Montesinos.—­The practicability of forming such a system of prevention may easily be allowed, where, as in Paraguay, institutions are fore-planned, and not, as everywhere in Europe, the slow and varying growth of circumstances.  But to introduce it into an old society, hic labor, hoc opus est!  The Augean stable might have been kept clean by ordinary labour, if from the first the filth had been removed every day; when it had accumulated for years, it became a task for Hercules to cleanse it.  Alas, the age of heroes and demigods is over!

Sir Thomas More.—­There lies your error!  As no general will ever defeat an enemy whom he believes to be invincible, so no difficulty can be overcome by those who fancy themselves unable to overcome it.  Statesmen in this point are, like physicians, afraid, lest their own reputation should suffer, to try new remedies in cases where the old routine of practice is known and proved to be ineffectual.  Ask yourself whether the wretched creatures of whom we are discoursing are not abandoned to their fate without the highest attempt to rescue them from it?  The utmost which your laws profess is, that under their administration no human being shall perish for want:  this is all!  To effect this you draw from the wealthy, the industrious, and the frugal, a revenue exceeding tenfold the whole expenses of government under Charles I., and yet even with this enormous expenditure upon the poor it is not effected.  I say nothing of those who perish for want of sufficient food and necessary comforts, the victims of slow suffering and obscure disease; nor of those who, having crept to some brick-kiln at night, in hope of preserving life by its warmth, are found there dead in the morning.  Not a winter passes in which some poor wretch does not actually die of cold and hunger in the streets of London!  With all your public and private eleemosynary establishments, with your eight million of poor-rates, with your numerous benevolent associations, and with a spirit of charity in individuals which keeps pace with the wealth of the richest nation in the world, these things happen, to the disgrace of the age and country, and to the opprobrium of humanity, for want of police and order!  You are silent!

Montesinos.—­Some shocking examples occurred to me.  The one of a poor Savoyard boy with his monkey starved to death in St. James’s Park.  The other, which is, if that be possible, a still more disgraceful case, is recorded incidentally in Rees’s Cyclopaedia under the word “monster.”  It is only in a huge overgrown city that 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.