And yet, as I have said, I am convinced that had Carlyle thrown off his prophetic mantle, and instead of alternately railing and denouncing, like some old Hebrew Prophet, had set himself down quietly to work out the fallacies of the old Economy in detail by the ordinary methods of logic and demonstration, he had both ability and penetration enough to have arrested, if not averted, the consequences of these doctrines of the orthodox Economy; not only as regards the Land of England, - which as we see has gone half out of cultivation since then, - but for the Working Classes in their struggles to earn a 'living wage' as well.

But the capitalists having captured the economists, and the economists in turn having captured the politicians, the working-class leaders, and the nation generally, nothing could arrest the triumphant march of the orthodox Economy with its gospel of 'laissez-faire' and Free Trade; and it now only remains for the great Trusts of the world to get hold of the Instruments of Production, by Protection, and then turning the hose of Combination on the smaller 'laissez-faire' capitalists wherever they are to be found, to drown them all out in turn, to make the rout of the old Political Economy complete. But to return. Ruskin, meantime, who prided himself on his purely analytical powers, finding that the words of Carlyle in denunciation of the old Economy were falling on deaf ears, and sympathizing besides with his righteous indignation at the practical results of its teachings, determined to take the field himself in defence of his master; in the hope that if he avoided his error of general abuse and denunciation, and went into the subject in detail on fresh lines, he might do something to stem the popular current in favour of the reigning Economy. But before giving an outline of his scheme, I may remark in passing, that never in the history of human thought has so marked and entire a change come over the method, principles, structure, and organization, of the Sciences dealing with human, as distinct from purely mechanical and physical things, as that which within the last two generations has made the principle of Evolution the standpoint and guiding star from which all political, moral, religious, and economical movements are surveyed; and further that nowhere do we become more conscious of this change than in studying the two books of Ruskin on Political Economy - 'Unto this Last,' and 'Munera Pulveris,' - both of which were written in pre-evolutionarv times.

They are purely statical in their standpoint from their first pages to their last, and seek to gain their end by painting on the sky, as it were, an ideal moral picture of what Political Economy ought to be, in elaborate detail, for the contemplation of statesmen and business men of all times and places, rather than by showing precisely how this millennial ideal was to be reached. And although his work was intended to be an extension of the moralized economic principles of Carlyle, it nevertheless differed from what Carlyle would have done, had he seriously tackled the special problems of the orthodox Economy, by that whole world of difference which separated the two men both in their temperaments and in their general intellectual equipment. Carlyle, although his ends and aims in all things were quite as high and ideal as those of Ruskin, would have nothing to do with anything weak or sentimental, or even conventionally moral, in the handling of practical problems; - as indeed is sufficiently evidenced by his almost brutal insistence on the necessity of resorting to force in great emergencies, as in the French Revolution and the Irish Campaign of Cromwell; his admiration for the promptness and effectiveness in action of men like Frederick the Great and Napoleon, and his apotheosis of great men of action generally; as well as in the contempt he always exhibited for men who, ignoring realities, thought to remedy unfavourable conditions by pouring buckets of 'rose-water sentimentalism,' moral precepts, and phrases like 'liberty, fraternity, and equality/ over them, - as seen, for example, in his contrast of the methods of Robespierre, on the one hand, and of Mirabeau and Danton, on the other.

And I doubt not that had Sir Robert Peel called on him, as he hoped, to preside over one or other of the Government 'circumlocution' offices, he would have done the work of clearance of the 'red-tape' methods in vogue there, in a way that would have been an enduring object-lesson for practical men in every department of government. So, too, had he lived to-day and been called on to handle the problems of Political Economy in their practical bearing, he would have begun by recognizing with Shakespeare, that the world in every department would soon become an unweeded garden were it not that our intellects and wills have been given us to be its gardeners, and would have allowed no mere Law of Population of Malthus or another, to so over-run the field that there was no standing room left for anybody, while he sat moaning and groaning retrospectively over it, - and then generalizing his groans into 'laws' of the Science of Political Economy. Nor would he, like the present Academical Schools, have permitted any tail-end or 'marginal' pieces of useless No-Rent land, any 'marginal' machines or wage-earners 'eating their heads off' and earning no profits, to make their way into the data of the Science, but would have cut them off ruthlessly to start with, as butchers do bits of dead and useless carcass, and so be done with them once and for all; and would then have constructed his Science out of factors every one of which was dynamical and alive - the Science being a human one and therefore fluid and coercible, and not, like the physical sciences, rigid and unamenable to human methods - and have got the morality which was his ultimate aim, out of his mode of combining and handling them.