those principles
slavery is inconsistent, and therefore not to be tolerated, even in
speculation.

_Montesinos_.--Yet its fitness, as a commutation for other punishments,
is admitted by Michaelis (though he decides against it) to be one of the
most difficult questions connected with the existing state of society.
And in the age of the Revolution, one of the sturdiest Scotch republicans
proposed the reestablishment of slavery, as the best or only means for
correcting the vices and removing the miseries of the poor.

_Sir Thomas More_.--The proposal of such a remedy must be admitted as
full proof of the malignity of the disease. And in further excuse of
Andrew Fletcher, it should be remembered that he belonged to a country
where many of the feudal virtues (as well as most of the feudal vices)
were at that time in full vigour. But let us return to our historical
view of the subject. In feudal servitude there was no motive for
cruelty, scarcely any for oppression. There were no needy slave-owners,
as there are in commercial colonies; and though slaves might sometimes
suffer from a wicked, or even a passionate master, there is no reason to
believe that they were habitually over-tasked, or subjected to systematic
ill-treatment; for that, indeed, can only arise from avarice, and avarice
is not the vice of feudal times. Still, however, slavery is intolerable
upon Christian principles; and to the influence of those principles it
yielded here in England. It had ceased, so as even to be forgotten in my
youth; and villenage was advancing fast towards its natural extinction.
The courts decided that a tenant having a lease could not be a villein
during its term, for if his labour were at the command of another how
could he undertake to pay rent? Landholders had thus to choose between
rent and villenage, and scarcely wanted the Field of the Cloth of Gold at
Ardres to show them which they stood most in need of. And as villenage
disappeared, free labourers of various descriptions multiplied; of whom
the more industrious and fortunate rose in society, and became tradesmen
and merchants; the unlucky and the reprobate became vagabonds.

_Montesinos_.--The latter class appears to have been far more numerous in
your age than in mine.

_Sir Thomas More_.--Waiving for the present the question whether they
really were so, they appear to have been so partly in consequence of the
desperate wars between the houses of York and Lancaster