ys and mine:

"Where plots full of nettles annoyeth the eye,
Sow hempseed among them, and nettles will die."

_Montesinos_.--The use of hemp indeed has not been spared. But with so
little avail has it been used, or rather to such ill effect, that every
public execution, instead of deterring villains from guilt, serves only
to afford them opportunity for it. Perhaps the very risk of the gallows
operates upon many a man among the inducements to commit the crime
whereto he is tempted; for with your true gamester the excitement seems
to be in proportion to the value of the stake. Yet I hold as little with
the humanity-mongers, who deny the necessity and lawfulness of inflicting
capital punishment in any case, as with the shallow moralists, who
exclaim against vindictive justice, when punishment would cease to be
just, if it were not vindictive.

_Sir Thomas More_.--And yet the inefficacious punishment of guilt is less
to be deplored and less to be condemned than the total omission of all
means for preventing it. Many thousands in your metropolis rise every
morning without knowing how they are to subsist during the day, or many
of them where they are to lay their heads at night. All men, even the
vicious themselves, know that wickedness leads to misery; but many, even
among the good and the wise, have yet to learn that misery is almost as
often the cause of wickedness.

_Montesinos_.--There are many who know this, but believe that it is not
in the power of human institutions to prevent this misery. They see the
effect, but regard the causes as inseparable from the condition of human
nature.

_Sir Thomas More_.--As surely as God is good, so surely there is no such
thing as necessary evil. For by the religious mind sickness and pain and
death are not to be accounted evils. Moral evils are of your own making,
and undoubtedly the greater part of them may be prevented; though it is
only in Paraguay (the most imperfect of Utopias) that any attempt at
prevention has been carried into effect. Deformities of mind, as of
body, will sometimes occur. Some voluntary castaways there will always
be, whom no fostering kindness and no parental care can preserve from
self-destruction; but if any are lost for want of care and culture, there
is a sin of omission in the society to which they belong.

_Montesinos_.--The practicability of forming such a system of prevention
may easily be allowed, where, as in Paraguay, instit