Ruskin, then, never understood the Society of Friends in the outward. This was the mere result of circumstances. Brought up in the south of London, educated at Oxford, living much abroad, with local interests and acquaintances chiefly centering round Denmark Hill, Oxford and Coniston, he had no great opportunity to meet Friends.
He never had any Quaker teaching in his youth. The voice of the Society of Friends was too faint to reach him. He never found his way across the hill from Brantwood to the ancient meeting house at Hawkshead, but his word has penetrated further than ours, and all unaware he has done our work.
How marvellous is this series of harmonies, unintended, unrecognized on both sides, between him and the Society of Friends! It looks as though Quakerism is not an arbitrary group of doctrines gathered up, as he fancied them, by George Fox, but a coherent system, all whose parts hang together as they all appear together when they rise up in Ruskin. It is a strong confirmation of the coherence and validity of the religious discoveries of our Quaker forefathers in the seventeenth century, when we find that they are repeated in the research of another emancipated but devout thinker, a religious rationalist who was an expert in the things of the soul.
The controversy between Ruskin and the orthodox Political Economists of his time was central in his career, and has occupied a prominent place in the thought of the last sixty years. Either Ruskin’s teaching or that of Mill and his colleagues, or that of both, has been clouded with uncertainty and so has lost force. If it should be found, as I shall try to show, that there was no real ground for the controversy at all--that it was all due to misapprehension, to mere ambiguity in a term, it will reinforce the conclusions of the economists in their modern revised form, add cogency to the teaching of Ruskin, and clear away storm clouds which have done great harm. The mistake arose through a wrong conception by Ruskin of the scope of Economics--of what its teachers were after.
Political Economy has always been treated by careful writers as the science of human action with regard to the acquisition and use of property. This is a pure science. It is a branch of applied psychology. It measures motives, and analyses the action of buyers and sellers with a view to finding out what men in business will normally do, and how values of land, labour, capital and commodities are determined. This does not open any question of right or wrong, any question of oppression or starvation, of luxury, vanity or pride. This is as cold-blooded, as purely intellectual and critical an inquiry as the study and measurement of electrical currents; what produces them, conducts them, wastes or scatters them. An electrician will show how a telephone may be made, he will invent it, and he will explain it; but it is no business of his to ask whether courtesy and good feeling or profanity and fraud will characterize the messages which will go over his instrument. That is not his business as a scientist, though the use of his own telephone is his business as a man.