manoeuvre, but because he honestly believes that his programme is at
once Christian and practicable. How does it come about, then, that an
educated man like himself can believe in, and devote himself to
preaching, doctrines so visionary and preposterous? Let us examine his
arguments more minutely, and we shall presently find our answer.

By his vigorous denunciation of the doctrine that all men are born
equal, he shows us that he is capable to a certain extent of seeing
things as they are. But he sees them from a distance only, as though
they were a range of distant mountains whose aspect is falsely
simplified and constantly changed by clouds, and of whose actual
configuration he has no idea whatever. Thus when he contemplates the
inequalities of men's economic powers, these appear to him alternately
in two different forms--as genuine powers of production and as powers of
mere seizure--without his discerning where in actual life the operation
of the one ends and the operation of the other begins: and, though for a
certain special purpose he admits, as we shall see presently, that some
able men are able in the sense of being exceptionally productive, his
thoughts and his feelings alike through the larger part of his argument
are dominated by the idea that ability is merely acquisitive. This is
shown by the fact that the two great productive enterprises which he
singles out as typical of modern wealth-getting generally are held up by
him as examples of acquisition pure and simple. "The steel kings," he
says, "did not invent steel. The oil kings did not invent oil." These
are the gifts of nature, which nature offers to all; but the strong men
abuse their strength by pushing forward and seizing them, and compelling
their weaker brethren to pay them a tribute for their use. Steel and
refined oil he evidently looks upon as two natural products. He has no
suspicion that, as any school-boy could have told him, steel is an
artificial metal which, as manufactured to-day, is one of the most
elaborate triumphs of modern industrial genius. As to the oil by the
light of which he doubtless writes his sermons, he apparently thinks of
it as existing fit for use in a lake, and ready to be dipped up by
everybody in nice little tin cans, if only the oil kings having got to
the lake first, did not by their superior strength frighten other people
away. Of the actual history of the production of usable oil, of the vast
and marvellous system