It is also (to those acquainted with his perverse and
wild rhetorical prejudices) even more amusing to remember that if a
Ruskin sentence (occupying one or two pages of small print) does not
remind us of the growth of a tree, the only other thing it does remind
of is the triumphant passage of a railway train.
Ruskin left behind him in his turn two quite separate streams of
inspiration. The first and more practical was concerned, like Carlyle's
_Chartism_, with a challenge to the social conclusions of the orthodox
economists. He was not so great a man as Carlyle, but he was a much more
clear-headed man; and the point and stab of his challenge still really
stands and sticks, like a dagger in a dead man. He answered the theory
that we must always get the cheapest labour we can, by pointing out that
we never do get the cheapest labour we can, in any matter about which we
really care twopence. We do not get the cheapest doctor. We either get a
doctor who charges nothing or a doctor who charges a recognised and
respectable fee. We do not trust the cheapest bishop. We do not allow
admirals to compete.
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