y exists to-day--the competition which Christian
socialism will abolish--is simply a competition in taking; and in order
to abolish it, the strong men, when they have taken a fair share, have
but to stand aside, to become as though they were weak, and so give
others a chance equal to their own.

Here, indeed, we have a conception, or rather a vague picture, of the
facts of modern industry, and of human nature as connected with it,
which is worthy of a man from dreamland. Every detail mentioned is
false. Every essential detail is omitted. In the first place, the
disinterested inventor, from whose behaviour our author reasons, is
purely a figment of his own clerical brain. Inventors in actual life, as
every one knows who has had occasion to deal with them, are generally
distinguished by an insane desire for money, by the wildest
over-estimates of the wealth which their inventions will ultimately
bring them, or by a greed which will sell them for a trifle, provided
this be paid immediately. In the second place, inventions, even the
greatest, so long as they represent the power of invention merely, are
utterly deficient in all practical value. So long as they exist nowhere
except in the author's brain, or drawings, or in descriptions, or even
in the form of models, they might, so far as the world is concerned,
have never existed at all. In the former cases they are dreams; in the
last case they are toys. They are brought down into the arena of actual
life only when, like souls provided with bodies, they cease to be ideas
or toys, and become machines or contrivances manufactured on a
commercial basis; and in order to effect successfully this practical
transformation, countless processes and countless faculties are involved
other than those comprised in intellectual invention itself.

There are cases, no doubt, in which the practical talents necessary for
realising an invention and the faculty of invention itself coexist in
the same man; but the inventor, when this happens, is not an inventor
only. He is not only a master of ideas; he is a master of things and
men. Such a combination is, however, far from common. As a rule, if his
inventions are to be of any use to the world, the inventor must ally
himself with men of another type, and these are the very men whom the
author of "The Gospel for To-day" conceives of as simply monopolising
and "working for all they are worth" contrivances which would otherwise
have been given to