The Parliament was soon called on to defend itself against more dangerous enemies. The country was groaning under the exhaustion of the civil war. For seven years it had been bleeding at every pore; and now that the war had ceased, the people began to utter aloud their complaints, which, if uttered before, had been drowned in the din of conflict. There was everywhere a terrible outcry against the burden of taxation; and famine and pestilence--the sure successors of carnage and spoliation--were decimating the people. In Lancashire and Westmoreland numbers were daily perishing, and the magistrates of Cumberland deposed that thirty thousand families in that county had neither seed- nor bread-corn, nor the means of procuring either. What rendered this state of things the more dangerous, was the turbulence of the Levellers. The principles of Republicanism which had borne on the heads of the army, threatened in turn to overwhelm them in their progress amongst the soldiers. It is easier to set in motion revolutionary ideas, than to say to them, "Thus far shall ye go and no farther." In all revolutions, the class which initiates them wishes to stop at the point that is most convenient to itself; but other classes beyond this line are equally anxious, and have an equal claim to the benefit of levelling principles. It is only power which limits their diffusion. The power now had passed from the king and the lords, and had centred in the leaders of the army. It was not convenient or desirable for them that it should go farther. But the soldiers and the lower officers, with John Lilburne at their head, claimed a Republic in its more popular sense. They read in the Bible, and preached from it in the field, that God was no respecter of persons; that human rights were as universal as the human race. They saw that Cromwell, Ireton, Harrison, and a few others were the men who ruled in the Parliament, the Council, and the Army; and they conceived that they were no longer seeking the common rights of the community, but the aggrandisement of themselves. Colonel John Lilburne was pouring out pamphlet upon pamphlet, and disseminating them through the ranks and through the people--"England's New Chains Discovered," "The Hunting of the Foxes from Triploe Heath to Whitehall by Five Small Beagles." These foxes were Cromwell, Ireton, Fairfax, etc., who had suppressed the mutiny at Triploe Heath--and the five beagles those who had been made to ride the wooden horse for their insubordination, that is, set upon a sharp three-cornered wooden machine, with weights or muskets tied to their feet. News came to Parliament that one Everard, a soldier passing for a prophet, and Winstanley, another, with thirty more, were assembled on St. George's Hill, near Cobham, in Surrey, and were digging the ground and planting it with roots and beans. They said they should shortly be four thousand, and invited all to come and help them, promising them meat, drink, and clothes.