and thus diverted the simple peasant's attention. The great Puritan
lords created the Commonwealth, and destroyed the common land.
They saved their poorer countrymen from the disgrace of paying
Ship Money, by taking from them the plow money and spade money
which they were doubtless too weak to guard. A fine old English
rhyme has immortalized this easy aristocratic habit--

You prosecute the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common,
But leave the larger felon loose Who steals the common from the goose.

But here, as in the case of the monasteries, we confront the strange
problem of submission. If they stole the common from the goose,
one can only say that he was a great goose to stand it.
The truth is that they reasoned with the goose; they explained
to him that all this was needed to get the Stuart fox over seas.
So in the nineteenth century the great nobles who became
mine-owners and railway directors earnestly assured everybody
that they did not do this from preference, but owing to a newly
discovered Economic Law. So the prosperous politicians of our own
generation introduce bills to prevent poor mothers from going
about with their own babies; or they calmly forbid their tenants
to drink beer in public inns. But this insolence is not (as you
would suppose) howled at by everybody as outrageous feudalism.
It is gently rebuked as Socialism. For an aristocracy
is always progressive; it is a form of going the pace.
Their parties grow later and later at night; for they are trying
to live to-morrow.

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