It is true that for some years, under the influence of two friends who were foreigners, he passed under the influence of their own materialism and doubt, and he tells us that from that hour it seemed as if the spirit of his mother and of Anita had both deserted him. During the last years of his life he became almost a hermit and seemed to be confused by the problems of the world in which he lived. But he had been starved, imprisoned, tortured, betrayed and shot down. The real Garibaldi speaks in this message that he addressed to the people of Italy:
"I am a Christian and I speak to Christians.
"I love and venerate the religion of Christ.
"Christ came into the world to deliver humanity from slavery.
"You who are here have the duty to educate the people.
"On a strong and wholesome education for the people depend the liberty and greatness of Italy!
The genius of John Ruskin's message is in a single sentence: "Life without industry is guilt, and industry without art and education is brutality." He held that all the doing that makes commerce is born of the thinking that makes scholars, and that all the flying of looms and the whirling of spindles begins with the quiet thought of some scholar, hidden in a closet, or sequestered in a cloister. He never made the mistake of supposing that education would change a ten-cent boy into a thousand-dollar-a-year man, but he _did_ know that there is some power in Nature that will transform a seed into a sheaf, an acorn into an oak, and that the truth will change a child into a sage, a statesman, a seer, a man with a message for his century.
Ruskin wrote many volumes to prove that wealth is not in raw material;--not in iron, not in wood, not in stone, not in cotton, not in wool. Wealth is largely in the intelligence put into the raw material. Pig-iron is worth twenty dollars a ton, but intelligence turns that ton of iron into a ton of tempered hair-springs, and it is worth perhaps ten thousand dollars a ton. The clay in Rodin's _Thinker_ represents a value of a few francs, but the idea in the _Thinker_ brought 150,000 francs. On the sixtieth anniversary of the coronation of Queen Victoria, an editor offered Rudyard Kipling $1,000 for a Commemoration poem. The paper, ink and the pen stand for a few pennies; all the rest of the $1,000 was for a trained intellect. The average income of a family in the United States to-day is not far from $2,000. That income could be carried up to $4,000 if our workers would only double the intelligence, efficiency and loyalty put into the raw material they handle!