frugal, a revenue exceeding tenfold the whole expenses of government under Charles I., and yet even with this enormous expenditure upon the poor it is not effected. I say nothing of those who perish for want of sufficient food and necessary comforts, the victims of slow suffering and obscure disease; nor of those who, having crept to some brick-kiln at night, in hope of preserving life by its warmth, are found there dead in the morning. Not a winter passes in which some poor wretch does not actually die of cold and hunger in the streets of London! With all your public and private eleemosynary establishments, with your eight million of poorrates, with your numerous benevolent associations, and with a spirit of charity in individuals which keeps pace with the wealth of the richest nation in the world, these things happen, to the disgrace of the age and country, and to the opprobrium of humanity, for want of police and order! ... You are silent!

MONTESINOS.

Some shocking examples occurred to me. The one of a poor Savoyard boy with his monkey starved to death in St. James's Park. The other, which is, if that be possible, a still more disgraceful case, is recorded incidentally in Rees's Cyclopædia under the word Monster.

It is only in a huge overgrown city that such cases could possibly occur.

SIR THOMAS MORE.

The extent of a metropolis ought to produce no such consequences. Whatever be the size of a bee-hive or an ant-hill, the same perfect order is observed in it.

MONTESINOS.

That is because bees and ants act under the guidance of unerring instinct.

SIR THOMAS MORE.

As if instinct were a superior faculty to reason! But the statesman, as well as the sluggard, may be told to "go to the ant and the bee, consider their ways and be wise!" It is for reason to observe and profit by the examples which instinct affords it.

MONTESINOS.

A country modelled upon Apiarian laws would be a strange Utopia! the bowstring would be used there as unmercifully as it is in the Seraglio,..to say nothing of the summary mode of bringing down the population to the means of subsistence. But this is straying from the subject. The consequences of defective order are indeed frightful, whether we regard the physical or the moral evils which are produced.

SIR THOMAS MORE.

And not less frightful when the political evils are contemplated! To the dangers of an oppressive and iniquitous order, such for example as exists where negro slavery is established, you are fully awake in England: but to those of defective order among yourselves, though they are precisely of the same nature, you are blind. And yet you have spirits among you who are labouring day and night to stir up a bellum servile, an insurrection like that of Wat Tyler, of the Jacquerie, and of the peasants in Germany. There is no provocation for this, as there was in all those dreadful convulsions of society: but there are misery and ignorance and desperate wickedness to work upon, which the want of order has produced. Think for a moment what London,.. nay, what the whole kingdom would be, were your Catilines to succeed in exciting as general an insurrection as that which was raised by one madman in your own childhood! Imagine the infatuated and infuriated wretches, whom not Spitalfields, St. Giles's, and Pimlico alone, but all the lanes and alleys and cellars of the metropolis would pour out;.. a frightful population, whose multitudes, when gathered together, might almost exceed belief! The streets of London would appear

to teem with them, like the land of Egypt with its plague of frogs: and the lava floods from a volcano would be less destructive than the hordes whom your great cities and manufacturing districts would vomit forth!

MONTESINOS.

Such an insane rebellion would speedily be crushed.

Perhaps so.

for the fire of

SIR THOMAS MORE.

But three days were enough

London. And be assured this

would not pass away without leaving in your records a memorial as durable and more dreadful!

MONTESINOS.

Is such an event to be apprehended?

SIR THOMAS MORE.

Its possibility at least ought always to be borne in mind. The French Revolution appeared much less possible when the Assembly of Notables was convoked; and the people of France were much less prepared for the career of horrors into which they were presently hurried.

116

COLLOQUY VI.

WALLA CRAG.-OWEN OF LANARK.

It is no wonder that foreigners, who form their notions of England from what they see in its metropolis, should give such dismal descriptions of an English November; a month when, according to the received opinion of continental writers, suicide comes as regularly in season with us as geese at Michaelmas, and green pease in June. Nothing indeed can be more cheerless and comfortless than a common November day in that huge overgrown city; the streets covered with that sort of thick greasy dirt, on which you are in danger of slipping at every step, and the sky concealed from sight by a dense, damp, oppressive, dusky atmosphere, composed of Essex fog and London smoke. But in the country November presents a very different aspect: there its soft, calm weather has a charm of its own; a stillness and serenity unlike any other season, and scarcely