Unfortunately for his reputation with after ages, as Lord Chancellor he seems to have forgotten the maxims of toleration (political and theological) of his earlier career, so well set forth in his Utopia; and he supplies a notable instance, not too rare, of retrogression with advancing years and dignities, and of “a head grown grey in vain.” In fact, he belonged, ecclesiastically, to the school of conservative sceptics, of whom his intimate friend Erasmus was the most conspicuous representative, rather than to the party of practical reform. Yet, in spite of so lamentable a failure in practical philosophy, More may claim a high degree of merit both for his courage and for his sagacity in propounding views far in advance of his time.
In the Utopia his ideas in regard to labour and to crime exhibit him, indeed, as in advance of the received dogmas even of the present day. As to the former he held that the labourer, as the actual basis and support of the whole social system, was justly entitled to some consideration, and to a more rational existence than usually allowed him by the policy of the ruling classes; and, in limiting the daily period of labour to nine hours, he anticipated by 350 years the tardy legislation on that important matter. In exposing the equal absurdity and iniquity of the criminal code he preached the despised doctrine of prevention rather than punishment, and denounced the monstrous inequality of penalties by which thieving was placed in the same category with murder and crimes of violence:—
“For great and horrible punishments be awarded to thieves, whereas much rather provision should have been made that there were some means whereby they might get their living, so that no man should be driven to this extreme necessity—first to steal and then to die.... By suffering your youth to be wantonly and viciously brought up and to be infected, even from their tender age, by little and little with vice—then, in God’s name, to be punished when they commit the same faults after being come to man’s state, which from their youth they were ever like to do—in this point, I pray you, what other thing do you than make thieves and then punish them.”[105]
What we are immediately concerned with here is his feeling in regard to slaughter. The Utopians condemn—
“Hunters also and hawkers (falconers), for what delight can there be, and not rather displeasure, in hearing the barking and howling of dogs? Or what greater pleasure is there to be felt when a dog follows a hare than when a dog follows a dog? For one thing is done by both—that is to say, running, if you have pleasure in that. But if the hope of slaughter and the expectation of tearing the victim in pieces pleases you, you should rather be moved with pity to see an innocent hare murdered by a dog—the weak by the strong, the fearful by the fierce, the innocent by the cruel and pitiless.[106] Therefore this exercise of hunting, as a thing unworthy to be used of free men, the Utopians have rejected to their butchers, to the which craft (as we said before) they appoint their bondsmen. For they count hunting the lowest, the vilest, and most abject part of butchery; and the other parts of it more profitable and more honest as bringing much more commodity, in that they (the butchers) kill their victims from necessity, whereas the hunter seeks nothing but pleasure of the seely [simple, innocent] and woful animal’s slaughter and murder. The which pleasure in beholding death, they say, doth rise in wild beasts, either of a cruel affection of mind or else by being changed, in continuance of time, into cruelty by long use of so cruel a pleasure. These, therefore, and all such like, which be innumerable, though the common sort of people do take them for pleasures, yet they, seeing that there is no natural pleasantness in them, plainly determine them to have no affinity with true and right feeling.”
In telling us that his model people “permit not their free citizens to accustom themselves to the killing of ‘beasts’ through the use whereof they think clemency, gentlest affection of our nature, by little and little to decay and perish,”[107] More for ever condemns the immorality of the Slaughter-House, whether he intended to do so in toto or no. In relegating the business of slaughter to their bondsmen (criminals who had been degraded from the rights of citizenship), the Utopians, we may observe, exhibit less of justice than of refinement. To devolve the trade of slaughter upon a pariah-class is not the least immoral of the necessary concomitants of the shambles. That the author of Utopia should feel an instinctive aversion from the coarseness and cruelty of the shambles is not surprising; that he should have failed to banish it entirely from his ideal commonwealth is less to be wondered at than to be lamented. That he had at least a latent consciousness of the indefensibility of slaughter for food appears sufficiently clear from his remark upon the Utopian religion that “they kill no living animal in sacrifice, nor do they think that God has delight in blood and slaughter, Who has given life to animals to the intent they should live.”
Wiser than ourselves, the ideal people do not waste their corn in the manufacture of alcoholic drinks:—
“They sow corn only for bread. For their drink is either wine made of grapes, or else of apples or pears, or else it is clear water—and many times mead made of honey or liquorice sodden in water, for of that they have great store.”
The selfish policy of converting arable into grazing land is emphatically denounced by More:—