More's Utopia, translated into modern English E-Book

Thomas More

• Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 241

Beschreibung

"Utopia" is a political romance by Sir Thomas More, and the name that he gave to an imaginary island, which he represents to have been discovered by a companion of Amerigo Vespucci, and in which existed a perfect society. He pictured a community where all the property belonged to the government, to which every one contributed by his labor, receiving therefrom a supply of his wants; where the citizen rose through all the gradations of his existence from form to form, as if in a vast public school; where gold was contemned, and all the members of the society, unswerved by passion, were fixed each in his proper place. It is little short of a miracle that the best treatise on the ills of a commonwealth, with the most suggestive thoughts as to the way of avoiding them, should have appeared in the days when absolutism was tightening its hold; and even in these days, when absolutism is bound to rise almost everywhere , we may still turn to the Utopia, and not only see, as Professor Brewer has said, the truest picture of the real condition of Europe at that period, but the most truly Christian programme ever put forward for the amelioration of human society by the diffusion of culture and the equalization of opportunity to all.

Leseprobe

More's Utopia

Translated into modern English

THOMAS MORE

GEORGE CHATTERTON RICHARDS

More's Utopia, Thomas More, G. C. Richards

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

86450 Altenmünster, Loschberg 9

Deutschland

ISBN: 9783988680945

www.jazzybee-verlag.de

[email protected]

CONTENTS:

INTRODUCTION.1

THE DISCOURSE OF RAPHAEL HYTHLODAYE ON THE BEST STATE OF A COMMONWEALTH.12

BOOK I.12

BOOK II36

CHAPTER I.36

CHAPTER II. OF THE CITIES, AND ESPECIALLY OF AMAUROTE.38

CHAPTER III. OF THE MAGISTRATES.40

CHAPTER IV. OF CRAFTS AND OCCUPATIONS.41

CHAPTER V. OF THEIR DEALINGS WITH ONE ANOTHER.44

CHAPTER VI. OF TRAVELLING.48

CHAPTER VII. OF SLAVES, ETC.62

CHAPTER VIII. OF WARFARE.67

CHAPTER IX. OF THE RELIGIONS IN UTOPIA.74

THOMAS MORE TO PETER GILLES, GREETING.86

TO THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS JEROME BUSLEIDEN, PROVOST OF AIRE AND COUNCILLOR TO THE CATHOLIC KING CHARLES, PETER GILLES OF ANTWERP SENDS GREETING.89

JEROME BUSLEIDEN TO THOMAS MORE, GREETING.91

JEROME BUSLEIDEN TO HIS FRIEND ERASMUS, GREETING.94

THOMAS MORE TO PETER GILLES, GREETING.95

ERASMUS OF ROTTERDAM TO  JOHN FROBEN, HIS DEAR GOSSIP, GREETINGS.97

INTRODUCTION.

