such cases could possibly occur.

_Sir Thomas More_.--The extent of a metropolis ought to produce no such
consequences. Whatever be the size of a bee-hive or an ant-hill, the
same perfect order is observed in it.

_Montesinos_.--That is because bees and ants act under the guidance of
unerring instinct.

_Sir Thomas More_.--As if instinct were a superior faculty to reason! But
the statesman, as well as the sluggard, may be told to "go to the ant and
the bee, consider their ways and be wise!" It is for reason to observe
and profit by the examples which instinct affords it.

_Montesinos_.--A country modelled upon Apiarian laws would be a strange
Utopia! the bowstring would be used there as unmercifully as it is in the
seraglio, to say nothing of the summary mode of bringing down the
population to the means of subsistence. But this is straying from the
subject. The consequences of defective order are indeed frightful,
whether we regard the physical or the moral evils which are produced.

_Sir Thomas More_.--And not less frightful when the political evils are
contemplated. To the dangers of an oppressive and iniquitous order,
such, for example, as exists where negro slavery is established, you are
fully awake in England; but to those of defective order among yourselves,
though they are precisely of the same nature, you are blind. And yet you
have spirits among you who are labouring day and night to stir up a
_bellum servile_, an insurrection like that of Wat Tyler, of the
Jacquerie, and of the peasants in Germany. There is no provocation for
this, as there was in all those dreadful convulsions of society: but
there are misery and ignorance and desperate wickedness to work upon,
which the want of order has produced. Think for a moment what London,
nay, what the whole kingdom would be, were your Catilines to succeed in
exciting as general an insurrection as that which was raised by one
madman in your own childhood! Imagine the infatuated and infuriated
wretches, whom not Spitalfields, St. Giles's, and Pimlico alone, but all
the lanes and alleys and cellars of the metropolis would pour out--a
frightful population, whose multitudes, when gathered together, might
almost exceed belief! The streets of London would appear to teem with
them, like the land of Egypt with its plague of frogs: and the lava
floods from a volcano would be less destructive than the hordes whom your
great cities and manufacturing districts wo