262 THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE

are placed above the necessity of labour for their bread, or who will not work although they should. There is a vast quantity of idle energy among European nations at this time, which ought to go into handicrafts; there are multitudes of idle semi-gentlemen who ought to be shoemakers and carpenters; but since they will not be these so long as they can help it, the business of the philanthropist is to find them some other employment than disturbing governments. It is of no use to tell them they are fools, and that they will only make themselves miserable in the end as well as others: if they have nothing else to do, they will do mischief; and the man who will not work, and who has no means of intellectual pleasure, is as sure to become an instrument of evil as if he had sold himself bodily to Satan. I have myself seen enough of the daily life of the young educated men of France and Italy,¹ to account for, as it deserves, the deepest national

necessity of Liberty in the positive sense of freedom to make the best of themselves, secured to the citizens of a state by wise government. He was not satisfied either with the republican short cuts of 1848, of which he witnessed the effects in France in that year, or with benevolent despotism, such as he had studied in Florence in 1845. The passage in the text is illustrated by a letter written to his father in that year :-

“BAVENO, Aug. 24, 1845.-... I wanted to explain what I meant by saying, a letter or two back, that I was getting more republican. I didn’t, you see, mean more of liberty man-of all curses that poor, vicious, idiotic man can suffer, liberty is perhaps the greatest; but if one can be made to govern oneself, the exertion required to do so brings out a fine creature. Of all governments I have ever seen at work, that of Florence seems to me at present the worst; and it is in its form, not in its head, for the Duke [Leopold II.] is a good sort of person enough. The people are quiet under him and happy; so are the frogs and the lice; and there is about as much mind and worthiness in the one as in the other. I have heard it said that if the fields of a country are well cultivated and its markets well supplied (and they are at Florence), the government was assuredly good. But it is not enough to make a government good, that its markets be well supplied-if it has turned its people into vegetables.”]

¹ [Ruskin often made notes of his observation of such points in his letters home and in his diaries. The following passage in a letter to his father from Rouen (Oct. 2, 1848) will serve as an example:-

“Certainly I saw nothing good at Caen. I went to a café, to get my sketching, regularly. The first day I went there, about eleven o’clock, in the upper room (sanded all over to conceal spitting) there followed me upstairs a party of five young men, decently enough dressed, who sat down to drink beer, smoke, and play at cards. We all continued our occupations for about an hour and a half, when one of them having risen and come to the window to see what I was about, I put aside my drawing (after allowing him to see it) and began conversation by saying what a happy country France was or must

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