“‘Rich’ is a relative word implying its opposite ‘poor’ as positively as the word ‘north’ implies its opposite ‘south.’ Men nearly always speak and write as if riches were absolute, and it were possible by following certain scientific precepts (Ruskin’s capital error turns up here), for everybody to be rich. Whereas riches are a power like that of electricity, acting only through inequalities or negations of itself. The force of the guinea you have in your pocket depends wholly on the default of a guinea in your neighbour’s pocket. If he did not want it, it would be of no use to you; the degree of power it possesses depends accurately upon the need or desire he has for it--and the art of making yourself rich, in the ordinary mercantile economist’s sense, is therefore equally and necessarily the art of keeping your neighbour poor.”[64] This is all true; if by rich we understand, as the use of the word in common practice warrants, relatively wealthy. The possession of money is the possession of an order upon labour; and it is of no use if there is no available labour needing it. Ruskin’s illustration is that of a large landed proprietor who could get no servants to feed his cattle, mine his gold, plough his corn lands, because no one was in want of his wages. He must lead a life of severe and common labour to produce even ordinary comforts, and live in the midst of a waste desert. Therefore, what is meant by making oneself rich is to produce the maximum inequality between ourselves and our neighbours.[65] Ruskin is grievously unfair in saying that that is the object of mercantile (political) economy; that it is “the science of getting rich.” Such a statement libels both the science and its expounders; and it contains, for Ruskin, an extraordinary looseness in the use of words. There cannot be a science of getting rich, that is an art or a craft. Science is organized knowledge, not practical faculty to do anything or get anything.[66] How wide is the range of Ruskin’s Economy, how practical its objects, how little of a science it is, how entirely an art, the art of practical government and production, will be further clear from this statement: “Political economy (the economy of a State or of citizens), consists simply in the production, preservation and distribution, at fittest time and place, of useful or pleasurable things. The farmer who cuts his hay at the right time, the shipwright who drives his bolts well home in sound wood, the builder who lays good bricks in well tempered mortar, the housewife who takes care of her furniture in the parlour and guards against all waste in her kitchen, and the singer who rightly disciplines and never overstrains his voice, are all political economists in the true and final sense; adding continually to the riches and well-being of the nation to which they belong.”[67]