1516 2026
This is an AI modernization of Utopia into contemporary English. The original is available from Project Gutenberg. Also available as an epub.
Thomas More published this book in Latin in 1516, when he was a London lawyer and scholar in his late thirties with a European reputation and a wide correspondence. Erasmus was a close friend and helped see it into print. More went on to become Lord Chancellor of England, resigned the office in 1532, and was beheaded in 1535 for refusing to accept Henry VIII as head of the church in England.
It comes in two books. The first is a conversation in a garden in Antwerp between More himself, who appears as a character in his own book, his friend Peter Giles, who was a real man and the town clerk there, and a traveller named Raphael Hythloday, who is not real and who says he sailed with Amerigo Vespucci and was left behind on the far side of the Atlantic. The second book is Hythloday talking almost without interruption: the geography, laws, work, meals, marriages, religion and warfare of an island commonwealth he says he lived in for five years.
The names are jokes and they are meant to be caught. Utopia is Greek for no place. Hythloday means something like dispenser of nonsense. The capital, Amaurot, is the dim city; the river running through it, the Anyder, is the no-water. This edition glosses them where they first appear, because More's readers got the joke for free.
The jokes do not make Book One a joke. Its attack on England is furious and entirely literal: landlords fencing common fields for sheep pasture and driving the farmers off, then the same farmers hanged as thieves when they steal to eat; kings who would rather conquer new territory than govern what they have; counsellors who tell those kings what they want to hear. More was writing about the country he lived in and he names the practices.
Readers who arrive expecting a blueprint find something stranger. Utopia has no private property, a six-hour working day, and gold so despised that it is made into chamber pots and the chains of slaves. It also has slaves, internal passports, punishment for sex before marriage, no privacy of any kind, and priests who visit the incurably sick to argue that they should stop eating. How much of this More meant, and how much he expected his readers to recoil, is genuinely unsettled and has been argued about for five centuries. Nothing here tries to settle it. His last sentence says there is much in Utopia that he would rather wish than hope to see in Europe, and that is as far as he goes.
The English here follows Gilbert Burnet's 1684 translation of the Latin rather than the Latin itself. Both books are complete.
Their Towns, and Especially Amaurot
Their Slaves and Their Marriages
Henry VIII, the unconquered King of England — a prince graced with every virtue a great monarch could ask for — recently had a dispute of no small weight with Charles, the most serene Prince of Castile. So he sent me to Flanders as his ambassador to negotiate and settle the matter. I went as colleague and companion to that incomparable man Cuthbert Tonstal, whom the King had just made Master of the Rolls to everyone's applause. About him I'll say nothing — not because I worry a friend's testimony would be suspect, but because his learning and character are too great for me to do them justice, and too well known to need my advertising. Praising him would be, as the proverb says, showing the sun with a lantern.
The men the Prince appointed to negotiate with us met us at Bruges, as agreed — all of them distinguished. The Margrave of Bruges headed their delegation, but their wisest member, and the one who spoke for the rest, was George Temse, the Provost of Casselsee. Art and nature had teamed up to make him eloquent: he was deeply learned in the law, and his natural talent, sharpened by long practice in public business, made him very good at untangling difficult matters. After several meetings without an agreement, they went off to Brussels for a few days to learn their Prince's pleasure; and since our business allowed it, I went to Antwerp.
While I was there, of the many people who came to visit me, none was more welcome than Peter Giles. He was born in Antwerp, where he is a man of great honor and good standing — though less than he deserves, for I doubt you could find anywhere a young man more learned or better bred. He is as worthy as he is knowledgeable, courteous to everyone, especially warm toward his friends, and so full of openness and affection that there is hardly one friend in a thousand so complete in every respect. He is unusually modest; there is nothing artificial about him, and yet no one carries plain good sense more gracefully. His conversation was so pleasant, and so innocently cheerful, that his company went a long way toward easing my longing for home — for my country, my wife, and my children, whom four months of absence had made me miss very badly.
One day, as I was walking home from mass at St. Mary's — the chief church in Antwerp, and the busiest — I happened to see Peter talking with a stranger. The man looked past the prime of life: his face was tanned, his beard was long, and his cloak hung carelessly off his shoulder. From his look and his dress, I took him for a ship's captain.
The moment Peter spotted me, he came over and greeted me, and as I was returning the courtesy he drew me aside and pointed to the man he'd been talking with. "Do you see that man?" he said. "I was just about to bring him to you."
"He would have been very welcome," I said, "for your sake."
"And for his own, if you knew him," Peter replied. "There is no man alive who can tell you as much about unknown nations and countries as he can — and I know how hungry you are for that kind of thing."
"Then I guessed right," I said. "At first glance I took him for a sailor."
"Then you guessed very wrong," he said. "He has sailed, yes — but not as a sailor. As a traveler. Or really, as a philosopher. This is Raphael; his family name is Hythloday — Greek, as it happens, for 'speaker of nonsense.' He knows Latin well enough, but he is brilliant in Greek, which he studied much harder, because his real passion is philosophy — and in philosophy, he says, the Romans left us nothing worth having except some Seneca and Cicero. He's Portuguese by birth, and he was so eager to see the world that he divided his whole estate among his brothers and threw in his lot with Amerigo Vespucci. He shared in three of the four voyages that everyone is now reading about; only on the last one he didn't come home. Instead he begged Vespucci — practically forced him — for permission to be one of the twenty-four men left behind at the farthest point they reached on that final voyage to New Castile. Being left behind suited him perfectly. He has always cared more about traveling than about going home to be buried in his own country. He likes to say that the road to heaven is the same length from everywhere, and that a man with no grave still has the whole sky to cover him. Though that attitude would have cost him dearly if God hadn't been gracious to him: after he and five Castilian companions had traveled through many countries, by an astonishing stroke of luck he reached Ceylon, and from there Calicut, where he conveniently found some Portuguese ships — and so, against everyone's expectations, he made it back to his native country."
When Peter had finished, I thanked him for his kindness in going to such trouble to introduce me to a man whose conversation he knew I would enjoy. Then Raphael and I greeted each other warmly, and after the usual courtesies that strangers exchange on first meeting, we all went to my house, sat down in the garden on a bench of green turf, and fell into conversation.
Raphael told us that after Vespucci sailed away, he and the companions who had stayed behind in New Castile gradually won the affection of the local people by meeting with them often and treating them gently. Before long they were not only living among them in safety but talking with them like old friends, and they became such favorites of a certain prince — whose name and country I've forgotten — that he generously supplied them with everything they needed, including the means to travel: boats when they went by water, wagons when they went by land. He sent along a thoroughly reliable guide with instructions to introduce and recommend them to whatever other princes they wished to visit. And after many days' journey, they came to towns, and cities, and commonwealths that were both well governed and full of people.
