ouble that number:
establishments that were as vast and as magnificent and as beautiful as
your Belvoirs and your Chatsworths, your Wentworths and your Stowes. Try
to imagine the effect of thirty or forty Chatsworths in this county
the proprietors of which were never absent. You complain enough now
of absentees. The monks were never non-resident. They expended their
revenue among those whose labour had produced it. These holy men too
built and planted as they did everything else for posterity: their
churches were cathedrals; their schools colleges; their halls and
libraries the muniment rooms of kingdoms; their woods and waters, their
farms and gardens, were laid out and disposed on a scale and in a spirit
that are now extinct: they made the country beautiful, and the people
proud of their country."

"Yet if the monks were such public benefactors, why did not the people
rise in their favour?"

"They did, but too late. They struggled for a century, but they
struggled against property and they were beat. As long as the monks
existed, the people, when aggrieved, had property on their side. And
now 'tis all over," said the stranger; "and travellers come and stare at
these ruins, and think themselves very wise to moralize over time. They
are the children of violence, not of time. It is war that created these
ruins, civil war, of all our civil wars the most inhuman, for it was
waged with the unresisting. The monasteries were taken by storm, they
were sacked, gutted, battered with warlike instruments, blown up with
gunpowder; you may see the marks of the blast against the new tower
here. Never was such a plunder. The whole face of the country for a
century was that of a land recently invaded by a ruthless enemy; it was
worse than the Norman conquest; nor has England ever lost this character
of ravage. I don't know whether the union workhouses will remove it.
They are building something for the people at last. After an experiment
of three centuries, your gaols being full, and your treadmills losing
something of their virtue, you have given us a substitute for the
monasteries."

"You lament the old faith," said Egremont, in a tone of respect.

"I am not viewing the question as one of faith," said the stranger.
"It is not as a matter of religion, but as a matter of right, that I am
considering it: as a matter, I should say, of private right and public
happiness. You might have changed if you thought fit the religion of the
a