The Crown of Wild Olive

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One hundred and twenty-sixth thousand. In an armorial calf binding. Externally, smart, with only some slight rubbing. Prize bookplate to front pastedown. Pages are bright, and generally clean. Reprinted in with the help of original edition published long back [']. Lovell Company 94 pages. Although this copy is undated binding materials and style indicate early s. Highly decorated green full-cloth binding features a griffin with books in black stamped details and borders.

Spine title-panel in gilt is cllean and sharp. Binding stamped "Oxford Edition". Binding is clean, square, solid and sharp looking. Very light wear at head of spine. Decorated endpapers of green flowers, text of heavy paper, lightly toned but very clean complete text. Quite solidly bound year old book, looks good for another !. Decorative Cloth with Gilt. Benjamin Hish, Bookseller Condition: Half-vellum with floral motif on spine. Four lectures on industry and war. The crown of wild olive; three lectures on work traffic and war by John Ruskin.

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The Crown Of Wild Olive

Will you be readier to the injustice which can never be redressed; and niggardly of mercy which you can bestow but once, and which, refusing, you refuse for ever? I think better of you, even of the most selfish, than that you would do this, well understood. And for yourselves, it seems to me, the question becomes not less grave, in these curt limits. If your life were but a fever fit, — the madness of a night, whose follies were all to be forgotten in the dawn, it might matter little how you fretted away the sickly hours, — what toys you snatched at, or let fall, — what visions you followed wistfully with the deceived eyes of sleepless phrenzy.

Is the earth only an hospital?

The Crown of Wild Olive by John Ruskin

Play, if you care to play, on the floor of the hospital dens. Knit its straw into what crowns please you; gather the dust of it for treasure, and die rich in that, clutching at the black motes in the air with your dying hands; — and yet, it may be well with you.

But if this life be no dream, and the world no hospital; if all the peace and power and joy you can ever win, must be won now; and all fruit of victory gathered here, or never; — will you still, throughout the puny totality of your life, weary yourselves in the fire for vanity? If there is no rest which remaineth for you, is there none you might presently take? The heathen, to whose creed you have returned, thought not so. They knew that life brought its contest, but they expected from it also the crown of all contest: It should have been of gold, they thought; but Jupiter was poor; this was the best the god could give them.

Seeking a greater than this, they had known it a mockery. Not in war, not in wealth, not in tyranny, was there any happiness to be found for them — only in kindly peace, fruitful and free. The wreath was to be of wild olive, mark you: But this, such as it is, you may win while yet you live; type of grey honour and sweet rest. The furnace contained four tons of molten iron, and an equal amount of cinders, and ought to have been run out at 7.

But Snape and his mates, engaged in talking and drinking, neglected their duty, and in the meantime, the iron rose in the furnace until it reached a pipe wherein water was contained. Just as the men had stripped, and were proceeding to tap the furnace, the water in the pipe, converted into steam, burst down its front and let loose on them the molten metal, which instantaneously consumed Gardner; Snape, terribly burnt, and mad with pain, leaped into the canal and then ran home and fell dead on the threshold, Swift survived to reach the hospital, where he died too.

My Friends, — I have not come among you to-night to endeavour to give you an entertaining lecture; but to tell you a few plain facts, and ask you some plain, but necessary questions. I have seen and known too much of the struggle for life among our labouring population, to feel at ease, even under any circumstances, in inviting them to dwell on the trivialities of my own studies; but, much more, as I meet to-night, for the first time, the members of a working Institute established in the district in which I have passed the greater part of my life, I am desirous that we should at once understand each other, on graver matters.

I would fain tell you, with what feelings, and with what hope, I regard this Institution, as one of many such, now happily established throughout England, as well as in other countries; — Institutions which are preparing the way for a great change in all the circumstances of industrial life; but of which the success must wholly depend upon our clearly understanding the circumstances and necessary limits of this change. No teacher can truly promote the cause of education, until he knows the conditions of the life for which that education is to prepare his pupil.

The manner of the amusement, and the matter of the teaching, which any of us can offer you, must depend wholly on our first understanding from you, whether you think the distinction heretofore drawn between working men and others, is truly or falsely founded. Do you accept it as it stands? Let me make myself more distinctly understood. How much should they always be elevated, how much always depressed?

And, gentlemen and ladies — I pray those of you who are here to forgive me the offence there may be in what I am going to say. It is not I who wish to say it. Bitter voices say it; voices of battle and of famine through all the world, which must be heard some day, whoever keeps silence. Neither is it to you specially that I say it.