Under the equator, he said, and for as far on either side of it as the sun ranges, lie vast deserts scorched by perpetual heat. The soil is withered, everything looks bleak, and the land is either empty or overrun with wild beasts and serpents — along with a few men no less wild and cruel than the beasts themselves. But the farther they traveled, the milder everything became: the air less burning, the soil greener, even the animals tamer. At last they reached nations, towns, and cities that traded not only among themselves and with their neighbors but by sea and land with very distant countries. From then on, they had the chance to see lands in every direction, because no ship set out on any voyage that didn't gladly take him and his companions aboard.
The first vessels they saw were flat-bottomed, with sails of reeds and wicker woven tightly together, though some were of leather. Farther on, they found ships with rounded keels and canvas sails — like our own ships in every way — and sailors who understood astronomy and navigation. He won enormous goodwill among them by teaching them the use of the magnetic needle, which until then they had never heard of. They had always sailed cautiously, and only in summer; now they trust the magnet completely and sail in every season — more confident, perhaps, than safe. There is real reason to fear that a discovery they expected to be such a blessing may, through their own recklessness, end up doing them great harm.
It would take too long to repeat everything he told us he had observed in each place, and it would carry us too far from our purpose. Whatever is worth telling about the wise and prudent institutions he found among civilized nations may perhaps be told another time, on a better occasion. We asked him question after question about all of it, and he answered very willingly. We made no inquiries about monsters, since nothing is less of a novelty: you can hear about ravening dogs and wolves and cruel man-eaters almost anywhere. What is genuinely hard to find is a state that is well and wisely governed.
Now, while he noted plenty that was wrong in those newly discovered countries, he also counted up quite a few things that could serve as models for correcting the mistakes of our own nations. Those, as I've promised, I will report some other time. For now I intend to relate only what he told us about the manners and laws of the Utopians — the people of the island of Utopia, a name that is Greek for "no-place." But first let me describe the conversation that led us around to that commonwealth.
Raphael had been talking with great judgment about the errors found both here and over there, and the wise institutions of both, and he discussed the customs and government of every nation he'd passed through as precisely as if he'd lived his whole life in each one. Peter, amazed, said, "Honestly, Raphael, I can't understand why you don't enter some king's service. There isn't a king alive who wouldn't be delighted to have you. With your learning, and your knowledge of people and places, you wouldn't just keep a king entertained — you'd be genuinely useful to him, with all the examples you could lay before him and the advice you could give. And in the process you'd advance your own interests and be a great help to all your friends."
"As for my friends," Raphael answered, "I don't lose much sleep over them. I've already done my duty by them. Most people cling to their possessions until they're old and sick, and even then they give them up grudgingly, only when they can't enjoy them anymore. I handed mine over to my relatives and friends while I was still healthy, fresh, and young. They ought to be satisfied with that, and not expect me to go enslave myself to some king for their sake on top of it."
"Easy now!" said Peter. "I didn't say be a slave to a king — just be of service to one."
"Change the word," said Raphael, "and the thing remains the same."
"Call it whatever you like," Peter replied. "I still don't see any other way you could be so useful — privately to your friends and publicly to everyone — or make your own condition any happier."
"Happier?" answered Raphael. "By a way of life my whole soul recoils from? Right now I live exactly as I please, which I suspect very few courtiers can say. Besides, there are plenty of men scrambling after the favor of the great; the great will hardly notice if they have to do without me, and one or two others of my temperament."
At that point I spoke up. "It's clear, Raphael, that you want neither wealth nor power — and frankly, I admire a man like that more than I admire any of the great men of the world. But it seems to me it would be worthy of a soul as generous and philosophical as yours to apply your time and your thinking to public affairs, even if it costs you some personal comfort. And you could never do that to greater effect than by joining the council of some great prince and urging him — as I know you would — toward what is noble and right. For good and evil flow out from the prince over the whole nation, as from an unfailing spring. Your learning is so deep that even without practical experience, and your experience so wide that even without the learning, you would make an excellent counselor to any king on earth."
"You are doubly mistaken, my dear More," he said, "both about me and about the job itself. I don't have the ability you imagine I have — and even if I did, the public wouldn't be one jot better off for my sacrificing my peace and quiet to it. Start with the princes themselves. Most of them are far more devoted to the arts of war, which I neither know nor want to know, than to the useful arts of peace. They are far more interested in acquiring new kingdoms — by fair means or foul — than in governing well the ones they already have. Then consider their ministers. Every one of them is either genuinely so wise that he needs no one's advice, or at the very least so convinced of his own wisdom that he won't take any — unless it comes from whichever men happen to be the prince's favorites, and those they flatter and fawn over in hopes of binding them to their own interests. Nature has built us all this way: we love to be flattered, and we are charmed by our own ideas. The old crow loves his chick, and the ape adores her cub.
"Now picture a court like that — a roomful of men who envy everyone else and admire only themselves — and imagine someone proposing something he had read in history or seen in his travels. The rest of them will act as though their entire reputation for wisdom were in danger, as though they'd be written off as fools forever unless they could shoot the idea down. And if everything else fails, they fall back on this: 'Such-and-such was good enough for our ancestors, and we should only wish we could match their wisdom.' Then they settle back, very pleased with themselves, as if that answer demolished everything — as if it would be some terrible catastrophe for anyone to be caught being wiser than his ancestors. Mind you, we cheerfully let the genuinely good things from past ages slip away; but the moment something better is proposed, we grab the excuse of 'reverence for the past' and cling to it for dear life. I have run into these proud, stubborn, ridiculous judgments in many places — once, memorably, in England."
"You've been to England?" I asked.
"I have," he answered. "I spent several months there, not long after the rebellion in the West Country had been crushed, with a terrible slaughter of the poor people caught up in it.
"During that stay I owed a great deal to the reverend prelate John Morton — Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal, and Chancellor of England. He was a man, Peter — Mr. More can vouch for this, since he spent part of his boyhood in the Cardinal's own household — as venerable for his wisdom and virtue as for his high office. He was of middling height and not stooped by age; his face commanded respect rather than fear. He was easy company, but serious and dignified. He sometimes enjoyed testing the people who came to him on business by speaking sharply to them — never indecently — to see what spirit and presence of mind they had. When it stopped short of insolence, that kind of nerve delighted him, since it resembled his own temperament, and he considered such people the fittest for public office. He spoke gracefully and with weight; he was eminently skilled in the law; he had a vast understanding and a prodigious memory; and these natural gifts had been polished by study and experience. While I was in England, the King relied heavily on his advice, and the government seemed to rest chiefly on his shoulders. He had been schooled in public affairs from his youth, and having been tossed through many turns of fortune, he had acquired — at great cost — an immense stock of wisdom. Wisdom bought that dearly is not soon lost.
"One day, when I was dining with him, there happened to be an English lawyer at the table, who seized the chance to deliver a glowing tribute to the strict justice then being dealt out to thieves. 'They're being hanged so fast,' he said, 'that sometimes twenty swing from a single gallows!' And then he declared he couldn't understand for the life of him how, since so few of them escaped the rope, so many thieves were still out robbing everywhere.
"At this I took the liberty of speaking freely in front of the Cardinal. 'There's no mystery in it,' I said. 'This way of punishing thieves is neither just in itself nor good for the public. The punishment is too severe, and as a deterrent it doesn't work. Simple theft is not so monstrous a crime that it should cost a man his life — and no punishment on earth, however savage, will keep people from stealing when stealing is the only way they can eat. In this matter, you English — along with a good part of the rest of the world — behave like bad schoolmasters, who would rather whip their pupils than teach them. You enact dreadful punishments for thieves, when it would be far better to make sure that everyone has some way to earn a living — so that nobody is driven to the terrible necessity of stealing first and dying for it afterward.'
"'Society has provided for that already,' said the lawyer. 'There are trades, and there is farming. A man can always make a living by those — unless he simply prefers a life of crime.'
"'That dodge won't save you,' I said. 'Let's set aside the men who come home maimed from wars, foreign or civil — from the recent rebellion in Cornwall, say, or your wars with France before that — men who lose their limbs in the service of king and country and come back too broken to follow their old trades and too old to learn new ones. Set them aside, since wars come only now and then. Let's look instead at what happens every single day.
"'First, there is the great crowd of noblemen who live as idle as drones off the labor of other men — off their tenants, whom they skin to the quick to inflate their rents. That, by the way, is the one place they practice thrift; everywhere else they spend so freely they beggar themselves. And each of them drags around a swarm of idle attendants who have never learned any trade they could live by. The moment the lord dies, or the attendants fall sick, out they go — for your lords would sooner feed idlers than care for the sick, and the heir often can't afford to keep up the household his father kept. Now, a man turned out of doors like that finds his stomach growing sharp very quickly — and he turns to robbery just as sharply, because what else is there? He wanders until his health and his clothes are both worn through, and once he's ragged and hollow-faced, no gentleman will take him in, and no poor man dares to. The poor man knows perfectly well that a fellow raised in idleness and pleasure — a fellow used to strutting around with sword and buckler, sneering at the whole neighborhood as beneath him — is never going to take up a spade and mattock, or serve a poor master faithfully for thin wages and a thinner diet.'
"'But those are exactly the men we ought to cherish,' the lawyer answered. 'When war comes, the strength of our armies lies in them. Their noble birth gives them a loftier sense of honor than you'll find among tradesmen and plowmen.'
"'You might as well say,' I replied, 'that for the sake of war we ought to cherish thieves — and you'll certainly never run out of the one while you keep the other. Robbers make passable soldiers, after all, and soldiers make very enterprising robbers; the two professions are closely related. But this bad habit of keeping crowds of idle retainers isn't unique to England. France suffers from an even more pestilent version of it: the whole country is packed with soldiers kept on the payroll in peacetime — if you can call such a state of affairs peace — and kept there on the very logic you've just used to defend your noblemen's hangers-on. The self-styled statesmen there have a maxim that public safety requires a strong body of veteran soldiers standing ready at all times, since raw recruits, they think, can't be trusted. So they sometimes go hunting for a war simply to keep their men in training — to keep their hands from "growing dull," as Sallust put it, "through too long an intermission" of throat-cutting. France has learned at her own expense how dangerous it is to feed beasts like these. And the fates of the Romans, the Carthaginians, the Syrians, and many other nations and cities — all of them overturned and utterly ruined by their own standing armies — ought to make everyone else wiser. Even on its own terms the French maxim is folly, as their experience shows: their hardened veterans can't claim any great record of success against your raw recruits — though I'll say no more on that point, in case you think I'm flattering the English present. In any case, everyday experience shows that your town craftsmen and your country laborers, unless they're disabled in body or crushed in spirit by extreme want, aren't the least bit afraid of the noblemen's idle bodyguards. And those tall, strong men — for the nobility only bother to keep handsome specimens, whom they then proceed to spoil — those men, who now grow feeble with ease and soft with their pampered way of life, would hardly be less fit for action if they were taught honest work and made to earn their bread like men. However you look at it, it seems completely unreasonable to maintain a horde of idlers — who are a standing menace to the peace — for the sake of a war you need never have unless you choose to; and peace deserves far more of your attention than war ever will. But even all this isn't the whole reason men are driven to steal. There is another cause, one more peculiar to England.'
"'And what is that?' asked the Cardinal.
"'Your sheep,' I said. 'Normally so meek, so easily kept in order — they have now begun, I hear, to devour men. They unpeople not just villages but whole towns. For wherever the sheep of a district yield wool that is finer and richer than usual, there the nobles and the gentry — and even those holy men, the abbots! — are no longer satisfied with the old rents their estates produced. It isn't enough, apparently, to live at their ease and do the public no good; they have resolved to do it positive harm instead. They put a stop to all farming. They level houses and wipe out whole towns, leaving only the church standing, and they fence in the land as pasture for their sheep. As if your forests and game parks hadn't already swallowed enough ground, these fine gentlemen turn the best-inhabited country into a wilderness. One insatiable glutton — a plague upon his own nation — decides to enclose several thousand acres inside a single hedge, and the owners as well as the tenants are forced off their land: cheated out of it, or driven off by brute force, or so worn down by abuse that they finally sell. However it's done, out they go — these poor wretched people: men and women, husbands and wives, the old and the young, whole families, penniless but numerous, since farm work takes many hands. Out they trudge from the only homes they've ever known, with nowhere to go, and their household goods — worth little enough even if they could wait for a buyer — fetch almost nothing when they can't. That little money is soon spent. And then what is left for them but to steal — and be hanged for it, with what justice God only knows! — or to take to the roads and beg? Though if they beg, they're thrown into prison as idle vagabonds — these people who would gladly work, if anyone would hire them. But no one will, because there is no farm work to be had, and farm work is all they were ever bred to, now that there's no plowland left. One single shepherd can graze, on land turned over to pasture, a flock covering ground that would take many hands to plow and reap.
"'This, in many places, has driven up the price of grain. The price of wool has risen too — so high that the poor people who used to weave it into cloth can no longer afford to buy it, which throws still more of them out of work. It's true that since pasture began swallowing everything, God has punished the owners' greed with a rot that has destroyed sheep in enormous numbers — though to our eyes it might have seemed more just had it fallen on the owners themselves. But let the sheep multiply as fast as they like; the price will never fall. The wool trade may not technically be a monopoly, since it isn't cornered by a single man, but it lies in so few hands — and such rich ones — that the owners are never pressed to sell until they feel like it, and they never feel like it until the price is driven as high as it can go. The other livestock are expensive for the same reason, and more so: with the villages pulled down and farming everywhere in decay, no one is left whose business it is to breed the animals at all. The rich don't breed cattle the way they breed sheep; they buy them lean and cheap from elsewhere, fatten them on their own pastures, and sell them again at steep prices. And I don't believe the full damage of this system has been felt yet. So far the dealers raise prices only where they sell; but once they've been buying beasts out of the breeding districts faster than those districts can produce them, the supply must shrink, and the whole thing has to end in genuine scarcity. And so this island of yours, which seemed in this respect the happiest in the world, will be brought to misery by the cursed greed of a handful of men.
