Excerpt from John Ruskin: Social Reformer A book which professes to be primarily an exposition of Mr. Ruskin's social teaching may seem at first sight to be needless and unprofitable. No master of impassioned prose has endowed his writings with more perspicuity of meaning and more force of utterance, or used a fuller liberty of reiteration in placing his chief thoughts before the reading public. And yet these very qualities of brilliance and amplitude have helped to hide from many the supreme value of Mr. Ruskin's criticism of life, especially in reference to social reform, by giving too great emphasis and attractiveness to unrelated individual thoughts, set in single jewelled sentences, or in purple patches, and by thus concealing the consistency of thought and feeling which underlay and gave intellectual unity and order to his work. Though Mr. Ruskin, like Matthew Arnold, would probably disclaim the title of a system-maker, as implying too mechanical a conception of his intellectual life, and though his mode of composition seldom leans towards severity of arrangement, yet no great modern thinker exhibits in his writings a more definite and conscious adjustment of ideas, both in the order of their growth and in the maintenance of their relations towards one another. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.