Unto This Last
By John Ruskin.
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“Friend, I do thee no wrong. Did’st not thou agree with me for a penny? Take that thine is, and go thy way. I will give unto this last even as unto thee.”
“If ye think good, give me my price; and if not, forbear. So they weighed for my price thirty pieces of silver.”
Preface
The four following essays were published eighteen months ago in the Cornhill Magazine, and were reprobated in a violent manner, as far as I could hear, by most of the readers they met with.
Not a whit the less, I believe them to be the best, that is to say, the truest, rightest-worded, and most serviceable things I have ever written; and the last of them, having had especial pains spent on it, is probably the best I shall ever write.
“This,” the reader may reply, “it might be, yet not therefore well written.” Which, in no mock humility, admitting, I yet rest satisfied with the work, though with nothing else that I have done; and purposing shortly to follow out the subjects opened in these papers, as I may find leisure, I wish the introductory statements to be within the reach of anyone who may care to refer to them. So I republish the essays as they appeared. One word only is changed, correcting the estimate of a weight; and no word is added.
Although, however, I find nothing to modify in these papers, it is a matter of regret to me that the most startling of all the statements in them—that respecting the necessity of the organization of labour, with fixed wages—should have found its way into the first essay; it being quite one of the least important, though by no means the least certain, of the positions to be defended. The real gist of these papers, their central meaning and aim, is to give, as I believe for the first time in plain English—it has often been incidentally given in good Greek by Plato and Xenophon, and good Latin by Cicero and Horace—a logical definition of wealth: such definition being absolutely needed for a basis of economical science. The most reputed essay on that subject which has appeared in modern times, after opening with the statement that “writers on political economy profess to teach, or to investigate,1 the nature of wealth,” thus follows up the declaration of its thesis—“Everyone has a notion, sufficiently correct for common purposes, of what is meant by wealth.” … “It is no part of the design of this treatise to aim at metaphysical nicety of definition.”2
Metaphysical nicety, we assuredly do not need; but physical nicety, and logical accuracy, with respect to a physical subject, we as assuredly do.
Suppose the subject of inquiry, instead of being House-law (Oikonomia), had been Star-law (Astronomia), and that, ignoring distinction between stars fixed and wandering, as here between wealth radiant and wealth reflective, the writer had begun thus: “Everyone has a notion, sufficiently correct for common purposes, of what is meant by stars. Metaphysical nicety in the definition of a star is not the object of this treatise;”—the essay so opened might yet have been far more true in its final statements, and a thousandfold more serviceable to the navigator, than any treatise on wealth, which founds its conclusions on the popular conception of wealth, can ever become to the economist.
It was, therefore, the first object of these following papers to give an accurate and stable definition of wealth. Their second object was to show that the acquisition of wealth was finally possible only under certain moral conditions of society, of which quite the first was a belief in the existence and even, for practical purposes, in the attainability of honesty.
Without venturing to pronounce—since on such a matter human judgment is by no means conclusive—what is, or is not, the noblest of God’s works, we may yet admit so much of Pope’s assertion as that an honest man is among His best works presently visible, and, as things stand, a somewhat rare one; but not an incredible or miraculous work; still less an abnormal one. Honesty is not a disturbing force, which deranges the orbits of economy; but a consistent and commanding force, by obedience to which—and by no other obedience—those orbits can continue clear of chaos.
It is true, I have sometimes heard Pope condemned for the lowness, instead of the height, of his standard:—“Honesty is indeed
