Sir Thomas More.—­Because it was perceived to be an evil, and could never at any time be mistaken for a healthful symptom.  And because circumstances tended to suspend its progress.  The habits of these unhappy persons being at first wholly predatory, the laws proclaimed a sort of crusade against them, and great and inhuman riddance was made by the executioner.  Foreign service opened a drain in the succeeding reigns:  many also were drawn off by the spirit of maritime adventure, preferring the high seas to the high way, as a safer course of plundering.  Then came an age of civil war, with its large demand for human life.  Meanwhile as the old arrangements of society crumbled and decayed new ones were formed.  The ancient fabric was repaired in some parts and modernised in others.  And from the time of the Restoration the people supposed their institutions to be stable because after long and violent convulsions they found themselves at rest, and the transition which was then going on was slow, silent, and unperceived.  The process of converting slaves and villeins into servants and free peasantry had ended; that of raising a manufacturing populace and converting peasantry into poor was but begun; and it proceeded slowly for a full hundred years.

Montesinos.—­Those hundred years were the happiest which England has ever known.

Sir Thomas More.—­Perhaps so:  [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]

Montesinos.—­With the exception of the efforts which were made for restoring the exiled family of the Stuarts they were years of quiet uniform prosperity and advancement.  The morals of the country recovered from the contagion which Charles II. imported from France, and for which Puritanism had prepared the people.  Visitations of pestilence were suspended.  Sectarians enjoyed full toleration, and were contented.  The Church proved itself worthy of the victory which it had obtained.  The Constitution, after one great but short struggle, was well balanced and defined; and if the progress of art, science, and literature was not brilliant, it was steady, and the way for a brighter career was prepared.

Sir Thomas More.—­The way was prepared meantime for evil as well as for good.  You were retrograde in sound policy, sound philosophy and sound learning.  Our business at present is wholly with the first.  Because your policy, defective as it was at the best, had been retrograde, discoveries in physics, and advances in mechanical science which would have produced nothing but good in Utopia, became as injurious to the weal of the nation as they were instrumental to its wealth.  But such had your system imperceptibly become, and such were your statesmen, that the wealth of nations was considered as the sole measure of their prosperity.