Our factory system and the crowding into towns he detested; though he gives us no practical suggestions towards ending it except that most steam power should be abandoned--not quite all. There is a curious prophecy too about electricity superseding steam and smoke. We are beginning on hopeful lines here with Mond gas, central electrical power stations, and Garden Cities--if only we could and would compel our factories to stop making smoke, the greatest curse of the landscape. This is treated more fully in Chapter IX. Our Government must also take heed to all means of keeping our population in the country. Population Ruskin deals with fantastically by permitting marriages only to young men and young women after passing a suitable examination in business or domestic qualifications. He would provide them, on marriage, with an income for seven years from the State. If they had a private income beyond this minimum it must accumulate; so that all young couples start life on the same standard of expenditure. This is the most drastic of his regulations, and the most out of reach.[79] Under land tenure from the State each person was to hold no more than he could properly make use of--a system of permanent peasant proprietors, that is, at a quit rent;--the land inalienable in title, and to descend by primogeniture. We have also the somewhat obscure remark[80] that bread, water, and the roof over his head must be tax (i.e. rent) free to every man. Methods of administration are to be left to settle themselves. Also, “every man is to build his own house to his mind, and to have a mind to build it to.” As a system this leaves large gaps. What are to be the exact duties of the aristocratic annuitant landowners, and who are they to be? There is an echo of Plato’s “Guardians” in their position and duties: indeed they seem very like in their functions to those hierarchical beings. It may have been from Plato too that Ruskin learnt to emphasize the degradation of continuous mechanical work, particularly that which is connected with the mechanical use of fire. The Church is, as we have seen in Chapter III, to be exactly on the Quaker model. No one is to be paid for preaching. The preachers are to earn their living like other men; and the distinction between clergy and laity is to be absolutely done away. “Of clergymen’s usual work, admonition, theological demonstration, and the like I shall want very little done indeed, and that little done for nothing! for I will allow no man to admonish anybody, until he has previously earned his own dinner by more productive work than admonition.” The lesson on humility to religious persons in _Time and Tide_ is very amusing.[81]