"'On top of this, the high price of grain leads everyone who can to cut down their households — and where do the dismissed servants go, except to begging, or to robbery, which a man of any spirit takes to sooner? And as if to speed your poverty and misery along, luxury comes flooding in. There is extravagant vanity in dress and reckless spending on food — and not just in noble households, but among tradesmen, among the farmers themselves, among people of every rank. Then you have your many houses of ill fame — and besides the notorious ones, your taverns and ale-houses are no better — plus dice, cards, backgammon, football, tennis, and quoits, all of which empty a man's purse at speed and send their devotees straight off to robbery for fresh funds.
"'Banish these plagues. Order the men who have unpeopled so much soil either to rebuild the villages they have pulled down or to hand the land over to those who will. Rein in the rich men's cornering of markets, which is nearly as bad as open monopoly. Feed fewer idlers. Restore agriculture, and regulate the wool trade, so that honest work can be found for all that crowd of idle men — the ones whom want has already turned into thieves, and the drifting vagabonds and useless serving-men who will certainly turn into thieves before long. Until you remedy these evils, it is pointless to boast about your strict justice against theft. That justice may look impressive, but it is neither truly just nor practical. You allow your people to be raised miserably, their characters corrupted from earliest childhood — and then, when they're grown, you punish them for the very crimes their whole upbringing promised from the start. What else can one conclude, I ask you, but that you first make the thieves and then punish them for it?'
"While I was talking, the lawyer had been busy preparing his answer. He had decided to follow the solemn debating method that consists of repeating everything your opponent said before you reply to a word of it — as though the real contest were a test of memory. 'You have talked very prettily, for a stranger,' he said, 'though you have heard more about our affairs than you have been able to understand correctly. But I will make the whole matter plain to you. First I will repeat, in order, everything you have said; then I will show how badly your ignorance of our country has misled you; and last of all I will demolish your arguments one by one. So, to begin where I promised: there were four points—'
"'Hold your peace,' said the Cardinal. 'An answer that starts like that will not be finished quickly. We'll spare you the trouble of making it now and save it for your next meeting — tomorrow, say, if your affairs and Raphael's allow it. But meanwhile, Raphael,' he said, turning to me, 'I would very much like to hear why you think theft ought not to be punished by death. Surely you wouldn't simply allow it? And do you have some other punishment in mind that would serve the public better? Death plainly doesn't stop men from stealing — so once thieves felt sure of their lives, what fear or force could possibly hold them back? They would read the softer sentence as an open invitation to commit more crimes.'
"'It seems to me a thoroughly unjust thing,' I answered, 'to take a man's life for a little money. Nothing in the world can be set equal in value to a human life. If you say the thief dies not for the money but for breaking the law, then I answer: extreme justice is extreme injury. We should not approve of laws so terrible that they make the smallest offense a hanging matter, nor of the Stoic notion that all crimes are equal — as if there were no difference between killing a man and picking his pocket. Look at the two honestly, and there is no likeness between them, and no proportion. God has commanded us not to kill — and shall we kill so casually, over a little stolen money? Perhaps you'll say the commandment only forbids killing where the law of the land hasn't approved it. But by that same logic, men could pass laws approving adultery and perjury. God has taken from us the right to dispose even of our own lives, let alone other people's. If the mutual agreement of men, making laws among themselves, can authorize killing in cases where God has given us no warrant — if a human statute can simply release people from the divine law and make homicide lawful — what is that but setting man's law above God's? Admit that once, and by the same rule men may trim the laws of God to their own convenience in everything else. Even the law of Moses — harsh and severe as it was, a yoke laid on a stubborn and slavish people — punished theft with a fine, not with death. We can hardly imagine that under the new law of mercy, in which God treats us with the tenderness of a father, He has given us a wider license for cruelty than He gave the Jews.
"'Those are my reasons for thinking it unlawful to put thieves to death. And the absurdity of it — the positive harm it does the commonwealth — should be obvious to anyone: a thief and a murderer face exactly the same punishment. If a robber sees that his danger is the same whether he's convicted of theft or of murder, simple arithmetic pushes him to kill the man he would otherwise only have robbed. The penalty is no worse if he's caught, and the killing is safer — for with the one witness best able to convict him out of the way, there is far less risk of being discovered at all. Terrify thieves too much, in short, and you train them in cruelty.
"'As for the question — what punishment would work better? — in my judgment that is far easier to answer than to ask what could work worse. Why should we doubt the value of the method long used by the old Romans, who understood the arts of government as well as anyone? They condemned men convicted of great crimes to labor for life in quarries, or to dig in the mines in chains. But the arrangement I like best is one I observed during my travels in Persia, among the Polylerites — a sizable and well-governed nation whose name, as it happens, is Greek for "a great deal of nonsense." They pay a yearly tribute to the King of Persia, but in every other respect they are a free people, living under their own laws. They lie far from the sea, ringed around by hills; their land is fruitful, and they are content with what it produces, so they trade little with anyone and have no appetite for enlarging their borders. Their mountains, and the pension they pay the Persian, keep them safe from invasion. So they fight no wars. They live comfortably rather than splendidly, and you would call them happy sooner than great or famous — I doubt anyone beyond their immediate neighbors has ever heard their name.
"'Now, here is how they deal with thieves. A convicted thief must restore what he stole to the owner — not to the prince, as in most countries, for the Polylerites reckon the prince has no more right to stolen goods than the thief does. If the stolen property no longer exists, the thief's own goods are valued, restitution is made out of them, and whatever remains goes to his wife and children. The thief himself is sentenced to labor on the public works — but he is neither imprisoned nor chained, unless there is something extraordinary in his crime. The convicts go about loose and free, working for the public. If one is idle or slack, he is whipped; if he works hard, he is treated decently, with no mark of disgrace. The only restraint is this: every evening the roll is called, and then they are locked up for the night. Apart from constant labor, their lives are not hard. Since they work for the public, they are fed from the public stores — which is managed differently in different districts. In some, their keep is raised by charitable contributions; that may sound precarious, but the people there are so kindhearted that the convicts are supplied more plentifully this way than any other. In other districts, public revenues are set aside for them, or a special poll tax is levied for their maintenance. In some places they do no public work at all; instead, any private man who needs laborers can go to the marketplace and hire them, a little cheaper than free workmen — with leave to use the whip if they dawdle. One way or another, there is always work for them, and beyond his own keep each of them earns something for the public purse.
