Wealth consists in things essentially valuable. Value is the life-giving power of a thing, and is twofold: intrinsic and effectual. Cost is the quantity of labor required to produce a thing; price the quantity of labor which its producer will take in exchange for it. Cost and price are commercial conditions. Intrinsic value is in the things themselves and not their use, and does not depend upon the market price. The production of effectual value always involves two needs: first, the production of a thing essentially useful, and, second, the production of a capacity to use it. When these come together there is wealth; when they do not there can be no wealth. "No noble thing can be wealth save to a noble person." A horse is useless to one who cannot ride, a painting to one who cannot see.

He groups valuable things under five heads: 1. Land, with associated air, water, and organisms. 2. Houses, furniture, and instruments. 3. Stored or prepared food, clothing, and medicine. 4. Books. 5. Works of art.

The value of land depends upon its fertility, healthfulness, and beauty. If properly cared for it is the most precious of property. The value of buildings is found in their strength, convenience, size, location, and architectural beauty. The value of furniture and instruments, in their power to assist in human labor of head or hand. Of food, medicine, luxuries, in their essential, æsthetic, and ethical qualities. Of books and works of art, in their preservation of facts, and in their ability to excite noble emotion and intellectual action. The province of society is to foster good literature and art, and render it acceptable to the people.

Money is a documentary expression of a legal claim. If it were all destroyed the world would be neither richer nor poorer. It cannot be arbitrarily multiplied. Riches consist in the claim which any one may have upon the wealth of the world, and may be limited by either legal or moral restraint. When the few are rich and the many poor society is in an unhealthful condition. The distribution of riches he divides into selection, direction, and provision. Selection provides for ownership-says who shall own the things; direction provides for authority over labor; provision provides for the accumulation of capital.

The whole of political economy, he holds, is contained in these three things, and he amplifies them in accord with his

humanitarian and moral ideas. Things hurtful to man have no value. Rum, fire-arins, and munitions of war are worse than valueless, and their manufacture waste. Things machine-made, houses, cloths, utensils, imitations of works of art, have but little value in developing the human mind or heart, or adding to the sum of human good, and are, therefore, of very limited worth. "Wealth does not consist in the accidental object of a morbid desire, but in the constant object of a legitimate one."

A man's power over his property, he contends, is fivefold. Use for self, administration for others, ostentation, destruction, or bequest; and possession is only found in the first, and is sternly limited to shelter, a little food, a few clothes, a few books, a little admiration of works of art. About all one can do with property is to administer or maladminister it, or become a curator of what he imagines to be his.

Wealth must always be to a people a variable quantity and quality, depending upon the number of persons who have a capacity for its use and appreciate the different things which constitute it, and consists in the relation of these things to the following questions: What is the nature of the things it has? What is their quantity in relation to the population? Who, and how many, hold them, and in what proportions? Who are the claimants upon them, and in what proportions? What is the relation of the thing to the currency? The things held may be profitable or useless: food, clothing, books, houses, works of art; or sky-rockets, gunpowder, chromos, or rum. The more it has of the latter the poorer a people are. So that the laws of a true economy do not depend upon demand and supply, but principally upon what is demanded, and what supplied.

He denies utterly the wage fund theory, is opposed to interest upon money, and favors a rent only sufficient to keep up the wear and tear of property and pay its tax. He contends that labor is not limited by capital, save by the capital of heart and hand. Capital is the product of labor, and is valueless without it; and if all of it was swept from existence labor could produce it again, as it is constantly increasing it now.

Space will not permit a further amplification of Mr. Ruskin's theories of political economy. The reader will find a full discussion of the subject in his Munera Pulveris and Fors Clavigera, with ample illustrations and various puttings of the case.

These theories are so at variance with those generally received that they have attracted but little attention from thinkers; but, true or false, they are an attempt to take the science of political economy out of its utter materialism and supreme selfishness, and re-assert the grand old truth that it is "righteousness exalteth a nation," while "sin is a reproach to any people," and a declaration that the solution of all social and economic problems must be found in the application to them of the principles of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

He attributes the miseries of the slums, the debasement of the people, the poverty and suffering, the wretchedness and cruelty, the seething mass of moral rottenness and death, to the practical infidelity which declares in practice that God's laws are right in theory, but the devil's laws are the only practical ones in business, and to what he deems the imbecile and wicked social and economic order of the present times. Liv. ing is more expensive, life more burdensome, poverty and want more prevalent, the people more brutalized, because

The greater part of the labor of the people is spent unproductively; that is to say, producing iron plates, iron guns, gunpowder, infernal machines, infernal fortresses floating about, infernal fortresses standing still, infernal means of mischievous locomotion, infernal law-suits, infernal parliamentary elocution, infernal beer, infernal gazettes, magazines, and pictures. Calculate the labor spent in producing these infernal articles annually, and put against it the labor spent in producing food; the only wonder is that the poverty is not tenfold what it is.*

He believes that government should be so far paternal that it should foster the healthful pursuits of a people, preventing hurtful ones; that every manufactured article should be required to be of good workmanship and material, and that it should never be sold for less than cost of production; that a minimum price should annually be set upon all things, according to locality, cost of production, and transportation. This would prevent underselling, imperfect manufacture, and the demoralization which grows out of a conscienceless competition.

