[Yes, good 'Aye, but I want to leave that to somebody else,' was the answer. friend, and the same excuse might be made for any form of theft.-J. R.] "I will merely add, that if there were enforced and public account of the amount of moneys advanced on loan, and if the true conditions and workings of those loans could be shown, there would be revealed such an amount of cruel stress upon the foolish, weak, and poor of the small tradesmen (a class far more numerous than are needed) as would render it very intelligible why so many faces are seamed with lines of suffering and anxiety. I think it possible that the fungus growth and increasing mischief of these loan establishments may reach such a pitch as to necessitate legislative interference, as has been the case with gambling. But there will never fail modes of evading the law, and the sufficient cure will be found only when men shall consider it a dishonour to have it imputed to them that any portion of their income is derived from usury." Draft at Bridgwater (per Mr. Ruskin) 16. THE UNION BANK OF LONDON (CHANCERY LANE BRANCH) 1876 Aug. 16. To Balance 24. (J. P. Stilwell). Dr. 94 3 4 50 25 1300 s. d. 4400 (a) By report from Bank; but the "repayments" named in it should not have been added to the cash account, being on separate account with the Company. I will make all clear in December.1 (b) For Signor Caldara (Venetian botany 2). (c) Nominally loan, to poor relation, but I do not suppose he will ever be able The following £200 I do not doubt receiving again. to pay me. 1 [Letter 72: see p. 769.] 2 [See above, p. 583; and compare Vol. XXIX. p. 31 n.] 18. (III.) I print the following letter with little comment, because I have no wish to discuss the question of the uses of Dissent with a Dissenting Minister; nor do I choose at present to enter on the subject at all. St. George, taking cognizance only of the postscript, thanks the Dissenting Minister for his sympathy; but encourages his own servant to persist in believing that the "more excellent way "1 (of Charity), which St. Paul showed, in the 13th of Corinthians, is quite as truly followed in devoting the funds at his said servant's disposal to the relief of the poor, as in the maintenance of Ruskinian Preachers for the dissemination of Ruskinian opinions, in a Ruskinian Society, with the especial object of saving Mr. Ruskin's and the Society's souls. "September 14th, 1876. "DEAR MR. RUSKIN,-Mr. Sillar's 'valuable letter' in last month's Fors,a (a) would have been more valuable if he had understood what he was writing about. Mr. Tyerman (in his Life and Times of Wesley, p. 431) gives the trifling differences between the present Rules of the Methodist Societies and the first edition issued in 1743. Instead of interested persons having altered old John Wesley's rules' (he was forty years old when he drew them up) to suit modern ideas'—the alterations, whether good or bad, were made by himself. "The first contributions in the Classes' were made for the express purpose of discharging a debt on a preaching house. Then they were devoted to the relief of the poor,' there being at the time no preachers dependent on the Society for support. After 1743, when circuits had been formed and preachers stationed in certain localities, their maintenance gradually became the principal charge upon the Society's funds. (See Smith's History of Methodism, vol. i., p. 669.) In 1771 Wesley says expressly that the contributions are applied towards the expenses of the Society." (b) (Journal, vol. iii., p. 205.) Certainly Methodism, thus supported, has done far more to benefit the poor and raise them, than any amount of mere almsgiving could have done. Methodist preachers have at least one sign of being in the apostolical succession. They can say, with Paul, as poor, yet making many rich.' (c) 666 "Going to law' was altered by Mr. Wesley to brother going to law with brother,' in order, no doubt, to bring the rule into verbal agreement with 1 Cor. vi. 6. (d) "Usury' was defined by Mr. Wesley to be 'unlawful interest,' (e) in accordance with the ordinary notions of his day. He was greatly in advance of his age, yet he could scarcely have been expected to anticipate the definition of Usury given, as far as I know, (f) for the first time in Fors for August, 1876 [Letter 68. I don't see why we Methodists should be charged with breaking the laws of Moses, David, and Christ (Fors, Letter 68, § 9 n.), if we consider old John Wesley's' definition to be as good as the 'modern idea.' "Of course St. George, for whom I have the greatest respect and admiration, will correct Mr. Sillar's mistake. "I am, Sir, "ANOTHER READER OF FORS' (which I wish you would "A METHODIST PREACHER. "P.S.-Why should you not copy old John Wesley, and establish your St. George's Company on a legal basis? In 1784 he drew up a Deed of Declaration, which was duly enrolled in Chancery. It stated the purposes for which his Society was formed, and the mode in which it was to be governed. A Deed of Trust was [1 Corinthians xii. 31.] afterwards drawn up for one of our chapels, reciting at length this Deed of Declaration, and all the purposes for which the property was to be used. All our other property is settled on the same trusts. A single line in each subsequent chapel deed -stating that all the trusts are to be the same as those of the Model Deed,' as we call the first one-obviates the necessity and expense of repeating a very long legal document. 