Sir Thomas More or Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society Part 5

_Montesinos_.--If you allude to that part of the Saxon law which required that all the people should be placed under _borh_, I must observe that even those writers who regard the name of Alfred with the greatest reverence always condemn this part of his system of government.

_Sir Thomas More_.--It is a question of degree. The just medium between too much superintendence and too little: the mystery whereby the free will of the subject is preserved, while it is directed by the fore purpose of the State (which is the secret of true polity), is yet to be found out. But this is certain, that whatever be the origin of government, its duties are patriarchal, that is to say, parental: superintendence is one of those duties, and is capable of being exercised to any extent by delegation and sub-delegation.

_Montesinos_.--The Madras system, my excellent friend Dr. Bell would exclaim if he were here. That which, as he says, gives in a school to the master, the hundred eyes of Argus, and the hundred hands of Briareus, might in a state give omnipresence to law, and omnipotence to order. This is indeed the fair ideal of a commonwealth.

_Sir Thomas More_.--And it was this at which Alfred aimed. His means were violent, because the age was barbarous. Experience would have shown wherein they required amendment, and as manners improved the laws would have been softened with them. But they disappeared altogether during the years of internal warfare and turbulence which ensued. The feudal order which was established with the Norman conquest, or at least methodised after it, was in this part of its scheme less complete: still it had the same bearing. When that also went to decay, munic.i.p.al police did not supply its place. Church discipline then fell into disuse; clerical influence was lost; and the consequence now is, that in a country where one part of the community enjoys the highest advantages of civilisation with which any people upon this globe have ever in any age been favoured, there is among the lower cla.s.ses a ma.s.s of ignorance, vice, and wretchedness, which no generous heart can contemplate without grief, and which, when the other signs of the times are considered, may reasonably excite alarm for the fabric of society that rests upon such a base. It resembles the tower in your own vision, its beautiful summit elevated above all other buildings, the foundations placed upon the sand, and mouldering.

_Montesinos_.

"Rising so high, and built so insecure, Ill may such perishable work endure!"

You will not, I hope, come to that conclusion! You will not, I hope, say with the evil prophet--

"The fabric of her power is undermined; The Earthquake underneath it will have way, And all that glorious structure, as the wind Scatters a summer cloud, be swept away!"

_Sir Thomas More_.--Look at the populace of London, and ask yourself what security there is that the same blind fury which broke out in your childhood against the Roman Catholics may not be excited against the government, in one of those opportunities which accident is perpetually offering to the desperate villains whom your laws serve rather to protect than to punis.h.!.+

_Montesinos_.--It is an observation of Mercier's, that despotism loves large cities. The remark was made with reference to Paris only a little while before the French Revolution! But even if he had looked no farther than the history of his own country and of that very metropolis, he might have found sufficient proof that insubordination and anarchy like them quite as well.

_Sir Thomas More_.--London is the heart of your commercial system, but it is also the hot-bed of corruption. It is at once the centre of wealth and the sink of misery; the seat of intellect and empire: and yet a wilderness wherein they, who live like wild beasts upon their fellow-creatures, find prey and cover. Other wild beasts have long since been extirpated: even in the wilds of Scotland, and of barbarous, or worse than barbarous Ireland, the wolf is no longer to be found; a degree of civilisation this to which no other country has attained. Man, and man alone, is permitted to run wild. You plough your fields and harrow them; you have your scarifiers to make the ground clean; and if after all this weeds should spring up, the careful cultivator roots them out by hand. But ignorance and misery and vice are allowed to grow, and blossom, and seed, not on the waste alone, but in the very garden and pleasure-ground of society and civilisation. Old Thomas Tusser's coa.r.s.e remedy is the only one which legislators have yet thought of applying.

_Montesinos_.--What remedy is that?

_Sir Thomas More_.--'Twas the husbandman's practice in his days and mine:

"Where plots full of nettles annoyeth the eye, Sow hempseed among them, and nettles will die."

_Montesinos_.--The use of hemp indeed has not been spared. But with so little avail has it been used, or rather to such ill effect, that every public execution, instead of deterring villains from guilt, serves only to afford them opportunity for it. Perhaps the very risk of the gallows operates upon many a man among the inducements to commit the crime whereto he is tempted; for with your true gamester the excitement seems to be in proportion to the value of the stake. Yet I hold as little with the humanity-mongers, who deny the necessity and lawfulness of inflicting capital punishment in any case, as with the shallow moralists, who exclaim against vindictive justice, when punishment would cease to be just, if it were not vindictive.

_Sir Thomas More_.--And yet the inefficacious punishment of guilt is less to be deplored and less to be condemned than the total omission of all means for preventing it. Many thousands in your metropolis rise every morning without knowing how they are to subsist during the day, or many of them where they are to lay their heads at night. All men, even the vicious themselves, know that wickedness leads to misery; but many, even among the good and the wise, have yet to learn that misery is almost as often the cause of wickedness.

_Montesinos_.--There are many who know this, but believe that it is not in the power of human inst.i.tutions to prevent this misery. They see the effect, but regard the causes as inseparable from the condition of human nature.

_Sir Thomas More_.--As surely as G.o.d is good, so surely there is no such thing as necessary evil. For by the religious mind sickness and pain and death are not to be accounted evils. Moral evils are of your own making, and undoubtedly the greater part of them may be prevented; though it is only in Paraguay (the most imperfect of Utopias) that any attempt at prevention has been carried into effect. Deformities of mind, as of body, will sometimes occur. Some voluntary castaways there will always be, whom no fostering kindness and no parental care can preserve from self-destruction; but if any are lost for want of care and culture, there is a sin of omission in the society to which they belong.

_Montesinos_.--The practicability of forming such a system of prevention may easily be allowed, where, as in Paraguay, inst.i.tutions are fore-planned, and not, as everywhere in Europe, the slow and varying growth of circ.u.mstances. But to introduce it into an old society, _hic labor_, _hoc opus est_! The Augean stable might have been kept clean by ordinary labour, if from the first the filth had been removed every day; when it had acc.u.mulated for years, it became a task for Hercules to cleanse it. Alas, the age of heroes and demiG.o.ds is over!

_Sir Thomas More_.--There lies your error! As no general will ever defeat an enemy whom he believes to be invincible, so no difficulty can be overcome by those who fancy themselves unable to overcome it.

Statesmen in this point are, like physicians, afraid, lest their own reputation should suffer, to try new remedies in cases where the old routine of practice is known and proved to be ineffectual. Ask yourself whether the wretched creatures of whom we are discoursing are not abandoned to their fate without the highest attempt to rescue them from it? The utmost which your laws profess is, that under their administration no human being shall perish for want: this is all! To effect this you draw from the wealthy, the industrious, and the 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 pa.s.ses 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 poor- rates, with your numerous benevolent a.s.sociations, 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 Cyclopaedia 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 mult.i.tudes, 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.

_Sir Thomas More_.--Perhaps so. But three days were enough for the Fire of London. And be a.s.sured this would not pa.s.s 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 a.s.sembly of Notables was convoked; and the people of France were much less prepared for the career of horrors into which they were presently hurried.

COLLOQUY XIV.--THE LIBRARY.

I was in my library, making room upon the shelves for some books which had just arrived from New England, removing to a less conspicuous station others which were of less value and in worse dress, when Sir Thomas entered. You are employed, said he, to your heart's content. Why, Montesinos, with these books, and the delight you take in their constant society, what have you to covet or desire?

_Montesinos_.--Nothing, except more books.

_Sir Thomas More_.--

"_Crescit_, _indulgens sibi_, _dirus hydrops_."

_Montesinos_.--Nay, nay, my ghostly monitor, this at least is no diseased desire. If I covet more, it is for the want I feel and the use which I should make of them. "Libraries," says my good old friend George Dyer, a man as learned as he is benevolent, "libraries are the wardrobes of literature, whence men, properly informed, might bring forth something for ornament, much for curiosity, and more for use." These books of mine, as you well know, are not drawn up here for display, however much the pride of the eye may be gratified in beholding them, they are on actual service. Whenever they may be dispersed, there is not one among them that will ever be more comfortably lodged, or more highly prized by its possessor; and generations may pa.s.s away before some of them will again find a reader. It is well that we do not moralise too much upon such subjects.

