cerned with the social than with the political question, and their aim, explained with passionate earnestness by Gerrard Winstanley, their leader, was to recover the rights to the land of the "younger brother," as he pathetically calls the poor. The diggers, he protests, desire to deprive no man of his enclosure. Let "the elder brothers" remain in their enclosures, but let the common people ("after all their taxes, free-quarter and loss of blood to recover England from the Norman yoke") have freedom to improve the commons and waste lands. That is all he demands. He knows that it is falsely reported that the diggers "have intent to fortify ourselves, and afterwards fight against others, and take away their goods from them, which is a thing we abhor." But why should the elder brother take all? Why should some be "lifted up in the chair of tyranny, and others trod under the footstool of misery, as if the earth were made for a few, and not for all?" The poor are driven by misery to steal, and then laws are made to hang them for stealing. "The earth was made by the Lord to be a Common Treasury for all, not a particular treasury for some. Leave off dominion and lordship one over another; for the whole hulk of mankind are but one living Earth." Winstanley is not ashamed to be called a leveller, for "Jesus Christ, the Saviour of all Men, is the Greatest, first and truest Leveller that ever was spoken of in the World; and He shall cause men to beat their swords into plough-shares, and their spears into pruning-hooks, and Nations shall learn war no more." Winstanley had written these things in many pamphlets, "yet my mind was not at rest, because nothing was acted." So on Sunday, 1st April 1649, he and his disciples began to dig on "Little Heath," on St George's Hill, between Cobham and Weybridge. They put forth a manifesto, which says: "The work we are going about is this, To dig up George's Hill and the waste grounds thereabouts, and to sow corn, and to eat our bread together by the sweat of our brows … that everyone that is born in the Land may be fed by the Earth his Mother that brought him forth."
Two hundred years after Winstanley, a clergyman of the Church of England, whose writings were long among the text-books of our universities, expressed in one of those very text-books opinions which might have been taken
