Such are the lessons which his life and teachings seem
to us to inculcate.
What Winstanley regarded, and what a steadily increasing number of
earnest students to-day regard, as a fundamental social truth was
revealed to him; and right well he gave expression, by words and deeds,
to his strong and well-grounded conviction of the equal claim of all to
the use of Mother Earth, to the use of the nation's natural home,
workhouse and storehouse, whence, by labour, everything necessary to
life and comfort can alone be derived. Winstanley realised, as they
to-day realise, that to admit in the abstract the Fatherhood of God and
the Brotherhood of Man, to admit the equal claim of all to life, and yet
to deny the equal claim of all to the use of God's Earth, to share in
those blessings which the great Father of all men has lavished upon His
children, and which form the only means by which life can be maintained,
is but hypocrisy and cant. The "rights of property," the financial
interests of the privileged classes, the Elder Brothers, the so-called
"power of the capitalists," may be based on and involved in the
recognition of the claim of the few to control the use of the Earth. But
the rights of man, the material, moral and spiritual interests of the
masses of mankind, their emancipation from the unjust economic
conditions to-day enthralling and impoverishing them, narrowing and
degrading their lives, depriving them of all real enjoyment of the
present, as of all hope for the future, hindering the advance of the
race to a nobler civilisation, to a higher plane of individual and
social life, depend upon our recognising and enforcing the claim of all
to the use of the Earth, and to share in the bounties of Nature, upon
equitable terms.
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