The Harvest of RuskinGraham, John W. (John William)
Religion
The Harvest of Ruskin
Graham, John W. (John William)
Ruskin, John, 1819-1900
He will support the labour colonies of the Salvation Army and Small
Holdings Associations. He will invest in the stock of Garden City or
other Garden Suburbs; he will work for the Minority Report on the Poor
Law, and for all plans for strengthening and humanizing Education, for
Town Planning and Smoke Abatement. He will labour to extend among the
laity the duties of the clergy, and among the clergy the spirit of the
layman, he will help all Peace Societies, and labour to promote good
understanding with other countries through the League of Nations. He
will clip the wings of capital seeking to use the British Flag as a
business asset, and he will do this by a capital levy, the super-tax and
the Death Duties. He will be a mild and reasonable Socialist, so far as
to extend the scope of municipal action as it may be found practicable.
He would support the principle of a minimum wage, co-operative
partnerships, and collective bargaining; and he would probably give
cautiously some power to segregate the feeble-minded. He would provide
Art Galleries and Museums housed in noble buildings, and would
religiously preserve the surviving beauty of the country side. Two
possible changes may be treated at greater length.
I. The higher professional activities may be still further removed from
competition and put under salaried service. There will be competition
for posts; that is right; but if medical men and lawyers did not depend
upon fees, we should be rid of many abuses; and the work would gain in
dignity. I believe clergymen, professors and public schoolmasters do as
good work as those who follow callings more directly dependent on the
casual payments and goodwill of customers. With regard to education,
there would be danger of loss as well as of gain, if private schools and
private tutors were abolished. They should remain available for those
who desire them. There will always be people who demand a special
religious atmosphere or who wish to make experiments. And there will be
pupils who from bad health, or neglect of early training, could not
properly benefit from the schools of the State. It is not necessary that
the public body in control should be either the State or the
Municipality. In my view, neither the universities nor the public
schools would benefit by such a change. Nevertheless, it is becoming
increasingly agreed that the nation should shoulder a larger part of the
expense, and guarantee the quality of the teaching, more widely and
liberally than it does at present. In this connection it is all the more
necessary that the State should clear itself of militarism. For if
military training were to become compulsory in schools, as is seriously
threatened, the nation would be once more as acutely divided about it,
as it has been, so long and so disastrously, over denominational
schools. We should have conscientious objectors in permanence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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