“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.