Part 15 (2/2)
”You Lordly Foes, you will rejoice this news to hear and see.
Do so, go on; but we'll rejoice much more the Truth to see.
For by our hands Truth is declared, and nothing is kept back; Our faithfulness much joy doth bring, though victuals we may lack, This trial may our G.o.d see good, to try, not us, but you; That your profession of the Truth may prove either false or true.”
And after another and much worse specimen of his poetry, which we will spare our readers, he concludes as follows:
”And here I end, having put my Arm as far as my strength will go to advance Righteousness. I have writ; I have acted; I have Peace.
And now I must wait to see the Spirit do His own work in the hearts of others; and whether England shall be the first Land, or some other, wherein Truth shall sit down in triumph.
”But, O England, England, would G.o.d thou didst know the things that belong to thy peace before they be hid from thine eyes. The Spirit of Righteousness hath striven with thee, and doth yet strive with thee, and yet there is hope. Come in thou England, submit to righteousness before the voice go out, my Spirit shall strive no longer with flesh, and let not Covetousness make thee oppress the poor....
”Gentlemen of the Army, we have spoken to you; we have appealed to the Parliament; we have declared our Cause with all humility to you all; and we are Englishmen, your friends that stuck to you in your miseries, when those Lords of Manors that oppose us were wavering on both sides. Yet you have heard them, and answered their request to beat us off; and yet you would not afford us an answer.
”Yet Love and Patience shall lie down and suffer; let Pride and Covetousness stretch themselves upon their beds of ease, and forget the afflictions of Joseph, and persecute us for Righteousness'
sake, yet we will wait to see the issue. The Power of Righteousness is our G.o.d; the Globe runs round; the longest suns.h.i.+ne day ends in a dark night. Therefore to Thee, O Thou King of Righteousness, we do commit our cause. Judge Thou between us and them that strive against us, and those that deal treacherously with Thee and us; and do Thine own work, and help weak flesh in whom the Spirit is willing.”
”To thee, O thou King of Righteousness, we do commit our cause. Judge Thou, and help weak flesh in whom the Spirit is willing.” At this very hour the same prayer, the same cry for Justice, is still ascending to the throne of the King of Righteousness from the disinherited ma.s.ses, on whose shoulders the weight of our civilisation rests, and whom it presses down to helpless poverty, misery, and wretchedness, and who are still suffering from the same fundamental injustice against which, as we have seen, Gerrard Winstanley protested so eloquently over two hundred and fifty years ago.
FOOTNOTES:
[132:1] King's Pamphlets. British Museum, Press Mark, E. 587.
[133:1] In deference to prevailing conventionalities, we have ventured to alter this line.
[137:1] In the next chapter we shall learn something of those ”Diggers that have caused scandal,” and whose actions and views Winstanley found it necessary to disown.
CHAPTER XIII
A VINDICATION; A DECLARATION; AND AN APPEAL
”There is but one way to remove an evil--and that is to remove its cause. Poverty deepens as wealth increases, and wages are forced down while productive power grows, because land, which is the source of all wealth and the field of all labour, is monopolised.
To extirpate poverty, to make wages what justice demands they should be, the full earnings of the labourer, we must therefore subst.i.tute for the individual owners.h.i.+p of land a common owners.h.i.+p.
Nothing else will go to the cause of the evil--in nothing else is there the slightest hope.”--HENRY GEORGE, 1877-1878.
In the pamphlet we have considered in the previous chapter we heard that ”there have some come among the Diggers that have caused scandal,” and whose ways were disowned by Winstanley and his a.s.sociates. A few weeks subsequent to its publication, Winstanley judged it necessary publicly and formally to dissociate himself and his companions from them, which he did, in a manner quite in accordance with his own principles, in a small pamphlet of some eight pages, which was published under the t.i.tle:
”A VINDICATION OF THOSE WHOSE ENDEAVOURS IS ONLY TO MAKE THE EARTH A COMMON TREASURY, CALLED DIGGERS: Or Some Reasons given by them against the immoderate use of creatures, or the excessive community of women, called Ranting or rather Renting,”[146:1]
which, after a long condemnation of ”the Ranting Practice,” runs as follows:
”There are only two things I must speak as an advice in Love.
”First, Let everyone that intends to live in peace set themselves with diligent labour to till, dig and plow the common and barren land, to get them bread with righteous, moderate working, among a moderate-minded people; this prevents the evil of idleness, and the danger of the Ranting power.
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