"For foresight is a melancholy gift, Which bares the bald, and speeds the all-too-swift."

H. T.

But the dispersion of a library, whether in retrospect or in antic.i.p.ation, is always to me a melancholy thing.

_Sir Thomas More_.--How many such dispersions must have taken place to have made it possible that these books should thus be brought together here among the c.u.mberland mountains.

_Montesinos_.--Many, indeed; and in many instances most disastrous ones.

Not a few of these volumes have been cast up from the wreck of the family or convent libraries during the late Revolution. Yonder "Acta Sanctorum"

belonged to the Capuchins, at Ghent. This book of St. Bridget's Revelations, in which not only all the initial letters are illuminated, but every capital throughout the volume was coloured, came from the Carmelite Nunnery at Bruges. That copy of Alain Chartier, from the Jesuits' College at Louvain; that _Imago Primi Saeculi Societatis_, from their college at Ruremond. Here are books from Colbert's library, here others from the Lamoignon one. And here are two volumes of a work, not more rare than valuable for its contents, divorced, unhappily, and it is to be feared for ever, from the one which should stand between them; they were printed in a convent at Manila, and brought from thence when that city was taken by Sir William Draper; they have given me, perhaps, as many pleasurable hours (pa.s.sed in acquiring information which I could not otherwise have obtained), as Sir William spent years of anxiety and vexation in vainly soliciting the reward of his conquest.

About a score of the more out-of-the-way works in my possession belonged to some unknown person, who seems carefully to have gleaned the bookstalls a little before and after the year 1790. He marked them with certain ciphers, always at the end of the volume. They are in various languages, and I never found his mark in any book that was not worth buying, or that I should not have bought without that indication to induce me. All were in ragged condition, and having been dispersed, upon the owner's death probably, as of no value, to the stalls they had returned; and there I found this portion of them just before my old haunts as a book-hunter in the metropolis were disforested, to make room for the improvements between Westminster and Oxford Road. I have endeavoured without success to discover the name of their former possessor. He must have been a remarkable man, and the whole of his collection, judging of it by that part which has come into my hands, must have been singularly curious. A book is the more valuable to me when I know to whom it has belonged, and through what "scenes and changes" it has pa.s.sed.

_Sir Thomas More_.--You would have its history recorded in the fly-leaf as carefully as the pedigree of a racehorse is preserved.

_Montesinos_.--I confess that I have much of that feeling in which the superst.i.tion concerning relics has originated, and I am sorry when I see the name of a former owner obliterated in a book, or the plate of his arms defaced. Poor memorials though they be, yet they are something saved for a while from oblivion, and I should be almost as unwilling to destroy them as to efface the _Hic jacet_ of a tombstone. There may be sometimes a pleasure in recognising them, sometimes a salutary sadness.

Yonder Chronicle of King D. Manoel, by Damiam de Goes, and yonder "General History of Spain," by Esteban de Garibay, are signed by their respective authors. The minds of these laborious and useful scholars are in their works, but you are brought into a more personal relation with them when you see the page upon which you know that their eyes have rested, and the very characters which their hands have traced. This copy of Casaubon's Epistles was sent to me from Florence by Walter Landor. He had perused it carefully, and to that perusal we are indebted for one of the most pleasing of his Conversations; these letters had carried him in spirit to the age of their writer, and shown James I. to him in the light wherein James was regarded by contemporary scholars, and under the impression thus produced Landor has written of him in his happiest mood, calmly, philosophically, feelingly, and with no more of favourable leaning than justice will always manifest when justice is in good humour and in charity with all men. The book came from the palace library at Milan, how or when abstracted I know not, but this beautiful dialogue would never have been written had it remained there in its place upon the shelf, for the worms to finish the work which they had begun. Isaac Casaubon must be in your society, Sir Thomas, for where Erasmus is you will be, and there also Casaubon will have his place among the wise and the good. Tell him, I pray you, that due honour has in these days been rendered to his name by one who as a scholar is qualified to appreciate his merits, and whose writings will be more durable than monuments of bra.s.s or marble.

_Sir Thomas More_.--Is there no message to him from Walter Landor's friend?