NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.

I. I have kept the following kind and helpful letter for the close of the year:—

“January 8, 1874.

“Sir,—I have been much moved by a passage in No. 37 of Fors Clavigera, in which you express yourself in somewhat desponding terms as to your loneliness in ‘life and thought,’ now you have grown old. You complain that many of your early friends have forgotten or disregarded you, and that you are almost left alone. I cannot certainly be called an early friend, or, in the common meaning of the word, a friend of any time. But I cannot refrain from telling you that there are ‘more than 7,000’ in this very ‘Christ-defying’ England whom you have made your friends by your wise sympathy and faithful teaching. I, for my own part, owe you a debt of thankfulness not only for the pleasant hours I have spent with you in your books, but also for the clearer views of many of the ills which at present press upon us, and for the methods of cure upon which you so urgently and earnestly insist. I would especially mention ‘Unto this Last’ as having afforded me the highest satisfaction. It has ever since I first read it been my text-book of political economy. I think it is one of the needfullest lessons for a selfish, recklessly competitive, cheapest-buying and dearest-selling age, that it should be told there are principles deeper, higher, and even more prudent than those by which it is [284]just now governed. It is particularly refreshing to find Christ’s truths applied to modern commercial immorality in the trenchant and convincing style which characterizes your much maligned but most valuable book. It has been, let me assure you, appreciated in very unexpected quarters; and one humble person to whom I lent my copy, being too poor to buy one for himself actually wrote it out word for word, that he might always have it by him.”

(“What a shame!” thinks the enlightened Mudie-subscriber. “See what comes of his refusing to sell his books cheap.”

Yes,—see what comes of it. The dreadful calamity, to another person, of doing once, what I did myself twice—and, in great part of the book, three times. A vain author, indeed, thinks nothing of the trouble of writing his own books. But I had infinitely rather write somebody’s else’s. My good poor disciple, at the most, had not half the pain his master had; learnt his book rightly, and gave me more help, by this best kind of laborious sympathy, than twenty score of flattering friends who tell me what a fine word-painter I am, and don’t take the pains to understand so much as half a sentence in a volume.)

“You have done, and are doing, a good work for England, and I pray you not to be discouraged. Continue as you have been doing, convincing us by your ‘sweet reasonableness’ of our errors and miseries, and the time will doubtless come when your work, now being done in Jeremiah-like sadness and hopelessness, will bear gracious and abundant fruit.

“Will you pardon my troubling you with this note? but, indeed, I could not be happy after reading your gloomy experience, until I had done my little best to send one poor ray of comfort into your seemingly almost weary heart.

“I remain,
“Yours very sincerely.”

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II. Next to this delightful testimony to my ‘sweet reasonableness,’ here is some discussion of evidence on the other side:—

November 12, 1872.

“To John Ruskin, LL.D., greeting, these.

“Enclosed is a slip cut from the ‘Liverpool Mercury’ of last Friday, November 8. I don’t send it to you because I think it matters anything what the ‘Mercury’ thinks about any one’s qualification for either the inside or outside of any asylum; but that I may suggest to you, as a working-man reader of your letters, the desirability of your printing any letters of importance you may send to any of the London papers, over again—in, say, the space of ‘Fors Clavigera’ that you have set apart for correspondence. It is most tantalizing to see a bit printed like the enclosed, and not know either what is before or after. I felt similar feelings some time ago over a little bit of a letter about the subscription to Warwick Castle.

“We cannot always see the London papers, especially us provincials; and we would like to see what goes on between you and the newspaper world.

“Trusting that you will give this suggestion some consideration, and at any rate take it as given in good faith from a disciple following afar off,

“I remain, sincerely yours.”

The enclosed slip was as follows:—

“Mr. Ruskin’s Tender Point.—Mr. John Ruskin has written a letter to a contemporary on madness and crime, which goes far to clear up the mystery which has surrounded some of his writings of late. The following passage amply qualifies the distinguished art critic for admission into any asylum in the country:—‘I assure you, sir, insanity is a tender point with me.’ ” The writer then quotes to the end the last paragraph of the letter, [286]which, in compliance with my correspondent’s wish, I am happy here to reprint in its entirety.

MADNESS AND CRIME.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE ‘PALL MALL GAZETTE.’

Sir,—Towards the close of the excellent article on the Taylor trial in your issue for October 31, you say that people never will be, nor ought to be, persuaded “to treat criminals simply as vermin which they destroy, and not as men who are to be punished.” Certainly not, sir! Who ever talked or thought of regarding criminals “simply” as anything; (or innocent people either, if there be any)? But regarding criminals complexly and accurately, they are partly men, partly vermin; what is human in them you must punish—what is vermicular, abolish. Anything between—if you can find it—I wish you joy of, and hope you may be able to preserve it to society. Insane persons, horses, dogs, or cats, become vermin when they become dangerous. I am sorry for darling Fido, but there is no question about what is to be done with him.

