course of the lecture, insisted enough on the nature of relative 
 capacity and individual character, as the roots of all real value in 
 Art. AVe are too much in the habit, in these days, of acting as if 
 Art worth a price in the market were a commodity which people 
 could be generally taught to produce, and as if the education of the 
 artist, not his capacity^ gave the sterling value to his work. No 
 impression can possibly be more absurd or false. Whatever peo- 
 ple can teach each other to do, they will estimate, and ought to 
 estimate, only as common industry ; nothing will ever fetch a high 
 price but precisely that which cannot be taught, and which nobody 
 can do but the man from whom it is purchased. No state of 
 society, nor stage of knowledge, ever does away with the natural 
 
no 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 pre-eminence of one man over anotlier; and it is that pre-emi- 
 nence, and that only, which will give work high value in the mar- 
 ket, or which ought to do so. It is a had sign of the judgment, 
 and bad omen for the progress, of a nation, if it supposes itself to 
 possess many artists of equal merit. Noble art is nothing less than 
 the expression of a great soul ; and great souls are not common 
 things. If ever we confound their work with that of others, it is 
 not through liberality, but through blindness. 
 
 Note 4th, p. 26 . — '■'‘Public favour P 
 
 There is great difficulty in making any short or general state- 
 ment of the difference between great and ignoble minds in their 
 behaviour to the “ public.” It is by no means universally the case 
 that a mean mind, as stated in the text, will bend itself to what 
 you ask of it : on the contrary, there is one kind of mind, the 
 meanest of all, which perpetually complains of the public, contem- 
 plates and proclaims itself as a “ genius,” refuses all wholesome dis- 
 cipline or humble office, and ends in miserable and revengeful ruin ; 
 also, the greatest minds are marked by nothing more distinctly 
 than an inconceivable humility, and acceptance of work or instruc- 
 tion in any form, and from any quarter. They will learn from 
 everybody, and do anything that anybody asks of them, so long as 
 it involves only toil, or what other men would think degradation* 
 But the point of quarrel, nevertheless, assuredly rises some day 
 between the public and them, respecting some matter, not of hu- 
 miliation, but of Fact. Your great man always at last comes to 
 see something the public don’t see. This something he will 
 assuredly persist in asserting, Avhether with tongue or pencil, to be 
 as he sees it, not as they sec it ; and all the world in a heap on the 
 other side, will not get him to say otherwise. Then, if the world 
 objects to the saying, he may happen to get stoned or burnt for it, 
 but that does not in the least matter to him : if the world has no 
 particular objection to the saying, he may get leave to mutter it to 
 himself till he dies, and be merely taken for an idiot; that also 
 docs not matter to him — mutter it he will, according to what he 
 
ADDENDA. 
 
 Ill 
 
 perceives to be fact, and not at all according to the roaring of the 
 walls of Red sea on the right hand or left of him. Hence the 
 quarrel, sure at some time or other, to be started between the pub- 
 lic and him ; while your mean man, though he will spit and scratch 
 spiritedly at the public, while it does not attend to him, will bow 
 to it for its clap in any direction, and say anything when he has 
 got its ear, which he thinks will bring him another clap ; and thus, 
 as stated in the text, he and it go on smoothly together. 
 
 There are, however, times when the obstinacy of the mean man 
 looks very like the obstinacy of the great one ; but if you look 
 closely into the matter, you will always see that the obstinacy of 
 the first is in the pronunciation of “ I and of the second, in the 
 pronunciation of “ It.” 
 
 Rote 5th, p. 41. — “ In'cention of new wantsP 
 
 It would have been impossible for political economists long to 
 have endured the error spoken of in the text,'^' had they not been 
 
 * I have given the political economists too much credit in saying this. 
 Actually, while these sheets are passing through the press, the blunt, broad, 
 unmitigated fallacy is enunciated, formally and precisely, by the common 
 councilmen of Rew York, 'in their report on the present commercial crisis. 
 Here is their collective opinion, published in the Times of Rovember 23rd, 
 1857 : — “Another erroneous idea is that luxurious living, extravagant dress- 
 ing, splendid turn-outs and fine houses, are the cause of distress to a nation, 
 Ro more erroneous impression could exist. Every extravagance that the 
 man of 100,000 or 1,000,000 dollars indulges in adds to the means, the sup- 
 port, the wealth of ten or a hundred who had little or nothing else but their 
 labour, their intellect, or their taste. If a man of 1,000,000 dollars spends 
 principal and interest in ten years, and finds himself beggared at the end of 
 that time, he has actually made a hundred who have catered to his extrava- 
 gance, employers or employed, so much richer by the division of his wealth. 
 He may be ruined, but the nation is better off and richer, for one hundred 
 minds and hands, with 10,000 dollars apiece, are fur more productive than 
 one with the whole.” 
 
