ir
habitations, travelling with their wives and children to other
parts to get Relief, but could have none. That the Committees and
Justices of the Peace of Cumberland signed a certificate, that
there were Thirty Thousand Families that had neither seed nor bread
corn, nor money to buy either, and they desired a collection for
them, which was made, but much too little to relieve so great a
multitude."

(P. 404.) Under date May 1649:

"Letters from Lancashire of great scarcity of corn, and that the
famine was sore among them, after which the plague overspread
itself in many parts of the country, taking away whole families
together, and few escaped where any house was visited, and that the
Levellers got into arms, but were suppressed speedily by the
Governor."

(P. 421.) Under date August 1649:

"Letters of great complaints of the taxes in Lancashire: and that
the meaner sort threaten to leave their habitations, and their
wives and children to be maintained by the Gentry; that they can no
longer bear the oppression, to have the bread taken out of the
mouths of their wives and children by taxes; and that if an army of
the Turks came to relieve them, they will join them."

Under such circumstances we cannot be surprised that Winstanley's
revolutionary, though to our mind eternally true, doctrines, upholding
the equal claim of all to the use of the land, proclaimed as they were
with all the eloquence, zeal and fire of his noble spirit, should have
awakened an echo in the hearts of the more thoughtful, as well as of the
more necessitous, of his fellow-citizens. But all in vain. In his time,
as in our time, the Inward Light could not overcome the Outward
Darkness, nor Universal Love, which is Justice and Righteousness,
overcome Self Love, which is Covetousness. Then, as now, the Spirit of
Equity, of Reason and of Love was impotent when opposed by the power of
the Sword, of Force. And yet, and yet--more especially in view of the
thought to-day stirring advanced political circles in every
constitutionally governed country in the world--who dare maintain that
Winstanley lived in vain!

About a fortnight after the publication of his _Appeal to all
Englishmen_, Winstanley issued yet another pamphlet, of which, as it
contains nothing save what he had already better expressed in his other
writings, we need only quote the su