moi," but as the aggregate of population, struggling onwards, or back, to a Greek ideal of true political philosophy. But the stock-in-trade of truth with which it started was becoming used up. The history of philosophy shows that every movement, however popular and practical, has its origin and its support in some metaphysical theory. The details of public business are worked by rule of thumb, and by opportunism; but the great national ideal, the spirit of the age, is the outcome of some thinker's theory which has prevailed. Now the old political economy was the outcome of eighteenth-century philosophy; of the éclaircissement, the school of rough generalizations; the mood of mind which takes the line of least resistance, and hastens to deductive conclusions from introspection, or from too scanty survey of the infinite multiplicity of facts which it has not time nor patience to sift. It assumed "whatever is, is right;" and whatever was, at the moment, the phase of prevailing activity, it took for the eternal and immutable order of things. In this case, the commercial and manufacturing industries, a new and magnificent development of civilization, it assumed to be normal. It generalized too rapidly upon the tendencies which the growing trade and material progress of England brought into play, as if these were the only objects, the only facts of life; as if output of cotton and coal, for example, were an end of existence. And it deduced rules by which

the output might be increased, and formulated Division of Labor, Competition, and so forth, as the means to its end.

This was parallel to the old orthodoxy in art, with which Mr. Ruskin had to deal in his youth. Then there had been a similar system of thought, based on an outworn metaphysic, the Platonism of the Renaissance, applied to the making of pictures. Certain ideals, archetypes, had been assumed as ultimate truths; and rules for painting had been deduced from them. Mr. Ruskin had shown that the scientific method of the modern age could be applied to this province of thought; that " particular fact" was to be regarded as the starting-point, and that, after due induction. of principles, new values were to be given to the words truth, beauty, and imagination. The old rules, fallaciously supposed universal laws, he set aside, not without opposition; and ended in securing the acceptance of Turner and Naturalism.

John Stuart Mill had shown the logical side of that movement in 1843; but just as Ruskin, by sympathy with romanticism, had been attracted over to the reactionary school for a time, so Mill, by his sympathy with liberalism, the descendant of the éclaircissement, had allowed himself to be less true to the modern scientific method in his political economy. He advanced beyond Bentham; but still on the same lines. Carlyle had exemplified the opposite school of thought, a school whose tradition had been kept alive in Ger

many. Dr. Arnold of Rugby, the friend of Niebuhr and Bunsen, wrote to Mr. James Marshall from Fox How (January 23, 1840): "My differences with the Liberal Party would turn, I think, chiefly on two points. First, I agree with Carlyle, in thinking that they greatly over-estimate Bentham, and also that they overrate the political economists generally; not that I doubt the ability of these writers, or the truth of their conclusions, as far as regards their own science, — but I think that the summum bonum of their science, and of human life, are not identical; and therefore, many questions in which free trade is involved, and the advantages of large capital, etc., although perfectly simple in an economical point of view, become, when considered politically, very complex; and the economical good is very often, from the neglect of other points, made in practice a direct social evil." 1

What Arnold said privately in 1840, Ruskin said publicly in 1860. What he had done for Turner, he did for Carlyle: he analyzed the principles of those two great men, and laid the foundations of a new system, in the first case of an art theory, in the second case of a social theory, which they had illustrated in concrete examples.

As long as he kept to the political economy of art, spectators could look on with comfort, and applaud him when he fought for the rights of the workman. It was only against architects and

1 Stanley's Life of Arnold, letter 223. The italics are mine.

master-builders that his first attack was directed; it was only for art craftsmen that he fought, before 1860. But then he suddenly changed his front; bore down upon all employers, fought for all laborers; attacked not only the wrongs of one class, but the whole series of public evils. He began by a destructive criticism of the whole economy of the commercial school; as the champion, not of modern painters, but of modern thinkers; of a scientific method of economy, as opposed to the academic; of the broad view, based on the complex facts of life, as against the narrow view, based only on such facts as appeared to the commercial mind, nursed in eighteenth-century traditions.

He showed, as others have since shown more calmly and completely, after he broke the ground for them, that the old economy did not take in the whole facts of the case, as any true science does, and must do. It was not true to the data, he said, to assume a state of normal immorality, as Adam Smith seemed to do, in declaring that the only calculable motive for work was the fear of losing pay. It was not true to human nature to neglect the many phases of honesty and loyalty which really existed, and by which, in actual life, society was upheld, and successful trade and manufacture were made possible. Again; to lay down as "laws" mere generalizations which the will of any man could set aside, was a misunderstanding of the meaning of "law" in modern sci

ence. He showed that competition, for example, was not a "law," but only a phase of commercial society. If it were a law, properly so called, it would be universal and inevitable, like the attraction of gravitation; whereas in many cases it was actually set aside, at the will of one man or company of men, for coöperation; and in other cases, he showed, it stopped progress and the flow of wealth which it was supposed to promote. Supply and demand, again, was not a "law" in the sense of being a necessary condition of all production: witness the supply of art and poetry irrespective of demand; of the means of life, lamentably falling short of it. Only by intellectual jugglery could it be made out that Albert Dürer, doing his best work for next to nothing, was his own consumer; or that the bitter cry of starvation was not an effectual demand.

He concluded that the orthodox political economy was not a true science, but that it stood to the real economy in the relation of alchemy to chemistry, as a pseudo-science, needing reformation and reconstruction. Further, that it was not a political economy at all; it was only a commercial economy; since it dealt one-sidedly with the aspects and advantages of the trading classes only, not with those of the community at large; and with the trading class in one age only, in one society and form of civilization only, regardless of what might be learned of the spirit in which other commercial nations, such as the Vene