by which it is brought within reach of the
consumers, of the by-products which reduce its price--all of them the
results of concentrated economic ability, and requiring from week to
week its constant and renewed application--the author of "The Gospel for
To-day" apparently knows nothing. The oil kings and the steel kings,
according to his conception of them, need merely refrain from the
exercise of their only distinctive power--that is to say, an exceptional
power of seizing; and every Christian socialist in New York and
elsewhere will have the same oil in his lamps that he has now, and a
constant supply of cutlery and all other forms of hardware, the sole
difference being that he will get them at half-price or for nothing, and
have the money thus saved to spend upon new enjoyments. And his
conception of ability, as connected with the output of steel and oil, is
his conception of ability as applied to the production of goods
generally.

He makes, however, one exception. There is, he admits, one form of
ability which does actually add to the wealth of the modern world, and
may possibly be credited with producing the largest part of it. This is
the faculty of invention. Here, at last, we seem to be listening to the
language of sober sense. But let us see what follows. Inventors, our
author proceeds, being the types of exceptional ability which is really
beneficent and productive, are precisely the men who afford us our
surest grounds for believing in the possibility of that moral conversion
which socialism proposes to effect among able men at large. For what, he
says, as a fact do we find the inventors doing? They invent, he says,
for the pure love of inventing, or else from a desire to do good to
their fellow creatures. The thought of money for themselves never enters
into their minds. The selfish desire for money makes its appearance only
when the strong man whose ability is merely acquisitive thrusts himself
on the scene, buys the inventors' inventions up, and then proceeds "to
work them for all they are worth." These mere seizers of wealth, these
appropriators of the inventions of others, need but to learn a lesson of
abnegation which the inventors have learned already, or rather a lesson
which is easier; for while these noble men, the inventors, have no wish
to take what they produce, the majority of able men, such as the steel
kings and the oil kings, need merely forbear to take. Competition, in
short, as it actuall