straight from Winstanley. "The poor," says Archdeacon Paley in his "Moral Philosophy," "have a claim founded in the law of nature, which may be thus explained:—All things were originally common. No one being able to produce a charter from heaven, had any better title to a particular possession than his next neighbour. There are reasons for mankind agreeing upon a separation of this common fund: God, for these reasons, is presumed to have ratified it. But this separation was made and consented to, upon the expectation and condition that everyone should have left a sufficiency for his subsistence, or the means of procuring it … and therefore, when the partition of property is rigidly maintained against the claims of indigence and distress, it is maintained in opposition to the intention of those who made it, and to his, who is the supreme Proprietor of everything, and who has filled the world with plenteousness for the sustentation and comfort of all whom he sends into it." Paley, indeed, goes farther than Winstanley; for Winstanley was always most careful to disclaim any intention of taking that which belonged to the rich; but Paley says that "a man, in a state of extreme necessity, has a right to use another's property when it is necessary for his own preservation to do so; a right to take, without, or against the owner's leave, the first food, clothes, or shelter, he meets with, when he is in danger of perishing for want of them." And Paley is in accord, not only with all the great civil and religious moralists who went before him, but even with the law of England, which, as Bacon says, "chargeth no man with default where the act is compulsory … necessity carrieth a privilege in itself. Necessity is of three sorts: … first, of conservation of life; if a man steal viands to satisfy his present hunger, this is no felony nor larceny."[1] And the only authorities who deny this, do so on the ground that since the establishment of a Poor Law, no man can say he is in danger of starvation.
The poor diggers! They soon found that a parliament was much the same as a king, so far as privilege was
- ↑ Locke, as little a visionary as any man who ever lived, said: "God has not left one man so to the mercy of another, that he may starve him, if he pleases … no man could ever have a just power over the life of another by right of property in land or possessions."
