To Hallin, a popular teacher, interested above all in the mingled problems of ethics and economics, such an incident was naturally of extreme importance.  But he was himself opposed by deepest conviction, intellectual and moral, to the book and its conclusions.  The more its success grew, the more eager and passionate became his own desire to battle with it.  His platform, of course, was secured to him; his openings many.  Hundreds and thousands of men all over England were keen to know what he had to say about the new phenomenon.

And he had been saying his say—­throwing into it all his energies, all his finest work.  With the result that—­for the first time in eleven years—­he felt his position in the working-class movement giving beneath his feet, and his influence beginning to drop from his hand.  Coldness in place of enthusiasm; critical aloofness in place of affection; readiness to forget and omit him in matters where he had always hitherto belonged to the inner circle and the trusted few—­these bitter ghosts, with their hard, unfamiliar looks, had risen of late in his world of idealist effort and joy, and had brought with them darkness and chill.  He could not give way, for he had a singular unity of soul—­it had been the source of his power—­and every economical or social conviction was in some way bound up with the moral and religious passion which was his being—­his inmost nature.  And his sensitive state of nerve and brain, his anchorite’s way of life, did not allow him the distractions of other men.  The spread of these and other similar ideas seemed to him a question of the future of England; and he had already begun to throw himself into the unequal struggle with a martyr’s tenacity, and with some prescience of the martyr’s fate.

Even Bennett!  As he sat there alone in the dim lamp-light, his head bent over his knees, his hands hanging loosely before him, he thought bitterly of the defection of that old friend who had stood by him through so many lesser contests.  It was impossible that Bennett should think the schemes of that book feasible!  Yet he was one of the honestest of men, and, within a certain range, one of the most clear-headed.  As for the others, they had been all against him.  Intellectually, their opinion did not matter to him; but morally it was so strange to him to find himself on the side of doubt and dissent, while all his friends were talking language which was almost the language of a new faith!

He had various lecturing engagements ahead, connected with this great debate which was now surging throughout the Labour world of London.  He had accepted them with eagerness; in these weary night hours he looked forward to them with terror, seeing before him perpetually thousands of hostile faces, living in a nightmare of lost sympathies and broken friendships.  Oh, for sleep—­for the power to rest—­to escape this corrosion of an ever active thought, which settled and reconciled nothing!