ed 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.

_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