THOMAS MORE, eldest son of John More, judge in the Court of Common Pleas ( 1518 ) and of the King's Bench ( 1520 ), was born February 7th, 1478, or 1477 as Mr. Nichols more probably holds, in Milk Street, London. He received his early education at the school attached to St. Anthony's Hospital in Threadneedle Street, but was removed from school, at a date which cannot be precisely fixed, to be placed in the household of Cardinal Morton, who as Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor was the most important person in England after the Sovereign. In the first book of Utopia he makes Hythlodaye give a most pleasant account of the Cardinal ( p. 9 ), and says himself, ' You have given me great pleasure while listening to you I felt not only as if I was at home in my native country, but as if I had gone back to the days of my youth, being pleasantly reminded of that Cardinal in whose household I was brought up as a lad ' ( p. 25 ). It has been held that More's History of Richard III., which he wrote in 1513, was a translation, or rather a free adaptation, of Morton's Latin. Morton himself is reported by Roper, More's son in law, to have said of the boy to his guests, Those of us who live to see it will find that this child here waiting at the table will grow into a marvellous man. ' Doubtless it was Morton's influence which sent him to Oxford, when he was at the most fifteen. At Oxford he spent ' not fully two years, ' and so took no degree. Whether he was entered at Canterbury College, which was afterwards swallowed up in the great foundation of Wolsey, or at St. Mary Hall, or had a connexion with both, cannot be stated with any certainty. It seems probable that he made the acquaintance of Colet, who did not leave for Italy till 1493, that he heard the Greek lectures of Grocyn, who returned from Italy in 1490 and did not finally settle in London till 1499, and from his mention of Linacre in his Epistle to Dorpius, ' that he heard his lectures on Aristotle. Anyhow, this brief academic life must have begun the study of Greek. It was cut short by the determination of his father to allow him no more time for these studies, and to insist on his devoting himself to the law. So he was entered at New Inn, 1494, removed to Lincoln's Inn, 1496, and finally called to the Bar at the age of about 22 or 23 in 1500. In 1499 he made the acquaintance of the great scholar Erasmus, who had been brought to England by his patron, the young Lord Mountjoy. He was profoundly impressed by the learning and wit of the great humanist, who wrote a most life like description of him to Ulrich von Hutten, 23 July 1519, when all the scholars of the Continent were talking about the English author, whom the Utopia had recently made famous. It must have been in the autumn of 1499, when Erasmus was staying at Lord Mountjoy's house at Greenwich, that More and a legal friend played a trick upon him, by taking him a walk to Eltham and introducing him by surprise to the royal children then under the poet Skelton as tutor. Prince Henry, afterwards King, challenged the foreign scholar to write something for him, like the verses which More had just offered. Erasmus went home somewhat displeased, and in the course of three days hammered out some verses, though as he says there had been a long divorce between him and the Muses. Soon after this time (' adhuc paene adolescens 'says Erasmus ) More delivered public lectures in Grocyn's church of St. Lawrence Jewry, on St. Augustine's De Civitate Dei, which were largely attended by clergy and men much senior to himself. In 1504 he was returned to Parliament, and there is little doubt, though the details are uncertain, that he signalized himself by opposition to the exorbitant demands of the King, of whom he gives, while not naming him, such an unfavourable picture in Utopia, Book I. (pp. 29, 30). At this period he became ascetic in his habits, perhaps when he was in enforced retirement from public life, and had thoughts of becoming a Carthusian. But about this time Colet became Dean of St. Paul's and used his influence, as his spiritual director, in the opposite direction. So in June, 1505, he married happily, and settled in Bucklersbury, where Erasmus twice visited him, the second time on his return from Italy in 1509, when while waiting for his books he wrote out the Encomium Moriae, the material for which he had put together on his journey. His young wife was alive in May, 1511, but must have died during the summer; and as Erasmus puts it, ' a few months after her death he married a widow, rather to look after his family than to give himself pleasure, neither very handsome nor young, as he jokingly says, but a vigorous and vigilant housekeeper, and yet with her he lives as amiably and pleasantly as if she were ever so lovely a girl. ' Ammonius, the King's Latin secretary, later in the year tells Erasmus that he has moved from More's house to other quarters, where he is no better off, but at least does not see the hooked beak of the harpy, ' an ungallant description of the second Mrs. More. Already in the previous year More had been made under-Sheriff of London ( Vice-comes, as the office is called on the title page of Utopia ), an office of great responsibility and honour, in which he won popularity by his endeavours to settle cases by agreement and his unwillingness to exact fees.

He had paid short visits to Louvain and Paris in 1508, but his first lengthy absence from England was in the spring of 1515, when the London merchants petitioned that he should be made an extra member of the embassy to 1 Germain Brie in his Antimorus charges More with censuring Henry VII. in his eulogy of Henry VIII. More can only reply (Allen, 1087 ) that the evils corrected by the son were due to the father's ill health and bad counsellors. Flanders, to settle commercial difficulties with the regency of the young Charles, already by right of his mother King of Castile. This embassy kept him away from England for nearly seven months, and was very irksome and expensive to him, but it gave him the great advantage of becoming intimate with Cuthbert Tunstall, an ecclesiastic much versed in diplomacy and no mean scholar ( as his letters to Budé, the ' doyen ' of French learning, show ), whose opinion Erasmus himself quoted to Aldus along with those of Grocyn, Linacre and Latimer, in order to induce the great printer to publish his translation of Euripides. It also introduced him to Jerome Busleiden, of Mechlin, whose library and collections of antiques delighted him, and who paid the English author the compliment of writing a commendatory letter for his book. But above all he valued the opportunity of meeting Peter Gilles, the friend and host of Erasmus, who plays so prominent a part in Utopia, a man so learned, witty and modest, that I would gladly pay a good part of my fortune to be his constant companion ': and certainly it is a charmingly ingenuous and frank countenance which Quintin Matsys shows us in the diptych of Erasmus and Gilles, which he painted in May, 1517, for presentation to More. Peter was not very well at the time, and Erasmus, at the advice of a doctor, took some pills, with such bad results that the painter refused to go on with the sittings until he had recovered his proper expression. A good part of More's leisure time, when the duties of the embassy were not pressing, must have been devoted to the composition of Book II. of Utopia.