I am sure that most now present know their duties of kindness, and fulfil them, better perhaps than I do mine. But I speak to you as representing your whole class, which errs, I know, chiefly by thoughtlessness, but not therefore the less terribly. Wilful error is limited by the will, but what limit is there to that of which we are unconscious? Answer, you workmen who are here, as you would among yourselves, frankly; and tell me how you would have me call those classes.

Am I to call them — would you think me right in calling them — the idle classes? I think you would feel somewhat uneasy, and as if I were not treating my subject honestly, or speaking from my heart, if I went on under the supposition that all rich people were idle.

You would be both unjust and unwise if you allowed me to say that; — not less unjust than the rich people who say that all the poor are idle, and will never work if they can help it, or more than they can help. For indeed the fact is, that there are idle poor and idle rich; and there are busy poor and busy rich. Many a beggar is as lazy as if he had ten thousand a year; and many a man of large fortune is busier than his errand-boy, and never would think of stopping in the street to play marbles.

So that, in a large view, the distinction between workers and idlers, as between knaves and honest men, runs through the very heart and innermost economies of men of all ranks and in all positions. There is a working class — strong and happy — among both rich and poor; there is an idle class — weak, wicked, and miserable — among both rich and poor. And the worst of the misunderstandings arising between the two orders come of the unlucky fact that the wise of one class habitually contemplate the foolish of the other. If the busy rich people watched and rebuked the idle rich people, all would be right; and if the busy poor people watched and rebuked the idle poor people, all would be right.

But each class has a tendency to look for the faults of the other. A hard-working man of property is particularly offended by an idle beggar; and an orderly, but poor, workman is naturally intolerant of the licentious luxury of the rich.

The Crown Of Wild Olive by Ruskin, John

And what is severe judgment in the minds of the just men of either class, becomes fierce enmity in the unjust — but among the unjust only. None but the dissolute among the poor look upon the rich as their natural enemies, or desire to pillage their houses and divide their property. None but the dissolute among the rich speak in opprobrious terms of the vices and follies of the poor. There is, then, no class distinction between idle and industrious people; and I am going to-night to speak only of the industrious. And these distinctions are mainly four:. First, then, of the distinction between the classes who work and the classes who play.

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Of course we must agree upon a definition of these terms, — work and play, — before going farther. You play, as you call it, at cricket, for instance. That is as hard work as anything else; but it amuses you, and it has no result but the amusement. Play may be useful in a secondary sense nothing is indeed more useful or necessary ; but the use of it depends on its being spontaneous.

Let us, then, enquire together what sort of games the playing class in England spend their lives in playing at. The first of all English games is making money. That is an all-absorbing game; and we knock each other down oftener in playing at that than at foot-ball, or any other roughest sport; and it is absolutely without purpose; no one who engages heartily in that game ever knows why. Ask a great money-maker what he wants to do with his money — he never knows. He gets it only that he may get it. Just as, at cricket, you get more runs. So all that great foul city of London there, — rattling, growling, smoking, stinking, — a ghastly heap of fermenting brick-work, pouring out poison at every pore, — you fancy it is a city of work?

Not a street of it! It is a great city of play; very nasty play, and very hard play, but still play. Well, the first great English game is this playing at counters. It differs from the rest in that it appears always to be producing money, while every other game is expensive. But it does not always produce money. Our next great English game, however, hunting and shooting, is costly altogether; and how much we are fined for it annually in land, horses, gamekeepers, and game laws, and all else that accompanies that beautiful and special English game, I will not endeavour to count now: It is not the cheapest of games.

You ladies like to lead the fashion: Dress yourselves nicely, and dress everybody else nicely. Lead the fashions for the poor first; make them look well, and you yourselves will look, in ways of which you have now no conception, all the better. The fashions you have set for some time among your peasantry are not pretty ones; their doublets are too irregularly slashed, and the wind blows too frankly through them.

It is entrancingly pleasant to the imagination; the facts of it, not always so pleasant. We dress for it, however, more finely than for any other sport; and go out to it, not merely in scarlet, as to hunt, but in scarlet and gold, and all manner of fine colours: The mere immediate cost of all these plays is what I want you to consider; they all cost deadly work somewhere, as many of us know too well. Men will be taught that an existence of play, sustained by the blood of other creatures, is a good existence for gnats and sucking fish; but not for men: I pass then to our second distinction; between the rich and poor, between Dives and Lazarus, — distinction which exists more sternly, I suppose, in this day, than ever in the world, Pagan or Christian, till now.

