Whether this is desirable, or the last word of human organization, is quite another question; and the questions are better kept separate. Moral considerations are too important to come in as an incidental qualification to business motives. They should be the dominating influence, and it is better that economic results should not obtain a sort of sanction as being tinctured with righteousness, when only a few drops of the tincture have been administered. It is better that Economics should keep their place as a science of observed facts. At the present moment when war is being diagnosed as the worst disease of society, there are many voices to point out its origin in economic greed, and through rivalry in the exploitation of backward peoples. Military pomp and pride, the mere ambition of Emperors and Generals, must bear their share of the blame, but greed and oppression are the tap-root of war, and Ruskin, it happens, was foremost in saying so, as is pointed out in a later chapter. The economic motive is behind many actions where it is not avowed. Since the elementary need of man is, and always has been, to make a living, and he tries to make it as pleasantly as possible, this must be so, and the laws which govern production, distribution and exchange are of prime importance for men in communities. When Ruskin touched on an economic law, on a doctrine of the science which he thus erroneously blasphemed, he was remarkably correct; he was an orthodox follower after all of much of the doctrine of Mill. He was “an utterly fearless and unscrupulous free trader.”[48] His instinct, the moral sanction to which he always looked--as Mill also did--as a guide to practice, told him that protection was a wicked action, forbidding to workers in other countries their right to earn their living in the way by which they could produce the most. “I mean by co-operation, not only fellowship between trading firms, but between trading nations; so that it shall no more be thought (as it is now, with ludicrous and vain selfishness) an advantage for one nation to undersell another, and take its occupation away from it; but that the primal and eternal law of commerce shall be of all men understood--viz., that every nation is fitted by its character and the nature of its territories for some particular employments and manufactures, and that it is the true interest of every other nation to encourage it in such speciality.”[49] “I do not admit even the idea of reciprocity. Let other nations, if they like, keep their ports shut; every wise nation will throw its own open.”[50] He knew every point of the correct economic theory of free trade. He realized foreign commerce as exchange or barter, with the dependence of exports upon imports. This dependence, showing the true nature of International Trade, follows from the correct doctrine of currency. Ruskin emphasized this doctrine repeatedly. He knew that every fall in the supply of commodities made the gold currency of less