"_Facta est immensi copia mundi_."
But under the Tudors there existed no such means for disposing of the
ejected population, and except the few who could obtain places as
domestic servants, or employment as labourers and handicraftsmen
(classes, it must be remembered, for all which the employ was diminished
by the very ejectment in question), they who were turned adrift soon
found themselves houseless and hopeless, and were reduced to prey upon
that society which had so unwisely as well as inhumanly discarded them.
_Montesinos_.--Thus it is that men collectively as well as individually
create for themselves so large a part of the evils they endure.
_Sir Thomas More_.--Enforce upon your contemporaries that truth which is
as important in politics as in ethics, and you will not have lived in
vain! Scatter that seed upon the waters, and doubt not of the harvest!
Vindicate always the system of nature, in other and sounder words, the
ways of God, while you point out with all faithfulness
"what ills
Remediable and yet unremedied
Afflict man's wretched race,"
and the approbation of your own heart will be sufficient reward on earth.
_Montesinos_.--The will has not been wanting.
_Sir Thomas More_.--There are cases in which the will carries with it the
power; and this is of them. No man was ever yet deeply convinced of any
momentous truth without feeling in himself the power as well as the
desire of communicating it.
_Montesinos_.--True, Sir Thomas; but the perilous abuse of that feeling
by enthusiasts and fanatics leads to an error in the opposite extreme.
We sacrifice too much to prudence; and, in fear of incurring the danger
or the reproach of enthusiasm, too often we stifle the holiest impulses
of the understanding and the heart.
"Our doubts are traitors,
And make us lose the good we oft might win,
By fearing to attempt."
--But I pray you, resume your discourse. The monasteries were probably
the chief palliatives of this great evil while they existed.
_Sir Thomas More_.--Their power of palliating it was not great, for the
expenditure of those establishments kept a just pace with their revenues.
They accumulated no treasures, and never were any incomes more
beneficially employed. The great abbeys vied with each other in
architectural magnificence, in this more especially, but likewise in
every branch of liberal expenditure, giving employment to great numbers,
which was better than giving unearned food. They provided, as it became
them, for the old and helpless also. That they prevented the necessity
of raising rates for the poor by the copious alms which they distributed,
and by indiscriminately feeding the indigent, has been inferred, because
those rates became necessary immediately after the suppression of the
religious houses. But this is one of those hasty inferences which have
no other foundation than a mere coincidence of time in the supposed cause
and effect.
_Montesinos_.--For which you have furnished a proverbial illustration in
your excellent story of Tenterden Steeple and Goodwin Sands.
_Sir Thomas More_.--That illustration would have been buried in the dust
if it had not been repeated by Hugh Latimer at St. Paul's Cross. It was
the only thing in my writings by which he profited. If he had learnt
more from them he might have died in his bed, with less satisfaction to
himself and less honour from posterity. We went different ways, but we
came to the same end, and met where we had little expectation of meeting.
I must do him the justice to say that when he forwarded the work of
destruction it was with the hope and intention of employing the materials
in a better edifice; and that no man opposed the sacrilegious temper of
the age more bravely. The monasteries, in the dissolution of which he
rejoiced as much as he regretted the infamous disposal of their spoils,
delayed the growth of pauperism, by the corrodies with which they were
charged; the effect of these reservations on the part of the founders and
benefactors being, that a comfortable and respectable support was
provided for those who grew old in the service of their respective
families; and there existed no great family, and perhaps no wealthy one,
which had not entitled itself thus to dispose of some of its aged
dependants. And the extent of the depopulating system was limited while
those houses endured: because though some of the great abbots were not
less rapacious than the lay lords, and more criminal, the heads in
general could not be led, like the nobles, into a prodigal expenditure,
the burthen of which fell always upon the tenants; and rents in kind were
to them more convenient than in money, their whole economy being founded
upon that system, and adapted to it.
_Montesinos_.--Both facts and arguments were indeed strongly on your side
when you wrote against the supplication of beggars; but the form in which
you embodied them gave the adversary an advantage, for it was connected
with one of the greatest abuses and absurdities of the Romish Church.