I will put it sharply before you, to begin with, merely by reading two paragraphs which I cut from two papers that lay on my breakfast table on the same morning, the 25th of November, The piece about the rich Russian at Paris is commonplace enough, and stupid besides for fifteen francs, — 12 s. Still, the two paragraphs printed on the same day are worth putting side by side.

He is a Russian, and, with your permission, we will call him Count Teufelskine. In manners he is dignified — nay, perhaps apathetic; nothing disturbs the placid serenity of that calm exterior. One day our friend breakfasted chez Bignon. Her fears proved to be true. The wretched creature appeared to have been dead several hours. He had perished of cold and wet, and the rain had been beating down on him all night.

The deceased was a bone-picker. He was in the lowest stage of poverty, poorly clad, and half-starved. The police had frequently driven him away from the stone yard, between sunset and sunrise, and told him to go home.

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He selected a most desolate spot for his wretched death. A penny and some bones were found in his pockets. The deceased was between fifty and sixty years of age. Inspector Roberts, of the K division, has given directions for inquiries to be made at the lodging-houses respecting the deceased, to ascertain his identity if possible.

It is low in quantity, but it is sufficient to support nature; yet within ten years of the passing of the Poor Law Act, we heard of the paupers in the Andover Union gnawing the scraps of putrid flesh and sucking the marrow from the bones of horses which they were employed to crush. You see my reason for thinking that our Lazarus of Christianity has some advantage over the Jewish one. Now this distinction between rich and poor rests on two bases. Within its proper limits, on a basis which is lawful and everlastingly necessary; beyond them, on a basis unlawful, and everlastingly corrupting the framework of society.

The lawful basis of wealth is, that a man who works should be paid the fair value of his work; and that if he does not choose to spend it to-day, he should have free leave to keep it, and spend it to-morrow. Thus, an industrious man working daily, and laying by daily, attains at last the possession of an accumulated sum of wealth, to which he has absolute right. The idle person who will not work, and the wasteful person who lays nothing by, at the end of the same time will be doubly poor — poor in possession, and dissolute in moral habit; and he will then naturally covet the money which the other has saved.

And if he is then allowed to attack the other, and rob him of his well-earned wealth, there is no more any motive for saving, or any reward for good conduct; and all society is thereupon dissolved, or exists only in systems of rapine. Therefore the first necessity of social life is the clearness of national conscience in enforcing the law — that he should keep who has justly earned.

That law, I say, is the proper basis of distinction between rich and poor. But there is also a false basis of distinction; namely, the power held over those who earn wealth by those who levy or exact it. There will be always a number of men who would fain set themselves to the accumulation of wealth as the sole object of their lives. Necessarily, that class of men is an uneducated class, inferior in intellect, and more or less cowardly.

It is physically impossible for a well-educated, intellectual, or brave man to make money the chief object of his thoughts; as physically impossible as it is for him to make his dinner the principal object of them. All healthy people like their dinners, but their dinner is not the main object of their lives.

So all healthily minded people like making money — ought to like it, and to enjoy the sensation of winning it; but the main object of their life is not money; it is something better than money. A good soldier, for instance, mainly wishes to do his fighting well. He is glad of his pay — very properly so, and justly grumbles when you keep him ten years without it — still, his main notion of life is to win battles, not to be paid for winning them. They like fees no doubt, — ought to like them; yet if they are brave and well educated, the entire object of their lives is not fees.

They, on the whole, desire to cure the sick; and, — if they are good doctors, and the choice were fairly put to them, — would rather cure their patient, and lose their fee, than kill him, and get it. And so with all other brave and rightly trained men; their work is first, their fee second — very important always, but still second. But in every nation, as I said, there are a vast class who are ill-educated, cowardly, and more or less stupid. And with these people, just as certainly the fee is first, and the work second, as with brave people the work is first and the fee second. And this is no small distinction.

It is the whole distinction in a man; distinction between life and death in him, between heaven and hell for him. You cannot serve two masters; — you must serve one or other. If your work is first with you, and your fee second, work is your master, and the lord of work, who is God. They are always, as I said, more or less stupid, and cannot conceive of anything else so nice as money.

Stupidity is always the basis of the Judas bargain. We do great injustice to Iscariot, in thinking him wicked above all common wickedness. He was horror-struck when he found that Christ would be killed; threw his money away instantly, and hanged himself. How many of our present money-seekers, think you, would have the grace to hang themselves, whoever was killed?

But Judas was a common, selfish, muddle-headed, pilfering fellow; his hand always in the bag of the poor, not caring for them.

