Excerpt #33: the real criminals

The criminals of England are not the starving poor who steal food they cannot afford, but the rich, who devise clever financial systems that siphon away food produced by laborers and sell it for a profit in the cities or abroad. Cobbett put these ideas to the test upon meeting a group of angry farmers on the road, intent on punishing an elderly man for stealing cabbages. “Would you punish a man, a poor man … and, moreover, an old man,” Cobbett asks them, “when that Holy Bible, which I dare say you profess to believe in … teaches you that the hungry man may, without committing any offense at all, go into his neighbor’s vineyard and eat his fill of grapes?” When the men insist that this fellow is a “bad man,” Cobbett reminds them that “the Bible, in both Testaments, commands us to be merciful to the poor, to feed the hungry, to have compassion on the aged; and it makes no exception as to the ‘character’ of the parties.”

https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/environment/saving-the-commons