the world gratis. He does not see that, if men such
as the steel kings and the oil kings did not work inventions for all
they are worth, the inventions themselves would be practically worth
nothing.

Let the reader reflect on the astounding ignorance of the world, and
especially of the world of industry, which is betrayed with so much
naivete by this socialist of the Christian pulpit. He knows so little of
the commonest facts of history that he looks upon steel as a ready-made
product of nature, and all the mills of the steel trust as merely a
means of monopolising knives, bridges, rails, and locomotive-engines,
which the citizens of America would otherwise be able to take at will,
like a bevy of school-children helping themselves from a heap of apples.
He imagines that inventions, as they form themselves in the head of the
inventor, leap direct into use, without any intervening process; while
the inventor himself is a being so superior to the world he works in,
that the rapture of being allowed to work for it is the only reward he
covets, that he has never dreamed of such selfish things as profits, and
does not even know the meaning of a patent or a founder's share; and
that the oil kings and the steel kings and all other able men, will save
society by following in the footsteps of this chimera.

Such are the wild, childish, and disconnected ideas entertained by our
clerical author of the world which he proposes to reform; and he is in
this respect not peculiar. On the contrary he is a most favourable type
of Christian socialists generally; and Christian socialists, in respect
of their mental and moral equipment, are simply secular socialists of
the more modern and educated type, with their ignorances and credulities
accentuated, but not otherwise altered, by the solemnities of religious
language, and a vague religious sentiment which achieves a facile
intensity because it is never restrained by fact.

Socialists, in short, of all schools, are socialists because they are
ignorant of, or fail to apprehend, certain facts or principles of nature
and of human nature which are essential to the complicated process of
modern productive industry; or it is perhaps a truer way of putting the
case to say that they could not be socialists unless they were thus
ignorant. In this they resemble the devisers of perpetual motions, or
scientific and infallible systems for breaking the bank at a
roulette-table. In so far as they are s