Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/46

 and a cluster of flowers of given beauty a fixed power of enlivening or animating the senses and heart.” But whether any particular object will yield such a service depends upon the state of the recipient, “his capacity to use it.” Wealth has no effectual value if there is no capacity to use it in the recipient. Its effectual value increases with the capacity of the user. The finest picture in the world has no effectual value if there is nobody available to appreciate its beauty. Even “a sheaf of wheat” may be devoid of “effectual” value if its owner has a surfeit, and it cannot pass to another who is in need of food. Curiously enough this view of wealth and value is here confined to the human utility of articles of wealth and takes no direct account of their human cost. This is the stranger inasmuch as Ruskin’s earliest and strongest charge against the economic system was that, by dividing and mechanizing labour, it took away all interest in and joy of work. He was artist before he became economist, and it was the vital cost of excessive and degraded work that drew him into his passionate campaign. But though in Munera Pulveris he appears to concentrate upon utility in its sense of humanly serviceable consumption as his central theme, his wider economic thesis lies in the correlation of human cost to human utility. A subdivided routine-producer could not be an efficient consumer of any of the more worthy sorts of wealth. Nor could an idle consumer, living not by his labour but on his “means.”