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Christ would come out of it well enough, and he have his thirty pieces. Nay, but it is asked how is that an unfair advantage? Has not the man who has worked for the money a right to use it as he best can? No; in this respect, money is now exactly what mountain promontories over public roads were in old times.

The barons fought for them fairly: Well, capital now is exactly what crags were then. Men fight fairly we will, at least, grant so much, though it is more than we ought for their money; but, once having got it, the fortified millionaire can make everybody who passes below pay toll to his million, and build another tower of his money castle. And I can tell you, the poor vagrants by the roadside suffer now quite as much from the bag-baron, as ever they did from the crag-baron. Bags and crags have just the same result on rags. I have not time, however, to-night to show you in how many ways the power of capital is unjust; but this one great principle I have to assert — you will find it quite indisputably true — that whenever money is the principal object of life with either man or nation, it is both got ill, and spent ill; and does harm both in the getting and spending; but when it is not the principal object, it and all other things will be well got, and well spent.

And here is the test, with every man, of whether money is the principal object with him, or not. For you know it must be spent some day; the only question is whether the man who makes it shall spend it, or some one else. And generally it is better for the maker to spend it, for he will know best its value and use. This is the true law of life.

And if a man does not choose thus to spend his money, he must either hoard it or lend it, and the worst thing he can generally do is to lend it; for borrowers are nearly always ill-spenders, and it is with lent money that all evil is mainly done, and all unjust war protracted. For observe what the real fact is, respecting loans to foreign military governments, and how strange it is. If your little boy came to you to ask for money to spend in squibs and crackers, you would think twice before you gave it him; and you would have some idea that it was wasted, when you saw it fly off in fireworks, even though he did no mischief with it.

But the Russian children, and Austrian children, come to you, borrowing money, not to spend in innocent squibs, but in cartridges and bayonets to attack you in India with, and to keep down all noble life in Italy with, and to murder Polish women and children with; and that you will give at once, because they pay you interest for it.

Now, in order to pay you that interest, they must tax every working peasant in their dominions; and on that work you live. You therefore at once rob the Austrian peasant, assassinate or banish the Polish peasant, and you live on the produce of the theft, and the bribe for the assassination! That is the broad fact — that is the practical meaning of your foreign loans, and of most large interest of money; and then you quarrel with Bishop Colenso, forsooth, as if he denied the Bible, and you believed it!

I pass now to our third condition of separation, between the men who work with the hand, and those who work with the head. And here we have at last an inevitable distinction. There must be work done by the arms, or none of us could live. There must be work done by the brains, or the life we get would not be worth having. And the same men cannot do both.

There is rough work to be done, and rough men must do it; there is gentle work to be done, and gentlemen must do it; and it is physically impossible that one class should do, or divide, the work of the other. And it is of no use to try to conceal this sorrowful fact by fine words, and to talk to the workman about the honourableness of manual labour and the dignity of humanity.

If it is any comfort to you to be told that the rough work is the more honourable of the two, I should be sorry to take that much of consolation from you; and in some sense I need not. And thus the perpetual question and contest must arise, who is to do this rough work? Well, my good working friends, these questions will take a little time to answer yet. They must be answered: Only note these few particulars, which are already sure.

As to the distribution of the hard work. None of us, or very few of us, do either hard or soft work because we think we ought; but because we have chanced to fall into the way of it, and cannot help ourselves. Now, nobody does anything well that they cannot help doing: And, depend upon it, all work must be done at last, not in a disorderly, scrambling, doggish way, but in an ordered, soldierly, human way — a lawful way. Men are enlisted for the labour that kills — the labour of war: Let them be enlisted also for the labour that feeds: Teach the plough exercise as carefully as you do the sword exercise, and let the officers of troops of life be held as much gentlemen as the officers of troops of death; and all is done: People are perpetually squabbling about what will be best to do, or easiest to do, or adviseablest to do, or profitablest to do; but they never, so far as I hear them talk, ever ask what it is just to do.

And it is the law of heaven that you shall not be able to judge what is wise or easy, unless you are first resolved to judge what is just, and to do it. If it begs for a toy or a piece of cake — does it call that serving its father? That, with God, is prayer, and He likes to hear it: God likes mere beggars as little as you do — He likes honest servants, not beggars.

The one Divine work — the one ordered sacrifice — is to do justice; and it is the last we are ever inclined to do. Anything rather than that! As much charity as you choose, but no justice. You must build upon justice, for this main reason, that you have not, at first, charity to build with. It is the last reward of good work. Do justice to your brother you can do that, whether you love him or not , and you will come to love him. It is all very fine to think you can build upon charity to begin with; but you will find all you have got to begin with, begins at home, and is essentially love of yourself.

