Thus, after describing the prevalence of thieving and robbery, he points to idleness as its cause, but dwells emphatically on the distinction between the idleness which is of choice and that which is enforced by lack of employment. Half the thieves would be honest labourers if they had the chance. The maintenance or development of industries which provide employment would be an effective cure; but instead of seeking a cure, the authorities fall back on punishment. But the severity of the law, instead of checking the minor misdemeanours, converts the pickpocket into a dangerous robber who—having no worse penalty to fear for the graver offence—resorts to violence without hesitation: so that the system regularly manufactures the worst ruffianism.
The instability and disorganisation of industry produced by what we now call “corners,” has its prototype in the “engrossing” and “forestalling,” by which wealthy men make themselves monopolists. The inevitable tendency of capital to flow in dividend-producing, not philanthropic, channels, is foreshadowed by the steady conversion by wealth-seeking landlords of arable land into sheep-runs; a process which left much of the rural population without work, wages, food, or home. Incidentally it may be noted that, while modern historians are disposed rather to dwell on the substitution of greedy laymen for the monasteries as landlords as one of the later causes of this particular trouble, More expressly includes “certeyn abbottes, holy men no doubt,” in his denunciation thereof. He may, however, mean no more than that even the Church was not exempt from this reproach. In dealing with this economic tendency for capital to seek the most lucrative channel, More made the universal mistake of his day in believing that it could be effectively restrained by Acts of Parliament.
In a vein no less practical, and no less opposed to the conventional ideas of the time, and with a still more playful seriousness, the traveller discourses of high politics and finance as they were debated in the Cabinets of Europe, with the aggrandisement and enrichment of monarchs as the one end in view. “‘This myne advyce, maister More,’ says he, ‘how think you it would be harde and taken?’ ‘So God helpe me, not very thankefully’ quod I.’”
By this discussion, the way is prepared for Hythloday to favour his company with an account of the remarkable polity which he found in Utopia (a State as to the whereabouts of which More subsequently writes in anxious inquiry to Peter Giles, who answers in the like vein of pretended regret at being unable to answer the question). This account occupies the second book, forming about two-thirds of the whole work.
In this fantasy, practicality vanishes at the outset. Such are the defences, natural or artificial, of this most favoured island, that any would-be invader is doomed to certain destruction, while the country produces everything that man requires for comfort. It needs no army and no navy, self-defence and self-assertion being equally superfluous: its relations with foreign States are purely complimentary. The Utopians make no foreign leagues. Where the bonds of goodwill are not sufficient to maintain friendly relations, nations enter upon leagues, but only to desert them at the first call of interest. Such is the strange conviction of the Utopians, though they had not themselves experienced the kaleidoscopic permutations and combinations of Ferdinand the Catholic, Maximilian, Louis XII., Henry VII., Julius II., and the Venetians. If by any chance they find it necessary to go to war, there is a convenient breed of fighting men in a country not too far away, who can always be hired for the purpose.
Being thus preserved from the creation of a military caste, while universal education has prevented knowledge from being concentrated in a priestly caste, it has been easy to prevent the development of any sort of privileged class through the accumulation of private property, which is prohibited. Hence, in Utopia, communism is practicable, and the whole system is as a matter of course communistic, though the principle is not extended to the relations between the sexes. Having arrived at their religion not through the Christian Revelation, but by Reason, any religious views are tolerated which are not manifestly anti-social. It is a corollary of these conditions that government is in the hands of elected magistrates, who have neither class interests nor personal interests to deflect them from their proper function of ruling with a single eye to the interests of the whole people. The possibility that sectarian interests might have developed as a disturbing factor does not seem to have presented itself; perhaps, where no religious views might be aggressively expressed or repressed, no strife of sects was to be feared.
In every direction, of course, the manners and customs of the Utopians suggest that the manners and customs of the English are susceptible of improvement. They take a philosophic view of the pleasures of life, reckoning the gratification of animal appetites exceedingly low in practice as well as in theory. They have no lust of gold and jewels. They have no craving for display, for gambling, for the baser forms of sport. On the other hand, they appreciate the value of sanitation. There is no idleness, since every one is required to do his share of work, but there is ample leisure for all; instead of one half of the population having too much, and the other half too little, to do. Thus they can enjoy in abundance those rational pleasures in which they take a true delight, abiding in health and wealth.
V
MORE IN PUBLIC LIFE
It should be sufficiently clear that no one was more thoroughly aware than Sir Thomas More himself that the Utopian conditions could not be produced in a European State, and that Utopian institutions could only exist under Utopian conditions. Of that fact he was destined to give practical demonstration when called upon to discharge the functions of a practical ruler.
In 1518 More became a Privy Councillor, and probably his influence may be detected in the efforts, renewed about this time, to check the conversion of arable land into pasture, and the evil practice of enclosures. But Martin Luther’s activity was just beginning, and its results were to make the contrast between Utopia and England even more marked than previously. Before entering, however, on More’s attitude to this new phase of the Reformation, we have to note some other points in this stage of his career.