The Veins of Wealth - John Ruskin

 

The Veins of Wealth     - John Ruskin

 

     The title ‘The Veins of Wealth’ is appropriate and suitable. It is suggestive too.  Ruskin suggests that the circulation of wealth in the body –politics, resembles that of the blood in the human body. Veins are the blood vessels carrying blood to the heart. Ruskin compares human beings to veins carrying life-giving wealth to the heart of the state.

    Ruskin brings out a clear-cut distinction between Political Economy and Mercantile Economy. Political Economy consists simply of the production, preservation and distribution, at fittest time and place, of or useful pleasurable things. In brief, it implies the economy of national welfare. Mercantile Economy, on the other hand, signifies the accumulation, in the hands of individuals, of legal or moral claim upon or power over the labour of others. It implies poverty or debt on one side and riches or right on the other. Naturally, it does not add to the well-being of the State in which it exists.

    The orthodox political economist assumes that inequalities are necessarily advantageous though established and directed unjustly. Ruskin felt that inequalities of wealth unjustly established have injured the nation in which they exist. On the other hand, if inequalities of wealth are justly established, they benefit the nation in the course of their establishment.

      According to Ruskin, the real value of wealth depends on justice and honest way by which it is accumulated. Any given accumulation of commercial wealth may be indicative, on the one hand, of faithful industries, progressive energies and productive ingenuities or on the other, it may be indicative of moral luxury, merciless tyranny, dangerous tricks.

     It is wrong to presume that wealth is all powerful and that human-beings are insignificant. In truth, the persons themselves are wealth. The price of gold which people possess are ornamental things and hence not so real as the reality itself. The wealth of a nation is in its good men and women and in nothing else but to produce healthy, happy-hearted human beings. The best national manufactures are souls of a good quality.