MR. RUSKIN ON SOCIAL MATTERS.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XI, Issue 67, 8 March 1876, Page 4

MR. RUSKIN ON SOCIAL MATTERS.

The following is from an English paper :— " Mr. Ruskin's Fors for the current month (Jan.) is a terrible number. I is issued from "The house of a friend who, being ashamed of me and my words, requests tbat this Fors may not be dated from it/ It is more tbo n probable that most people who read tbe oumber will think the request of Mr. Ruskin's friend a wise one. No paper of Mr. Ruskin's has ever contained fiercer attacks on the way we now live. The Charity Societies, the receivers of charity, the owners of capital, their workmen, artists, farmers, and scholars, are lashed without mercy, and informed that tbey have helped to make England " a population mostly of beggars, or, worse, bagmen, not merely bearing the bag, but nothing else but bags — sloppy, star-fishy, seven-suckered stomachs of indiscriminate covetousoess, ready to beg, borrow, gamble, swindle, or write anything a publisher pays for." For publishing the following passage, Mr. Raskin, if he lived in France, would be thrown into prison for inciting tbe populace to riot :— M I never stand up io a theatre to rest myself and look round the housp, without renewal of wonder bow the crowd in the pic and shilling gallery allow us of the boxes and stalls to keep our places. I think of it. Those fellows behind there have housed us and fed us ; their wives have washed our clothes and kept us tidy ; they have bought us the best places, and brought us through the cold to tbem ;— and there they sit behind us, patiently seeing and hearing what tbey may ; — there they pack themselves, squeezed and distant, behind our ch.irs ; — we, their elect toyß and pet puppets, oiled and varnished and incensed, lounge in iront placidly, or for the greater part wearily and sickly contemplative. . . . 'They did not stick you up,' say you ; ' you paid for your stalls with your own money ' ' Where did you get your money ? Some of you by selling the Goßpel, others by selling justice, others by selling their blood (and no man has a right to sell aught of these three things any more than a woman her body) j — the rest, if not by swindle, by simple taxation of the labor of the shilling gallery.' " -— ■ " - ' 1 1 ii ■■■*-.