f in, and trust of,
the multitude. For Hallin, the divine originating life was realised and
manifested through the common humanity and its struggle, as a whole; for
Raeburn, only in the best of it, morally or intellectually; the rest
remaining an inscrutable problem, which did not, indeed, prevent faith,
but hung upon it like a dead weight. Such divisions, however, are among
the common divisions of thinking men, and had never interfered with the
friendship of these two in the least.

But the developing alienation between Hallin and hundreds of his
working-men friends was of an infinitely keener and sorer kind. Since he
had begun his lecturing and propagandist life, Socialist ideas of all
kinds had made great way in England. And, on the whole, as the
prevailing type of them grew stronger, Hallin's sympathy with them had
grown weaker and weaker. Property to him meant "self-realisation"; and
the abuse of property was no more just ground for a crusade which
logically aimed at doing away with it, than the abuse of other human
powers or instincts would make it reasonable to try and do away
with--say love, or religion. To give property, and therewith the fuller
human opportunity, to those that have none, was the inmost desire of his
life. And not merely common property--though like all true soldiers of
the human cause he believed that common property will be in the future
enormously extended--but in the first place, and above all, to
distribute the discipline and the trust of personal and private
possession among an infinitely greater number of hands than possess them
already. And that not for wealth's sake--though a more equal
distribution of property, and therewith of capacity, must inevitably
tend to wealth--but for the soul's sake, and for the sake of that
continuous appropriation by the race of its moral and spiritual
heritage.

How is it to be done? Hallin, like many others, would have
answered--"For England--mainly by a fresh distribution of the land."
Not, of course, by violence--which only means the worst form of waste
known to history--but by the continuous pressure of an emancipating
legislation, relieving land from shackles long since struck off other
kinds of property--by the assertion, within a certain limited range, of
communal initiative and control--and above all by the continuous private
effort in all sorts of ways and spheres of "men of good will." For all
sweeping uniform schemes he had the natural contem