So, in tragic conflict, these two men are before us. Not that Mill ever replied. He died in 1872, and during his lifetime he could afford to ignore the eccentricities of an unstable genius, at whom all sober people smiled in pity. But now I would fain even for Mill’s sake reconcile them. You have true tragedy, not when right meets wrong, the noble the ignoble, but when two principles, both noble, are brought into a conflict they cannot avoid--Mill, the Liberal, the rationalist, with his watchwords of equality, liberty and a free chance for all--and Ruskin the Conservative, the indignant enemy of mechanical progress, speaking ever of order and obedience, reverence and graded ranks:--Mill, a servant of present humanity, with but a faint critical hold on the Unseen; Ruskin, emotional and inspired, who not seldom would fain call down fire from heaven on Mill’s newly enfranchised citizens, because they blasphemed. So that I conclude that scholastic Economics is a reliable, useful scientific enquiry, forming a basis for the very same practical aims which Ruskin has set us striving for, and written by men who loved their fellows and were conspicuous examples of uprightness and benevolence, truth-keeping and friends of their kind. We know how unscrupulous men of business used their conclusions, particularly those conclusions which have not stood the test of criticism, as a sort of textbook of oppression, as giving a scientific necessity for starvation, and so excusing hardness of heart. That this was so, must be Ruskin’s excuse for declaring war upon the economists. But it was a war wholly unnecessary; it clouded his prophecy with confused issues, and it laid the Master himself among the wounded. It will be necessary, in order properly to express the scope of Political Economy, to examine more fully its definition of the two factors whose action and reaction upon one another form the subject matter of the science. These two factors are Man and Wealth. What is Man as an economic being? What is the “economic man”? He is assumed by Mill and others[60] as a being who considers his own side of a bargain only, who in all contracts will do the best he can for himself, and who, in the use of his capital, and the direction of his labour, is influenced by an intelligent and passionless eye to his own interests. He has no regard for custom, or public opinion, or compassion, or resentment, or personal partiality, or class prejudice. Mill does not pretend that this person actually exists; but that the tendency of things is as though he did exist; and that it is most easy to assume his existence, and after that recognize the qualifications which other parts of human nature require us to put in, just as in mechanics we calculate what would happen if surfaces were smooth, and then allow for friction afterwards. Ruskin’s criticisms are not always fair. He writes: