fully cognisant of human infirmities, and of the necessity for gradual evolution to the "moral culture" he speaks

of.

The various ideals and proposals which resulted, in general culture, education, ethics and social science, we must notice one by one as they come into view in the various books of the period. A few points, especially economical, may be mentioned. These first two books did not suggest anything directly revolutionary. They upheld Free Trade; they did not decry Interest; they declined to accept Socialism. But they objected to the fixing of price by competition-as they did to competition in any shape; and thought that, if trade and labour could be paid as "professions are paid, common consent would soon fix a normal standard of wages. The basis of the valuation of labour would be, not the labour-market and the rights of capital, but a consensus that equal industry is worth equal remuneration; regard being had, in the case of skilled labour, to arrears of work involved in the worker's actual capacity. It is sometimes said that Mr. Ruskin thought that "landscape artists and labouring men ought to be paid alike." What he did hold was that in any trade or class the wages should be fixed by a commonly accepted tariff, and not altered except by common consent.

For those who failed to get work under such conditions, he thought that the government should provide, by an extension of existing systems of industrial schools and reformatories, and by a reconstruction of the prison and poor-laws. This was not part of his ideal commonwealth, but a means of effecting a transition to it. He wished to see the ignorant taught, the idle employed, and the penniless pensioned, by the public; as indeed they

practically are; but more kindly, more educationally. As supplementary to private enterprise, he would have the wreckage and breakage of society taught in government schools and employed in government workshops, under compulsion, if necessary; as a kind of moral hospital for the cure of idleness and vice and pauperism ;-a desperate remedy for a desperate evil, but one which, after all, it seems we are adopting, in schemes for Home Colonisation and the rescue of the "submerged tenth."

Here is a true anecdote. When the General of the Salvation Army was working at the scheme which lately met with such an outcry of acceptance, he told the Rev. H. V. Mills, the first promoter of the Home-Colony plan, that he was entirely ignorant of political economy, and asked for a book on the subject. Mills gave him Unto This Last.

CHAPTER III.

DISSENT IN GEOLOGY.

(1863.)

"In delectu autem narrationum et experimentorum melius hominibus cavisse nos arbitramur quam qui adhuc in historia naturali versati sunt."

Bacon, "Inst. Magna."

UR hermit among the Limestone Alps of Savoy

differed in one respect from his predecessors. They, for the most part, saw nothing in the rocks and stones around them except the prison walls of their seclusion; he could not be within constant sight of the mountains without watching them and thinking over them, and the wonders of their scenery and structure. And it was well for him that it could be so. The terrible depression of mind which his social and philanthropic work had brought on, found a relief in the renewal of his old mountainworship. After sending off the last of his Fraser papers, in which, when the verdict had twice gone against him, he tried to show cause why sentence should not be passed, the strain was at its severest. He felt, as few others not directly interested felt, the sufferings of the outcast in English slums and Savoyard hovels; and heard the cry of the oppressed in Poland and in Italy: and he had been silenced. What could he do but, as he said in the letters

to Mr. Norton, "lay his head to the very ground," and try to forget it all among the stones and the snows?

He wandered about, geologising, and spent a while at Talloires on the Lake of Annecy, where the old Abbey had been turned into an inn, and one slept in a monk's cell and meditated in the cloister of the monastery, St. Bernard of Menthon's memory haunting the place, and St. Germain's cave close by in the rocks above. About the end of May Mr. Ruskin came back to England, and was invited to lecture again at the Royal Institution. The subject he chose was "The Stratified Alps of Savoy."

At that time many distinguished foreign geologists were working at the Alps; but little of conclusive importance had been published, except in papers imbedded in Transactions of various societies. Professor Alphonse Favre's great work did not appear until 1867, and the Mechanismus der Gebirgsbildung of Professor Heim not till 1878; so that for an English public the subject was a fresh one. To Mr. Ruskin it was familiar: he had been elected a Fellow of the Geological Society in 1840, at the age of twenty-one; he had worked through Savoy with his Saussure in hand nearly thirty years before, and, many a time since that, had spent the intervals of literary business in rambling and climbing with the hammer and note-book. Indeed, on all his travels and even on his usual afternoon walks he was accustomed to keep his eyes open for the geology of any neighbourhood he was in; and his servant regularly carried a bag for specimens, which rarely came home empty. The note-books of the Modern Painters period contain infinite memoranda and diagrammatic sketches, of which a very small fraction have been used. In the field he had compared Studer's meagre sections, and consulted the available

authorities on physical geology, though he had never entered upon the more popular sister-science of palæontology. He left the determination of strata to specialists: his interest was fixed on the structure of mountains-the relation of geology to scenery; a question upon which he had some right to be heard, as knowing more about scenery than most geologists, and more about geology than most artists. His dissent from orthodox opinions was not the mere blunder of an ill-informed amateur; it was a protest against the adoption of certain views which had become fashionable chiefly owing to the popularity of the men who had propounded them. Parallel with the state-religion in England there has been a state-science; the prestige of the science-bishops has been no doubt as wisely used as that of the church-bishops: it has certainly prevailed with their own inferior clergy and laity in much the same way. Mr. Ruskin, who had been the admirer and to some extent the personal pupil of several of the leading geologists of the last generation, questioned the infallibility of the more recent school. Science, of course, always welcomes investigation, up to a certain point, and so, as the Journal de Genève reported, "la foule se pressait dans les salles de l'Institut royale de Londres, pour entendre la lecture des fragments d'un ouvrage scientifique, dont l'auteur compte parmi les écrivains les plus estimés de l'Angleterre. M. Ruskin s'est fait connaître depuis longtemps par des publications remarquables sur l'art en général et la peinture en particulier, mais il se presentait cette fois à son auditoire sous un nouveau jour. C'était le géologue que l'on venait entendre, et l'événement a prouvé qu'il n'était point inférieur au littérateur et au critique."

The main object of this lecture was to draw attention to