This close pastoral care by public authority has never yet been realized. It has been left to private philanthropy, guided at one time by the Elberfeld system as practised in the industrial towns on the Rhine. As in manufactures the State has guided and inspected business, rather than conducted it, so its Labour Exchanges and its unemployment allowance and Insurance against sickness have done much to ease and diminish the pain of unemployment. But, of course, this is only a stage in our progress. And the comprehensive lines of Ruskin’s case for the orphans of Great Business may well be earnestly remembered as a standard to work towards. We have at any rate left behind us mere reliance on the terrors of starvation and death as the only spur to industry in the Great Society, as the present world of vast production and exchange has been called.[70] 4. Comfort and home for the old and destitute, free from the slur of the Poor Law. This has been provided by Old Age Pensions. Thus Ruskin’s schemes are being or are on the way to be realized, in quite remarkable detail. How much, uttered by leading writers in 1862, remains so fresh as these in 1920? Ruskin proclaimed some truths too early for his peace of mind, but not for the service of men. The characteristic novelty of the proposals was that they were social, not political, though written in a period when political reforms occupied the forefront of progressive thought. They were no doubt a necessary stage. We should not belittle them in disappointment. For without a democratic franchise no social reforms could have been achieved. Ruskin’s proposals are also extremely moderate, and essentially conservative. He declares his disbelief in “the common Socialist idea of the division of property,”[71] though, as land is to be in the hands of those who can use it best, there was to be much compulsory purchase, a practice with which we are increasingly familiar, for housing, for allotments, and for small holdings. Nationalization of railways is definitely part of the programme, as we should expect.[72] The most radical change concerned Wages. Ruskin declared that wages should be fixed and steady under the responsibility of either the Government or the Craft Gilds, and should be independent of the number of people competing for work. As usual, he blamed the economists because this was not so in nature, as though physiologists were to blame for indigestion. But, as mere economics, he understood the doctrine, and accepted its truth. He says that the cheapening of bread under the absence of the Corn Laws would cause wages “to fall permanently in precisely the same proportion.”[73] That is, he accepted the “supply price” of wages--being the maintenance which the labourer under competition would accept.