_Sir Thomas More_.--Montesinos, I allow you to call it an abuse; but if
you think any of the abuses of that church were in their origin so
unreasonable as to deserve the appellation of absurdities, you must have
studied its history with less consideration and a less equitable spirit
than I have given you credit for. Both Master Fish and I had each our
prejudices and errors. We were both sincere; Master Fish would
undoubtedly have gone to the stake in defence of his opinions as
cheerfully as I laid down my neck upon the block; like his namesake in
the tale which you have quoted, he too when in Nix's frying-pan would
have said he was in his duty, and content. But withal he cannot be
called an honest man, unless in that sort of liberal signification by
which, in these days, good words are so detorted from their original and
genuine meaning as to express precisely the reverse of what was formerly
intended by them. More gross exaggerations and more rascally
mis-statements could hardly be made by one of your own thorough-paced
revolutionists than those upon which the whole argument of his
supplication is built.
_Montesinos_.--If he had fallen into your hands you would have made a
stock-fish of him.
_Sir Thomas More_.--Perhaps so. I had not then I learnt that laying men
by the heels is not the best way of curing them of an error in the head.
But the King protected him. Henry had too much sagacity not to perceive
the consequences which such a book was likely to produce, and he said,
after perusing it, "If a man should pull down an old stone wall, and
begin at the bottom, the upper part thereof might chance to fall upon his
head." But he saw also that it tended to serve his immediate purpose.
_Montesinos_.--I marvel that good old John Fox, upright, downright man as
he was, should have inserted in his "Acts and Monuments" a libel like
this, which contains no arguments except such as were adapted to
ignorance, cupidity, and malice.
_Sir Thomas More_.--Old John Fox ought to have known that, however
advantageous the dissolution of the monastic houses might be to the views
of the Reformers, it was every way injurious to the labouring classes. As
far as they were concerned, the transfer of property was always to worse
hands. The tenantry were deprived of their best landlords, artificers of
their best employers, the poor and miserable of their best and surest
friends. There would have been no insurrections in behalf of the old
religion if the zeal of the peasantry had not been inflamed by a sore
feeling of the injury which they suffered in the change. A great
increase of the vagabond population was the direct and immediate
consequence. They who were ejected from their tenements or deprived of
their accustomed employment were turned loose upon society; and the
greater number, of course and of necessity, ran wild.
_Montesinos_.--Wild, indeed! The old chroniclers give a dreadful picture
of their numbers and of their wickedness, which called forth and deserved
the utmost severity of the law. They lived like savages in the woods and
wastes, committing the most atrocious actions, stealing children, and
burning, breaking, or otherwise disfiguring their limbs for the purpose
of exciting compassion, and obtaining alms by this most flagitious of all
imaginable crimes. Surely we have nothing so bad as this.
_Sir Thomas More_.--The crime of stealing children for such purposes is
rendered exceedingly difficult by the ease and rapidity with which a hue
and cry can now be raised throughout the land, and the eagerness and
detestation with which the criminal would be pursued; still, however, it
is sometimes practised. In other respects the professional beggars of
the nineteenth century are not a whit better than their predecessors of
the sixteenth; and your gipsies and travelling potters, who, gipsy-like,
pitch their tents upon the common, or by the wayside, retain with as much
fidelity the manners and morals of the old vagabonds as they do the
_cant_, or pedlar's French, which this class of people are said to have
invented in the age whereof we are now speaking.
_Montesinos_.--But the number of our vagabonds has greatly diminished. In
your Henry's reign it is affirmed that no fewer than 72,000 criminals
were hanged; you have yourself described them as strung up by scores upon
a gibbet all over the country. Even in the golden days of good Queen
Bess the executions were from three to four hundred annually. A large
allowance must be made for the increased humanity of the nation, and the
humaner temper with which the laws are administered: but the new crimes
which increased wealth and a system of credit on one hand, and increased
ingenuity, and new means of mischief on the part of the depredators have
produced, must also be taken into the account. And the result will show
a diminution in the number of those who prey upon society either by open
war or secret wiles.
_Sir Thomas More_.--Add your paupers to the list, and you will then have
added to it not less than an eighth of your whole population. But
looking at the depredators alone, perhaps it will be found that the evil
is at this time more widely extended, more intimately connected with the
constitution of society, like a chronic and organic disease, 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 everywhere, 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 control. 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.