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.

That the same fate should have befallen his political writings, his
noble and yet simple an