Returning to England at the end of the year, he then wrote Book I. The following extracts from Mr. Allen's Erasmi Epistolae will fully illustrate the publication of the first edition of Utopia. On 3rd September, 1516, More writes to Erasmus, ' My Nowhere (Nusquama, nowhere well written, I send you with a prefatory letter to my dear Peter. From experience I know there is no need for me to urge you to look after the rest of the business. ' Probably about 20th September he writes: Some time ago I sent you Nowhere, as to which I am anxious it should come out soon, well provided with high recommendations, and if possible not only from scholars but also well-known public men; chiefly because of one person's attitude ( I think you will guess who, without my mentioning his name ) who, moved by I know not what ( you can guess as to that ), is sorry that it is brought out before the Horatian nine years. Please look after all this as you think best for me. I should like to know if you have shown, or at least ( as I expect you have ) described it, to Tunstall. I should prefer the latter, for then it will be twice pleasing to him, because it will appear more polished through your report than my writing, and because you will relieve him of the trouble of reading it. ' On 2nd October Erasmus writes to More from Antwerp: As to the Island and the rest, all care shall be taken. Peter Gilles is devoted to you and very much approves of your Nowhere. ' Erasmus writes to Gilles from Brussels 17th October: ' I am getting Nowhere ready. You must send a preface, but not addressed to me but someone else, preferably Busleiden.'

We may suspect that Erasmus, though willing to take all possible trouble in connection with the printing, was a little dubious about the subject matter, and inclined to be critical of the Latinity. In his letter to Hutten he speaks of the first book as written more hurriedly than the second, and so the work, he says, was uneven in style. He often says what a great scholar More would have been if he had been trained in Italy. More's Latinity is certainly, as he himself admits ( Allen 424,116 ), not as polished as that of Erasmus, but its vigour is unmistakable, and there is so much pathos and ' saeva indignatio ' in it, that it often becomes really eloquent. It may be too that Erasmus was not much enamoured of communism: the wonder is that Budé swallows it whole, as agreeable to Christ's institution. When Erasmus contributes a prefatory letter to Froben's edition, writing on 25th August, 1517 ( that is after the book had already been well received ), he says: ' I have hitherto been always pleased beyond measure with all the writings of my friend More, but felt some distrust of my judgment because of the close friendship existing between us.

But now that I see learned men unanimously adopting my opinion and even more warmly admiring his remarkable genius, not that they have greater affection but greater discernment, I feel convinced I am right and shall not hesitate in future to express openly what I think. ' More writes to Erasmus on 31st October, 1516: ' I am delighted that my dear Peter likes my Nowhere; if it finds favour with such good judges, it will begin to find favour with me. I shall be glad to know whether Tunstall likes it, or Busleiden or your Chancellor. I scarcely dare to hope for the approval of men so fortunate as to be in the foremost positions in their countries, unless it is gained by the fact that if such great scholars and eminent men lived in my commonwealth, they would certainly be the leading men; while as it is, in their own, however highly they are valued ( and of course they are valued highly ), they have great rascals equal, if not superior, to them in influence and authority. I do not believe that it will weigh with them, that in such a state they would not have many subjects and inferiors, as kings now describe their peoples, or rather as lower than slaves; for it is far more honourable to govern free men, and such good men have no vestige of that jealousy which wishes others to be badly off, while one is well off oneself. ' On 9th November, Busleiden forwards his prefatory letter to Erasmus with a short accompanying note ( p. 135 ). On 12th November, Gerhard Geldenhauer, who corrected proofs for Diericz Martens ' press at Louvain, writes to Erasmus: Our friend Diericz has gladly undertaken to print Utopia. Paludanus will show you a woodcut of the island made by a first rate artist; if you wish any alteration in it, write or add a note to the drawing. '

