for various objects.  These objects were—­first:  to buy land for the agricultural members to cultivate, paying their rent, not to the other members, but to the company; not refusing machinery, but preferring manual labour.  Next, to buy mills and factories, to be likewise owned by the Guild and worked by members—­using water power in preference to steam (steam at first not forbidden)—­and making the lives of the people employed as well spent as might be, with a fair wage, healthy work, and so forth.  The loss on starting was to be made up from the Guild store, but it was anticipated that the honesty of the goods turned out would ultimately make such enterprises pay, even in a commercial world.  Then, for the people employed and their families, there would be places of recreation and instruction, supplied by the Guild, and intended to give the agricultural labourer or mill-hand, trained from infancy in Guild schools, some insight into Literature, Science and Art—­and tastes which his easy position would leave him free to cultivate.

So far the plan was simple.  It was not a colony—­but merely the working of existing industries in a certain way.  Anticipating further development of the scheme, Ruskin looked forward to a guild coinage, as pretty as the Florentines had; a costume as becoming as the Swiss:  and other Platonically devised details, which were not the essentials of the proposal, and never came into operation.  But some of his plans were actually realised.

The chief objects of “St. George” come under three heads, as we have just noticed:  agricultural, industrial, and educational.  The actual schools would not be needed until the farms and mills had been so far established as to secure a permanent attendance.  But meanwhile provision was being made for them, both in literature and in art.  The “Bibliotheca Pastorum,” was to be a comprehensive little library—­far less than the 100 books of the Pall Mall Gazette—­and yet bringing before the St. George’s workman standard and serious writing of all times.  It was to include, in separate volumes, the Books of Moses and the Psalms of David and the Revelation of St. John.  Of Greek, the Economist of Xenophon, and Hesiod, which Ruskin undertook to translate into prose.  Of Latin the first two Georgics and sixth AEneid of Virgil, in Gawain Douglas’ translation.  Dante; Chaucer, excluding the “Canterbury Tales”—­but including the “Romance of the Rose”; Gotthelf’s “Ulric the Farmer,” from the French version which Ruskin had loved ever since his father used to read it him on their first tours in Switzerland; and an early English history by an Oxford friend.  Later were published Sir Philip Sidney’s psalter, and Ruskin’s own biography of Sir Herbert Edwardes, under the title of “A Knight’s Faith.”