For some years past, Hall Caine has devoted himself to literary public affairs. He is Sir Walter Resant's best supporter in his noble efforts to protect authors and to advance their interests. His ability as a public speaker and a politician of letters is great, and in recognition of this he was asked--a most distinguished honor--in November of last year to open the Edinburgh Literary and Philosophical Institution for the winter session, his predecessors having been John Morley and Mr. Goschen. He is at this writing in America on behalf of the Authors' Society, in connection with the Canadian copyright difficulty. He possesses in a marked degree that sense of solidarity amongst men of letters in which most successful authors are so singularly lacking, and the great power with which his world-wide popularity has vested him is used by him rather in the general interest of the craft than to own advantage. His life in his home in Peel, in the midst of his family--the old parents, the pretty young wife, and the two bonny lads--is noble in its simplicity, a life of high thinking, when, his success and personal popularity being what they are, he has many temptations to worldliness. He attributes his success in part to the fact that he has always been a great reader of the Bible. "I think," he says, "that I know my Bible as few literary men know it. There is no book in the world like it, and the finest novels ever written fall far short in interest of the stories it tells. Whatever strong situations I have in my books are not of my creation, but are taken from the Bible. 'The Deemster' is the story of the prodigal son. 'The Bondman' is the story of Esau and Jacob, though in my version sympathy attaches to Esau. 'The Scapegoat' is the story of Eli and his sons, but with Samuel as a little girl. 'The Manxman' is the story of David and Uriah. My new book also comes out of the Bible, from a perfectly startling source." Hall Caine does not begin his books with a character or group of characters, like Dickens or Scott, nor with a plot, like Wilkie Collins, nor with a scene, like Black, but with an idea, a spiritual intent. In all his books the central motive is always the same. "It is," he says, "the idea of justice, the idea of a Divine Justice, the idea that righteousness always works itself out, that out of hatred and malice comes Love. My theory is that a novel, a piece of imaginative writing, must end with a sense of justice, must leave the impression that justice is inevitable. My theory is also--on the matters which divide novelists into realists and idealists--that the highest form of art is produced by the artist who is so far an idealist that he wants to say something and so far a realist that he copies nature as closely as he can in saying it."