156 MY LIFE 



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 wilder- 

 ness for deer and grouse; which has stolen the commons 

 and filched the roadside wastes, which has driven the labour- 

 ing 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 bene- 

 ficiaries of this inhuman system who, when a partial restitu- 

 tion 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 

 only legalize, but justify our process of restitution. It will 

 justify it, because, unlike their laws, which always took from 

 the poor to give to the rich — to the very class which made 

 the laws — ours will only take from the superfluity of the rich, 