Yet, I assure you, sir, insanity is a tender point with me. One of my best friends has just gone mad; and all the rest say I am mad myself. But, if ever I murder anybody—and, indeed, there are numbers of people I should like to murder—I won’t say that I ought to be hanged; for I think nobody but a bishop or a bank director can ever be rogue enough to deserve hanging; but I particularly, and with all that is left me of what I imagine to be sound mind, request that I may be immediately shot.

I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
J. Ruskin.

Corpus Christi College, Oxford, November 2, (1872).

III. I am very grateful to the friend who sends me the following note on my criticism of Dickens in last letter:— [287]

“It does not in the least detract from the force of Fors, p. 253, line 18 (November), that there was a real ‘Miss Flite,’ whom I have seen, and my father well remembers; and who used to haunt the Courts in general, and sometimes to address them. She had been ruined, it was believed; and Dickens must have seen her, for her picture is like the original. But he knew nothing about her, and only constructed her after his fashion. She cannot have been any prototype of the character of Miss Flite. I never heard her real name. Poor thing! she did not look sweet or kind, but crazed and spiteful; and unless looks deceived Dickens, he just gave careless, false witness about her. Her condition seemed to strengthen your statement in its very gist,—as Law had made her look like Peter Peebles.

“My father remembers little Miss F., of whom nothing was known. She always carried papers and a bag, and received occasional charity from lawyers.

“Gridley’s real name was Ikey;—he haunted Chancery. Another, named Pitt, in the Exchequer;—broken attorneys, both.”

IV. I have long kept by me an official statement of the condition of England when I began Fors, and together with it an illustrative column, printed, without alteration, from the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ of the previous year. They may now fitly close my four years’ work, of which I have good hope next year to see some fruit.

Mr. Goschen on the Condition of England.—“The nation is again making money at an enormous rate, and driving every kind of decently secure investment up to unprecedented figures. Foreign Stocks, Indian Stocks, Home Railway Shares, all securities which are beyond the control of mere speculators and offer above four per cent. were never so dear; risky [288]loans for millions, like that for Peru, are taken with avidity; the cup is getting full, and in all human probability some new burst of speculation is at hand, which may take a beneficial form—for instance, we could get rid of a hundred millions in making cheap country railways with immense advantage—but will more probably turn out to be a mere method of depletion. However it goes, the country is once more getting rich, and the money is filtering downwards to the actual workers. The people, as Mr. Goschen showed by unimpugnable figures, are consuming more sugar, more tea, more beer, spirits, and tobacco, more, in fact, of every kind of popular luxury, than ever. Their savings have also increased, while the exports of cotton, of wool, of linen, of iron, of machinery, have reached a figure wholly beyond precedent. By the testimony of all manner of men—factory inspectors, poor-law inspectors, members of great cities—the Lancashire trade, the silk trade, the flax-spinning trade, the lace trade, and, above all, the iron trade, are all so flourishing, that the want is not of work to be done, but of hands to do it. Even the iron shipbuilding trade, which was at so low a point, is reviving, and the only one believed to be still under serious depression is the building trade of London, which has, it is believed, been considerably overdone. So great is the demand for hands in some parts of the country, that Mr. Goschen believes that internal emigration would do more to help the people than emigration to America, while it is certain that no relief which can be afforded by the departure of a few workpeople is equal to the relief caused by the revival of any one great trade—relief, we must add, which would be more rapid and diffused if the trades’ unions, in this one respect at least false to their central idea of the brotherhood of labour, were not so jealous of the intrusion of outsiders. There is hardly a trade into which a countryman of thirty, however clever, can enter at his own discretion—one of the many social disqualifications which press upon the agricultural labourer. [289]

“The picture thus drawn by Mr. Goschen, and truly drawn—for the President of the Poor-Law Board is a man who does not manipulate figures, but treats them with the reverence of the born statist—is a very pleasant one, especially to those who believe that wealth is the foundation of civilization; but yet what a weary load it is that, according to the same speech, this country is carrying, and must carry! There are 1,100,000 paupers on the books, and not a tenth of them will be taken off by any revival whatever, for not a tenth of them are workers. The rest are children—350,000 of them alone—widows, people past work, cripples, lunatics, incapables, human drift of one sort or another, the detritus of commerce and labour, a compost of suffering, helplessness, and disease. In addition to the burden of the State, in addition to the burden of the Debt, which we talk of as nothing, but without which England would be the least-taxed country in the world, this country has to maintain an army of incapables twice as numerous as the army of France, to feed, and clothe, and lodge and teach them,—an army which she cannot disband, and which she seems incompetent even to diminish. To talk of emigration, of enterprise, even of education, as reducing this burden, is almost waste of breath; for cripples do not emigrate, the aged do not benefit by trade, when education is universal children must still be kept alive.”—The Spectator, June 25, 1870.

