The last conversation had left a weight upon me, which was not lessened
when I contemplated the question in solitude. I called to mind the
melancholy view which Young has taken of the world in his unhappy poem:
"A part how small of the terraqueous globe
Is tenanted by man! the rest a waste,
Rocks, deserts, frozen seas and burning sands,
Wild haunts of monsters, poisons, stings, and death.
Such is earth's melancholy map! But, far
More sad, this earth is a true map of man."
Sad as this representation is, I could not but acknowledge that the moral
and intellectual view is not more consolatory than the poet felt it to
be; and it was a less sorrowful consideration to think how large a
portion of the habitable earth is possessed by savages, or by nations
whom inhuman despotisms and monstrous superstitions have degraded in some
respects below the savage state, than to observe how small a part of what
is called the civilised world is truly civilised; and in the most
civilised parts to how small a portion of the inhabitants the real
blessings of civilisation are confined. In this mood how heartily should
I have accorded with Owen of Lanark if I could have agreed with that
happiest and most beneficent and most practical of all enthusiasts as
well concerning the remedy as the disease!
"Well, Montesinos," said the spirit, when he visited me next, "have you
recollected or found any solid arguments for maintaining that the
labouring classes, who form the great bulk of the population, are in a
happier condition, physical, moral, or intellectual, in these times, than
they were in mine?"
_Montesinos_.--Perhaps, Sir Thomas, their condition was better precisely
during your age than it ever has been either before or since. The feudal
system had well-nigh lost all its inhuman parts, and the worse inhumanity
of the commercial system had not yet shown itself.
_Sir Thomas More_.--It was, indeed, a most important age in English
history, and, till the Reformation so fearfully disturbed it, in many
respects a happy and an enviable one. But the process was then beginning
which is not yet completed. As the feudal system relaxed and tended to
dissolution the condition of the multitude was changed. Let us trace it
from earlier times! In what state do you suppose the people of this
island to have been when they were invaded by the Romans?
_Montesinos_.--Something worse than the Greeks of the Homeric age:
something better than the Sandwich or Tonga islanders when they were
visited by Captain Cook. Inferior to the former in arts, in polity, and,
above all, in their domestic institutions; superior to the latter as
having the use of cattle and being under a superstition in which, amid
many abominations, some patriarchal truths were preserved. Less
fortunate in physical circumstances than either, because of the climate.
_Sir Thomas More_.--A viler state of morals than their polyandrian system
must have produced can scarcely be imagined; and the ferocity of their
manners, little as is otherwise known of them, is sufficiently shown by
their scythed war-chariots, and the fact that in the open country the
path from one town to another was by a covered way. But in what
condition were the labouring classes?
_Montesinos_.--In slavery, I suppose. When the Romans first attacked the
island it was believed at Rome that slaves were the only booty which
Britain could afford; and slaves, no doubt, must have been the staple
commodity for which its ports were visited. Different tribes had at
different times established themselves here by conquest, and wherever
settlements are thus made slavery is the natural consequence. It was a
part of the Roman economy; and when the Saxons carved out their kingdoms
with the sword, the slaves, and their masters too, if any survived,
became the property of the new lords of the land, like the cattle who
pastured upon it. It is not likely even that the Saxons should have
brought artificers of any kind with them, smiths perhaps alone excepted.
Trades of every description must have been practised by the slaves whom
they found. The same sort of transfer ensued upon the Norman conquest.
After that event there could have been no fresh supply of domestic
slaves, unless they were imported from Ireland, as well as carried
thither for sale. That trade did not continue long. Emancipation was
promoted by the clergy, and slavery was exchanged for vassalage, which in
like manner gradually disappeared as the condition of the people
improved.
_Sir Thomas More_.--You are hurrying too fast to that conclusion.
Hitherto more has been lost than gained in morals by the transition; and
you will not maintain that anything which is morally injurious can be
politically advantageous. Vassalage I know is a word which bears no
favourable acceptation in this liberal age; and slavery is in worse
repute. But we must remember that slavery implies a very different state
in different ages of the world, and in different stages of society.
_Montesinos_.--In many parts of the East, and of the Mohammedan world, as
in the patriarchal times, it is scarcely an evil. Among savages it is as
little so. In a luxurious state more vices are called into action, the
condition of the slave depends more upon the temper of the owner, and the
evil then predominates. But slavery is nowhere so bad as in commercial
colonies, where the desire of gain hardens the heart--the basest
appetites have free scope there; and the worst passions are under little
restraint from law, less from religion, and none from public opinion.
_Sir Thomas More_.--You have omitted in this enumeration that kind of
slavery which existed in England.
_Montesinos_.--The slavery of the feudal ages may perhaps be classed
midway between the best description of that state and the worst. I
suppose it to have been less humane than it generally is in Turkey, less
severe than it generally was in Rome and Greece. In too many respects
the slaves were at the mercy of their lords. They might be put in irons
and punished with stripes; they were sometimes branded; and there is
proof that it has been the custom to yoke them in teams like cattle.
_Sir Thomas More_.--Are you, then, Montesinos, so much the dupe of words
as to account among their grievances a mere practice of convenience?
