Page:The Republic by Plato.djvu/94

lxxxvi more cause,” says Hythloday, “to fear that my words shall not be believed, for that I know how difficultly and hardly I myself would have believed another man telling the same, if I had not myself seen it with mine own eyes.” Or again: “If you had been with me in Utopia, and had presently seen their fashions and laws as I did which lived there five years and more, and would never have come thence, but only to make the new land known here,” etc. More greatly regrets that he forgot to ask Hythloday in what part of the world Utopia is situated; he “would have spent no small sum of money rather than it should have escaped him,” and he begs Peter Giles to see Hythloday or write to him and obtain an answer to the question. After this we are not surprised to hear that a professor of divinity (perhaps “a late famous vicar of Croydon in Surrey,” as the translator thinks) is desirous of being sent thither as a missionary by the high-bishop, “yea, and that he may himself be made Bishop of Utopia, nothing doubting that he must obtain this bishopric with suit; and he counteth that a godly suit which proceedeth not of the desire of honor or lucre, but only of a godly zeal.” The design may have failed through the disappearance of Hythloday, concerning whom we have “very uncertain news” after his departure. There is no doubt, however, that he had told More and Giles the exact situation of the island, but unfortunately at the same moment More’s attention, as he is reminded in a letter from Giles, was drawn off by a servant, and one of the company from a cold caught on shipboard coughed so loud as to prevent Giles from hearing. And “the secret has perished” with him; to this day the place of Utopia remains unknown.

The words of Phædrus (275 B), “O Socrates, you can easily invent Egyptians or anything,” are recalled to our mind as we read this lifelike fiction. Yet the greater merit of the work is not the admirable art, but the originality of thought. More is as free as Plato from the prejudices of his age, and far more tolerant. The Utopians do not allow him who believes not in the immortality of the soul to share in the administration of the State (cp. “Laws” x. 908 foll.), “howbeit they put him to no punishment, because they be persuaded that it is in no man’s power to believe what he list;” and “no man is to be blamed for reasoning in support of his own