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.
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
substitute for the individual ownership of land a common ownership.
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