_Sir Thomas More_.--Old John Fox ought to have known that, however advantageous the dissolution of the monastic houses might be to the views of the Reformers, it was every way injurious to the labouring classes. As far as they were concerned, the transfer of property was always to worse hands. The tenantry were deprived of their best landlords, artificers of their best employers, the poor and miserable of their best and surest friends. There would have been no insurrections in behalf of the old religion if the zeal of the peasantry had not been inflamed by a sore feeling of the injury which they suffered in the change. A great increase of the vagabond population was the direct and immediate consequence. They who were ejected from their tenements or deprived of their accustomed employment were turned loose upon society; and the greater number, of course and of necessity, ran wild. _Montesinos_.--Wild, indeed! The old chroniclers give a dreadful picture of their numbers and of their wickedness, which called forth and deserved the utmost severity of the law. They lived like savages in the woods and wastes, committing the most atrocious actions, stealing children, and burning, breaking, or otherwise disfiguring their limbs for the purpose of exciting compassion, and obtaining alms by this most flagitious of all imaginable crimes. Surely we have nothing so bad as this. _Sir Thomas More_.--The crime of stealing children for such purposes is rendered exceedingly difficult by the ease and rapidity with which a hue and cry can now be raised throughout the land, and the eagerness and detestation with which the criminal would be pursued; still, however, it is sometimes practised. In other respects the professional beggars of the nineteenth century are not a whit better than their predecessors of the sixteenth; and your gipsies and travelling potters, who, gipsy-like, pitch their tents upon the common, or by the wayside, retain with as much fidelity the manners and morals of the old vagabonds as they do the _cant_, or pedlar's French, which this class of people are said to have invented in the age whereof we are now speaking. _Montesinos_.--But the number of our vagabonds has greatly diminished. In your Henry's reign it is affirmed that no fewer than 72,000 criminals were hanged; you have yourself described them as strung up by scores upon a gibbet all over the country. Even in the golden days of good Queen Bess the executions were from three to four hundred annually. A large allowance must be made for the increased humanity of the nation, and the humaner temper with which the laws are administered: but the new crimes which increased wealth and a system of credit on one hand, and increased ingenuity, and new means of mischief on the part of the depredators have produced, must also be taken into the account. And the result will show a diminution in the number of those who prey upon society either by open war or secret wiles.