[Return to the Library Edition “The Veins of Wealth”]
The waters of the world go where they are required.... No human laws can withstand its flow. They can only guide it: but this, the leading trench and limiting mound can do so thoroughly, that it shall become water of life — the riches of the hand of wisdom; or, on the contrary, by leaving it to its own lawless flow, they may make it, what it has been too often, the last and deadliest of national plagues: water of Marah — the water which feeds the roots of all evil. [XVI, 60-61]
The biblical allusions of this passage form a meditation on Exodus — appropriately, because the structure of that book resembles the typological structure of Unto This Last, and also because Moses as lawgiver is also, by divine favor, the nourisher of his people. (By his various miraculous conversions — the rock that yields water, the almond rod that flowers, the dead land that provides manna, the bitter waters of Marah that turn sweet — Moses shows what any employer can do by the uses of wealth.) Wisdom, which we have encountered before in Ruskin, also becomes a form of nourishment ("the water of life," "the riches of the hand of wisdom"). (The imagery and meaning of Unto This Last comes closest here to The King of the Golden River, particularly in the sudden appearance halfway through each book of the wise figure capable of turning the dry land into abundance and revealing the true relationships between gold and life.) [209]
Bibliography
Sawyer, Paul. Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. [Complete text in The Victorian Web.]
Last modified 27 February 2019