all what I want for men.  We shall go on saying that now to the end of our days.  But what we do all three want is something very alike.  Our different roads are parallel.  I aim at a growing collective life, a perpetually enhanced inheritance for our race, through the fullest, freest development of the individual life.  What they aim at ultimately I do not understand, but it is manifest that its immediate form is the fullest and freest development of the individual life.  We all three hate equally and sympathetically the spectacle of human beings blown up with windy wealth and irresponsible power as cruelly and absurdly as boys blow up frogs; we all three detest the complex causes that dwarf and cripple lives from the moment of birth and starve and debase great masses of mankind.  We want as universally as possible the jolly life, men and women warm-blooded and well-aired, acting freely and joyously, gathering life as children gather corn-cockles in corn.  We all three want people to have property of a real and personal sort, to have the son, as Chesterton put it, bringing up the port his father laid down, and pride in the pears one has grown in one’s own garden.  And I agree with Chesterton that giving—­giving oneself out of love and fellowship—­is the salt of life.

But there I diverge from him, less in spirit, I think, than in the manner of his expression.  There is a base because impersonal way of giving.  “Standing drink,” which he praises as noble, is just the thing I cannot stand, the ultimate mockery and vulgarisation of that fine act of bringing out the cherished thing saved for the heaven-sent guest.  It is a mere commercial transaction, essentially of the evil of our time.  Think of it!  Two temporarily homeless beings agree to drink together, and they turn in and face the public supply of drink (a little vitiated by private commercial necessities) in the public-house. (It is horrible that life should be so wholesale and heartless.) And Jones, with a sudden effusion of manner, thrusts twopence or ninepence (got God knows how) into the economic mysteries and personal delicacy of Brown.  I’d as soon a man slipped sixpence down my neck.  If Jones has used love and sympathy to detect a certain real thirst and need in Brown and knowledge and power in its assuaging by some specially appropriate fluid, then we have an altogether different matter; but the common business of “standing treat” and giving presents and entertainments is as proud and unspiritual as cock-crowing, as foolish and inhuman as that sorry compendium of mercantile vices, the game of poker, and I am amazed to find Chesterton commend it.