Spirit of Commerce, looking at any well-dressed woman, might say, in the words of Marlow, "This is the face that launched a thousand ships"; while the Spirit of Socialism could do nothing but "burn the topless towers." In this way of putting the case there was perhaps some slight exaggeration, but there is in it, at all events, more truth than falsehood. Another address--it took a more serious form--I delivered by special request to a more comprehensive audience, in which ladies likewise abounded. It was delivered in one of the theaters. The subject I was asked to discuss was a manifesto which had just been issued by a well-to-do cleric in favor of Christian Socialism. The argument of this divine was interesting and certain parts of it were sound. Its fault was that the end of it quite forgot the beginning. He began by admitting that the great fortunes of to-day were due for the most part to the few who possessed to an exceptional degree the talents by which wealth is produced; but talents of this special class were, he said, wholly unconnected with any moral desert. Indeed, the mere production of such goods as are estimable in terms of money was, of all forms of human activity, the lowest, and the men who made money were the last people in the world who ought to be allowed to keep it. The demand of Socialism was, he said, that this gross and despicable thing should be distributed among other people. The special demand of Christian Socialism was that the principal claimant on all growing wealth should be the Church. The fault, he said, of the existing situation was due to the fathers of the Constitution of the United States, who laid it down that one of the primary rights of the individual was freedom to produce as much as he could, and keep it; the true formula being, according to him, that every man who produced appreciably more than his neighbors should be either hampered in production or else deprived of his products. It was not difficult to show, without passing the bounds of good humor, that the arguments of this semienlightened reformer were, in the end, like a snake whose head was biting off its tail.