for His waiting
people some other way than by you."

He then summarises the prevailing ills, and indicates their manifest and
immediate duty, as follows:

"The main thing that you should look upon is the Land, which calls
upon her children to be free from the entanglements of the Norman
Taskmasters. For one third part lies waste and barren, and her
children starve for want, in regard the Lords of Manors will not
suffer the poor to manure it.... The power is in your hands, the
Nations Representative, O let the first thing you do be this, to
set the land free. Let the Gentry have their enclosures free from
all enslaving entanglements whatsoever, and let the Common People
have the Commons and Waste Lands set free to them from all Norman
enslaving Lords of Manors. That so both Elder and Younger Brother,
as we spring successively one from another, may live free and quiet
one by and with another in this Land of our Nativity." "This
thing," he then boldly declares, "you are bound to see done, or at
least to endeavour it, before another Representative force you;
otherwise you cannot discharge your trust to God and man." And the
Appeal concludes with the following words: "Set the Land free from
oppression, and righteousness will be the Laws, Government, and
Strength of that People."

The Long Parliament, however, were too busy carrying English
civilisation into Ireland to heed his words. And yet surely there was
work enough for them to do in their own country, in which, as we have
already pointed out, since the reign of Henry the Seventh the condition
of the masses of the people had steadily worsened, and, as a natural
consequence, the number of beggars, "rogues and vagrants," despite
barbarous laws, involving their wholesale hanging, had steadily
increased. During the reign of James the First, in a pamphlet entitled
_Grievous Groans of the Poor_, published 1622, we hear the complaint
that "the number of the poor do daily increase." The only remedy the
then wise men of England could devise was to make the laws against them
still more severe. Consequently it was ordered that the first time such
people were apprehended they should be branded with the letter R, and if
subsequently again found begging or wandering they were "to suffer death
without benefit of Clergy." Yet such was their obstinacy that they still
increased in numbers; an