“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 God; the Globe runs round; the longest sunshine 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 masses, 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.
[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 substitute for the individual ownership of land a common ownership. 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 associates. 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 title:
“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: