and therefore more difficult of cure. Like other vermin they are numerous in proportion as they find shelter; and for this species of noxious beast, large towns and manufacturing districts afford better cover than the forest or the waste. The fault lies in your institutions, which in the time of the Saxons were better adapted to maintain security and order, than they are now. No man in those days could prey upon society, unless he were at war with it as an outlaw, a proclaimed and open enemy. Rude as the laws were, the purposes of law had not then been perverted: it had not been made a craft; it served to deter men from committing crimes, or to punish them for the commission; never to shield notorious, acknowledged, impudent guilt from condign punishment. And in the fabric of society, imperfect as it was, the outline and rudiments of what it ought to be were distinctly marked in some main parts, where they are now well-nigh utterly effaced. Every person had his place. There was a system of superintendence every where, civil as well as religious. They who were born in villenage, were born to an inheritance of labour, but not of inevitable depravity and wretchedness. If one class were regarded in some respects as cattle, they were at least taken care

of; they were trained, fed, sheltered and protected; and there was an eye upon them when they strayed. None were wild, unless they ran wild wilfully, and in defiance of controul. None were beneath the notice of the priest, nor placed out of the possible reach of his instruction and his care. But how large a part of your population are like the dogs at Lisbon and Constantinople, unowned, unbroken to any useful purpose, subsisting by chance or by prey, living in filth, mischief and wretchedness; a nuisance to the community while they live, and dying miserably at last! This evil had its beginning in my days; it is now approaching fast to its consummation.

95

COLLOQUY V.

DECAY OF THE FEUDAL SYSTEM.-EDWARD VI.

-ALFRED.

I HAD retired to my library, as usual, after dinner, and while I was wishing for the appearance of my ghostly visitor, he became visible. Behold me to your wish! said he. Thank you, I replied, for those precious words.

SIR THOMAS MORE.

Wherefore precious?

MONTESINOS.

Because they show that spirits who are in bliss perceive our thoughts;...that that communion with the departed for which the heart yearns in its moods of intensest feeling, is in reality attained when it is desired.

SIR THOMAS MORE.

You deduce a large inference from scanty premises. As if it were not easy to know without any super-human intuition that you would wish for the arrival of one whose com

pany you like, at a time when you were expecting it.

And is this all!

MONTESINOS.

SIR THOMAS MORE.

All that the words necessarily imply. For the rest, crede quod habeas et habes, according to the scurvy tale which makes my friend Erasmus a horse-stealer, and fathers Latin rhymes upon him. But let us take up the thread of our discourse; or, as we used to say in old times, begin it again and mend it, for it is neither mass nor matins."

66

MONTESINOS.

You were saying that the evil of a vagrant and brutalized population began in your days,* and is approaching to its consummation at this time.

SIR THOMAS MORE.

The decay of the feudal system produced it. When armies were no longer raised upon that system, soldiers were disbanded at the end of a war, as they are now; that is to say, they were turned adrift to fare as they could,...to

* Harrison says, "it is not yet full threescore years since this trade began; but how it hath prospered since that time it is easy to judge, for they are now supposed, of one sex and another, to amount not above 10,000 persons."- Holinshed, i. 309.

work if they could find employment; otherwise to beg, starve, live upon the alms of their neighbours, or prey upon a wider community in a manner more congenial to the habits and temper of their old vocation. In In consequence of the gains which were to be obtained by inclosures and sheep-farming, families were unhoused and driven loose upon the country. These persons, and they who were emancipated from villanage, or who had in a more summary manner emancipated themselves, multiplied in poverty and wretchedness. Lastly, owing to the fashion for large households of retainers, great numbers of men were trained up in an idle and dissolute way of life, liable at any time to be cast off when age or accident invalided them, or when the master of the family died; and then if not ashamed to beg, too lewd to work, and ready for any kind of mischief. Owing to these co-operating causes, a huge population of outcasts was produced, numerous enough seriously to infest society, yet not so large as to threaten its subversion.

MONTESINOS.

A derangement of the existing system produced them then; they are a constituent part of the system now. With you they were, as you have called them, outcasts: with us, to borrow an