He nevertheless believes that the rule of England is for the good of the subject races, is a national duty and a piece of self-sacrifice and world service, the English white man’s burden. He has an eloquent passage on this subject in his Inaugural Lecture at Oxford, beginning “Reign or die.” His hostility to the Manchester School comes out in his characteristic style. “I tell you that the principle of non-intervention, as now preached among us, is as selfish and cruel as the worst frenzy of conquest, and differs from it only by being not only malignant, but dastardly.” “Within these last ten years, we English have, as a knightly nation, lost our spurs: we have fought where we should not have fought, for gain; and we have been passive, where we should not have been passive, for fear.”[103] I am indeed much afraid that this, spoken in 1865, has generally been the case throughout our history. III. As to wars for defence: Ruskin principally devotes himself to attacking the essential slavery of military obedience: he will have no mercenary standing armies, only unprofessional citizen armies for defence. So he ends with fatherly counsel to his hearers to be industrious and serious minded, not to bet, to be pure and honourable, and reverent towards all women; and the ladies present he exhorts to wear black whenever there is war, that so, by their influence, there may be no more wars. There you have a summary of the famous lecture on War in the _Crown of Wild Olive_, which has weakened Ruskin’s influence with many of his friends, and done undoubted harm. But I call it on the whole a peace address given by a man who combined with his hatred of violence and ruin a certain attachment to picturesque mediævalism. The wars of Arthur or Roland were his ideal. He recognized the heroism and self-abandonment of such soldiers as he had read about all his life in Homer and Scott. But our modern wars include everything he hated; they are wars for trade and for gain, sordid and financial in origin and sordid and financial in results. Ruskin explains his attitude quite clearly in the Appendix to the _Crown of Wild Olive_, at the beginning of his notes on the Political Economy of the Kings of Prussia. “I am often accused of inconsistency; but believe myself defensible against the charge with respect to what I have said on nearly every subject except that of war. It is impossible for me to write consistently of war, for the groups of facts I have gathered about it lead me to two precisely opposite conclusions.