Ruskin UNTO THIS LAST
A paraphrase
By : M. K. Gandhi
Translated into the Gujarati by : Valji Govindji Desai
Printed & Published by :
Jitendra T Desai
Navajivan Publishing House
Ahmedabad 380 014 (INDIA) Ruskin UNTO THIS LAST
www.mkgandhi.org Page
2
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
In a chapter in his Autobiography (Part IV, Chapter XVIII) entitled 'The Magic
Spell of a Book' Gandhiji tells us how he read Ruskin's Unto
This Last on the
twenty-four hours' journey from Johannesburg to Durban. 'The
train reached
there in the evening. I could not get any sleep that night.
I determined to
change my life in accordance with the ideals of the book....
I translated it later
into Gujarati, entitling it Sarvodaya.'
Sarvodaya is here re-translated into English, Ruskin's
winged words being
retained as far as possible.
At the end of that chapter Gandhiji gives us a summary of
the teachings of Unto
This Last as he understood it:
1. The good of the individual is contained in the good of
all.
2. A lawyer's work has the same value as the barber's, as
all have the same
right of earning their livelihood from their work.
3. A life of labour, i.e. the life of the tiller of the soil
and the
handicraftsman is the life worth living.
Nothing more need be said as regards the paraphrase of
Ruskin's four chapters,
but Gandhiji's conclusion (pp. 77-80), written as it was in
South Africa long
before he returned to India in 1915, is prophetic and fit to
be treasured by
India for all time to come. And the last paragraph of the
booklet is a pearl
beyond price.
V G. D.
2007, Bhadra vadi 5Ruskin UNTO THIS LAST
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[SECOND EDITION]
This is a reprint of the first edition except for a few
verbal alterations
suggested by my friend Shri Verrier Elwin who was good
enough to go through
the translation at my request.
V G. D.
Vasantapanchami, 2012Ruskin UNTO THIS LAST
www.mkgandhi.org Page
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INTRODUCTION
People in the West generally hold that the whole duty of man
is to promote the
happiness of the majority of mankind, and happiness is
supposed to mean only
physical happiness and economic prosperity. If the laws of
morality are broken
in the conquest of this happiness, it does not matter very
much. Again, as the
object sought to be attained is the happiness of the
majority, Westerners do
not think there is any harm if this is secured by
sacrificing a minority. The
consequences of this line of thinking are writ large on the
face of Europe.
This exclusive search for physical and economic well-being
prosecuted in
disregard of morality is contrary to divine law, as some
wise men in the West
have shown. One of these was John Ruskin who contends in
Unto This Last that
men can be happy only if they obey the moral law.
We in India are very much given nowadays to an imitation of
the West. It is
necessary to imitate the virtues of the West, but there is
no doubt that
Western standards are often bad, and every one will agree
that we should shun
all evil things.
The Indians in South Africa are reduced to a sorry plight.
We go abroad in order
to make money, and in trying to get rich quick, we lose
sight of morality and
forget that God will judge all our acts. Self-interest
absorbs our energies and
paralyzes our power of discrimination between good and evil.
The result is that
instead of gaining anything, we lose a great deal by staying
in foreign
countries; or at least we fail to derive full benefit from
it. Morality is an
essential ingredient in all the faiths of the world, but
apart from religion, our
common sense indicates the necessity of observing the moral
law. Only by
observing it can we hope to be happy, as Ruskin shows in the
following pages.
Socrates in Plato's Apology
1
gives us some idea of
our duty as men. And he was
as good as his word. I feel that Ruskin's Unto This Last is
an expansion of
Socrates' ideas; he tells us how men in various walks of
life should behave if
they intend to translate these ideas into action. What
follows is not a Ruskin UNTO THIS LAST
www.mkgandhi.org Page
5
translation of Unto This Last but a paraphrase, as a
translation would not be
particularly useful to the readers of Indian Opinion. Even
the title has not been
translated but paraphrased as Sarvodaya [the welfare of
all], as that was what
Ruskin aimed at in writing this book.
1
Gandhiji had published a summary of The Apology in Indian
Opinion before
Sarvodaya was written.
ምንም አስተያየቶች የሉም:
አስተያየት ይለጥፉ