"'They all wear clothing of a single distinctive color, worn by no one else. Their hair is cropped just above the ears, and a piece of one ear is clipped off. Friends may give them food, drink, or clothes — provided the clothes are the right color — but giving them money is death, for the giver and the taker alike, and it is just as fatal for any free man to take money from them for any reason whatsoever. It is also death for any of these slaves — for that is what they are called — to so much as handle a weapon. The slaves of each district wear that district's particular badge: it is a capital offense to throw the badge away, to cross the district boundary, or to speak with a slave of another jurisdiction. Even plotting an escape is punished exactly like escaping: death for any slave who is in on the plan, slavery for any free man. Informers, on the other hand, are rewarded — a free man with money, a slave with his liberty — and both with a pardon for whatever part they played; so that it is never safer to go through with such a scheme than to repent of it.
"'Those are their laws and customs concerning robbery, and it is easy to see how mild and humane they are — and how practical. The state comes down hard on the vice, but it saves the man, and it handles him in a way designed to make him honest, and to make him spend the rest of his life repairing the harm he once did to society. There is so little fear of these men slipping back into their old ways that travelers crossing the country actually hire them as guides, exchanging them at each district boundary. The convicts have nothing to rob with: they are unarmed; money found on them is proof of crime all by itself; punishment is certain if they are caught; and escape is hopeless, since their clothing is unlike anything ordinary people wear — they could only run away naked, and even then the cropped ear would betray them. The one conceivable danger is that they might conspire against the government. But the slaves of a single district could accomplish nothing alone, and a general conspiracy would require the slaves of many districts to meet and talk — which they cannot even attempt, when merely speaking together is a capital crime. And what man would join a plot in which silence is so dangerous and betrayal so profitable? Besides, none of them is utterly without hope of freedom: by obedience and patience, and by giving good evidence that they mean to live differently in the future, they may expect liberty at last; every year, some are set free on the strength of their good conduct.'
"When I had told them all this, I added that I saw no reason why such a method could not be adopted even in England, and with far better results than the strict justice the lawyer had praised so warmly. To which the lawyer replied that it could never be established in England without endangering the whole nation — and having said so, he shook his head, made a few faces, and fell silent. The whole company seemed to be of his opinion.
"Except the Cardinal. 'It is not easy to guess,' he said, 'whether this would turn out well or badly, since it has never been tried. But suppose, when sentence of death has been passed on a thief, the king were to reprieve him for a time and try the experiment on him — withdrawing the privilege of sanctuary. If it worked, the practice could be made law; if it failed, the worst that follows is carrying out the original sentence a little later, and I cannot see how the delay would be unjust, or inconvenient, or in any way dangerous. As for vagabonds, I think they ought to be dealt with the same way; we have passed law after law against them and gained nothing.'
"When the Cardinal finished, the whole table fell over itself praising the proposal — the very proposal they had despised when it came from me — and they praised the part about the vagabonds most of all, because that part was his own.
"I honestly don't know whether what happened next is worth repeating, since it was perfectly ridiculous. But it is not beside the point, and there is some use to be made of it, so I'll risk it. There was a jester standing by, who played the fool so convincingly that you would have sworn he wasn't playing. His jokes were so feeble that we laughed at him more than at them — though now and then, as if by accident, something not half bad came out of him, proving the old proverb that a man who throws the dice often enough will sometimes have a lucky hit. One of the guests remarked that I had taken care of the thieves and the Cardinal had taken care of the vagabonds, so that nothing remained but to make some public provision for the poor whom sickness or old age had left unable to work.
"'Leave that to me,' said the fool. 'I'll see to them. There is no class of people I would rather have out of my sight. They have pestered me often enough with their wailing and their sad stories — and not one of those tales, however doleful, has ever pried a single penny out of me. Either I had no mind to give them anything, or I had a mind and nothing to give. They've learned their lesson by now: when they see me coming, they save their breath and let me pass without a word, for they know they'll get no more from me than from a priest. So here is my law: all these beggars shall be parceled out among the monasteries — the men to the Benedictines, to be made lay brothers, and the women to be nuns.'
"The Cardinal smiled, and let it pass as a joke; the rest of the company took it up in earnest. Now, there was a friar at the table, a theologian — a grave, sour man — yet the jab at priests and monks pleased him so much that he decided to have his own fun with the fool. 'You still won't be rid of beggars,' he said, 'unless you make some provision for us friars too.'
"'That has been seen to already,' the fool answered. 'The Cardinal provided for you when he proposed rounding up vagabonds and setting them to work. I know of no vagabonds anywhere to match you.'
"The whole table glanced at the Cardinal, and when they saw he was not displeased, they all took up the joke heartily — all except the friar. He, as you can easily imagine, was stung, and flew into such a passion that he could not stop himself from abusing the fool outright. He called him a knave, a slanderer, a backbiter, and a son of perdition, and rounded it all off with terrifying threats quoted out of Scripture. Now the jester was in his element, and he laid about him freely. 'Don't be angry, good friar,' he said, 'for it is written: "In patience possess your soul."'
"To which the friar replied — and I give you his exact words — 'I am not angry, you hangman; or at the very least I am not sinning, for the Psalmist says, "Be angry, and sin not."'
"At this the Cardinal gently advised him to govern his temper. 'No, my lord,' said the friar, 'I speak only out of good zeal, as I am bound to do — for holy men have had good zeal. As it is said, "The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up." And we sing in church how those who mocked Elisha on his way up to the house of God felt the effects of his zeal — as that mocker there, that rogue, that scoundrel, may yet feel it himself.'
"'You mean well, no doubt,' said the Cardinal, 'but in my opinion you would act more wisely — and certainly more becomingly — if you did not let yourself be drawn into a ridiculous contest with a fool.'
"'No, my lord,' he answered, 'that would not be wise at all. Solomon himself, the wisest of men, said: "Answer a fool according to his folly" — which is exactly what I am doing. I am showing him the ditch he will fall into if he doesn't take care. The many mockers of Elisha — and Elisha was only one bald man — felt the effects of his zeal; what then will become of one mocker of a great many friars, among whom are a great many bald men? Besides, we have a papal bull by which everyone who jeers at us stands excommunicated.'
"The Cardinal, seeing there would be no end of it, signaled the fool to leave, steered the conversation another way, and soon afterward rose from the table, dismissed us, and went off to hear petitions.
"And there, Mr. More, you have it — a tediously long story, and I would be ashamed of the length if you had not insisted on hearing it, and then listened like a man determined not to miss a word. I could have cut it short, but I told you the whole of it so you could watch how the very men who scorned my proposal applauded it the instant they saw the Cardinal did not dislike it — flatterers so abject that they seriously applauded ideas their master only entertained as jokes. From which you may judge how much courtiers would value me, or my advice."
