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?