this to which no other country has attained.  Man, and man alone, is permitted to run wild.  You plough your fields and harrow them; you have your scarifiers to make the ground clean; and if after all this weeds should spring up, the careful cultivator roots them out by hand.  But ignorance and misery and vice are allowed to grow, and blossom, and seed, not on the waste alone, but in the very garden and pleasure-ground of society and civilisation.  Old Thomas Tusser’s coarse remedy is the only one which legislators have yet thought of applying.

Montesinos.—­What remedy is that?

Sir Thomas More.—­’Twas the husbandman’s practice in his days and mine: 

“Where plots full of nettles annoyeth the eye, Sow hempseed among them, and nettles will die.”

Montesinos.—­The use of hemp indeed has not been spared.  But with so little avail has it been used, or rather to such ill effect, that every public execution, instead of deterring villains from guilt, serves only to afford them opportunity for it.  Perhaps the very risk of the gallows operates upon many a man among the inducements to commit the crime whereto he is tempted; for with your true gamester the excitement seems to be in proportion to the value of the stake.  Yet I hold as little with the humanity-mongers, who deny the necessity and lawfulness of inflicting capital punishment in any case, as with the shallow moralists, who exclaim against vindictive justice, when punishment would cease to be just, if it were not vindictive.

Sir Thomas More.—­And yet the inefficacious punishment of guilt is less to be deplored and less to be condemned than the total omission of all means for preventing it.  Many thousands in your metropolis rise every morning without knowing how they are to subsist during the day, or many of them where they are to lay their heads at night.  All men, even the vicious themselves, know that wickedness leads to misery; but many, even among the good and the wise, have yet to learn that misery is almost as often the cause of wickedness.

Montesinos.—­There are many who know this, but believe that it is not in the power of human institutions to prevent this misery.  They see the effect, but regard the causes as inseparable from the condition of human nature.

Sir Thomas More.—­As surely as God is good, so surely there is no such thing as necessary evil.  For by the religious mind sickness and pain and death are not to be accounted evils.  Moral evils are of your own making, and undoubtedly the greater part of them may be prevented; though it is only in Paraguay (the most imperfect of Utopias) that any attempt at prevention has been carried into effect.  Deformities of mind, as of body, will sometimes occur.  Some voluntary castaways there will always be, whom no fostering kindness and no parental care can preserve from self-destruction; but if any are lost for want of care and culture, there is a sin of omission in the society to which they belong.