finest necklace
that money in New York could buy?" "That necklace," said Tiffany's
salesman to my informant, "will never be stolen so long as it's worn
like that, for no one in his senses will ever believe it's real." The
moral which I drew from this anecdote for the benefit of my fair
audience was that women, if not the producers of wealth, are the main
incentives to production, that if it were not for them half of the
civilized industries of the entire world would cease, and that the
Spirit of Commerce, looking at any well-dressed woman, might say, in the
words of Marlow, "This is the face that launched a thousand ships";
while the Spirit of Socialism could do nothing but "burn the topless
towers." In this way of putting the case there was perhaps some slight
exaggeration, but there is in it, at all events, more truth than
falsehood.

Another address--it took a more serious form--I delivered by special
request to a more comprehensive audience, in which ladies likewise
abounded. It was delivered in one of the theaters. The subject I was
asked to discuss was a manifesto which had just been issued by a
well-to-do cleric in favor of Christian Socialism. The argument of this
divine was interesting and certain parts of it were sound. Its fault was
that the end of it quite forgot the beginning. He began by admitting
that the great fortunes of to-day were due for the most part to the few
who possessed to an exceptional degree the talents by which wealth is
produced; but talents of this special class were, he said, wholly
unconnected with any moral desert. Indeed, the mere production of such
goods as are estimable in terms of money was, of all forms of human
activity, the lowest, and the men who made money were the last people in
the world who ought to be allowed to keep it. The demand of Socialism
was, he said, that this gross and despicable thing should be distributed
among other people. The special demand of Christian Socialism was that
the principal claimant on all growing wealth should be the Church. The
fault, he said, of the existing situation was due to the fathers of the
Constitution of the United States, who laid it down that one of the
primary rights of the individual was freedom to produce as much as he
could, and keep it; the true formula being, according to him, that
every man who produced appreciably more than his neighbors should be
either hampered in production or else deprived of his products. It was
not di