Meynell, Alice: John Ruskin (Edinburgh , London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1901)

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CHAPTER XI.
‘THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART’ (1857).
This little volume holds the substance of two lectures
given at Manchester. The lecturer exercises here the
pleasant art of stimulating his hearers by a paradox, and
of following the phrase of surprise by an irrefutable
exposition. His theme is the right expenditure of
public money. He, like the other economists, has to
find room, in the national dispensations, for expense
upon the arts, and in some sort the luxuries, of life.
Christian and ascetic, he has to consent to this use of
the fruits of the labours of the poor, as the severe but
not ascetic “ Manchester ” economist also must needs
do. Mill, who insists that all unproductive consump-
tion is so much loss and destruction, evidently arranges
for, and tolerates, so much loss and destruction in a
certain cause; he allows the artist to destroy what he
consumes. With such permission a purely scientific
writer has nothing to do. Like a writer on arithmetic
a writer on political economy proper states these laws,
those causes, and yonder consequences, and is not