pt of the student--or
the moralist. To imagine that by nationalising sixty annual millions of
rent for instance you could make England a city of God, was not only a
vain dream, but a belittling of England's history and England's task. A
nation is not saved so cheaply!--and to see those energies turned to
land nationalisation or the scheming of a Collectivist millennium, which
might have gone to the housing, educating, and refining of English men,
women, and children of to-day, to moralising the employer's view of his
profit, and the landlord's conception of his estate--filled him with a
growing despair.

The relation of such a habit of life and mind to the Collectivist and
Socialist ideas now coming to the front in England, as in every other
European country, is obvious enough. To Hallin the social life, the
community, was everything--yet to be a "Socialist" seemed to him more
and more to be a traitor! He would have built his state on the purified
will of the individual man, and could conceive no other foundation for a
state worth having. But for purification there must be effort, and for
effort there must be freedom. Socialism, as he read it, despised and
decried freedom, and placed the good of man wholly in certain external
conditions. It was aiming at a state of things under which the joys and
pains, the teaching and the risks of true possession, were to be for
ever shut off from the poor human will, which yet, according to him,
could never do without them, if man was to be man.

So that he saw it all _sub specie aeternitatis_, as a matter not of
economic theory, but rather of religion. Raeburn, as they talked, shrank
in dismay from the burning intensity of mood underlying his controlled
speech. He spoke, for instance, of Bennett's conversion to Harry
Wharton's proposed bill, or of the land nationalising scheme he was
spending all his slender stores of breath and strength in attacking, not
with anger or contempt, but with, a passionate sorrow which seemed to
Raeburn preposterous! intolerable!--to be exhausting in him the very
springs and sources of a too precarious life. There rose in Aldous at
last an indignant protest which yet could hardly find itself words. What
help to have softened the edge and fury of religious war, only to
discover new antagonisms of opinion as capable of devastating heart and
affections as any _homoousion_ of old? Had they not already cost him
love? Were they also, in another fashion, to co