On 18th November Erasmus writes to Gilles from Brussels that Utopia is in the printer's hands. On 4th December More writes to Erasmus from London to say that he has received a letter from Tunstall complimenting him on his work. You cannot think how elated I am, how I have grown in stature and hold my head higher; so constantly do I imagine myself in the part of sovereign of Utopia; in fact I fancy I am walking with the crown of corn ears upon my head, wearing a Franciscan cloak, and carrying the corn sheaf as a sceptre, attended by a great throng of the people of Amaurote. Then would meet us a great procession of ambassadors and foreign potentates, pitiable in comparison of us, showing a foolish pride in coming decked out like children and adorned with women's ornaments, and with chains of that contemptible gold, ridiculous in purple and jewels and such " air blown trifles. " But I should not like you or Tunstall to judge me according to the dispositions of others, who are changed by changing fortunes. Though it has seemed good to Heaven to raise my lowliness to such high estate, as I consider far superior to any monarchy, yet you will never find me forgetful of the old intimacy which I enjoyed with you while yet in the position of a subject. If you do not object to making the small journey and coming to visit me in Utopia, I will see that all who are under my mild sway, shall pay you that honour which is due to those whom they understand to be very dear to their ruler. I should have continued this delightful dream, but alas! the coming of daylight has dispelled the dream and shaken me off my throne and sends me back to the daily mill of the courts. My only comfort is that real reigns do not last much longer. ' This extract illustrates well the sportive fancy of the author, to which he gives free rein in addressing his intimate friends. On 15th December he writes to Erasmus ' I am daily expecting my Utopia, with the feelings of a mother awaiting the return of a son from abroad. ' The book had already come out on 4th January, 1517, when Lord Mountjoy writes to Erasmus from Tournay: ' I have received your letter, together with the book about the island of Utopia, with great pleasure, the letter as coming from a close friend, and the book as the work of one whom, not only for his learning but his close friendship, we value most highly. Owing to the pressure of business I have not yet read the little work, but shall soon peruse it, so that, though I cannot enjoy More's actual society, I can see him in his work. ' On 13th January, More writes to Erasmus to say he has written to thank Busleiden for his prefatory letter, and asks him to thank Paludanus and Gilles, who had done their parts to please Erasmus. Clava writes to Erasmus from Ghent on 6th February to say he has ordered and is hourly expecting Thomas More's witty book, and Erasmus replies on 14th February: ' When you read More's Utopia you will fancy yourself transported into another world; everything there is so new. ' On 18th February, Guy Morillon writing to Erasmus has obviously read the book, for he derives a joke from it.

Mr. Lupton ( Introd. p. lxiv. ) has carefully described the first edition ( A ). Gilles did his work very badly; for it is full of gross errors. But the ' egregius pictor ' did his work well; his initials appear to have been O. N., as these letters are on the flag which waves from the mast of the ship. On 21st February Erasmus writes to Budé at Paris, and recommends him to buy and read Utopia, which he will not regret, and similarly on 24th February recommends it to the physician William Cop, as not only amusing, but a shrewd exposition of the sources of the evils which affect almost all governments. Already Erasmus was planning a new edition. On 8th March he asks More to send a corrected copy, and on 30th May ( probably ) he says he has sent the Epigrams and Utopia to Basle to be printed by Froben. On 24th August he writes to Froben's corrector: ' I should like Utopia and More's Epigrams to be introduced by a preface from Beatus Rhenanus, and if you approve, they can be united in one volume ' ( as they were ). But there was delay at Froben's press, and meanwhile Lupset, who was in Paris, apparently at the suggestion of Budé, who now contributed a prefatory letter, procured a new edition ( B ) near the end of 1517 by the printer Gilles de Gourmont. Erasmus complains of its misprints ( 5th March, 1518 ); but unjustly, for it corrected a great many misprints of the first edition.

Froben's edition, including Budé's letter to Lupset, which according to Erasmus was made the excuse for the delay, did not appear till March 1518 ( C ). The woodcut was redrawn and made more artistic, but quite unintelligible; and three figures were added, Hythlodaye being named; his companion is probably intended for More, the third figure cannot be certainly identified. These additions and the title page are ascribed to Ambrose Holbein; the woodcut on p. 13 is signed by Hans Holbein. All the prefatory matter is included with the exception of More's second letter to Gilles ( from the 2nd edition ) and the letter and verses of Paludanus, which are therefore not translated in this volume. In the edition of November ( D ) Hans Holbein's drawings alone are retained, and many errors are corrected.

