Montesinos.—­They order these things better in Utopia.

Sir Thomas More.—­In this, as well as in some other points upon which we shall touch hereafter, the difference between you and the Utopians is as great as between the existing generation and the race by whom yonder circle was set up.  With regard to diseases and remedies in general, the real state of the case may be consolatory, but it is not comfortable.  Great and certain progress has been made in chirurgery; and if the improvements in the other branch of medical science have not been so certain and so great, it is because the physician works in the dark, and has to deal with what is hidden and mysterious.  But the evils for which these sciences are the palliatives have increased in a proportion that heavily overweighs the benefit of improved therapeutics.  For as the intercourse between nations has become greater, the evils of one have been communicated to another.  Pigs, Spanish dollars, and Norway rats, are not the only commodities and incommodities which have performed the circumnavigation, and are to be found wherever European ships have touched.  Diseases also find their way from one part of the inhabited globe to another, wherever it is possible for them to exist.  The most formidable endemic or contagious maladies in your nosology are not indigenous; and as far as regards health therefore, the ancient Britons, with no other remedies than their fields and woods afforded them, and no other medical practitioners than their deceitful priests, were in a better condition than their descendants, with all the instruction which is derived from Sydenham and Heberden, and Hunter, and with all the powers which chemistry has put into their hands.

Montesinos.—­You have well said that there is nothing comfortable in this view of the case:  but what is there consolatory in it?

Sir Thomas More.—­The consolation is upon your principle of expectant hope.  Whenever improved morals, wiser habits, more practical religion, and more efficient institutions shall have diminished the moral and material causes of disease, a thoroughly scientific practice, the result of long experience and accumulated observations, will then exist, to remedy all that is within the power of human art, and to alleviate what is irremediable.  To existing individuals this consolation is something like the satisfaction you might feel in learning that a fine estate was entailed upon your family at the expiration of a lease of ninety-nine years from the present time.  But I had forgotten to whom I am talking.  A poet always looks onward to some such distant inheritance.  His hopes are usually in nubibus, and his expectations in the paulo post futurum tense.

Montesinos.—­His state is the more gracious then because his enjoyment is always to come.  It is however a real satisfaction to me that there is some sunshine in your prospect.