 Yes, gentlemen of the common council; but what has been doing in the 
 time of the transfer ? The spending of the fortune has taken a certain num- 
 ber of years (suppose ten), and during that time 1,000,000 dollars worth of 
 
112 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 confused by an idea, in part well founded, tliat tbe energies and re- 
 finements, as well as the riches of civilized life, arose from imagin- 
 ary wants. It is quite true, that the savage who knows no needs 
 but those of food, shelter, and sleep, and after he has snared his 
 venison and patched the rents of his hut, passes the rest of his 
 time in animal repose, is in a lower state than the man who labours 
 incessantly that he may procure for himself the luxuries of civiliza- 
 tion ; and true also, that the difterence between one and another 
 nation in progressive power depends in great part on vain desires ; 
 but these idle motives are merely to be considered as giving exer- 
 cise to the national body and mind ; they are not sources of wealth, 
 except so far as they give the habits of industry and acquisitiveness. 
 If a boy is clumsy and lazy, we shall do good if w^e can persuade 
 him to carve cherry-stones and fly kites ; and this use of his fingers 
 and limbs may eventually be the cause of his becoming a wealthy 
 and happy man ; but we must not therefore argue that cherry-stones 
 are valuable property, or that kite-flying is a profitable mode of pass- 
 ing time. In like manner, a nation always wastes its time and 
 labour directlij^ when it invents a new want of a frivolous kind, 
 and yet the invention of such a want may be the sign of a healthy 
 activity, and the labour undergone to satisfy the new want may 
 lead, indirectly^ to useful discoveries or to noble arts ; so that a 
 nation is not to be discouraged in its fancies when it is either too 
 
 work has leen dono by the people, who have been paid that sum for it. 
 ■\Vliere is the product of that work? By your own statement, wholly con- 
 sumed ; for the man for whom it has been done is now a beggar. You have 
 given therefore, as a nation, 1,000,000 dollars worth of work, and ten years 
 of time, and you have produced, as ultimate result, one beggar 1 Excellent 
 econoni}', gentlemen ; and sure to conduce, in due sequence, to the produc- 
 tion of more than one beggar. Perhaps the matter may be made clearer to 
 )'OU, however, by a more familiar instance. If a schoolboy goes out in tke 
 morning with- five shillings in his pocket, and comes home at night penniless, 
 having si)ent his all in tarts, principal and interest are gone, and fruiterer 
 and baker are enriched. So far so good. But suppose the schoolboy, instead, 
 has bought a book and a knife ; principal and interest are gone, and book- 
 seller and ciitler are enriched. But the schoolboy is enriched also, and may 
 help his schoolfellows next day with knife and book, instead of lying in bed 
 and ineurring a debt to the doctor. 
 
ADDENDA. 
 
 113 
 
 weak or foolish to be moved to exertion by anything but fancies, 
 or has attended to its serious business first. If a nation will not 
 forge iron, but likes distilling lavender, by all means give it laven- 
 der to distil ; only do not let its economists suppose that lavender 
 is as profitable to it as oats, or that it helps poor people to live, 
 any more than the schoolboy’s kite provides him his dinner. 
 Luxuries, whether national or personal, must be paid for by labour 
 withdrawn from useful things ; and no nation has a right to 
 indulge in them until all its poor are comfortably housed and fed. 
 
 The enervating influence of luxury, and its tendencies to increase 
 vice, are points which I keep entirely out of consideration in the 
 present essay : but, so far as they bear on any question discussed, 
 they merely furnish additional evidence on the side which I have 
 taken. Thus, in the present case, I assume that the luxuries of 
 civilized life are in possession harmless, and in acquirement, ser- 
 viceable as a motive for exertion ; and even on these favourable 
 terms, we arrive at the conclusion that the nation ought not to 
 indulge in them except under severe limitations. Much less ought 
 it to indulge in them if the temptation consequent on their posses- 
 sion, or fatality incident to their manufacture, more than counter- 
 balances the good done by the effort to obtain them. 
 
 Note Gth, p. 52. — “ Economy of Literature.’''' 
 
 I have been much impressed lately by one of the results of the 
 quantity of our books ; namely, the stern impossibility of getting 
 anything understood, that required patience to understand. I 
 observe always, in the case of my own writings, that if ever I 
 state anything which has cost me any trouble to ascertain, and 
 which, therefore, will probably require a minute or two of reflec- 
 tion from the reader before it can be accepted, — that statement 
 will not only be misunderstood, but in all probability taken to 
 mean something very nearly the reverse of what it does mean. 
 Now, whatever faults there may be in my modes of expression, I 
 know that the words I use will always be found, by Johnson’s dic- 
 tionary, to bear, first of all, the sense I use them in ; and that the 
 
J14 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 sentences, iv'lietlier awkwardly turned or not, will, by the ordinary 
 rules of grammar, bear no other interpretation than that I mean 
 them to bear ; so that the misunderstanding of them must result, 
 ultimately, from the mere fact that their matter sometimes requires 
 a little patience. And I see the same kind of misinterpretation 
 put on the words of other writers, whenever they require the same 
 kind of thought. 
 
 I was at first a little despondent about this ; but, on the whole, 
 I believe it will have a good effect upon our literature for some 
 time to come ; and then, perhaps, the public may recover its 
 patience again. For certainly it is excellent discipline for an 
 author to feel that he must say all he has to say in the fewest pos- 
 sible Avords, or his reader is sure to skip them ; and in the plainest 
 possible words, or his reader will certainly misunderstand them. 
 Generally, also, a downright fact may be told in a plain way ; and 
 we want downright facts at present more than anything else. And 
 though I often hear moral people complaining of the bad effects 
 of Avant of thought, for my part, it seems to me that one of the 
 Avorst diseases to Avhich the human creature is liable is its disease 
 of thinking. If it Avould only just look* at a thing instead of 
 thinking Avhat it must be like, or do a thing, instead of thinking it 
 cannot be done, Ave should all get on far better. 
 
 * There can be no question, hoAvever, of the mischievous tendency of the 
 hurry of the present day, in the way people undertake this very looking. I 
 gave tliree years’ close and incessant labour to the examination of the chro- 
 nology of the architecture of Venice ; two long winters being wholly spent 
 in the drawing of details on the spot: and yet I see constantly that architects 
 Avlio pass throe or four days in a gondola going up and down the grand canal, 
 think that their first impressions are just as likely to be true as my patiently 
 wrought conclusions. Mr. Street, for instance, glances hastily at the facade 
 of the Ducal Palace — so hastily that ho does not even see what its pattern 
 is, and misses tlie alternation of red and black in the centres of its squares — 
 and yet he instantly ventures on an opinion on the chronology of its capitals, 
 Avliif.h is one of the most complicated and difficult subjects in the whole range 
 of tiothic archaoology. It may, nevertheless, bo ascertained Avith very fair 
 probability of correctness by any person who will give a month’s hard work 
 to it, l)ut it can bo ascertained no otherwise. 
 
ADDENDA. 
 
 llo 
 
 Note Yth, p. 93 . — '‘'■Pilots of the State.’’'' 
 
 "While, however, undoubtedly, these responsibilities attach to 
 every person possessed of wealth, it is necessary both to avoid any 
 stringency of statement respecting the benevolent modes of spend- 
 ing money, and to admit and approve so much liberty of spend- 
 ing it for selfish pleasures as may distinctly make wealth a personal 
 reward for toil, and secure in the minds of all men the right of 
 property. For although, without doubt, the purest pleasures it 
 can procure are not selfish, it is only as a means of personal grati- 
 fication that it will be desired by a large majority of Avorkers ; and 
 it would be no less false ethics than false policy to check their 
 energy by any forms of public opinion Avhich bore hardly against 
 the wanton expenditure of honestly got wealth. It Avould be hard 
 if a man Avho had passed the greater part of his life at the desk 
 or counter could not at last innocently gratify a caprice ; and all 
 the best and most sacred ends of almsgiving would be at once dis- 
 appointed, if the idea of a moral claim took the place of affection- 
 ate gratitude in the mind of the receiver. 
 
 Some distinction is made by us naturally in this respect between 
 earned and inherited Avealth ; that Avhich is inherited appearing to 
 iiiA'olve the most definite responsibilities, especially when consisting 
 in revenues derived from the soil. The form of taxation Avhich 
 constitutes rental of lands places annually a certain portion of the 
 national wealth in the hands of the nobles, or other proprietors of 
 the soil, under conditions peculiarly calculated to induce them to 
 give their best care to its efficient administration. The want 
 of instruction in even the simplest principles of commerce and 
 economy, Avhich hitherto has disgraced our schools and universi- 
 ties, has indeed been the cause of ruin or total inutility of life to 
 multitudes of our men of estate ; but this deficiency in our public 
 education cannot exist much longer, and it appears to be highly 
 advantageous for the State that a certain number of persons dis- 
 tinguished by race should be permitted to set examples of Avise 
 expenditure, whether in the advancement of science, or in patron- 
 age of art and literature ; only they must see to it that they take 
 
116 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 their right standing more firmly than they have done hitherto, 
 for the position of a rich man in relation . to those around him 
 is, in our present real life, and is also contemplated generally by 
 political economists as being, precisely the reverse of what it 
 ought to be. A rich man ought to be continually examining how 
 he may spend his money for the advantage of others; at present, 
 others are continually plotting how they may beguile him into 
 spending it apparently for his own. The aspect which he presents 
 to the eyes of the world is generally that of a person holding a 
 bag of money with a staunch grasp, and resolved to part with 
 none of it unless he is forced, and all the people about him are 
 plotting how they may force him ; that is to say, how they may 
 persuade him that he wants this thing or that ; or how they may 
 produce things that he will covet and buy. One man tries to per- 
 suade hiin that he wants perfumes ; another that he wants jewel- 
 lery; another that he wants sugarplums; another that he wants 
 roses at Clnistmas. Anybody who can invent a new want for him 
 is supposed to be a benefactor to society ; and thus the energies 
 of the poorer people about him are continually directed to the 
 production of covetable, instead of serviceable things; and the rich 
 man has the general aspect of a fool, plotted against by all the 
 world. Whereas the real aspect whicli he ought to have is that 
 of a person wiser than others, entrusted with the inanagement of 
 a larger quantity of capital, which he administers for the profit of 
 all, directing each man to the labour which is most healthy for 
 him, and most serviceable for the community. 
 
 Note 8th, p. 93. — “'iSz'Z/j and Purple." 
 
 In various places throughout these lectures I have had to allude 
 to the distinction between productive and unproductive labour,, 
 aixl between tnie and false wealth. I shall here endeavour, as 
 clearly as I can, to ex])laiii the distinction I mean. 
 
 l’ro))crty may be divided generally into two kinds ; that which 
 ]»roduces life, and that which produces the objects of life. That 
 which produces or maintains life consists of food, in so far as it is 
 
ADDENDA. 
 
 m 
 
 nourishing; of furniture and clothing, in so far as they are pro- 
 tective or cherishing ; of fuel ; and of all land, instruments, or 
 materials, necessary to produce food, houses, clothes, and fuel. It 
 is specially and rightly called useful property. 
 
 The property which produces the objects of life consists of all 
 that gives pleasure or suggests and preserves thought : of food, 
 furniture, and land, in so far as they are pleasing to the appetite or 
 the eye ; of luxurious dress, and all other kinds of luxuries ; of 
 books, pictures, and architecture. But the modes of connection 
 of certain minor forms of property with human labour render it 
 desirable to arrange them under more than these two heads. 
 Property may therefore be conveniently considered as of five 
 kinds. 
 
 1st. Property necessary to life, but not producible by labour, 
 and therefore belonging of right, in a due measure, to every 
 human being as soon as he is born, and morally inalienable. As 
 for instance, his proper share of the atmosphere, without which he 
 cannot breathe, and of water, which he needs to quench his thirst. 
 As much land as he needs to feed from is also inalienable; but in 
 well regulated communities this quantity of land may often be 
 represented by other possessions, or its need supplied by wages 
 and privileges. 
 
 2. Property necessary to life, but only producible by labour, 
 and of which the possession is morally connected with labour, so 
 that no person capable of doing the work necessary for its pro- 
 duction has a right to it until he has done that work; — “he that 
 will not work, neither should he eat.” It consists of simple food, 
 clothing, and habitation, with their seeds and materials, or instru- 
 ments and machinery, and animals used for necessary draught or 
 locomotion, Ac. It is to be observed of this kind of property, 
 that its increase cannot usually be carried beyond a certain point, 
 because it depends not on labour only, but on things of which the 
 supply is limited by nature. The possible accumulation of corn 
 depends on the quantity of corn-growing land possessed or com- 
 mercially accessible ; and that of steel, similarly, on the accessible 
 quantity of coal and ironstone. It follows from this natural 
 limitation of supply that the accumulation of property of this kind 
 
118 
 
 rOLlTICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 in large masses at one point, or in one person’s hands, commonly 
 involves, more or less, the scarcity of it at another point and in 
 other persons’ hands; so that the accidents or energies which may 
 enable one man to procure a great deal of it, may, and in all like- 
 lihood will partially prevent other men procuring a sufficiency of 
 it, however willing they may be to work for it ; therefore, the 
 modes of its accumulation and distribution need to be in some 
 degree regulated by law and by national treaties, in order to 
 secure justice to all men. 
 
 Another point requiring notice respecting this sort of property 
 is, that no work can be wasted in producing it, provided only the 
 kind of it produced be preservable and distributable, since for 
 every grain of such commodities we produce we are rendering so 
 much more life possible on earth.'^* But though we are sure, thus, 
 that we are employing people well, we cannot be sure we might 
 not have employed them better ; for it is possible to direct labour 
 to the production of life, until little or none is left for that of the 
 objects of life, and thus to increase population at the expense of 
 
 * This point has sometimes been disputed ; for instance, opening Mill’s 
 Political Economy the other day, I chanced on a passage in which he says 
 that a man who makes a coat, if the person who wears the coat does nothing 
 useful while he wears it, has done no more good to society than the man 
 who has only raised a pine-apple. But this is a fallacy induced by endeavour 
 after too much subtlety. None of us have a right to say that the life of a 
 man is of no use to Mm, though it may be of no use to us ; and the man 
 who made tlie coat, and therebj'- prolonged another man’s life, has done a 
 gracious and useful work, wliatever may come of the life so prolonged. We 
 may say to the wearer of the coat, “ You who are wearing coats, and doing 
 notliing in llicin, are at present wasting your own life and other people’s;” 
 but wo have no right to say that his existence, however wasted, is wasted 
 away. It may Ijc just dragging itself on, in its thin golden line, with nothing 
 dependent upon it, to the point where it is to strengthen into good chain 
 cable, and liavo tliousands of other lives dependent on it. Meantime, the 
 simple fact respect ing tlie coat-maker is, that he has given so much life to 
 the creature, tiio results of wliich ho cannot calculate; they may be — in all 
 probability will Ijc — inlinite results in some way. But the raiser of pines, 
 who has only given a j)leasant taste in the mouth to some one, may see with 
 tolerable clearness to tlie end of the taste in the mouth, and of all conceiv- 
 able results therefrom. 
 
ADDENDA. 
 
 119 
 
 civilization, learning, and morality : on the other hand, it is just 
 as possible — and the error is one to which the world is, on the 
 whole, more liable — to direct labour to the objects of life till too 
 little is left for life, and thus to increase luxury or learning at the 
 expense of population. Right political economy holds its aim 
 poised justly between the two extremes, desiring neither to crowd 
 its dominions with a race of savages, nor to found courts and 
 colleges in the midst of a desert. 
 
 3. The third kind of property is that which conduces to bodily 
 pleasures and conveniences, without directly tending to sustain 
 life ; perhaps sometimes indirectly tending to destroy it. All 
 dainty (as distinguished from nourishing) food, and means of pro- 
 ducing it ; all scents not needed for health ; substances valued 
 only for their appearance and rarity (as gold and jewels) ; flowers 
 of difficult culture ; animals used for delight (as horses for racing), 
 and such like, form property of this class ; to which the term 
 “ luxury, or luxuries,” ought exclusively to belong. 
 
 Respecting which we have to note, flrst, that all such property 
 is of doubtful advantage even to its possessor. Furniture tempting 
 to indolence, sweet odours, and luscious food, are more or less in- 
 jurious to health : while, jewels, liveries, and other such common 
 belongings of wealthy people, certainly eonvey no pleasure to 
 their owners proportionate to their cost. 
 
