X] KINGTON AND RADNORSHIRE 157 



reverence and of which they considered themselves the special 

 defenders. They read in what they called TJie Word of 

 God, "Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay 

 field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed 

 alone in the midst of the earth ! " Yet this is what they were, 

 and are, constantly striving for, not by purchase only, but by 

 open or secret robbery. Again, they read in their holy 

 book, "The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is 

 Mine ; " and at every fiftieth year all land was to return to 

 the family that had sold it, so that no one could keep land 

 beyond the year of jubilee, the reason being that no man or 

 family should be permanently impoverished by the misdeeds 

 of his ancestors. But this part of the law they never obey. 



This all-embracing system of land-robbery, for which 

 nothing is too great and nothing too small ; which has 

 absorbed meadow and forest, moor and mountain, which has 

 appropriated most of our rivers and lakes and the fish that 

 live in them ; which often claims the very seashore and 

 rocky coasts of our island home, fencing them off from the 

 wayfarer who seeks the solace of their health-giving air and 

 wild beauty, while making the peasant pay for his seaweed 

 manure and the fisherman for his bait of shell-fish ; which 

 has desolated whole counties to replace men by sheep or 

 cattle, and has destroyed fields and cottages to make a 

 wilderness for deer and grouse ; which has stolen the com- 

 mons and filched the roadside wastes ; which has driven the 

 labouring poor into the cities, and has thus been the primary 

 and chief cause of the lifelong misery, disease, and early 

 death of thousands who might have lived lives of honest 

 toil and comparative well-being had they been permitted 

 free access to land in their native villages ; — it is the advocates 

 and beneficiaries of this inhuman system who, when a 

 partial restitution of their unholy gains is proposed, are the 

 loudest in their cries of " robbery " ! 



But all the robbery, all the spoliation, all the legal and 

 illegal filching, has been on their side, and they still hold the 

 stolen property. They made laws to legalize their actions, 

 and, some day, we, the people, will make laws which will not 



