Unto This Last

• 1. Introduction

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  Unto This Last began as four magazine articles by John Ruskin, printed in the monthly Cornhill Magazine between August and December 1860. Ruskin gave himself a blunt task. He wanted to say what wealth really is. He also argued that wealth can only be gained in a society that values honesty. Those were fighting words aimed at economics itself. Why did a parable about vineyard workers supply the title? How did Victorian readers respond when the articles appeared? And how did a few magazine pages end up guiding a working farm in South Africa?

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• 2. A Borrowed Title

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  The essay opens with two short passages from scripture, one from Matthew 20:13 and one from Zechariah 11:12, both in the King James Version. The first is spoken by an employer to a worker who complains about his pay. It includes the lines "Friend, I do thee no wrong" and "I will give unto this last even as unto thee." The title comes from that last line. It belongs to the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard. In that story, the "last" are the eleventh hour labourers, who receive the same payment as those who worked the entire day. Readers of the period usually took the parable as a religious allegory. One reading cast the late workers as death-bed converts. Another saw them as peoples of the world who arrive late to religion. Ruskin ignored both. He asked instead what the story implies about society and the economy, including who ought to receive a living wage. The second passage he chose ends with a price counted out in coin: "So they weighed for my price thirty pieces of silver."

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• 3. The Quarrel With Economics

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  The economists of the 18th and 19th centuries were the main targets of Ruskin's criticism. He judged their thinking harshly and set out to replace it with a measure of wealth tied to human well-being. For this reason, Ruskin is seen as a precursor of what later came to be called social economy. His argument also looked beyond the factory floor. The essay attacks the destructive effects of industrialism on the natural world. Because of that, some historians read it as an early sign of the Green movement. A work that questioned both the textbooks of economists and the cost of industry was bound to provoke a reaction from readers of a popular monthly.

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• 4. Protest and Applause

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  By Ruskin's own account, the articles were "very violently criticized." Subscribers sent letters of protest, and the publisher stopped the series after four months. Ruskin answered his critics and collected the four articles into a book in May 1862. Very few welcomed it. One who did was Thomas Carlyle, whom Ruskin credited with having "led the way" through his attack on laissez-faire political economy, which Carlyle called the "Dismal Science." Carlyle wrote to Ruskin: "I have read your paper with exhilaration, exultation, often with laughter, with bravissimo!" He predicted that such a piece, flung into half a million British heads on the same day, would do a great deal of good. He added that he was glad to find himself in "a minority of two." Carlyle also insisted that no science worthy of the name could call itself political economy while ignoring the moral terms Ruskin laid out. The minority would grow, and a political party was among the places it showed up.

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• 5. On the Labour Benches

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  The 1906 UK general election was the breakthrough for the British Labour Party. Afterward, a survey asked Labour Members of Parliament which books had influenced them most. Unto This Last appeared on their lists as one of the key influences. The book is also cited as an inspiration for the party in its early stages. An essay that had driven subscribers to write angry letters in 1860 was, within a generation, part of the reading behind a new bloc in Parliament. Its most famous reader, though, lived thousands of miles away.

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• 6. Gandhi and the Farm

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  In March 1904, Mahatma Gandhi came across Unto This Last in South Africa. He owed the discovery to Henry Polak, whom he had met in a vegetarian restaurant. Polak worked as sub-editor of The Critic, a Johannesburg paper. Gandhi decided at once to reshape his own life according to Ruskin's teaching. He also resolved to publish his own newspaper, Indian Opinion, from a farm. On that farm, everyone would receive the same salary, whatever their function, race, or nationality. For the time, this was a radical idea. The result was the Phoenix Settlement. Gandhi would later give the essay a new life in his own language.

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• 7. Sarvodaya Returns

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  In 1908, Gandhi translated Unto This Last into Gujarati and titled it Sarvodaya, meaning the well-being of all. In 1951, Valji Govindji Desai translated it back into English as Unto This Last: A Paraphrase. That version is the one that brought Ruskin's ideas back to English readers through Gandhi's voice. It can be read as Gandhi's programme on economics, since he found in Ruskin an important part of his own social and economic ideas. The vineyard parable that gave Ruskin his title had traveled from the Cornhill Magazine to a farm near Johannesburg and back again.

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