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 contempt 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.