Yet all the real economic questions would remain, even though
money or private property were abolished. The real economy is the making
and preserving of life and the means of life. We live in a chaos where
the elementary conditions of human existence are constantly forgotten.
The real politics, the real economy, the real political economy, are the
questions of the birth-rate and the wheat supply--the relations not
between man and man, or class and class, or sex and sex, but mankind,
living and dying and being born, and the world in which he has to live.
The time is near at hand when the first conditions of national life will
be recognized as they have never been since the dawn of modern
industrialism. The products of men's labour and women's labour will be
appraised and paid for in proportion to their _real_ value, their
strength or availableness for life.
In "Unto This Last" and "Munera Pulveris," Ruskin has laid down, on what
are really unchallengeable biological grounds, the foundations of the
political economy of the future. We are going to have done with the
industries which eat up men. We cannot much longer afford to grow whisky
where we might grow wheat, for there are ever more mouths to be fed, and
wheat is running short. Cheap and dear mean nothing when we get down to
realities. Is a thing vital or is it mortal?--that is the only
question. It may be vital and costless, like air, or mortal and dear,
like alcohol.
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