Colloquy 5. Decay Of The Feudal System.--Edward VI.--Alfred

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_ 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 company you like, at a time when you were expecting it.

_Montesinos_.--And is this all?

_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."

_Montesinos_.--You were saying that the evil of a vagrant and brutalised 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 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 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 villenage, 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 illustration from foreign institutions, they have become a caste. But during two centuries the evil appears to have decreased. Why was this?

_Sir Thomas More_.--Because it was perceived to be an evil, and could never at any time be mistaken for a healthful symptom. And because circumstances tended to suspend its progress. The habits of these unhappy persons being at first wholly predatory, the laws proclaimed a sort of crusade against them, and great and inhuman riddance was made by the executioner. Foreign service opened a drain in the succeeding reigns: many also were drawn off by the spirit of maritime adventure, preferring the high seas to the high way, as a safer course of plundering. Then came an age of civil war, with its large demand for human life. Meanwhile as the old arrangements of society crumbled and decayed new ones were formed. The ancient fabric was repaired in some parts and modernised in others. And from the time of the Restoration the people supposed their institutions to be stable because after long and violent convulsions they found themselves at rest, and the transition which was then going on was slow, silent, and unperceived. The process of converting slaves and villeins into servants and free peasantry had ended; that of raising a manufacturing populace and converting peasantry into poor was but begun; and it proceeded slowly for a full hundred years.

_Montesinos_.--Those hundred years were the happiest which England has ever known.

_Sir Thomas More_.--Perhaps so: [Greek text].

_Montesinos_.--With the exception of the efforts which were made for restoring the exiled family of the Stuarts they were years of quiet uniform prosperity and advancement. The morals of the country recovered from the contagion which Charles II. imported from France, and for which Puritanism had prepared the people. Visitations of pestilence were suspended. Sectarians enjoyed full toleration, and were contented. The Church proved itself worthy of the victory which it had obtained. The Constitution, after one great but short struggle, was well balanced and defined; and if the progress of art, science, and literature was not brilliant, it was steady, and the way for a brighter career was prepared.

_Sir Thomas More_.--The way was prepared meantime for evil as well as for good. You were retrograde in sound policy, sound philosophy and sound learning. Our business at present is wholly with the first. Because your policy, defective as it was at the best, had been retrograde, discoveries in physics, and advances in mechanical science which would have produced nothing but good in Utopia, became as injurious to the weal of the nation as they were instrumental to its wealth. But such had your system imperceptibly become, and such were your statesmen, that the wealth of nations was considered as the sole measure of their prosperity.

_Montesinos_.--In feudal ages the object of those monarchs who had any determinate object in view was either to extend their dominions by conquest from their neighbours, or to increase their authority at home by breaking the power of a turbulent nobility. In commercial ages the great and sole object of government, when not engaged in war, was to augment its revenues, for the purpose of supporting the charges which former wars had induced, or which the apprehension of fresh ones rendered necessary. And thus it has been, that of the two main ends of government, which are the security of the subjects and the improvement of the nation, the latter has never been seriously attempted, scarcely indeed taken into consideration; and the former imperfectly attained.

_Sir Thomas More_.--Fail not, however, I entreat you, to bear in mind that this has not been the fault of your rulers at any time. It has been their misfortune--an original sin in the constitution of the society wherein they were born. Circumstances which they did not make and could not control have impelled them onward in ways which neither for themselves nor the nation were ways of pleasantness and peace.

_Montesinos_.--There is one beautiful exception--Edward VI.

"That blessed Prince whose saintly name might move
The understanding heart to tears of reverent love."

He would have struck into the right course.

_Sir Thomas More_.--You have a Catholic feeling concerning saints, Montesinos, though you look for them in the Protestant calendar. Edward deserves to be remembered with that feeling. But had his life been prolonged to the full age of man it would not have been in his power to remedy the evil which had been done in his father's reign and during his own minority. To have effected that would have required a strength and obduracy of character incompatible with his meek and innocent nature. In intellect and attainments he kept pace with his age, a more stirring and intellectual one than any which had gone before it: but in the wisdom of the heart he was far beyond that age, or indeed any that has succeeded it. It cannot be said of him as of Henry of Windsor, that he was fitter for a cloister than a throne, but he was fitter for a heavenly crown than a terrestrial one. This country was not worthy of him!--scarcely this earth!

_Montesinos_.--There is a homely verse common in village churchyards, the truth of which has been felt by many a heart, as some consolation in its keenest afflictions:--

"God calls them first whom He loves best."

But surely no prince ever more sedulously employed himself to learn his office. His views in some respects were not in accord with the more enlarged principles of trade, which experience has taught us. But on the other hand he judged rightly what "the medicines were by which the sores of the commonwealth might be healed." His prescriptions are as applicable now as they were then, and in most points as needful: they were "good education, good example, good laws, and the just execution of those laws: punishing the vagabond and idle, encouraging the good, ordering well the customers, and engendering friendship in all parts of the commonwealth." In these, and more especially in the first of these, he hoped and purposed to have "shown his device." But it was not permitted. Nevertheless, he has his reward. It has been more wittily than charitably said that Hell is paved with good intentions: they have their place in Heaven also. Evil thoughts and desires are justly accounted to us for sin; assuredly therefore the sincere goodwill will be accounted for the deed, when means and opportunity have been wanting to bring it to effect. There are feelings and purposes as well as "thoughts,

--whose very sweetness yieldeth proof
That they were born for immortality."

_Sir Thomas More_.--Those great legislative measures whereby the character of a nation is changed and stamped are more practicable in a barbarous age than in one so far advanced as that of the Tudors; under a despotic government, than under a free one; and among an ignorant, rather than inquiring people. Obedience is then either yielded to a power which is too strong to be resisted, or willingly given to the acknowledged superiority of some commanding mind, carrying with it, as in such ages it does, an appearance of divinity. Our incomparable Alfred was a prince in many respects favourably circumstanced for accomplishing a great work like this, if his victory over the Danes had been so complete as to have secured the country against any further evils from that tremendous enemy. And had England remained free from the scourge of their invasion under his successors, it is more than likely that his institutions would at this day have been the groundwork of your polity.

_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, municipal 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 classes a mass 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 punish!

_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 coarse 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 institutions 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 God 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, institutions are fore-planned, and not, as everywhere in Europe, the slow and varying growth of circumstances. 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 accumulated for years, it became a task for Hercules to cleanse it. Alas, the age of heroes and demigods 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 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 poor- rates, 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 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 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.

_Sir Thomas More_.--Perhaps so. But three days were enough for the Fire of 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. _

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