After a decade of social writing and four years of intermittent planning, Ruskin launched a national fund in the inaugural Fors of January 1871. The idea had been emerging for some time. Writing in 1863 from the tranquillity of his Alpine retreat, Ruskin told Norton that whilst he wanted to remain there, the horrors of modernity were ever-present: ‘the peace in which I live at present is only as if I had buried myself in a tuft of grass in a battlefield wet with blood, for the cry of the earth about me is in my ears continually if I did not lay my head to the very ground’ (36.436–37). An inexorable movement towards social engagement during the 1860s shaped Guild ideas and made Ruskin a reluctant leader, sceptical of his abilities but unable to resist a call for help that in another 1863 letter to Norton he described as ‘a river of blood which can but sweep me down in the midst of its black clots, helpless’. He was ‘tormented between the longing for rest and for lovely life, and the sense of the terrific call of human crime for resistance and of human misery for help’ (36.450). Ruskin's social engagement was ‘vibrant with the anxious, corrosive conflict between self-denial and self-indulgence which darkened Ruskin's middle years and which culminated in an urge to sacrifice his energies, indeed his sanity, in the service of others’ (Rosenberg 1986, 119).