Fors Clavigera (Volume 1 of 8): Letters to the workmen and labourers of Great BritainRuskin, John
General
Fors Clavigera (Volume 1 of 8): Letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain
Ruskin, John
Aesthetics; Conduct of life; Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century; Social problems; Working class -- Great Britain
Fawcett, or the Politico-Economic Professor
of my own University--I challenge you, I beseech you, all and singly,
to tell me what I am to do with my money.
I mean, indeed, to give you my own poor opinion on the subject in
May; though I feel the more embarrassed in the thought of doing so,
because, in this present April, I am so much a fool as not even to
know clearly whether I have got any money or not. I know, indeed,
that things go on at present as if I had; but it seems to me that
there must be a mistake somewhere, and that some day it will be found
out. For instance, I have seven thousand pounds in what we call the
Funds or Founded things; but I am not comfortable about the Founding
of them. All that I can see of them is a square bit of paper, with
some ugly printing on it, and all that I know of them is that this bit
of paper gives me a right to tax you every year, and make you pay me
two hundred pounds out of your wages; which is very pleasant for me:
but how long will you be pleased to do so? Suppose it should occur to
you, any summer's day, that you had better not? Where would my seven
thousand pounds be? In fact, where are they now? We call ourselves
a rich people; but you see this seven thousand pounds of mine has no
real existence;--it only means that you, the workers, are poorer by two
hundred pounds a year than you would be if I hadn't got it. And this
is surely a very odd kind of money for a country to boast of. Well,
then, besides this, I have a bit of low land at Greenwich, which,
as far as I see anything of it, is not money at all, but only mud;
and would be of as little use to me as my handful of gravel in the
drawer, if it were not that an ingenious person has found out that
he can make chimney-pots of it; and, every quarter, he brings me
fifteen pounds off the price of his chimney-pots, so that I am always
sympathetically glad when there's a high wind, because then I know my
ingenious friend's business is thriving. But suppose it should come
into his head, in any less windy month than this April, that he had
better bring me none of the price of his chimneys? And even though he
should go on, as I hope he will, patiently,--(and I always give him a
glass of wine when he brings me the fifteen pounds),--is this really
to be called money of mine? And is the country any richer because,
when anybody's chimney-pot is blown down in Greenwich, he must pay
something extra, to me, before he can put it on again?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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