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Rh land, the prevalence of high prices, the readiness of princes to engage in war, and the licentiousness and greed of the rich. The labourers were reduced to beasts of burden so that a few rich men might live in idleness and luxury. Raphael suggests as remedies the abolition of capital punishment for theft and the development of agriculture, and urges that the law should be so contrived as to bestow on all men equal portions of riches and commodities. Such a dispensation was ‘the one and only way to the wealth of a community.’ In the second book the traveller describes, by way of contrast to the principles of government prevailing in contemporary Europe, the political and social constitution of the imaginary island of Utopia. The king is an officer elected for life, but removable if suspected of attempting to enslave his people, Communism is the law of the land, and personal liberty is at its zenith. No one is idle, yet the hours of labour are limited to six a day, and all leisure is devoted to the pursuit of the arts, literature, and science, with an occasional game of chess; but each citizen is allowed the fullest freedom in selecting his subject of study. A national system of education is extended as fully to women as to men. Sanitation is practised to perfection. No house is without a garden or abundant supply of fresh water. Hospitals and slaughter-houses are placed outside the towns. All meals are taken in common halls, as in the constitutions of Lycurgus. The Utopians never make leagues or treaties, nor engage in war unless in self-defence. They have few laws and no lawyers. Law-breakers are condemned to slavery until they give promise of amendment. Their philosophy is pure utilitarianism, and recognises the felicity of the body politic as the summum bonum to which the immediate pleasure of the individual citizen must be postponed. In matters of religion the freest toleration is recognised.

More conducts the dialogue between his fictitious traveller, Raphael, and living personages, like Peter Giles, Morton, and himself, with admirable dramatic skill, and a reader may easily be puzzled to detect where the fact ends and the fiction begins. In elaborating the details of his imaginary republic he displays fertile powers of invention, while his satiric reflections on the practices of the diplomatists and statesmen of his own day, especially in Raphael's remarks on leagues and treaties, could not have been bettered by Swift (cf., Henry VIII, i. 288-97). But unless the poor-law legislation of Elizabeth's reign can be ascribed to its influence, the ‘Utopia’ cannot be credited with more practical effect than Plato's ‘Republic.’ It doubtless suggested such speculative treatises as Campanella's ‘Civitas Solis,’ Bacon's fragmentary ‘New Atlantis,’ Hobbes's ‘Leviathan,’ Harrington's ‘Oceana,’ and Filmer's ‘Patriarchal.’ In many ways, too, the work anticipates the arguments of modern socialists, and some socialist reformers, despite the facts that monarchy and slavery are essential features of the Utopian commonwealth, have of late years adopted it as their text-book.

More, although an expounder, was no serious champion of a socialistic system. The ‘Utopia’ was mainly an exercise of the imagination, a playful satire on the world as it was (cf., Epist. ii. 1155). To a large extent it was an adaptation of Plato's ‘Republic’ and of the recorded practices of the early Christians, with some reminiscence of St. Augustine's ‘Civitas Dei’ (cf. Republic, transl. by Jowett, Oxford, 1891, Preface). More doubtless believed that classical ideals and the spirit of early mediæval monasticism might be both studied with advantage in an epoch which seemed to him dominated by the avarice of the rich and by too exclusively a mercantile spirit. But he distinctly disavowed any personal belief, in the practicability of communism, the leading principle in his fanciful State. After Raphael had explained his communistic panacea for the poverty of the many, More interposes in his own person the remark, ‘But I am of a contrary opinion’ (p. 69), and argues that ‘continued sedition and bloodshed’ must be the outcome of the abolition of private property. Subsequently in his ‘Supplication of Souls’—his reply to Fish's ‘Supplication of Beggars’—he sought with much vehemence to confute the theory that ‘hand labour’ was alone profitable to a state, and denounced Fish's proposal to confiscate church property on the ground that it would prove a prelude to a disastrous plunder of the rich by the poor. His theological tracts and his personal practice in and out of office amply prove that he viewed religious toleration in workaday life as undermining the foundations of society, and in conflict with laws both human and divine. More's practical opinions on religion and politics must be sought elsewhere than in the ‘Utopia.’

Completed in October 1516, the ‘Utopia’ seems to have been sent in manuscript to Peter Giles, Tunstall, and Erasmus, all of whom were enthusiastic in its praise. Erasmus, who described it as a revelation of the source of all political evils, arranged for its first publication at Thierry Martin's press at Louvain. It appeared in December 1516, with the title, ‘Libellus vere aureus nec minus salutaris 