Part 8 (2/2)
The ”Digger” movement was a shorter and much more obscure protest on behalf of the people than Lilburne's agitation for democracy; but it is notable for its social significance.
While Lilburne strove vigorously for political reforms that are still unaccomplished, Gerrard Winstanley preached a revolutionary gospel of social reform--as John Ball and Robert Ket had before him. But Winstanley's social doctrine allowed no room for violence, and included the non-resistance principles that found exposition in the Society of Friends.
Hence the ”Diggers,” preaching agrarian revolution; but denying all right to force of arms, never endangered the Commonwealth Government as Lilburne and the Levellers did.
Free Communism was the creed of more than one Protestant sect in the sixteenth century, and the Anabaptists on the Continent had been conspicuous for their experiments in community of goods and anarchist society.
Winstanley confined his teaching and practice to common owners.h.i.+p of land, pleading for the cultivation of the enclosed common lands, ”that all may feed upon the crops of the earth, and the burden of poverty be removed.”
There was to be no forcible expropriation of landlords.
”If the rich still hold fast to this propriety of Mine and Thine, let them labour their own lands with their own hands. And let the common people, that say the earth is _ours_, not _mine_, let them labour together, and eat bread together upon the commons, mountains, and hills.
”For as the enclosures are called such a man's land, and such a man's land, so the Commons and Heath are called the common people's. And let the world see who labour the earth in righteousness, and those to whom the Lord gives the blessing, let them be the people that shall inherit the earth.
”None can say that their right is taken from them. For let the rich work alone by themselves; and let the poor work together by themselves.”[62]
With the common owners.h.i.+p and cultivation of land, an end was to be made of all tyranny of man over his fellows.
[Ill.u.s.tration: JOHN HAMPDEN
_After the Engraving by G. Houbraken._]
”Leave off dominion and lords.h.i.+p one over another; for the whole bulk of mankind are but one living earth. Leave off imprisoning, whipping, and killing, which are but the actings of the curse. Let those that have hitherto had no land, and have been forced to rob and steal through poverty; henceforth let them quietly enjoy land to work upon, that everyone may enjoy the benefit of his creation, and eat his own bread with the sweat of his own brow.”
Winstanley's argument was quite simple:
”If any man can say that he makes corn or cattle, he may say, _That is mine_. But if the Lord made these for the use of His creation, surely then the earth was made by the Lord to be a Common Treasury for all, not a particular treasury for some.”
Two objections were urged against private property in land:
”First, it hath occasioned people to steal from one another. Secondly, it hath made laws to hang those that did steal. It tempts people to do an evil action, and then kills them for doing it.” It was a prolific age for pamphlets, the seventeenth century; the land teemed with preachers and visionaries, and Winstanley's writings never attracted the sympathy that was given to the fierce controversialists on theological and political questions.
Only when Winstanley and his Diggers set to work with spade and shovel on the barren soil of St. George's Hill, in Surrey, in the spring of 1649, was the attention of the Council of State called to the strange proceedings.
The matter was left to the local magistrates and landowners, and the Diggers were suppressed. A similar attempt to reclaim land near Wellingboro' was stopped at once as ”seditious and tumultuous.” It was quite useless for Winstanley to maintain that the English people were dispossessed of their lands by the Crown at the Norman Conquest, and that with the execution of the King the owners.h.i.+p of the Crown lands ought to revert to the people; Cromwell and the Council of State had no more patience with prophets of land nationalisation than with agitators of manhood suffrage. Indeed, the Commonwealth Government never took the trouble to distinguish between the different groups of disaffected people, but set them all down as ”Levellers,” to be punished as disturbers of the peace if they refused to obey authority.
Winstanley's last pamphlet was ”True Magistracy Restored,” an open letter to Oliver Cromwell, 1652, and after its publication Gerrard Winstanley and his Diggers are heard of no more.
To-day both Lilburne and Winstanley are to be recalled because the agitation for political democracy is always with us, and the question of land tenure is seen to be of profound importance in the discussion of social reform. No democratic statesman in our time can propose an improvement in the social condition of the people without reference to the land question, and no social reformer of the nineteenth century has had more influence or been more widely read and discussed than Henry George--the exponent of the Single Tax on Land Values.
Winstanley was very little heeded in his own day, but two hundred and fifty years later the civilised countries of the earth are found in deep debate over the respective rights of landowners and landless, and the relation of poverty to land owners.h.i.+p. State owners.h.i.+p, taxation of land values, peasant proprietors.h.i.+p, co-operative agriculture--all have their advocates to-day, but to Winstanley's question whether the earth was made ”for to give ease to a few or health to all,” only one answer is returned.
THE RESTORATION
Under the Commonwealth the landowners were as powerful as they had been under the monarchy. Enclosures continued. Social reform was not contemplated by Cromwell nor by Councils of State; democracy was equally outside the political vision of government. Church of England ministers were dispossessed in favour of Nonconformists, Puritanism became the established faith, Catholicism remained proscribed.
The interest in ecclesiastical and theological disputes was considerable, and Puritanism was popular with large numbers of the middle-cla.s.s. But to the ma.s.s of the people Puritanism was merely the suppression of further liberties, the prohibition of old customs, the stern abolition of Christmas revels and May-day games.
Lilburne did his best to get Cromwell to allow the people some responsibility in the choice of its rulers. Winstanley proposed a remedy for the social distress. To neither of these men was any concession made, and no consideration was given to their appeals.
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