"You have done me a great kindness with this story," I said, "for everything in it was told both wisely and delightfully. And while you spoke, I felt I was back in my own country, and a boy again — carried home by the memory of that good Cardinal, in whose household I was raised. You were dear to me already, Raphael, but you are dearer still for honoring his memory so warmly. Even so, I cannot change my opinion. I still believe that if you could overcome your distaste for the courts of princes, your advice could do the world an enormous amount of good — and that is the chief duty of every good man, the very point of living. Your friend Plato held that nations will only be happy when philosophers become kings, or kings philosophers. No wonder happiness keeps its distance, if philosophers will not even condescend to give kings their advice."
"They are not so grudging as that," said Raphael. "They would offer it gladly — indeed many have offered it already, in their published books — if the men in power were willing to listen. Plato surely judged it right: unless kings turn philosophers themselves, men soaked from childhood in wrong ideas will never wholly accept a philosopher's counsel. Plato learned that from his own experience with Dionysius.
"Suppose I were at some king's side, proposing sound laws and trying to root the cursed seeds of evil out of him. Don't you think I would be promptly thrown out of court, or at best kept around as a joke? Picture me, say, with the King of France — sitting in his most private council, the king himself presiding, while all his cleverest men are hard at work on their schemes: by what arts Milan can be kept, and Naples — which keeps slipping through their fingers — won back; how Venice can be broken, and after it the rest of Italy; then how Flanders, Brabant, the whole of Burgundy, and several other kingdoms besides — kingdoms he has already swallowed in his daydreams — can be stitched onto his empire. One man proposes a league with Venice: keep it exactly as long as it pays, share plans with them and even a cut of the spoils, and then, when success has made them unnecessary or unthreatening, take it all back out of their hands. Another proposes hiring German mercenaries, and pensions to keep the Swiss quiet. Another would win over the Emperor with money — the one argument that never fails with him. Another recommends peace with the King of Aragon, cemented by surrendering to him the claims on the kingdom of Navarre. Another thinks the Prince of Castile can be baited with the hope of an alliance, and a few of his courtiers drawn onto the French side with pensions. The hardest knot of all is England. Make a treaty of peace with them, of course; bind the alliance as tight as it will go; call them friends — and watch them as enemies. So keep the Scots standing by like hounds on a leash, ready to slip at England on any occasion; and quietly sponsor some exiled nobleman with a claim to the English crown — the treaty forbids doing it openly — as a way of keeping a king you do not trust permanently nervous.
"Now then: the room is at full boil, all these gallant gentlemen competing in counsels of war — and up stands a little man like me, and tells them to turn everything around. Leave Italy alone, I say; stay home. The kingdom of France is already almost too big for one man to govern well; the king should put any thought of adding to it out of his head. And then suppose I told them what the Achorians decided — a people who live to the southeast of the island of Utopia, and whose name is more Greek mischief: 'the people with no country.' Long ago they went to war to win their king a second kingdom, which he claimed as his inheritance through an old marriage alliance. They conquered it — and found that keeping it was every bit as much trouble as taking it had been. The seeds of trouble never stopped sprouting. Their new subjects were forever either rebelling or being invaded by foreigners, so the army could never be disbanded; the Achorians had to fight constantly, either for these people or against them. Meanwhile they were ground down by taxes, their money drained out of the kingdom, and their blood was spilled for their king's glory without a particle of benefit to themselves, even in peacetime. War corrupted their morals at home; robbery and murder flourished; the laws fell into contempt — because the king, his attention torn between two kingdoms, could not properly mind either. When the Achorians saw that this list of evils had no bottom, they took counsel together and very respectfully invited their king to choose whichever of the two kingdoms he liked better — because he could not keep both. They were too numerous a people, they said, to be ruled by half a king; no man, after all, would willingly share so much as a mule driver with another master. So the good prince was forced to hand his new kingdom to a friend — who was thrown out of it shortly afterward — and content himself with his old one.
"And to finish, suppose I pointed out that after all these warlike projects — after the vast confusion, and the burning-through of treasure and of men — some misfortune might force him in the end to give it all up anyway; and that he would therefore do far better to settle for the kingdom his fathers left him, improve it all he can, and make it flourish to the utmost; to love his people and be loved by them; to live among them, govern them gently, and leave other kingdoms alone, since his own share is big enough for him — if anything, too big. Tell me honestly: how do you think a speech like that would be received?"
"Not very well, I confess," said I.
"Then let us push on," he said. "Suppose I found myself instead among ministers of a different breed, whose great study is how the prince's treasury might be filled. One proposes raising the value of the currency whenever the king has debts to pay, and lowering it again whenever his revenues come in — so that he pays out much with a little, and for a little takes in a great deal. Another proposes a make-believe war, as the excuse for raising money to fight it, with a peace to be concluded the moment the money is collected — the whole thing staged with such a show of piety that the common people give thanks for their prince's religion and his tender care for his subjects' lives. A third digs out some musty old laws, dead from long disuse — laws everyone has forgotten and therefore everyone has broken — and proposes collecting the penalties for breaking them: there is a fortune in it, and the handsome cover story that it is only the law being enforced and justice being done. A fourth advises prohibiting a long list of things under heavy penalties — especially things contrary to the people's interest — and then selling exemptions, at a fine fat price, to anyone who profits by doing them. This trick pays twice over: the fines pour in from transgressors, and the steep price of the licenses makes the prince look like a tender guardian of his people, a man so unwilling to permit anything against the public good that he will not sell his permission cheap. Yet another advises him to make sure of the judges, so that they will rule for the royal prerogative in every case — and to summon them often to court, to argue his causes in his own presence. However unjust the king's claim may be, one judge or another can always be counted on — out of love of contradicting, or vanity about his own cleverness, or the plain itch to please — to find some crack through which the law can be bent the king's way. Once the judges disagree, the clearest matter in the world has become debatable; truth has been called into question; and the king has his opening to interpret the law for his own profit. The judges who hold out will come around in time, through fear or through 'discretion' — and once they have all been secured, they can be sent off to the Bench to pronounce boldly in the king's favor. Pretexts are never in short supply when the verdict must please a prince. It will be said that equity is on his side, or the letter of the law is, or some strained reading of its words — or, when everything else fails, there is always the king's undoubted prerogative, which stands above all law, and which no 'conscientious' judge dares treat lightly.
"So they all end up chanting Crassus's maxim together: no amount of treasure is enough for a prince who must maintain an army out of it. To which they add that a king can do nothing unjustly even if he wants to; that all property is his, down to the very persons of his subjects; that no man owns anything except what the king, out of his goodness, sees fit to leave him; and that it is in the king's interest to leave him as little as possible — for nothing keeps a people tame under a cruel and unjust government like poverty. Riches and liberty make men restless and proud; need and misery blunt them, beat them down, and crush out of them the last height of spirit that might have disposed them to rebel.
