short-coming of blame.' Our great teachers, he tells us, even Carlyle and Emerson, accept too easily the comforting belief that right will speedily become might. That is not the ordinary view of Carlyle, who was gloomy enough for most of us. Ruskin, in passages like the above, seems to be trying to surpass his master. We are worse, he assures us, than Eccelin of Padua, who slew two thousand innocent persons to maintain his power, whereas we lately slew in cold blood five hundred thousand persons by slow starvation—that is, as he explains, did not prevent a famine in Orissa. The cases are not strictly parallel. In spite of such feats of logic, Ruskin's bitter utterances constantly made you wince. His attacks on modern society might be caricatures, but clearly there were very ugly things to caricature. Whether he bewailed the invasion of country solitudes by railways and suburban villas, or the mean and narrow life of the dwellers in villas, or went further and produced hideous stories of gross brutality in the slums of London or Manchester, he had an unpleasant plausibility. If you tried to reply that such things were not unprecedented, you felt that the line of defence was rather mean, and that even if Ruskin was over-angry you had