 Farther, such property, for the most part, perishes in the using. 
 Jewels form a great exception — but rich food, fine dresses, horses 
 and carriages, are consumed by the owner’s use. Tt ought much 
 oftener be brought to the notice of rich men what sums of interest 
 of money they are paying towards the close of their lives, for luxu- 
 ries consumed in the middle of them. It would be very interest- 
 ing, for instance, to know the exact sum which the money spent 
 in London for ices, at its desserts and balls, during the last twenty 
 years had it been saved and put out at compound interest, would 
 at this moment have furnished for useful purposes. 
 
 Also, in most cases, the enjoyment of such property is wholly 
 selfish, and limited to its possessor. Splendid dress and equipage, 
 however, when so arranged as to produce real beauty of effect, may 
 often be rather a generous than a selfish channel of expenditure. 
 
120 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 Tliey will, however, necessarily in such case involve some of the 
 arts of design ; and therefore take their place in a higher category 
 than that of luxuries merely. 
 
 4. The fourth kind of property is tha,t which bestows intellectual 
 or emotional pleasure, consisting of land set apart for purposes of 
 delight more than for agriculture, of books, works of art, and 
 objects of natural history. 
 
 It is, of course, impossible to fix an accurate limit between pro- 
 perty of the last class and of this class, since things which are a 
 mere luxuiy to one person are a means of intellectual occupation 
 to another. Flowers in a London ball-room are a luxury; in a 
 botanical garden, a delight of the intellect ; and in their native 
 fields, both ; while the most noble works of art are continually 
 made material of vulgar luxury or of criminal pride ; but, when 
 rightl}^ used, property of this fourth class is the only kind which 
 deserves the name of real property ; it is the only kind which a 
 man can truly be said to “ possess.” What a man eats, or drinks, 
 or wears, so long as it is only what is needful for life, can no more 
 lie thought of as his possession than the air he breathes. The air 
 is as needful to him as the food ; but we do not talk of a man’s 
 wealth of air, and what food or clothing a man possesses more than 
 lie himself recpiires, must be for others to use (and, to him, there- 
 fore, not a i-cal property in itself, but only a means of obtaining 
 some real property in exchange for it). Whereas the things that 
 give intellectual or emotional enjoyment may be accumulated and 
 do not perish in using ; but continually supply new pleasures and 
 new powers of giving pleasures to others. And these, therefore, 
 are the only things which can rightly be thought of as giving 
 “wealth ” or “well being.” Food conduces only to “being,” but 
 tliesc; to “ well being.” And there is not any broader general dis- 
 tinction between lower and higher orders of men than rests on 
 their possession of this real property. The human race may be 
 properly divided by zoologists into “men who have gardens, libra- 
 i-ies, or works of art ; and who have none ;” and the former class 
 will include all noble persons, except only a few who make the 
 world their garden or museum ; while the people who have not^ 
 or, which is the same thing, do not care for gardens or libraries. 
 
ADDENDA. 
 
 121 
 
 but care for nothing but money or luxuries, will include none but 
 ignoble persons : only it is necessary to understand that 1 mean by 
 the term “ garden ” as much the Carthusian’s plot of ground fifteen 
 feet square between his monastery buttresses, as I do the grounds 
 of Chatsworth or Kew ; and I mean by the term “ art ” as much 
 the old sailor’s print of the Arethusa bearing up to engage the 
 Belle Poule, as I do Raphael’s “ Disputa,” and even rather more ; 
 for when abundant, beautiful possessions of this kind are almost 
 always associated with vulgar luxuiy, and become then anything 
 but indicative of noble character in their possessors. The ideal of 
 human life is a union of Spartan simplicity of manners with Athe- 
 nian sensibility and imagination, but in actual results, we are con- 
 tinually mistaking ignorance for simplicity, and sensuality for 
 refinement. 
 