"Now suppose I stood up once more and insisted that all such counsels are both dishonorable for a king and ruinous to him; that his honor — and his very safety — lies in his people's wealth rather than his own. Suppose I showed that people choose a king for their own sake and not for his, so that by his care and labor they may live comfortably and safely; and that a prince therefore owes more attention to his people's happiness than to his own, exactly as a shepherd owes more care to his flock than to himself. As for the notion that a poor population is the public's best security — they could not be more mistaken. Who quarrels more than beggars do? Who longs harder for upheaval than the man who is miserable as things stand? Who rushes into chaos more recklessly than the man with nothing to lose and a chance of something to gain? If a king were so despised or so hated by his people that he could keep them in their duty only by mistreatment, plunder, and confiscation — only by reducing them to beggars — it would be better for him to give up his throne than to hold it by methods that keep him the name of authority while stripping it of its majesty. There is no dignity in reigning over beggars; a king's dignity is to reign over rich and happy subjects. That was certainly the mind of Fabricius, a man of noble and exalted spirit, who said 'he would rather govern rich men than be rich himself; for one man to overflow with wealth and pleasure while everyone around him is mourning and groaning is to be the keeper of a jail, not of a kingdom.' A doctor who cannot cure one disease without throwing his patient into another is a bungler; just so, a king who can find no way of correcting his people except by stripping away the comforts of life confesses that he has no idea how to govern free men. Let him correct his own sloth, or his own pride, instead — for it is from the king's own vices that his people's contempt or hatred springs. Let him live without harming anyone, on what belongs to him, and fit his spending to his income. Let him restrain crime — better yet, prevent it by wise government, rather than letting it grow common and then turning severe. Let him not rashly revive laws that disuse has repealed, above all laws long forgotten and never missed. And let him never collect, as a penalty, money that a judge would refuse to award a private man making the same claim — money the judge would call him a crafty and unjust fellow for even demanding.
"And here I would tell them about the law of the Macarians, a people who also live not far from Utopia — the name, once again, is Greek: 'the blessed ones.' Their king, on the day he begins to reign, is bound by an oath, sealed with solemn sacrifices, never to hold in his treasury at any one time more than a thousand pounds of gold, or silver equal to it in value. They say this law was made by an excellent king who cared more for his country's prosperity than for his own wealth, and who meant it as a barrier against any king piling up treasure enough to impoverish his people. He judged that a thousand pounds would cover any emergency — the king against rebels, or the kingdom against invaders — but that it was not enough to tempt a king into invading other men's rights, which was his chief reason for making the law. His second reason was to keep money circulating freely, since trade and exchange require it. And a king who must give away whatever flows in above the legal limit will not go hunting for ways to squeeze his subjects. A king like that will be the terror of evil men, and the darling of all the good.
"If, as I say, I were to talk like this — or anything like this — to men whose minds were already leaning the other way, how deaf they would be to every word!"
"Stone deaf, no doubt," I answered, "and honestly, no wonder. One should never offer propositions or advice that one is certain will not be taken. What good can arguments that far off the beaten road possibly do? How can they move men whose minds are already filled with the opposite convictions? This speculative kind of philosophy is pleasant enough among friends in free conversation, but there is no room for it in the courts of princes, where great affairs are carried on by authority."
"That is exactly what I was saying," Raphael replied. "There is no room for philosophy in the courts of princes."
"Yes, there is," I said, "but not for this speculative kind, which assumes that everything fits everywhere at all times. There is another philosophy — a more flexible one. It knows what stage it is standing on, adapts itself to the scene, and teaches a man to play the part that has fallen to him gracefully and well. Suppose one of Plautus's comedies is being performed, and a troupe of household servants is bantering through a scene — and you walk on dressed as a philosopher and start reciting the speech Seneca gives to Nero in the tragedy Octavia. Wouldn't it be better to say nothing at all than to mix things so utterly mismatched and turn the show into a ridiculous tragicomedy? You spoil the play in hand when you splice in pieces of a different one — even if the pieces you add are better. So perform the play that's being acted, as well as you possibly can, and don't wreck it just because a more pleasing one happens to come into your head.
"It is exactly the same in a commonwealth, and in the councils of princes. If bad opinions can't be pulled out by the roots, if you can't cure some long-accepted vice as thoroughly as you'd wish, that is no reason to abandon the commonwealth — you don't desert the ship in a storm because you can't command the winds. And you shouldn't bombard people with arguments completely outside their experience when you can see that their settled notions will keep you from making any impression. Work at a slant instead. Manage things with all the skill you have, so that what you can't make good you can at least make as little bad as possible. Nothing will ever be entirely right until all men are good — and that's a blessing I don't expect to see anytime soon."
"By your method," Raphael answered, "all I would accomplish is to keep myself from going mad while I tried to cure the madness of everyone else. If I am to speak the truth, I must say the kinds of things I have been saying to you; and as for lying — whether a philosopher is allowed to do it, I can't tell you. I only know that I can't. My kind of talk might be unwelcome and irritating to those men, I grant you, but I don't see why it should strike anyone as foolish or extravagant. If I proposed the sort of things Plato invented in his Republic, or the things the Utopians actually practice in theirs — those things, though they are certainly better than what we have, are so different from our world, which is built entirely on private property (they have none), that I couldn't expect them to make any impression. But talk like mine, which only calls past evils to mind and warns of what may follow, has nothing in it so absurd that it can't be used at any time and place. It can only be unpleasant to men who have made up their minds to run headlong the opposite way.
"And if everything that the wicked lives of men have made look strange or out of place must be dropped as absurd or extravagant, then even among Christians we would have to stop preaching the greater part of what Christ taught us — though He commanded us not to hide it, but to proclaim from the housetops what He had taught in secret. Most of His teaching is far more opposed to the way people live in this age than anything I have said. But the preachers, it seems, have learned exactly the craft you're recommending to me. Finding that the world would not willingly bend its life to fit the rule Christ gave, they have bent His doctrine to fit men's lives — as if it were a ruler made of lead — so that the two might match up somehow or other. And I can see no result of this accommodation except that men now sin in greater comfort.
"That is precisely all the success I could have at court. Either I would disagree with everyone else, and then I might as well say nothing — or I would agree with them, and then, like everyone else, I would simply be helping their madness along. As for your 'working at a slant,' this bending and handling of things so dexterously that if they can't go well they'll go as little badly as possible — I honestly don't understand what you mean by it. At court there is no room for a man to hold his tongue or look the other way. You must openly approve the worst counsels and sign your name to the blackest schemes. A man who gave only lukewarm approval to wicked plans would be marked down as a spy, possibly as a traitor. So a man caught in that kind of company, far from being able to mend matters by your 'working at a slant,' will never find a single opening to do any good at all. The bad company will corrupt him long before he improves it. Or if, against all odds, he stays steady and innocent, then their follies and their crookedness will be pinned on him anyway: by mixing his counsels with theirs, he must carry his share of blame that belongs entirely to other men.