_Montesinos_.--The reproof was merited. But I was about to say that
there is no reason to think their treatment was generally rigorous. We
do not hear of any such office among them as that of the Roman _Lorarii_,
whose office appears by the dramatists to have been no sinecure. And it
is certain that they possessed in the laws, in the religion, and probably
in the manners of the country, a greater degree of protection than
existed to alleviate the lot of the Grecian and Roman slaves.
_Sir Thomas More_.--The practical difference between the condition of the
feudal slave, and of the labouring husbandman who succeeded to the
business of his station, was mainly this, that the former had neither the
feeling nor the insecurity of independence. He served one master as long
as he lived; and being at all times sure of the same sufficient
subsistence, if he belonged to the estate like the cattle, and was
accounted with them as part of the live stock, he resembled them also in
the exemption which he enjoyed from all cares concerning his own
maintenance and that of his family. The feudal slaves, indeed, were
subject to none of those vicissitudes which brought so many of the
proudest and most powerful barons to a disastrous end. They had nothing
to lose, and they had liberty to hope for; frequently as the reward of
their own faithful services, and not seldom from the piety or kindness of
their lords. This was a steady hope depending so little upon contingency
that it excited no disquietude or restlessness. They were therefore in
general satisfied with the lot to which they were born, as the
Greenlander is with his climate, the Bedouin with his deserts, and the
Hottentot and the Calmuck with their filthy and odious customs; and going
on in their regular and unvaried course of duty generation after
generation, they were content.
_Montesinos_.--"Fish, fish, are you in your duty?" said the young lady in
the Arabian tales, who came out of the kitchen wall clad in flowered
satin, and with a rod in her hand. The fish lifted up their heads and
replied, "Yes, yes; if you reckon, we reckon; if you pay your debts we
pay ours; if you fly we overcome, and are content." The fish who were
thus content, and in their duty, had been gutted, and were in the frying-
pan. I do not seek, however, to escape from the force of your argument
by catching at the words. On the other hand, I am sure it is not your
intention to represent slavery otherwise than as an evil, under any
modification.
_Sir Thomas More_.--That which is a great evil in itself become
relatively a good when it prevents or removes a greater evil; for
instance, loss of a limb when life is preserved by the sacrifice, or the
acute pain of a remedy by which a chronic disease is cured. Such was
slavery in its origin: a commutation for death, gladly accepted as mercy
under the arm of a conqueror in battle, or as the mitigation of a
judicial sentence. But it led immediately to nefarious abuses; and the
earliest records which tell us of its existence show us also that men
were kidnapped for sale. With the principles of Christianity, the
principles of religious philosophy--the only true policy, to which
mankind must come at last, by which alone all the remediable ills of
humanity are to be remedied, and for which you are taught to pray when
you entreat that your Father's kingdom may come--with those principles
slavery is inconsistent, and therefore not to be tolerated, even in
speculation.
_Montesinos_.--Yet its fitness, as a commutation for other punishments,
is admitted by Michaelis (though he decides against it) to be one of the
most difficult questions connected with the existing state of society.
And in the age of the Revolution, one of the sturdiest Scotch republicans
proposed the reestablishment of slavery, as the best or only means for
correcting the vices and removing the miseries of the poor.
_Sir Thomas More_.--The proposal of such a remedy must be admitted as
full proof of the malignity of the disease. And in further excuse of
Andrew Fletcher, it should be remembered that he belonged to a country
where many of the feudal virtues (as well as most of the feudal vices)
were at that time in full vigour. But let us return to our historical
view of the subject. In feudal servitude there was no motive for
cruelty, scarcely any for oppression. There were no needy slave-owners,
as there are in commercial colonies; and though slaves might sometimes
suffer from a wicked, or even a passionate master, there is no reason to
believe that they were habitually over-tasked, or subjected to systematic
ill-treatment; for that, indeed, can only arise from avarice, and avarice
is not the vice of feudal times. Still, however, slavery is intolerable
upon Christian principles; and to the influence of those principles it
yielded here in England. It had ceased, so as even to be forgotten in my
youth; and villenage was advancing fast towards its natural extinction.
The courts decided that a tenant having a lease could not be a villein
during its term, for if his labour were at the command of another how
could he undertake to pay rent? Landholders had thus to choose between
rent and villenage, and scarcely wanted the Field of the Cloth of Gold at
Ardres to show them which they stood most in need of. And as villenage
disappeared, free labourers of various descriptions multiplied; of whom
the more industrious and fortunate rose in society, and became tradesmen
and merchants; the unlucky and the reprobate became vagabonds.
_Montesinos_.--The latter class appears to have been far more numerous in
your age than in mine.
_Sir Thomas More_.--Waiving for the present the question whether they
really were so, they appear to have been so partly in consequence of the
desperate wars between the houses of York and Lancaster, partly because
of the great change in society which succeeded to that contest. During
those wars both parties exerted themselves to bring into the field all
the force they could muster. Villeins in great numbers were then
emancipated, when they were embodied in arms; and great numbers
emancipated themselves, flying to London and other cities for protection
from the immediate evils of war, or taking advantage of the frequent
changes of property, and the precarious tenure by which it was held, to
exchange their own servile condition for a station of freedom with all
its hopes and chances. This took place to a great extent, and the
probabilities of success were greatly in their favour; for whatever may
have been practised in earlier and ruder times, in that age they
certainly were not branded like cattle, according to the usage of your
sugar islands.