 5. The fifth kind of propeity is representative property, consist- 
 ing of documents or money, or rather documents only, for money 
 itself is only a transferable document, current among societies of 
 men, giving claim, at sight, to some definite benefit or advantage, 
 most commonly to a certain share of real property existing in those 
 societies. The money is only genuine when the property it gives 
 claim to is real, or the advantages it gives claim to certain ; other- 
 wise, it is false, money, and may be considered as much “ forged ” 
 when issued by a government, or a bank, as when by an individual. 
 Thus, if a dozen of men, cast ashore on a desert island, pick up a 
 number of stones, put a red spot on each stone, and pass a law 
 that every stone marked with a red spot shall give claim to a peck 
 of wheat ; — so long as no wheat exist-s, or can exist, on the island, 
 the stones are not money. But the moment so much wheat exists 
 as shall render it possible for the society always to give a peck for 
 every spotted stone, the spotted stones would become money, and 
 might be exchanged by their possessors for whatever other com- 
 modities they chose, to the value of the peck of wheat which the 
 Stones represented. If more stones were issued than the quantity 
 of wheat could answer the demand of, the value of the stone 
 coinage would be depreciated, in proportion to its increase above 
 the quantity needed to answer it. 
 
 Again, supposing a certain number of the men so cast ashore 
 ' " 6 
 
122 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOlVlY OF AKT. 
 
 were set aside by lot, or any other convention, to do the roughet 
 labour necessary for the whole society, they themselves being 
 maintained by the daily allotment of a certain quantity of food, 
 clothing, &c. Then, if it were agreed that the stones spotted with 
 red should be signs of a Government order foT the labour of these 
 men ; and that any person presenting a spotted stoiie at the office 
 of the labourers, should be entitled to a man’s work for a week 
 or a day, the red stones would be money ; and might — probably 
 ■would, — immediately pass current in the island for as much food, 
 or clothing, or iron, or any other article as a man’s work for the 
 period secured by the stone was worth. But if the Government 
 issued so many spotted stones that it was impossible for the body 
 of men they employed to comply with the orders ; as, suppose, if 
 they only employed twelve men, and issued eighteen spotted stones, 
 daily, ordering a day’s work each, then the six extra stones would 
 bo forged or false money ; and the effect of this forgery would be 
 the depreciation of the value of the whole coinage by one-third, 
 that being the period of shortcoming which would, on the average, 
 necessarily ensue in the execution of each order. Much occasional 
 work may be done in a state or society, by help of an issue of false 
 money (or false promises) by way of stimulants; and the fruit of 
 tills work, if it comes into the promiser’s hands, may sometimes 
 enable the false promises at last to be fulfilled : hence the frequent 
 Issue of false money by governments and banks, and the not unfre- 
 (juent escapes from the natural and proper consequences of such 
 false issues, so as to cause a confused conception in most people’s 
 minds of what money really is. I am not sure whether some 
 (inantity of such false issue may not really be permissible in a 
 nation, accurately proportioned to the minimum average produce 
 of the labour it excites; but all such procedures arc more or less 
 unsound ; and the notion of unlimited issue of currency is simply 
 one of the absurdcst and most monstrous that ever came into dis- 
 jointed Inimau wits. ' 
 
 dhc use of objects of real or supposed value for currency, as 
 gold, jewellery, etc., is barbarous ; and it always expresses either 
 the measure of the distrust in the society of its own government, 
 or the proportion of distrustful or barbarous nations with whom it 
 
ADDENDA. 
 
 123 
 
 Las to tleal. A metal not easily corroded or imitated, is a desiraLlc 
 medium of currency for the sake of cleanliness and convenience, 
 but were it possible to prevent forgery, the more worthless the 
 metal itself, the better. The use of worthless media, unrestrained 
 by the use of valuable media, has always hitherto involved, and is 
 therefore supposed to involve necessarily, unlimited, or at least 
 improperly extended, issue ; but we might as well suppose that a 
 man must necessarily issue unlimited promises because his words 
 cost nothing. Intercourse with foreign nations must, indeed, for 
 ages yet to come, at the world’s present rate of progress, be car- 
 ried on by valuable currencies; but such transactions are nothing 
 more than forms nf barter. The gold used at present as a currency 
 is not, in point of hict, currency at all, but the real property^' 
 which the currency gives claim to, stamped to measure its quan- 
 tity, and mingling with the real currency occasionally by barter. 
 
