time that the comfortable classes made a short summary and confession of
what they have really done with the very poor Englishman. The dawn of the
mediaeval civilisation found him a serf; which is a different thing from a
slave. He had security; although the man belonged to the land rather than
the land to the man. He could not be evicted; his rent could not be
raised. In practice, it came to something like this: that if the lord
rode down his cabbages he had not much chance of redress; but he had the
chance of growing more cabbages. He had direct access to the means of
production.

Since then the centuries in England have achieved something different; and
something which, fortunately, is perfectly easy to state. There is no
doubt about what we have done. We have kept the inequality, but we have
destroyed the security. The man is not tied to the land, as in serfdom;
nor is the land tied to the man, as in a peasantry. The rich man has
entered into an absolute ownership of farms and fields; and (in the modern
industrial phrase) he has locked out the English people. They can only
find an acre to dig or a house to sleep in by accepting such competitive
and cruel terms as he chooses to impose.

Well, what would happen then, over the larger parts of the planet, parts
inhabited by savages? Savages, of course, would hunt and fish. That
retreat for the English poor was perceived; and that retreat was cut off.
Game laws were made to extend over districts like the Arctic snows or the
Sahara. The rich man had property over animals he had no more dreamed of
than a governor of Roman Africa had dreamed of a giraffe. He owned all
the birds that passed over his land: he might as well have owned all the
clouds that passed over it. If a rabbit ran from Smith's land to Brown's
land, it belonged to Brown, as if it were his pet dog. The logical
answer to this would be simple: Any one stung on Brown's land ought to be