6 "Success to St. George,-yet there is, I think, 'a more excellent way."" 19. a. Mr. Sillar's letter did not appear in last month's Fors. A small portion of it appeared, in which I regret that Mr. Sillar so far misunderstood John Wesley as to imagine him incapable of altering his own rules so as to make them useless. b. I wish the Wesleyans were the only Society whose contributions are applied to no better purpose. C. I envy my correspondent's complacency in his own and his Society's munificence, too sorrowfully to endeavour to dispel it. d. The "verbal" agreement is indeed secured by the alteration. But as St. Paul, by a "brother," meant any Christian, I shall be glad to learn from my correspondent whether the Wesleyans understand their rule in that significance. e. Many thanks to Mr. Wesley. Doubtless his disciples know what rate of interest is lawful, and what not; and also by what law it was made so; and always pause with pious accuracy at the decimal point whereat the excellence of an investment begins to make it criminal. St. George will be grateful to their representative for information on these-not unimportant -particulars. f. How far that is, my correspondent's duly dissenting scorn of the wisdom of the Greeks, and legality of the Jews, has doubtless prevented his thinking it necessary to discover. I must not waste the time of other readers in assisting his elementary investigations; but have merely to point out to him that definitions either of theft, adultery, usury, or murder, have only become necessary in modern times: and that Methodists, and any other persons, are charged by me with breaking the law of Moses, David, and Christ, in so far only as they do accept Mr. John Wesley's, or any other person's, definition instead of their utterly unquestionable meaning.1 (Would T. S., of North Tyne, reprint his letters for me from the Sunderland paper, to be sent out with December Fors? 2) 20. (IV.) I reprint the following paragraph chiefly as an example of our ineffable British absurdity. It is perfectly right to compel fathers to send their children to school; but, once sent, it is the schoolmaster's business to keep hold of them. In St. George's schools, it would have been the little runaway gentleman who would have got sent to prison; and kept, sotto piombi, on bread and water, until he could be trusted with more liberty. The fate of the father, under the present application of British 3 1 [For reply of "A Methodist Preacher" to Ruskin's criticism, see Letter 73, § 18 (Vol. XXIX. p. 28).] [The letters were reprinted in a pamphlet entitled John Wesley and Usury, Notes of a Discussion by T. S. and others in the "Newcastle Weekly Chronicle," July and August, 1876: Sunderland 1877.] 3 [See Stones of Venice, vol. ii. (Vol. X. p. 342) and ibid., vol. i. (Vol. IX. p. 185).] law, leaves the problem, it seems to me, still insoluble but in that manner. But I should like to know more of the previous history of parent and child. "The story of George Widowson, aged fifty-seven, told at the inquest held on his remains at Mile End Old Town on Wednesday, is worth recording. Widowson was, as appears by the evidence of his daughter, a sober, hard-working man until he was sent to prison for three days in last December in default of paying a fine for not sending his son, a boy eleven years of age, to school. The deceased, as several witnesses deposed, constantly endeavoured to make the child go to school, and had frequently taken him there himself; but it was all in vain. Young Widowson when taken to school invariably ran away, the result being that his father was driven to distraction. His imprisonment in December had preyed on his mind, and he took to drinking. He frequently threatened to destroy himself rather than be imprisoned again. Hearing that another summons was about to be issued against him, he broke up his home, and on the night of the 30th ultimo solved the educational problem by throwing himself into the Regent's Canal. Fear of being again sent to prison by the School Board was, his daughter believed, the cause of his committing this act. The jury returned a verdict in accordance with this opinion; and although George Widowson was wrong to escape from the clutches of the friends of humanity by putting an end to his life, those who blame him should remember that imprisonment to a bona fide working man of irreproachable character, is simply torture. He loses all that in his own eyes makes life worth preservation."-Pall Mall Gazette, July 7th, 1876. 21. (V.) The next extract contains some wholesome comments on our more advanced system of modern education. 6 "INDIAN CIVIL SERVICE.