In the Utopia we see the fruits of More's experience and reading. On the embassy he contrasted the Flemish towns with his own London, and thus Amaurote, as it once was, ( p. 47 ) is to the rebuilt Amaurote, as London to Bruges or Antwerp. The arguments of Hythlodaye against becoming a courtier are just those which More was vainly urging in his own case; for soon after the publication of Utopia he was, as Erasmus puts it, dragged to court by Henry VIII. ' No one ever more vigorously sued to be admitted to a court than he endeavoured to avoid it. ' But to resist both Wolsey and the King would have been only possible had More been less worth having. In that you have been dragged to court, you are lost to us and to letters, ' says Erasmus sadly in April, 1518. There is much playful wit in Utopia, but there is far more bitter satire. No one can read without emotion his description of the eviction of the tenant by the landlord's enclosures, or the manufacture of thieves in preference to the prevention of crime. Ill fed, ill housed, ill clad, the poor man lives a life of grinding toil for an unreasonable number of hours ( p. 51 ).

Many may have equalled, but none has surpassed, More in his deep sympathy for the miseries of the many and his indignation at the tyranny of the few, their ' oligopolium ' as he terms it. Though he represents himself as combating Hythlodaye's communism and carefully guards himself from time to time against being supposed to agree with the practices described, there can be no doubt that ( in spite of his disclaimer, p. 79 ) he is really expressing his own view when he says that ' Christ instituted all things common ( Budé assents to this too ), and when he adds that this way of living is still in use among the truest societies of Christians, ' meaning monasteries, we cannot doubt that he is in earnest. A very sincere, and even ascetic Christian himself, he is scandalized by the abuses in the Church of his day, bellicose Popes and Bishops ( while the Utopian priests prevented slaughter and composed belligerents ), preachers who adapt the law of Christ like a leaden rule to human sinfulness, abbots turning their lands into sheep walks, the excessive number of the clergy lowering the standard of clerical life, and excluding the possibility of real vocation. But we must not suppose that he seriously puts forward cremation or the marriage of priests, or the priesthood of women, or divorce for incompatibility of temper, or the legalisation of suicide in case of hopeless disease; and that not merely because he wrote later against some of these things, but because he is writing in the vein of Platonic irony throughout. Where he seems to condemn fasting, he is very careful to guard himself ( p. 79 ).

With equal boldness he lashes the failings of kings –– their delight in war rather than in the ' honourable activities of peace, ' their faithlessness to treaties, their debasing of the coinage, their obtaining of subsidies on false pretences, their revival of obsolete laws, and either fining for their non observance or selling exemption from their provisions, their interference with servile judges, their shameless intrigues against one another. All these things Henry VII. did, and most of these Henry VIII. did at a later date. The statement that the people choose the King for their own sake, and not for his ' ( p. 31 ) must have sounded very obnoxious in Tudor ears. ' We wonder, ' says Professor Jowett, ' how in the reign of Henry VIII., though veiled in another language, and published in a foreign country, such speculations could have been endured. ' It is significant that actually there is no King in Utopia. It is true that More is a little inconsistent with himself. In the facetious letter already quoted, he fancies himself King of the island, and ' Ademus ' ( p. 54 ) can hardly be meant to be the title of each of the fifty four city mayors but as a rule, when the ' prince ' is mentioned, it means the life-president or mayor of one city state. For of course the Utopian cities are essentially Greek ' poleis. '

Nor can he have pleased the nobility of the time. He would deprive them of their sports; hunting is ' the meanest part of the butcher's craft. ' Their gambling and vulgar pleasures he abhors. Their idle retainers are a menace to society. Their extravagance in pulling down houses and building others on fresh sites ruins themselves and does no one any good. The glory of war and chivalry which they delight in is unreal, and as if to take away all its glamour, he causes the Utopians to use every kind of stratagem and assassination so as to avert or minimize the bloodshed of wars. Their love of gorgeous clothes and jewelry is ridiculed in the description of the Anemolian embassy, which King Henry VIII. must almost have thought a reflection on himself.

