Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/44

 the mere freak of a literary verbalist but a genuinely scientific demand. “There is no wealth but life. Life including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest influence, both personal and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.” Here, as elsewhere, the rich and impassioned eloquence of Ruskin was, and still is, an obstacle to his acceptance as a scientific teacher in a country where every form of eloquence is still apt to be regarded with suspicion as an attempt to cloud our reason. But Ruskin’s main charge against the current political economy was that it had deliberately and systematically degraded the true and formerly accepted meaning of such terms as “wealth,” “value,” and “profit” by putting them to the narrow service of business mentality.

Though Ruskin often protested that his indictment was “scientific,” it can hardly be questioned that it derived its force and validity from his appreciation of life as the finest of the fine arts. This required him to introduce the ethical standard of an “ought” into the valuation of every economic process or result. I expressed this important need in the following passage of my book. “The true ‘value’ of a thing is neither the price paid for it, nor the amount of present satisfaction