TWO WORDS FROM RUSKIN.

White Ribbon, Volume 24, Issue 277, 18 July 1918, Page 5

TWO WORDS FROM RUSKIN.

The sensibility of the nation is indicat'd by the tint ness of its customs; its courage, continence and self-re-spect by its per', stencc in them. Bysensibility 1 mean its natural perception of beauty, fitness and rightness; or of what is lov fly, decent and just ; faculties dependent mu« h on race, and the primal sign'' of lint' breeding in man; but cultivable also by education, and necessarily perishing without it. True education has, indeed, no other function than th * development of these faculties, and 01 the relative will. It has been the gr at /*rror of modern intelligence to mistake science for education. You do not educate a man bytelling him what he knew not, but by making him what he was not. • • • Since the essence of wealth consists in power over men, will i* not follow that the nobh r and the more in number the persons are over whom it has power, the greater the wealth? Perhaps it may even appear, after some consideration, that the persons themselves are the wealth, that these pieces of gold with which we are in the habit of guiding them are, in fact, nothing more than a kind of Byzantine harness or trappings, very glittering and beautiful in barbaric sight, wherewith we bridle the creatures; but that if these same living creatures could be guided without the fretting and jingling of the Bvzants in their mouths and ears, they might themselves lx- more valuable than th n ir bridles. In fact, it may be discovered that the true veins of wealth are purple and not in rock, but in flesh —perhaps, even th it the final outcome and consummation of all wealth is in th/’ producing as many as possible full-breathed, bright-eyed and happy-hearted human cratures. Our modern wealth, I think, has rather a tendency the other way most political economists appearing to consider multitudes of human creatures n>t conducive to wealth, or at best conducive to it only by remaining in a dim-eyed and narrow-chested state of being.