Sir Thomas More.—­And it was this at which Alfred aimed.  His means were violent, because the age was barbarous.  Experience would have shown wherein they required amendment, and as manners improved the laws would have been softened with them.  But they disappeared altogether during the years of internal warfare and turbulence which ensued.  The feudal order which was established with the Norman conquest, or at least methodised after it, was in this part of its scheme less complete:  still it had the same bearing.  When that also went to decay, municipal police did not supply its place.  Church discipline then fell into disuse; clerical influence was lost; and the consequence now is, that in a country where one part of the community enjoys the highest advantages of civilisation with which any people upon this globe have ever in any age been favoured, there is among the lower classes a mass of ignorance, vice, and wretchedness, which no generous heart can contemplate without grief, and which, when the other signs of the times are considered, may reasonably excite alarm for the fabric of society that rests upon such a base.  It resembles the tower in your own vision, its beautiful summit elevated above all other buildings, the foundations placed upon the sand, and mouldering.

Montesinos.

“Rising so high, and built so insecure,
Ill may such perishable work endure!”

You will not, I hope, come to that conclusion!  You will not, I hope, say with the evil prophet —

“The fabric of her power is undermined;
   The Earthquake underneath it will have way,
And all that glorious structure, as the wind
   Scatters a summer cloud, be swept away!”

Sir Thomas More.—­Look at the populace of London, and ask yourself what security there is that the same blind fury which broke out in your childhood against the Roman Catholics may not be excited against the government, in one of those opportunities which accident is perpetually offering to the desperate villains whom your laws serve rather to protect than to punish!

Montesinos.—­It is an observation of Mercier’s, that despotism loves large cities.  The remark was made with reference to Paris only a little while before the French Revolution!  But even if he had looked no farther than the history of his own country and of that very metropolis, he might have found sufficient proof that insubordination and anarchy like them quite as well.

Sir Thomas More.—­London is the heart of your commercial system, but it is also the hot-bed of corruption.  It is at once the centre of wealth and the sink of misery; the seat of intellect and empire:  and yet a wilderness wherein they, who live like wild beasts upon their fellow-creatures, find prey and cover.  Other wild beasts have long since been extirpated:  even in the wilds of Scotland, and of barbarous, or worse than barbarous Ireland, the wolf is no longer to be found; a degree of civilisation