“Now to amend the matter, to this wretched beggary and miserable poverty is joined great wantonness, importunate superfluity and excessive riot. For not only gentlemen’s servants, but also handicraftman, yea and almost the plowmen of the country, with all other sorts of people, use much strange and proud newfangledness in their apparel, and too much prodigal riot and sumptuous fare at their table. Now bawds, queans, whores, harlots, strumpets, brothel-houses, stews, and yet another stews, winetaverns, alehouses and tippling houses, with so many naughty, lewd, and unlawful games, as dice, cards, tables, tennis, bowls, quoits, do not all these send the haunters of them straight astealing when their money is gone? “Cast out these pernicious abominations, make a law that they, which plucked down farms and towns of husbandry, shall reëdify them, or else yield and uprender the possession thereof to such as will go to the cost of building them anew. Suffer not these rich men to buy up all, to engross and forestall, and with their monopoly to keep the market alone as please them. Let not so many be brought up in idleness, let husbandry and tillage be restored, let clothworking be renewed, that there may be honest labors for this idle sort to pass their time profitably, which hitherto either poverty has caused to be thieves, or else now to be vagabonds, or idle serving men, and shortly will be thieves. Doubtless unless you find a remedy for these enormities, you shall in vain advance yourselves of executing justice upon felons. For this justice is more beautiful in appearance, and more flourishing to the show, than either just or profitable. For by suffering your youth wantonly and viciously to be brought up, and to be infected, even from their tender age, by little and little with vice, then in God’s name to be punished, when they commit the same faults after being come to man’s state, which from their youth they were ever like to do; in this point, I pray you, what other thing do you, than make thieves and then punish them?” [3] II. JEAN MESLIER. [4] In speaking of the faults which cling to society Meslier, among other things, says the following about crime: