Page:The Victorian Age.djvu/25

[21]

harbours, and an importing rather than a producing country, some mighty saviour would have been needed, and lawgivers more than mortal, if you were to have even a chance of preserving your State from degeneracy. The sea is pleasant enough as a daily companion, but it has a bitter and brackish quality, filling the streets with merchants and shopkeepers, and begetting in the souls of men uncertain and dishonest ways, making the State unfaithful and unfriendly to her own children and to other nations.' Like Plato, Ruskin would fain have returned to a much simpler social structure, when each country, and even to a great extent each village, was sufficient to itself. He did not show how such a return is possible without blowing up the great towns and their inhabitants; but he quite seriously regarded the Industrial Revolution as a gigantic blunder, and believed that England would never be healthy or happy until what his contemporaries called progress had been somehow swept away with all its works. How this was to be done he hardly considered. Like a true Platonist,