ceived 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].

_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