A Joy For Ever (and Its Price in the Market)Ruskin, John
Philosophy
A Joy For Ever (and Its Price in the Market)
Ruskin, John
Art
152. But without hoping for this excess of clear-sightedness, we may at
least labour for a system of greater honesty and kindness in the minor
commerce of our daily life; since the great dishonesty of the great
buyers and sellers is nothing more than the natural growth and outcome
from the little dishonesty of the little buyers and sellers. Every
person who tries to buy an article for less than its proper value, or
who tries to sell it at more than its proper value--every consumer who
keeps a tradesman waiting for his money, and every tradesman who bribes
a consumer to extravagance by credit, is helping forward, according to
his own measure of power, a system of baseless and dishonourable
commerce, and forcing his country down into poverty and shame. And
people of moderate means and average powers of mind would do far more
real good by merely carrying out stern principles of justice and honesty
in common matters of trade, than by the most ingenious schemes of
extended philanthropy, or vociferous declarations of theological
doctrine. There are three weighty matters of the law--justice, mercy,
and truth; and of these the Teacher puts truth last, because that cannot
be known but by a course of acts of justice and love. But men put, in
all their efforts, truth first, because they mean by it their own
opinions; and thus, while the world has many people who would suffer
martyrdom in the cause of what they call truth, it has few who will
suffer even a little inconvenience, in that of justice and mercy.
SUPPLEMENTARY ADDITIONAL PAPERS.
EDUCATION IN ART.
ART SCHOOL NOTES.
SOCIAL POLICY.
EDUCATION IN ART.
(_Read for the author before the National Association for the Promotion
of Social Science in the autumn of 1858; and printed in the Transactions
of the Society for that year, pp. 311-16._)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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