Neither the Council of State nor the republican army had time or patience for Winstanley’s schemes, and the “Diggers” were dispersed with little trouble; but Winstanley’s religious teaching was to exercise considerable influence in the world when George Fox became its preacher, and his social teaching on the land question has thousands of disciples in Great Britain to-day. Gerrard Winstanley was born in Lancashire in 1609.[125] He seems to have settled in London as a small trader and to have lost what money he had in business--cheated he says, “in the thieving art of buying and selling, and by the burdens of and for the soldiery in the beginning of the war”--so that he was obliged “to accept of the good-will of friends to live a country life.” In the country Winstanley ponders the source of the ills around him, and, having some considerable gift of expression, gives utterance, in a number of pamphlets, to a cry for reform, and gathers followers. In December, 1648, Winstanley (or one of his friends) issued the earliest of the Digger publications under the title of “Light Shining in Buckinghamshire--A Discovery of the Main Ground, Original Cause of all the Slavery of the World, but chiefly in England. Presented by way of a Declaration of many of the Well-affected in that County, to all their poor oppressed Countrymen in England. And also to the consideration of the present army under the conduct of the Lord Fairfax.” A month later and Winstanley publishes his “New Law of Righteousness: Budding forth to restore the whole Creation from the Bondage of the Curse. Or a glimpse of the new Heaven and the new Earth, wherein dwells Righteousness.” Here, with a good deal of mystical religious phrasing (the author explains that when he was in a trance the message came to him), Winstanley proclaims his calling and unfolds his agrarian proposals: And when the Lord doth show unto me the place and manner, how He will have us that are called common people manure and work upon the common lands, I will then go forth and declare it by my action, to eat my bread by the sweat of my brow, without either giving or taking hire, looking upon the land as freely mine as another’s. There is to be no forcible expropriation of landlords: If the rich still hold fast to this propriety of Mine and Thine, let them labour their own lands with their own hands. And let the common people, that say the earth is _ours_, not _mine_, let them labor together, and eat bread together upon the commons, mountains, and hills. For as the enclosures are called such a man’s land, and such a man’s land, so the Commons and Heath are called the common people’s. And let the world see who labor the earth in righteousness, and those to whom the Lord gives the blessing, let them be the people that shall inherit the earth.