Note 86 — Chapter XXIV · EDUCATION AND THE SOCIAL PROBLEM—HISTORIC. EUROPE.
Reading edition
“Now, therefore, see briefly what it all comes to. First, you spend eighty millions of money in fireworks [war], doing no end of damage in letting them off.
“Then you borrow money to pay the firework-maker’s bill, from any gain-loving persons who have got it.
“And then, dressing your bailiff’s men in new red coats and cocked hats, you send them drumming and trumpeting into the fields, to take the peasants by the throat, and make them pay the interest on what you have borrowed, and the expense of the cocked hats besides.
“That is ‘financiering,’ my friends, as the mob of the money-makers understand it. And they understand it well. For that is what it always comes to, finally—taking the peasant by the throat. He must pay—for he only can. Food can only be got out of the ground, and all these devices of soldiership, and law, and arithmetic, are but ways of getting at last down to him, the furrow-driver, and snatching the roots from him as he digs.”—“Fors Clavigera,” Part II., p. 27. By John Ruskin, LL.D. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1882.