as needful:  they were “good education, good example, good laws, and the just execution of those laws:  punishing the vagabond and idle, encouraging the good, ordering well the customers, and engendering friendship in all parts of the commonwealth.”  In these, and more especially in the first of these, he hoped and purposed to have “shown his device.”  But it was not permitted.  Nevertheless, he has his reward.  It has been more wittily than charitably said that Hell is paved with good intentions:  they have their place in Heaven also.  Evil thoughts and desires are justly accounted to us for sin; assuredly therefore the sincere goodwill will be accounted for the deed, when means and opportunity have been wanting to bring it to effect.  There are feelings and purposes as well as “thoughts,

- whose very sweetness yieldeth proof That they were born for immortality.”

Sir Thomas More.—­Those great legislative measures whereby the character of a nation is changed and stamped are more practicable in a barbarous age than in one so far advanced as that of the Tudors; under a despotic government, than under a free one; and among an ignorant, rather than inquiring people.  Obedience is then either yielded to a power which is too strong to be resisted, or willingly given to the acknowledged superiority of some commanding mind, carrying with it, as in such ages it does, an appearance of divinity.  Our incomparable Alfred was a prince in many respects favourably circumstanced for accomplishing a great work like this, if his victory over the Danes had been so complete as to have secured the country against any further evils from that tremendous enemy.  And had England remained free from the scourge of their invasion under his successors, it is more than likely that his institutions would at this day have been the groundwork of your polity.

Montesinos.—­If you allude to that part of the Saxon law which required that all the people should be placed under borh, I must observe that even those writers who regard the name of Alfred with the greatest reverence always condemn this part of his system of government.

Sir Thomas More.—­It is a question of degree.  The just medium between too much superintendence and too little:  the mystery whereby the free will of the subject is preserved, while it is directed by the fore purpose of the State (which is the secret of true polity), is yet to be found out.  But this is certain, that whatever be the origin of government, its duties are patriarchal, that is to say, parental:  superintendence is one of those duties, and is capable of being exercised to any extent by delegation and sub-delegation.

Montesinos.—­The Madras system, my excellent friend Dr. Bell would exclaim if he were here.  That which, as he says, gives in a school to the master, the hundred eyes of Argus, and the hundred hands of Briareus, might in a state give omnipresence to law, and omnipotence to order.  This is indeed the fair ideal of a commonwealth.