On one point the age has gone beyond Ruskin. For good or evil we know we have nothing to trust to but Democracy. From the ugliness and gullibility of the democracy the secluded artist shrank, living in beauty and luxury at Oxford or Venice or by the Lake of Coniston. There was excuse, and there is still much excuse, for men of little faith. The democracy can be played upon and excited to war: its ruling puppets dare not take the drink from it even in war time. It has “demanded,” as economists say, our conscienceless and sensational newspapers, and it loves to read them. It needs much education, and particularly it needs what Ruskin hoped for from Education--character and conduct; first, grace and health and beauty of life; and, as chief intellectual prize, a relentless love of truth. Would that everybody would refuse to buy again a paper that had once deceived them, or to vote for a politician once proved untrustworthy. Reformers, forgetting the dead weight they have to shift, turn their guns on one another. Socialists seem to be most scornful of Liberalism, and particularly of those employers who are generous and public-spirited. It must be emphasized that Ruskin was an aristocrat in temperament. In fact he repudiated the idea of an equality which did not, he declared, exist. His sections in _Munera Pulveris_ against equal voting and on “natural slavery"--I suppose learnt from Aristotle’s _Politics_--are clear on this.[85] He did not support negro slavery, but his interests were chiefly taken up with opposing economic slavery at home, or reserving it for the fit people. The whole passage must be read to be understood. It is now in 1920 nearly fifty years since _Fors Clavigera_ began to come out, and the outlines of St. George’s Guild were drawn. Those who in that decade found a new inspiration and delight in discipleship to him, are now growing elderly; the glory of the early time when Ruskin’s genius was irradiating the pages of _Fors_ with the hope of a kingdom of God to be raised within the kingdom of this world, was in the days of youth, in the spring of aspiration and a not easily bounded hope. We nourished our hearts on godlike food; and we owe our Master an inextinguishable debt. It is often doubtless a thought full of sadness that the tender grace of a day that is dead will never come back to us, in the sober light of long experience in the realm of the commonplace. Our task now is, to gather up in our maturity that which abides; for our days are passing, and though the growth of the kingdom has not been all that we might have hoped, its spirit must still be handed on, and fixed, so far as we can fix it, in the permanent habits of man.