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 actually 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.