ing, and
killing, which are but the actings of the curse. Let those that have
hitherto had no land, and have been forced to rob and steal through
poverty; henceforth let them quietly enjoy land to work upon, that everyone
may enjoy the benefit of his creation, and eat his own bread with the sweat
of his own brow."

Winstanley's argument was quite simple:

"If any man can say that he makes corn or cattle, he may say, _That is
mine_. But if the Lord made these for the use of His creation, surely then
the earth was made by the Lord to be a Common Treasury for all, not a
particular treasury for some."

Two objections were urged against private property in land:

"First, it hath occasioned people to steal from one another. Secondly, it
hath made laws to hang those that did steal. It tempts people to do an evil
action, and then kills them for doing it." It was a prolific age for
pamphlets, the seventeenth century; the land teemed with preachers and
visionaries, and Winstanley's writings never attracted the sympathy that
was given to the fierce controversialists on theological and political
questions.

Only when Winstanley and his Diggers set to work with spade and shovel on
the barren soil of St. George's Hill, in Surrey, in the spring of 1649, was
the attention of the Council of State called to the strange proceedings.
The matter was left to the local magistrates and landowners, and the
Diggers were suppressed. A similar attempt to reclaim land near
Wellingboro' was stopped at once as "seditious and tumultuous." It was
quite useless for Winstanley to maintain that the English people were
dispossessed of their lands by the Crown at the Norman Conquest, and that
with the execution of the King the ownership of the Crown lands ought to
revert to the people; Cromwell and the Council of State had no more
patience with prophets of land nationalisation than with agitators of
manhood suffrage. Indeed, the Commonwealth Government never took the
trouble to distinguish between the different groups of disaffected people,
but set them all down as "Levellers," to be punished as disturbers of the
peace if they refused to obey authority.

Winstanley's last pamphlet was "True Magistracy Restored," an open letter
to Oliver Cromwell, 1652, and after its publication Gerrard Winstanley and
his Diggers are heard of no more.

To-day both Lilburne and Winstanley are to be recalled because the
agitation for political democracy is always with