Again, the intention of St. George was to have a happy body of workpeople, loyally co-operating with a superior type of employer, and banishing greedy competition. The surviving remnant of the Guild of St. George has very little in its own power in this way, but amongst the employers who have built these model villages there exists just this kind of relation in manifold ways. And again, it pays. When in the British Association at York the firm of Rowntree and Co. was being commended for the benefits they are giving their workpeople, Mr. Seebohm Rowntree, whose whole heart is in the work, made a speech insisting that it paid them. He did this in order to induce other people to do the same, and to show that it was feasible for the ordinary manufacturer.
Broadly speaking, we may say that what we are all striving for is being done, in ways more wholesale and more complicated than could have been worked out in the seventies. Two generations of social pioneers, thinkers, and experimenters, have been grappling with the problems since then, so that we should not expect precisely the same prescription to be given by the social physician to-day as was given by one of the great pioneers of healing nearly fifty years ago.
The agricultural settlement seems the furthest from practical politics. Nevertheless, a series of enactments since 1881 have established in Ireland that very arrangement of a peasant proprietary paying a fixed rent to the State, which is the essence of Ruskin’s proposal; except that the Irish rents under the Land Purchase Acts are terminable after a period of years; and so rather more easy than Ruskin’s. Presumably, if found successful, the system could be extended. It will certainly occupy the minds of reformers very much during the immediately coming years.
Education was naturally a chief concern with St. George, and it occupies Letter XVI of _Time and Tide_.[88] His schools were to be in the fresh air of the country, and with large playing fields securely their own. “The Laws of Health and exercises enjoined by them” are the first feature of the curriculum; and riding, running, all the honest personal exercises of offence and defence, and music, are to be included under this head. Then come “the mental graces of reverence and compassion, which are to be developed by deliberate and constant exercise,"--which means, doubtless, that there is to be no girding at passers-by in the streets, and no rat-catching for amusement. Then, as the bond and guardian of reverence and compassion, comes “the truth of spirit and word, of thought and sight--truth earnest and compassionate, sought for like a treasure, and kept like a crown.” This is to be taught chiefly “by pressing for close accuracy of statement, as a principle of honour and as an accomplishment of language.” There is much sound advice about this in Letter XVI. Then, for the actual curriculum, there come, first, history; and then natural science and mathematics. But there are to be three alternative curricula, one for city children, one for country children, and one for seafaring children. The city children are to study mathematics and the arts, country children, natural history and agriculture, and the future sailors, astronomy, geography, and marine natural history. A beginning of variety of just this kind now exists in the elementary schools, as noted in the last chapter.