Condense the text in its original language.

The Roots of Honour,

Five great intellectual professions, relating to daily necessities of life, have hitherto existed — three exist necessarily, in every civilised nation: The Soldier’s profession is to defend it. The Pastor’s to teach it. The Physician’s to keep it in health. The lawyer’s to enforce justice in it. The Merchant’s to provide for it. And the duty of all these men is, on due occasion, to die for it. “On due occasion,” namely: – The Soldier, rather than leave his post in battle. The Physician, rather than leave his post in plague. The Pastor, rather than teach Falsehood. The lawyer, rather than countenance Injustice. The Merchant-what is his “due occasion” of death? It is the main question for the merchant, as for all of us. For, truly, the man who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.

The Veins of Wealth

Every man of business knows by experience how money is made, and how it is lost.” Pardon me. Men of business do indeed know how they themselves made their money, or how, on occasion, they lost it. Playing a long-practised game, they are familiar with the chances of its cards, and can rightly explain their losses and gains. But they neither know who keeps the bank of the gambling-house, nor what other games may be played with the same cards, nor what other losses and gains, far away among the dark streets, are essentially, though invisibly, dependent on theirs in the lighted rooms. They have learned a few, and only a few, of the laws of mercantile economy; but not one of those of political economy.

The most covetous of mankind would, with small exultation, I presume, accept riches of this kind on these terms. What is really desired, under the name of riches, is essentially, power over men; in its simplest sense, the power of obtaining for our own advantage the labour of servant, tradesman, and artist; in wider sense, authority of directing large masses of the nation to various ends (good, trivial or hurtful, according to the mind of the rich person). And this power of wealth of course is greater or less in direct proportion to the poverty of the men over whom it is exercised, and in inverse proportion to the number of persons who are as rich as ourselves, and who are ready to give the same price for an article of which the supply is limited.

The whole question, therefore, respecting not only the advantage, but even the quantity, of national wealth, resolves itself finally into one of abstract justice. It is impossible to conclude, of any given mass of acquired wealth, merely by the fact of its existence, whether it signifies good or evil to the nation in the midst of which it exists. Its real value depends on the moral sign attached to it, just as sternly as that of a mathematical quantity depends on the algebraical sign attached to it. Any given accumulation of commercial wealth may be indicative, on the one hand, of faithful industries, progressive energies, and productive ingenuities: or, on the other, it may be indicative of mortal luxury, merciless tyranny, ruinous chicane. Some treasures are heavy with human tears, as an ill-stored harvest with untimely rain; and some gold is brighter in sunshine than it is in substance.

I can even imagine that England may cast all thoughts of possessive wealth back to the barbaric nations among whom they first arose; and that, while the sands of the Indus and adamant of Golconda may yet stiffen the housings of the charger, and flash from the turban of the slave, she, as a Christian mother, may at last attain to the virtues and the treasures of a Heathen one, and be able to lead forth her Sons, saying, — “These are My Jewels.”

Qui Judicatis Terram

‘Love justice you who govern the world’ or ‘Love justice, you judges on earth’)—suggests that justice is the proper object of love. It suggests that those engaged in making, promulgating, and enforcing the law should be moved, as legislators and justiciaries “He that oppresseth the poor to increase his riches, shall surely come to want.” And again, more strongly: “Rob not the poor because he is poor; neither oppress the afflicted in the place of business. For God shall spoil the soul of those that spoiled them.” The necessity of these laws of distribution or restraint is curiously over-looked in the ordinary political economist’s definition of his own “science.” He calls it, shortly, the “science of getting rich.” But there are many sciences, as well as many arts, of getting rich. Poisoning people of large estates, was one employed largely in the middle ages; adulteration of food of people of small estates, is one employed largely now. The ancient and honourable Highland method of blackmail; the more modern and less honourable system of obtaining goods on credit, and the other variously improved methods of appropriation — which, in major and minor scales of industry, down to the most artistic pocket-picking, we owe to recent genius, — all come under the general head of sciences, or arts, of getting rich. So that it is clear the popular economist, in calling his science the science par excellence of getting rich, must attach some peculiar ideas of limitation to its character. I hope I do not misrepresent him, by assuming that he means his science to be the science of “getting rich by legal or just means.” In this definition, is the word “just,” or “legal,” finally to stand? For it is possible among certain nations, or under certain rulers, or by help of certain advocates, that proceedings may be legal which are by no means just. for in this (as I believe in every other kind of slavery) the oppressor suffers at last more than the oppressed, and those magnificent lines of Pope, even in all their force, fall short of the truth — “Yet, to be just to these poor men of pelf, Each does but HATE HIS NEIGHBOUR AS HIMSELF: Damned to the mines, an equal fate betides The slave that digs it, and the slave that hides.”

The collateral and reversionary operations of justice in this matter I shall examine hereafter (it being needful first to define the nature of value); Those are extracts from Unto This last By John Ruskin here is the link to the full article