Then you will come to the poor little crossing-sweeper, got up also, — it, in its Sunday dress, — the dirtiest rags it has, — that it may beg the better: But what does Justice say, walking and watching near us? Christian Justice has been strangely mute, and seemingly blind; and, if not blind, decrepit, this many a day: Did Providence put them in that position, or did you? Supposing, then, we have it determined with appropriate justice, who is to do the hand work, the next questions must be how the hand-workers are to be paid, and how they are to be refreshed, and what play they are to have.

Now, the possible quantity of play depends on the possible quantity of pay; and the quantity of pay is not a matter for consideration to hand-workers only, but to all workers. Generally, good, useful work, whether of the hand or head, is either ill-paid, or not paid at all. People, as a rule, only pay for being amused or being cheated, not for being served.

Five thousand a year to your talker, and a shilling a day to your fighter, digger, and thinker, is the rule. None of the best head work in art, literature, or science, is ever paid for. How much do you think Homer got for his Iliad? In science, the man who discovered the telescope, and first saw heaven, was paid with a dungeon; the man who invented the microscope, and first saw earth, died of starvation, driven from his home: The worst that can happen to you is to break stones; not be broken by them. And for you there will come a time for better payment; some day, assuredly, more pence will be paid to Peter the Fisherman, and fewer to Peter the Pope; we shall pay people not quite so much for talking in Parliament and doing nothing, as for holding their tongues out of it and doing something; we shall pay our ploughman a little more and our lawyer a little less, and so on: This, I think, can be managed for you, my working friends, in the good time.

I must go on, however, to our last head, concerning ourselves all, as workers. What is wise work, and what is foolish work? What the difference between sense and nonsense, in daily occupation? Well, wise work is, briefly, work with God. Foolish work is work against God. And against these two great human deeds, justice and order, there are perpetually two great demons contending, — the devil of iniquity, or inequity, and the devil of disorder, or of death; for death is only consummation of disorder.

You have to fight these two fiends daily. Observe then, all wise work is mainly threefold in character. It is honest, useful, and cheerful. I hardly know anything more strange than that you recognise honesty in play, and you do not in work. Your English watchword is fair-play, your English hatred, foul-play. Did it ever strike you that you wanted another watchword also, fair-work, and another hatred also, foul-work? Your prize-fighter has some honour in him yet; and so have the men in the ring round him: But your prize-merchant gains his match by foul selling, and no one cries out against that.

You drive a gambler out of the gambling-room who loads dice, but you leave a tradesman in flourishing business, who loads scales! For observe, all dishonest dealing is loading scales. What does it matter whether I get short weight, adulterate substance, or dishonest fabric? The fault in the fabric is incomparably the worst of the two. Give me short measure of food, and I only lose by you; but give me adulterate food, and I die by you. Here, then, is your chief duty, you workmen and tradesmen — to be true to yourselves, and to us who would help you. We can do nothing for you, nor you for yourselves, without honesty.

Get that, you get all; without that, your suffrages, your reforms, your free-trade measures, your institutions of science, are all in vain. Then, secondly, wise work is useful. Yet do we ever ask ourselves, personally, or even nationally, whether our work is coming to anything or not? Of all wastes, the greatest waste that you can commit is the waste of labour. If you went down in the morning into your dairy, and you found that your youngest child had got down before you; and that he and the cat were at play together, and that he had poured out all the cream on the floor for the cat to lap up, you would scold the child, and be sorry the milk was wasted.

But if, instead of wooden bowls with milk in them, there are golden bowls with human life in them, and instead of the cat to play with — the devil to play with; and you yourself the player; and instead of leaving that golden bowl to be broken by God at the fountain, you break it in the dust yourself, and pour the human blood out on the ground for the fiend to lick up — that is no waste! I should like to know how you could kill them more utterly — kill them with second deaths, seventh deaths, hundredfold deaths?

Nay, the hunger, and the cold, and the little whistling bullets — our love-messengers between nation and nation — have brought pleasant messages from us to many a man before now; orders of sweet release, and leave at last to go where he will be most welcome and most happy. At the worst you do but shorten his life, you do not corrupt his life. And now I want you to take one thought home with you, and let it stay with you. But if you do, you must do more than pray for it; you must work for it.

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And, to work for it, you must know what it is: Observe, it is a kingdom that is to come to us; we are not to go to it. Also, it is not to be a kingdom of the dead, but of the living. Also, it is not to come all at once, but quietly; nobody knows how.