He is not in favor of a democratic form of government, but of an aristocratic one. He believes in a ruling class, ruling because of qualification to rule; and a lower class, removed alike from serfdom and sovereignty.

*Fors Clavigera, vol. i.

Mr. Ruskin is an eminently devont and religious man. In earlier life he was strictly Evangelical, and is still so in a large measure; but his views have widened as knowledge has increased, and in his later writings there is a seeming departure from his earlier faith, yet it is but seeming. There is a breadth and sweep of moral vision that is very wide, but he never loses his reverent spirit, veneration for God's word, or spirit of love for God's creatures. Nay, these rather increase, and because they do he is unsparing in his castigation of the Church when it fails to measure up to its care of, and work for, the best interests of mankind. Sesame and Lilies furnishes fine illustrations of this, as well as numberless passages scattered through all his later works, where he shows a loss of respect for a good deal of the so-called Christianity of the day, as many earnest and broadly cultured men do. Many of his expositions of Scripture are novel, but they are valuable and suggestive. They are concep tions from an independent stand-point, and as such are worthy of careful study.

When you take up a work of Ruskin you may be sure that

you will find nothing in it to lower your moral tone, but every thing to stimulate and elevate it. Whether you agree with him or not you will be impressed with the fact that he is no ordinary man, but one of profound thought and learning, candid, honest, and sincere. He believes what he advocates, and is imbued with reverence for God and love for his fellow-men. A spirit strong, tender, loving, and true, you cannot read him without in some measure partaking of a like quality of spirit. No man of the century will leave behind him a greater or more beneficial influence in the lines of his pursuits and teaching than he. Charming in style, beautifully poetic in thought, a diction that is the admiration of the English-speaking world and the ornament of the English tongue; with a thoroughness of culture in æsthetic and literary lines unequaled, allied to a spirit philanthropic, tender, loving, yet strong; devoutness like that of an olden prophet, and a heroism and industry unsurpassed, John Ruskin stands forth an honor to his race and a benefactor to mankind.

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ART. VI.-THE CHRONOLOGY OF ISRAEL AND ASSYRIA IN THE REIGN OF SHALMANESER II.

It is the purpose of the following paper to show the actual agreement of the biblical and Assyrian chronology for the period embracing the first twenty-one years of the reign of Shalmaneser II. (B. C. 860-839). There will thus be established the general accuracy of both accounts. So far as may be necessary for this purpose the events in the history of Judea, Israel, Assyria and Syria, or Damascus, will be synchronized.

For this synchronization it is of importance to settle the question, "Was A-ha-ab-bu Sir-'-lai Ahab of Israel?" Assyriologists for the most part affirm, George Smith seems to deny. Rev. D. P. Haigh suggested that the geographical name should be read "Su-hala, or Sam-hala, or Sav-hala, a kingdom near Damascus."* The phrase occurs but once; namely, in Shalmaneser's Karch (Kurch) monolith account of the battle of Karkar (Qarqar, Aroer), fought in the sixth year of his reign.

Schradert renders this account thus: "Karkar, my (his) royal city, I destroyed, laid waste, consumed with fire, 1,200 chariots, 1,200 horsemen, 20,000 men of Dad'idri of Damascus; 700 chariots, 700 horsemen, 10,000 men of Irchulin of Hamath; 2,000 chariots, 10,000 men of [A-ha-ab-bu Sir-'-lai] Ahab of Israel; 500 men of the Guaen; 1,000 men from the land of [Mu-us-ra-ai] Egypt; 10 chariots, 10,000 men from the land of Irkanett; 200 men of Mantinubaal of Arvad; 200 men from the land of Ursanat; 30 chariots, 10,000 men of Adunuba'al of Sizan; 1,000 camels of Gindibuh of Arba; . . . 100 men of Bahsa, son of Ruchub of Ammon; these twelve princes he (that is, Irchulin of Hamath) took to his assistance, advanced to join combat against me." It is important to keep in view that the head and front of this alliance was Irchulin of Hamath. So Smith: "Irchulena, king of Hamath, having summoned his allies to his assistance," etc. The Assyrian defeated them, and writes: "14,000 of their troops I slew." He here and in the two other accounts claims that twelve kings were opposed to him (apparently not including Dad'idri), but Smith, Eponym Canon, pp. 189, 190.

+ Cuneiform Inscriptions and the Old Testament, Eng. Translation, vol. i, p. 186, etc. Assyria from the Monuments, p. 50.