“There is no Wealth but Life.”

Context & Editorial Note

This statement comes from John Ruskin’s Unto This Last, a set of essays first published in 1860 amid Victorian debates about political economy, labor, and the social purpose of production. In the work’s literary argument, Ruskin challenges definitions of wealth that measure prosperity solely through material accumulation or exchange. The passage presents a broader moral and human framework for considering value, while its interpretation remains grounded in the text’s nineteenth-century polemical setting.