It is difficult, though but a test of our own honesty and
sincerity, to give practical support to unpopular doctrines and
proposals which would tend to make these noble and elevating conceptions
into real, living realities, and to enforce us to act honestly,
equitably and righteously ourselves. Hence it is that even to-day those
who advocate any such doctrines, any such social change, are either
dismissed as impossible, utopian dreamers, or denounced as revolutionary
demagogues, as "prophets of iniquity," "preachers of immorality,"
"advocates of villany," as enemies of society, and so on; and if this
fails of its desired effects, other means are found by which their
influence is undermined and their teachings discredited in the minds of
those who more or less blindly follow in the wake of the "superior
classes," the privileged few and their more or less direct dependents.
Thus Society continues its troubled slumbers until--until the necessary
changes denied to peaceful reformers, to the thinkers of the race, may
be demanded, by revolutionary methods, by force, by those who know
themselves injured and oppressed, though they may be ignorant of the
means by which they are wronged.
It was, however, as a sincere and unswerving advocate of peaceful,
practical reforms, as a courageous and unflinching opponent of the use
of force, of the sword, even for righteous ends, that Winstanley
appealed to his own generation, as Henry George, Ruskin and Tolstoy
appeal to the present.
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