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 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 da