In the same fashion Ruskin started a movement among the working men for a diffusion of sound learning. The St. George Guild represents the first University Extension Course and the first Chautauqua system our world ever knew. More than fifty years ago he worked out his plan to carry the knowledge given to rich men's sons in their lecture halls and libraries to the working people, who were to carry on their studies in the evening after the day's labour was over. He laid out a course of studies for these working men, planned the organization of lecture centers, gave us the outline of the University Extension Course of lectures, induced many men in England to go from one working man's guild and club to another, and after Ruskin's health broke down, the men in the faculty of Oxford University took Ruskin's mother-idea, and developed it into the University Extension Course of lectures. Brought to our country that idea has spread through these lecture courses carried on in great halls in the winter, in tents and open-air assemblies in the summer.
We say much of our Social Settlement Work, and trace these thousands of settlements in the tenement-house region of great cities back to Arnold Toynbee's work, and that of Canon Barnett, in the East End of London. But we must remember that when Ruskin was lecturing in Oxford to some of the richest boys in Great Britain he told them that every boy who consumed more than he produced was a pauper and that the more the youth received from his ancestors and the State, the larger his debt to those who were less fortunate. He believed that every gifted boy should keep in touch, not only with his own class, but with all classes, and that every youth would do well to do some physical work every day. Ruskin and his students built a road outside of Oxford, and the foreman of the gang of students was young Arnold Toynbee. Toynbee admired and loved Ruskin, as a young pupil and disciple loves a noble teacher and a great master.
After his health broke down, Ruskin gave up his work in Whitechapel Road and urged Arnold Toynbee to give himself to the problems of the poor, and when Ruskin's health gave way completely, it was Toynbee who rewrote his lectures on labour and capital and gave them a new form in his _Industrial Revolution in Great Britain_. The time came when Arnold Toynbee broke down with overwork and brain fever, as his master had broken before him, and his friend Canon Barnett raised the money to make Toynbee Hall a permanent institution. But the seed of the Social Settlement movement was John Ruskin's brief career in the tenement region of the East End, and the first full fruit was in his disciple's Toynbee Hall and in Canon Barnett's noble work at St. Jude's. Little by little the Social Settlement Idea spread, until in the tenement regions of Manchester, Birmingham, New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, gifted men and women of wealth, leisure and patrician position, began to give their lives to the neglected poor.