_Montesinos_.--A planter, who notwithstanding this curious specimen of
his taste and sensibility, was a man of humane studies and humane
feelings, describes the refined and elegant manner in which the operation
is performed, by way of mitigating the indignation which such a usage
ought to excite. He assures us that the stamp is not a branding iron,
but a silver instrument; and that it is heated not in the fire, but over
the flame of spirits of wine.
_Sir Thomas More_.--Excellent planter! worthy to have been flogged at a
gilt whipping-post with a scourge of gold thread! The practice of
marking slaves had fallen into disuse; probably it was only used at first
with captives, or with those who were newly-purchased from a distant
country, never with those born upon the soil. And there was no means of
raising a hue and cry after a runaway slave so effectually as is done by
your colonial gazettes, the only productions of the British colonial
press.
_Montesinos_.--Include, I pray you, in the former part of your censure
the journals of the United States, the land of democracy and equal
rights.
_Sir Thomas More_.--How much more honourable was the tendency of our
laws, and of national feeling in those days, which you perhaps as well as
your trans-Atlantic brethren have been accustomed to think barbarous,
when compared with this your own age of reason and liberality! The
master who killed his slave was as liable to punishment as if he had
killed a freeman. Instead of impeding enfranchisement, the laws, as well
as the public feeling, encouraged it. If a villein who had fled from his
lord remained a year and a day unclaimed upon the King's demesne lands,
or in any privileged town, he became free. All doubtful cases were
decided _in favorem libertatis_. Even the established maxim in law,
_partus sequitur ventrem_, was set aside in favour of liberty; the child
of a neif was free if the father were a freeman, or if it were
illegitimate, in which case it was settled that the free condition of the
father should always be presumed.
_Montesinos_.--Such a principle must surely have tended to increase the
illegitimate population.
_Sir Thomas More_.--That inference is drawn from the morals of your own
age, and the pernicious effect of your poor laws as they are now
thoroughly understood and deliberately acted upon by a race who are
thinking always of their imaginary rights, and never of their duties. You
forget the efficacy of ecclesiastical discipline; and that the old Church
was more vigilant, and therefore more efficient than that which rose upon
its ruins. And you suppose that personal liberty was more valued by
persons in a state of servitude than was actually the case. For if in
earlier ages emancipation was an act of piety and benevolence,
afterwards, when the great crisis of society came on, it proceeded more
frequently from avarice than from any worthier motive; and the slave who
was set free sometimes found himself much in the situation of a household
dog that is turned into the streets.
_Montesinos_.--Are you alluding to the progress of inclosures, which from
the accession of the Tudors to the age of the Stuarts were complained of
as the great and crying evil of the times?
_Sir Thomas More_.--That process originated as soon as rents began to be
of more importance than personal services, and money more convenient to
the landlords than payments in kind.
_Montesinos_.--And this I suppose began to be the case under Edward III.
The splendour of his court, and the foreign wars in which he was engaged,
must have made money more necessary to the knights and nobles than it had
ever been before, except during the Crusades.
_Sir Thomas More_.--The wars of York and Lancaster retarded the process;
but immediately after the termination of that fierce struggle it was
accelerated by the rapid growth of commerce, and by the great influx of
wealth from the new found world. Under a settled and strong and vigilant
government men became of less value as vassals and retainers, because the
boldest barons no longer dared contemplate the possibility of trying
their strength against the crown, or attempting to disturb the
succession. Four-legged animals therefore were wanted for slaughter more
than two-legged ones; and moreover, sheep could be shorn, whereas the art
of fleecing the tenantry was in its infancy, and could not always be
practised with the same certain success. A trading spirit thus gradually
superseded the rude but kindlier principle of the feudal system: profit
and loss became the rule of conduct; in came calculation, and out went
feeling.
_Montesinos_.--I remember your description (for indeed who can forget
it?) how sheep, more destructive than the Dragon of Wantley in those
days, began to devour men and fields and houses. The same process is at
this day going on in the Highlands, though under different circumstances;
some which palliate the evil, and some which aggravate the injustice.
_Sir Thomas More_.--The real nature of the evil was misunderstood by my
contemporaries, and for some generations afterward. A decrease of
population was the effect complained of, whereas the greater grievance
was that a different and worse population was produced.
_Montesinos_.--I comprehend you. The same effect followed which has been
caused in these days by the extinction of small farms.
_Sir Thomas More_.--The same in kind, but greater in degree; or at least
if not greater, or so general in extent, it was more directly felt. When
that ruinous fashion prevailed in your age there were many resources for
the class of people who were thus thrown out of their natural and proper
place in the social system. Your fleets and armies at that time required
as many hands as could be supplied; and women and children were consumed
with proportionate rapidity by your manufactures.