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.