“In what respect do the duties of one nation to another in economic matters differ from those of members of the same nation to one another?” In fact, we have to deal with the problems of Socialism, of Co-operation, of Municipal action, of Luxury and of Trade Wars. He might have added Pauperism and Old Age Pensions, Standard Wages and Hours, and Nationalization of various kinds of property. There is a strong and audible echo of Ruskin’s aims about these practical problems; and one does not yet see why we cannot make room in our own minds both for economic science and the Ruskinian Economy to which these issues belong. There are passages, too, in Mill, which Ruskin himself might have written, which look beyond Production and Distribution to the larger needs and joys of man. He is considering the stationary state of capital and wealth, when economic progress has ceased, when people are not always growing more numerous and more wealthy, a state dreaded by the older economists, and ever to be held at arm’s length. But Mill says he thinks it would be better than our present condition. “I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on, that the trampling, crushing, elbowing and treading on each other’s heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of humankind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress. The northern and middle states of America are a specimen of this stage of civilization in very favourable circumstances, having apparently got rid of all social injustices and inequalities, that affect persons of Caucasian race and of the male sex, while the proportion of population to capital and land is such as to ensure abundance to every able-bodied member of the community who does not forfeit it by misconduct. They have the six points of Chartism, and they have no poverty; and all that these advantages do for them is that the life of the whole of one sex is devoted to dollar-hunting, and of the other to breeding dollar-hunters. The best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.”[58] That is Ruskin without the eloquence; that is his advice to stay in the station in which we have been placed, and not be always trying to get out of it. A little more from Mill: “I know not why it should be matter of congratulation that persons who are already richer than any one needs to be, should have doubled their means of consuming things which give little or no pleasure except as representative of wealth, or that numbers should pass over, every year, from the middle classes into a richer class, or from the class of the occupied rich to that of the unoccupied.”