Who, then, read and appreciated the Utopia? The ' Intelligenzia, ' not of course those scholastically trained, chiefly ecclesiastics, whose logical methods he ridicules ( p. 69 ), but the humanists in every country, to whom the letters of Erasmus introduce us one by one, who were eagerly studying Greek literature and teaching it. For the Utopia is based on the following writings. ( i. ) St. Augustine's De Civitate Dei, on which More had lectured to crowded audiences, represented an ideal city, on the lines of which the earthly city might be improved. There is an unmistakable reference to this treatise in II. ix., p. 106, where he speaks of the idea that disasters following a change of religion were due to the anger of the offended deity. His treatment of slavery as penal and corrective in substitution for capital punishment, which Hythlodaye argues against altogether, and which Utopia only admits for certain offences, is thought by Mr. Lupton to be derived from St. Augustine. ( ii. ) To Plato his debt is much greater. ' In his youth, ' says Erasmus, he wrote a dialogue to defend Plato's communism, even to the extent of defending community of wives. ' This feature is absent from Utopia, where the family is very like that which gathered under More's own roof at Chelsea grandfather, father and mother, married sons and daughters with their children. The family tie is only broken in Utopia by adoption for the public good, and to enable a man to learn a new trade. But otherwise Plato's writings are the very basis of the Utopia. The island Atlantis of the Critias suggested the island Utopia as a reformed island of Britain. The kingship of the philosopher is the very basis of Utopian polity: while on the other hand wise men retire from politics as they are ( Rep. VI. 496 ). As the guardians of Plato ' must not touch or handle silver and gold, or be under the same roof with them, or wear them, or drink from them, ' so it is in Utopia. As women go to battle in the Republic ( V. 457 ) so they do in Utopia. Horses are only kept for youths to develop their riding powers as a military exercise in Utopia ( Rep. V. 467 ). He refers to the story in Diogenes Laertius, that Plato refused to draw up a constitution for the Arcadians because they would not have equality of goods. But in one respect he has departed from the Republic. There are not three classes in Utopia, but really only one; for all may qualify themselves for the learned class out of which are chosen the magistrates, priests and ambassadors, and the only aristocracy in Utopia is that of intellect. ( iii. ) He seems to have drawn on Cicero's De Finibus for his account of the Epicurean and Stoic elements in the Utopian philosophy, though even here he is largely indebted to Republic, Book IX. ( iv. ). In several details he seems to have been thinking of Tacitus ' Germania. In that monograph the Roman historian, though he did not disguise the less admirable side of the Germans, was contrasting their simple life with the degenerate Rome of his day and so More, while he describes the conduct of the Utopians towards foreign nations as not altogether admirable in war, regards their polity as a great improvement on that of Europe. Their contempt for precious metals is a mark of the Germans, who, moreover, have few laws, whose women go to war, and who make their own clothes; while as the German principes ' decide on minor matters, but refer weightier ones to the tribal gathering, and never make any important decision on the same day the question is broached, so it is in Utopia.

( v. ) Many references to Plutarch's Lives, Laconian Institutions, and On Instinct in Animals have been gathered by editors and show More's knowledge of Plutarch's works. He would owe to Plutarch his knowledge of the common messes of Sparta. ( vi. ) The setting of the dialogue he takes from the Quattuor Americi Vesputii Navigationes published in 1507. Hythlodaye is one of the twenty four left behind by Vespucci at Cape Frio on his fourth voyage, and Utopia is somewhere between Brazil and India. It is also quite possible that More may have met at Antwerp some Portuguese or other mariner who gave him some account of Japan. It was somewhat later that the Portuguese and the Jesuits got a footing in that country, but some knowledge of it may well have reached Europe, while it was known to be closed to foreigners, as was Utopia to all intents and purposes. There is a striking similarity between Utopia's position as regards a continent and that of the islands of Japan, which similarly lie off the mainland in a crescent shape, and at the Strait of Tsushima are divided by a comparatively narrow channel from it and must have been originally connected with it. The Utopians are ( II. vi., p. 80 ) nimble and stronger than would appear from their stature, which is not, however, dwarfish. ' In More's day, Japan must have presented to the eye of any intelligent observer the appearance of a well settled and ordered government, and any traveller's account must have dwelt on the great antiquity of the civilizations of China and Japan ( p. 39 ). Of course More took his communism from Plato and Plato alone.

It remains to describe the Utopian form of government, which is complicated. As there are few laws and no lawyers More must have had a mean opinion of his brethren in his own profession — a good deal in Utopia depends on prudent administration. Utopia is a federation of fifty-four independent ' poleis, ' all of which have the same representative system. In each there is a popularly elected prince or mayor, who holds office for life, if he is not deposed on suspicion of aiming at a tyranny. He is President of a Council of twenty chief officers, who have sitting with them two representatives of the two hundred lower officers changing daily. The Council acts as a High Court of Justice and deals with ordinary matters, but as a pro-bouleutic body refers important matters to the two hundred lower officers, who consult the thirty families of which each is the head. How they collect their views is not stated. The Boule, so to speak, of each town thus consists of twenty three, the Ecclesia of 200, each of whom represents, or is supposed to represent, the opinion of about, as far as one can judge, 300 adults.