 The evils necessarily resulting from the use of baseless curren- 
 cies have been terribly illustrated while these sheets have been 
 passing through the press ; I have not had time to examine the 
 V arious conditions of dishonest or absurd trading which have led 
 to the late “ panic” in America and England ; this only I know, 
 that no merchant deserving the name ought to be more liable to 
 “ panic” than a soldier should ; for his name should never be on 
 more paper than he can at any instant meet the call ot‘ happen 
 what will. I do not say this without feeling at the same time 
 liow difficult it is to mark, in existing commerce, the just limits 
 between the spirit of enterprise and of speculation. Something of 
 
 * Or rather, equivalent to such real property, because eveiybody has been 
 accustomed to look upon it as valuable ; and therefore everybody is willing 
 to give labour or goods for it. But real property does ultimately consist only 
 in things that nourish the body or mind ; gold would be useless to us if we 
 could not get mutton or books for it. Ultimately all commercial mistakes 
 and embarrassments result from people expecting to get goods without work- 
 ing for them, or wasting them after they have got them. A nation which 
 labours, and takes care of the fruits of labour, would bo rich and happy ; 
 though there were no gold in the universe. A nation which is idle, and 
 wastes the produce of what work it does, would be poor and miserable, 
 though all its momitains were of gold, and had glens lllled with diamond 
 instead of glacier. 
 
124 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART. 
 
 the same temper which makes the English soldier do always all 
 that is possible, and attempt more than is possible, joins its influ- 
 ence with that of mere avarice in tempting the English merchant 
 into risks w^hich he cannot justify, and eftbrts which he cannot 
 sustain ; and the same passion for adventure which our travellers 
 gratify every summer on perilous snow wreaths, and cloud-encom- 
 passed precipices, surrounds with a romantic fascination the glit- 
 tering of a hollow investment, and gilds the clouds that curl round 
 gulfs of ruin. Nay, a higher and a more serious feeling frequent^ 
 mingles in the motley temptation ; and men apply themselves to 
 the task of growing rich, as to a labour of providential appoint- 
 ment, from which they cannot pause without culpability, nor retire 
 wdthout dishonour. Our large trading cities bear to me very 
 nearly the aspect of monastic establishments in which the roar of 
 the mill-wdieel and the crane takes the place of other devotional 
 music : and in which the worship of Mammon and Moloch is con- 
 ducted with a tender reverence and an exact propriety : the mer- 
 chant risino- to his Mammon matins with the self-denial of an ancho- 
 
 O 
 
 rite, and expiating the frivolities into which he may be beguiled in 
 the course of the day by late attendance at Mammon vespers. 
 But, with every allow^anee that can be made for these conscien- 
 tious and romantic persons, the fact remains the same, that by far 
 the greater number of the transactions which lead to these times 
 of commercial embarrassment may be ranged simply under two 
 great heads, — gambling and stealing; and both of these in their 
 most culpal)le form, namely, gambling with money which is not 
 ours, and stealing from those who trust us. I have sometimes 
 thought a day might come, when the nation wmuld perceive that 
 a well-educated man who steals a hundred thousand pounds, involv- 
 ing Ihe entire means of subsistence of a hundred families, deserves, 
 on tlie whole, as severe a punishment as an ill-educated man 
 who steals a piii’sc from a pocket, or a mug from a pantry. But 
 without hoping for this success of clear-sightedness, Ave may at 
 least labour for a system of greater honesty and kindness in the 
 minor commerce of our daily life ; since the great dishonesty of 
 the great buyers and sellers is nothing more than the natural 
 growth and outcome from the little dishonesty of the little buyers 
 
ADDENDA. 
 
 125 
 
 and sellers. Every person wlio tries to buy an article for less than 
 its proper value, or wlio tries to sell it at more than its proper 
 value — every consumer who keeps a tradesman waiting for iiis 
 money, and every tradesman who bribes a consumer to extrava- 
 gance by credit, is helping forward, according to his own measure 
 of power, a system of baseless and dishonourable commerce, and 
 forcing his country down into poverty and shame. And people 
 of moderate means and average powers of mind would do far more 
 real good by merely carrying out stern principles of justice and 
 honesty in common matters of trade, than by the most ingenious 
 schemes of extended philanthrop}^, or vociferous declarations of 
 theological doctrine. There are three weighty matters of the law 
 — ^justice, mercy, and truth ; and of these the Teacher puts truth 
 last, because that cannot be known but by a course of acts of jus- 
 tice and love. But men put, in all their efforts, truth first, 
 because they mean by it their own opinions ; and thus, while the 
 world has many people who would suffer martyrdom in the cause 
 of what they call truth, it has few who will suffer even a little 
 inconvenience in that of justice and mercy. 
 
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