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 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