Ruskin, as we have seen, was both a Conservative and a constructive Socialist. He hated the industrial developments which he saw around him--that which was called progress he saw to be full of evil, and he wanted to undo it. That made him a Conservative. But he had his own line of development, which was an idealized feudalism. What is there for us to learn now from either of these teachings, the negative Conservative cry against steam power and railways and bicycles, the positive advance towards Guild Socialism? The pastoral happiness of peasant life Ruskin thought he found in Bavaria, in Savoy, in Tuscany. He never really lived among the peasantry, nor was he, the shy visitor to the best hotels, with his courier and his portfolio, accustomed to familiar intercourse, particularly on money matters, with the worthy sons and daughters of toil whose industrious and quiet lives he admired. Neither in England, Scotland, Ireland, nor the Continent can the “merrie England” ideal of peasant life ever have existed. In Switzerland or France, where there have been since the Revolution no feudal landlords, it had a good chance; and also among the “statesmen” of Cumberland and Westmorland while they survived. The Canton Bern is to-day to the tourist’s eye a happy and prosperous land, and the other Protestant cantons resemble it. But we know most about our own northern “statesmen”; the Swiss or French small proprietor’s life must have been much the same as theirs. It was a hard, narrow life, absorbed in “money grubbing,” which was in their case no fault but a chief virtue, being necessary to survival. If a statesman was of a large and genial nature, the public-house was his common resort; and most of the stocks of statesmen came to grief by the recklessness or misfortunes of one generation. The estate was first mortgaged and then foreclosed and sold. A succession of steady cultivators, careful of the pence, hardly ever succeeded in making a family well to do or even comfortable, with reserves to meet disaster. I speak here of my own forbears. The holdings were too small. They worked all day and every day, in all weathers, lived and slept in quarters not conducive to delicate sensitiveness of feeling. A big attic, separated by a curtain into two, was the sleeping place of the children and servants, if there were any.[116] Books, education, travel, were denied them. On a lower level is the life of the peasants of the Rhone Valley, in dirt and hopelessness and overwork. It makes for degradation. But where feudal landlords exist, as they do in most places, the case is worse. The condition of the peasantry of Eastern Europe has been brought before us since the War in the daily papers so vividly that none can miss it. The system has broken down in revolution. It appears to an astonished English public, that the mass of the people have lived under local tyranny and very near the margin of maintenance, in Russia and her border states, in Roumania, Poland,