Thus Ruskin is to be found among the Peace advocates--uttering indeed the characteristic refrain of Christianity, and saying emphatically in _Fors_, in so many words, that we are not to avenge injuries. Yet he was altogether out of sympathy with the ordinary channels of such advocacy. Liberalism he loathed, democracy he utterly disbelieved in, John Bright was the object of his occasional angry or contemptuous reference; anything that savoured of Manchester was condemned as tainted with political economy; the British aristocrats, the present ones, not ones selected on new principles of excellence, but even the ones we have, were to be the leaders of a regenerated England, and fathers of the Fatherland. Liberty was a red rag to him; he preferred the servitude of the shepherd dog to the freedom of the buzzing gnat:--and so he experienced the awkwardness felt by those who, having on some issue joined the party of reaction, have yet within them their old reforming zeal: for in reality Ruskin was an enlightened Socialist philanthropist. For these reasons I fear that his peace influence has been very much neutralized and wasted; and therefore I have had peculiar pleasure in bringing it out in this chapter. All these extracts make it clear that the writer’s hatred of modern war waged by multitudes of conscript or other soldiers, machine guns, and chemical explosives, was a constant horror to him; and that his sentimental admiration for the feudal and Greek chivalry was an academic and otiose emotion, figuring appropriately as a propitiatory exordium to the young warriors of Woolwich, but otherwise not an influential part of his thoughts. Nevertheless Ruskin was a devotee of the nobler type of imperialism. He lived before the sordidness of “Empire,” and its taproot in High Commerce and Finance, had become as plain as they are to-day; and before the series of wars of Empire-building had culminated in the struggle for power in the Near East, power whose pursuit formed the principal motive for the Great World War. The Inaugural Lecture at Oxford is the central expression of this imperialism, in its concluding paragraphs. There are kindred passages in _The Crown of Wild Olive_.[115] _A Knight’s Faith_, the Life of Sir Herbert Edwardes of the Punjab, is written in the noblest imperialist vein. In this, though not in his economic teaching in general, Ruskin falls under the sentimental glamour of popular phrases, and loses touch with reality. _CHAPTER IX_ _MACHINERY_