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.  What Winstanley discovered and proclaimed in the Seventeenth Century, Henry George rediscovered and again proclaimed in the Nineteenth Century, and that in tones which are still reverberating and producing their effects on social thought throughout the length and breadth of the civilised world, promising ultimately to produce a change in social conditions compared with which the abolition of slavery sinks into comparative insignificance.  It is no longer a question of the emancipation of a few chattel slaves, but of the whole human race.

Fundamental social laws and institutions, based upon inequality of rights, must necessarily produce inequality of conditions.  And all who impartially consider the question will be forced to admit that both Winstanley and Henry George trace the prevailing social inequality, the debauching wealth of the few and the degrading poverty of the many, to its true cause.  Nor can there be any doubt but that if Winstanley’s practical and efficacious remedy had been adopted, if the use of the Common Land had been secured to the Common People on equitable terms, the economic condition of the masses of the generations which succeeded him, the whole subsequent economic, social and political history of the English People, would have been very different; and they would not now, in the Twentieth Century, be fighting for, or more often whispering with bated breath concerning, those very reforms he so strenuously advocated over two hundred and fifty years ago.

Winstanley’s writings met with the fate that awaits all thought much in advance of the times in which it is given to the world.  They have been ignored and forgotten; and till very recently even his memory had vanished from the minds of his fellow-countrymen, to whose emancipation he unstintedly devoted his life.  Nor can we be surprised at this, when we consider the circumstances.  There can be little doubt but that his earlier writings were the quiver whence the early Quakers derived many of their arrows, their most pointed and consequently by their opponents most hated doctrines.  And yet the highly philosophic and rational attitude toward cosmological and theological speculations Winstanley attained to in his last pamphlet, placed before our readers in Chapter XVI., seems to us sufficiently to account for his having been ignored even by those who may have availed themselves of his earlier works, and hence that these, too, should have been gradually forgotten.