V. The following single column of the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ has been occasionally referred to in past letters:—

“It is proposed to erect a memorial church at Oxford to the late Archbishop Longley. The cost is estimated at from £15,000 to £20,000. The subscriptions promised already amount to upwards of £2,000, and in the list are the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Bishops of Oxford, St. Asaph, and Chester.”

“An inquest was held in the Isle of Dogs by Mr. Humphreys, [290]the coroner, respecting the death of a woman named Catherine Spence, aged thirty-four, and her infant. She was the wife of a labourer, who had been almost without employment for two years and a half. They had pledged all their clothes to buy food, and some time since part of the furniture had been seized by the brokers for rent. The house in which they lived was occupied by six families, who paid the landlord 5s. 9d. for rent. One of the witnesses stated that ‘all the persons in the house were ill off for food, and the deceased never wanted it more than they did.’ The jury on going to view the bodies found that the bed on which the woman and child had died was composed of rags, and there were no bed-clothes upon it. A small box placed upon a broken chair had served as a table. Upon it lay a tract entitled ‘The Goodness of God.’ The windows were broken, and an old iron tray had been fastened up against one and a board up against another. Two days after his wife’s death the poor man went mad, and he was taken to the workhouse. He was not taken to the asylum, for there was no room for him in it—it was crowded with mad people. Another juror said it was of no use to return a verdict of death from starvation. It would only cause the distress in the island to be talked about in newspapers. The jury returned a verdict that the deceased woman died from exhaustion, privation, and want of food.”

“The Rev. James Nugent, the Roman Catholic chaplain of the Liverpool borough gaol, reported to the magistrates that crime is increasing among young women in Liverpool; and he despairs of amendment until effective steps are taken to check the open display of vice which may now be witnessed nightly, and even daily, in the thoroughfares of the town. Mr. Raffles, the stipendiary magistrate, confesses that he is at a loss what to do in order to deter women of the class referred to from offending against the law, as even committal to the sessions and a long term of imprisonment [291]fail to produce beneficial effects. Father Nugent also despairs of doing much good with this class; but he thinks that if they were subjected to stricter control, and prevented from parading in our thoroughfares, many girls would be deterred from falling into evil ways.”

“At the Liverpool borough gaol sessions Mr. Robertson Gladstone closely interrogated the chaplain (the Rev. Thomas Carter) respecting his visitation of the prisoners. Mr. Gladstone is of opinion that sufficient means to make the prisoners impressionable to religious teaching are not used; whilst the chaplain asserts that the system which he pursues is based upon a long experience, extending over twenty-eight years, at the gaol. Mr. Gladstone, who does not share the chaplain’s belief that the prisoners are ‘generally unimpressionable,’ hinted that some active steps in the matter would probably be taken.”

“Mr. Fowler, the stipendiary magistrate of Manchester, referring to Mr. Ernest Jones’ death yesterday, in the course of the proceedings at the City police-court, said: ‘I wish to say one word, which I intended to have said yesterday morning, in reference to the taking from amongst us of a face which has been so familiar in this court; but I wished to have some other magistrates present in order that I might, on the part of the bench, and not only as an individual, express our regret at the unexpected removal from our midst of a man whose life has been a very remarkable one, whose name will always be associated in this country in connection with the half-century he lived in it, and who, whatever his faults—and who amongst us is free?—possessed the great virtues of undoubted integrity and honour, and of being thoroughly consistent, never flinching from that course which he believed to be right, though at times at the cost of fortune and of freedom.’ ”

“A Chester tradesman named Meacock, an ex-town councillor, [292]has been arrested in that city on a charge of forging conveyances of property upon which he subsequently obtained a mortgage of £2,200. The lady who owns the property appeared before the magistrates, and declared that her signature to the conveyance was a forgery. The prisoner was remanded, and was sent to prison in default of obtaining the bail which was required.”

“Mr. Hughes, a Liverpool merchant, was summoned before the local bench for having sent to the London Dock a case, containing hydrochloric acid, without a distinct label or mark denoting that the goods were dangerous. A penalty of £10 was imposed.”

“A woman, named Daley, came before the Leeds magistrates, with her son, a boy six years old, whom she wished to be sent to a reformatory, as she was unable to control him. She said that one evening last week he went home, carrying a piece of rope, and said that he was going to hang himself with it. He added that he had already attempted to hang himself ‘in the Crown Court, but a little lass loosed the rope for him, and he fell into a tub of water.’ It turned out that the mother was living with a man by whom she had two children, and it was thought by some in court that her object was merely to relieve herself of the cost and care of the boy; but the magistrates, thinking that the boy would be better away from the contaminating influence of the street and of his home, committed him to the Certified Industrial Schools until he arrives at sixteen years of age, and ordered his mother to contribute one shilling per week towards his maintenance.”—Pall Mall Gazette, January 29, 1869.

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