-At a meeting of the Indian section of the Society of Arts, under the presidency of Mr. Andrew Cassels, a paper on 'Competition and its Effects upon Education' was read by Dr. George Birdwood. In the course of his remarks, he commented at length upon the India Office despatch of Feb. 24, regarding the selection and training of candidates for the Indian Civil Service,' and feared that it would but serve to confirm and aggravate and rapidly extend the very worst evil of the old system of competition-namely, the degeneration of secondary education throughout England. . . . The despatch tended to make over all the secondary schooling of the country to the crammers, or to reduce it to the crammers' system. They were making the entrance examinations year by year more and more difficult-as their first object must necessarily now be, not the moral and intellectual discipline of the boyhood of England, but to show an ever-growing percentage of success at the various competitive examinations always going on for public services. The devil take the hindermost' was fast becoming the ideal of education, even in the public schools. If they seriously took to cramming little fellows from twelve to fourteen for entrance into public schools, the rising generation would be used up before it reached manhood. A well-known physician of great experience told him that the competition for all sorts of scholarships and appointments was showing its evil fruits in the increase of insanity, epilepsy, and other nervous diseases amongst young people of the age from seventeen to nineteen, and especially amongst pupil-teachers; and if admission into the public schools of England was for the future to be regulated by competition, St. Vitus's dance would soon take the place of gout, as the fashionable disease of the upper classes. This was the inevitable result of the ill-digested and ill-regulated system of competition for the public services, and especially the Indian Civil Service, which had prevailed; and he feared that the recent despatch would only be to hasten the threatened revolution in their national secondary schools, and the last state of cramming under the despatch would be worse than the first. . . . The best of ... examiners was the examiner of his own pupils; for no man could measure real knowledge like the teacher. What should be aimed at was regular moderate study and sound and continuous discipline to start the growing man in life in the healthiest bodily and moral condition possible. He objected to children striving for prizes, whether in games or in studies. The fewer prizes won at school, the more would probably be won in life. Let their only anxiety be to educate their children well, and suffer no temptation to betray them into cramming, and the whole world was open to them."-Daily Telegraph.1 22. (VI.) The development of "humanity" in America is so brilliantly illustrated in the following paragraphs, that I have thought them worth preserving : From "The American Socialist, devoted to the Enlargement and Perfection of Home" "THE FUTURE OF SOCIETY "An American, visiting Europe, notices how completely there the various functions of the social body are performed. He finds a servant, an officer, a skilled workman, at every place. From the position of the stone-breaker on the highway, up to that of the highest Government official, every post is filled; every personal want of the traveller or the citizen is attended to. Policemen guard him in the streets, lackeys watch for his bidding at the hotels, railroad officials with almost superfluous care forward him on his way. As compared with American railroad management, the great English roads probably have four employés to our one. This plenitude of service results from three things-viz., density of population, which gives an abundant working class; cheapness of labour; and the aristocratic formation of society that tends to fix persons in the caste to which they were born. The effect is to produce a smoothness in the social movement— an absence of jar and friction, and a release in many cases from anxious, personal outlook, that are very agreeable. The difference between English and American life in respect to the supply of service is like that between riding on a highly-finished macadamized way, where every rut is filled and every stone is removed, and picking one's way over our common country roads. "Another thing that the traveller observes in Europe is the abundance everywhere of works of art. One's sense of beauty is continually gratified; now with a finished landscape, now with a noble building, now with statues, monuments, and paintings. This immense accumulation of art springs in part of course from the age of the nations where it is found; but it is also due in a very great degree to the employment given to artists by persons of wealth and leisure. Painting, sculpture, and architecture have always had constant, and sometimes munificent, patrons in the nobility and the Established Church. "Observing these things abroad, the American asks himself whether the institutions of this country are likely to produce in time any similar result here. Shall we have the finished organization, the mutual service, and the wealth of art that characterize European society? Before answering this, let us first ask ourselves whether it is desirable that we should have them in the same manner that they exist abroad? Certainly not. No American would be willing to pay the price which England pays for her system of service. The most painful thing which one sees abroad is the utter absence of ambition in the class of household servants. 1 [May 27, 1876. Sir George Birdwood's paper was printed in extenso in the Journal of the Society of Arts, June 2, 1876, vol. 24, pp 681-687.] XXVIII. 3 B |