"Plato had a fine comparison for why a philosopher is right to keep his hands off government. Suppose a man saw a great crowd run outside every day into the rain, he says, and take delight in getting soaked. Suppose he knew it would be useless to go out and urge them back indoors to escape the storm, and that the only thing he'd get for his trouble would be a soaking of his own. The best thing he can do is stay inside — and since he hasn't influence enough to correct other people's folly, at least take care to keep himself dry.
"But to tell you plainly what I really think: as long as there is any private property, and as long as money is the measure of all things, I do not believe a nation can be governed either justly or happily. Not justly, because the best things will always fall to the worst men. Not happily, because everything will be divided among a few — and even they are not happy in every respect — while the rest are left in absolute misery.
"So when I turn over in my mind the wise and good constitution of the Utopians — a people governed so well, with so few laws; where virtue gets its due reward, and yet everything is shared so equally that every man lives in plenty — and when I compare them with all the other nations, forever passing new laws and never once getting their affairs into order; nations where every man calls things his property, his own, and yet all the laws they can invent can't enable him to get it, or keep it, or even reliably tell what's his from what's his neighbor's — just look at the lawsuits: fresh ones breaking out every day, and dragging on forever, which proves the point well enough — when I weigh all this, I say, I grow more sympathetic to Plato, and I stop wondering why he refused to make laws for any people who would not accept a community of all things. That wisest of men saw plainly that there is one and only one road to a nation's happiness: putting everyone on a level. And I doubt that can ever be done where property exists. For when every man pulls toward himself everything he can grab, by one title or another, a handful of men end up splitting the entire wealth of the nation among themselves — however rich the nation may be — and leave poverty for all the rest. And generally speaking, the two groups deserve to trade fortunes: the rich are useless, greedy, ravenous; the poor are honest, modest men whose daily work serves the public far better than it serves themselves.
"So I am fully persuaded that until private property is taken away entirely, there can be no fair or just distribution of things, and the world cannot be happily governed. As long as property lasts, the largest and by far the best part of mankind will stay crushed under a load of cares and anxieties. I admit the load can be lightened a little without abolishing property — but it can never be lifted off. You could pass laws setting a limit on how much land and how much money any one man may hold. You could balance the prince and the people — keeping the prince from growing too powerful and the people from growing too unruly. You could forbid the buying of public offices, and keep them from being expensive to hold — since otherwise the men who fill them are tempted to make their money back by fraud and force, and the offices end up going to rich men when they ought to go to wise ones. Laws like these might do what careful nursing and a good diet do for a patient who is past saving: they can ease the disease and soften it, but they can never cure it. The body politic will never get back its health as long as property remains. It's like a patient with several diseases at once: in treating one sore, you inflame another; the remedy that clears up one symptom brings on a different one; and whatever strengthens one part of the body weakens the rest."
"On the contrary," I answered, "it seems to me that men can never live comfortably where everything is held in common. How can there be plenty where every man has an excuse to stop working? The hope of gain won't drive him, and his confidence that other men will do the work will make him lazy. And when people are pinched by want and yet can't legally call anything their own, what can follow but endless uprisings and bloodshed — especially once the respect and authority owed to magistrates collapses? And how authority is supposed to survive among men who are equal to one another in every single respect, I cannot begin to imagine."
"I'm not surprised it looks that way to you," said Raphael, "since you have no picture of such a commonwealth — or else a false one. But if you had been with me in Utopia, and had seen their laws and customs with your own eyes, as I did — I lived among them for five years, and I was so taken with the place that I would never have left at all, if not to tell the Europeans about that new world — then you would freely admit that you had never seen a people so well constituted anywhere."
"You will not easily persuade me," said Peter, "that any nation in that new world is better governed than the nations we have here. Our minds are no worse than theirs; and our governments, if I'm not mistaken, are older. Long practice has taught us any number of conveniences of life — and beyond that, a few lucky accidents have handed us discoveries that no man's ingenuity could ever have invented."
"As for which governments are older, theirs or ours," Raphael answered, "you could judge that fairly only if you had read their histories. If those are to be believed, they had towns before these parts of the world had inhabitants. And as for discoveries — whether stumbled on by chance or worked out by clever men — those could happen there just as well as here. I won't deny that we are naturally more ingenious than they are, but in industry and application they leave us far behind. Before our arrival they knew almost nothing about us; they lump us all together under one general name, 'the nations that lie beyond the equator.' But their chronicles record a shipwreck on their coast twelve hundred years ago: some Romans and Egyptians aboard got safely to shore and spent the rest of their lives among them. And just see what Utopian industriousness made of that one opportunity. There was not a useful art in the whole Roman world — at least, none that those castaways knew — that they failed to learn from their unexpected guests; and working from mere hints, they figured out for themselves even some arts that the survivors couldn't fully explain. That is how much they made of one accident — a few of our people washed up on their shore. But if any similar accident has ever carried anyone from there to Europe, we have made so little of it that we don't even remember it happened — just as, in years to come, our people will probably forget that I was ever there. From a single encounter, they made themselves masters of every good invention we had; I suspect it would be a long, long time before we adopted a single one of their good institutions. And that, I believe, is the true reason they are better governed and live happier than we do, though we are not behind them in brains or in natural advantages."
At this I said to him, "Then I beg you — describe that island to us in real detail. Don't be brief. Lay it all out in order: their land, their rivers, their towns, their people, their manners, their constitution, their laws — in a word, everything you imagine we would want to know. And you may safely imagine that we want to know everything about them that we don't know already."
"Nothing would please me more," he said, "for I have the whole subject carefully arranged in my mind. But it will take some time."
"Then let's go in and have lunch first," I said. "Afterward we'll have all the time we need."
He agreed. We went in and ate, and after the meal we came back and sat down in the same spot. I told my servants to see that no one came to interrupt us, and Peter and I urged Raphael to be as good as his word. When he saw how intent we were, he sat silent for a moment, collecting his thoughts, and then he began.
The island of Utopia is two hundred miles across at its widest point, and it holds nearly that width for most of its length, narrowing only toward the two ends. Its shape is something like a crescent moon. Between the two horns of the crescent, the sea flows in through a strait eleven miles wide and opens into a great bay, ringed by about five hundred miles of coastline and sheltered from the wind. There is hardly any current in this bay, so the whole coast works, in effect, as one enormous harbor — which makes it wonderfully easy for the islanders to trade with one another by ship.
But getting into that bay is another matter. The entrance is treacherous: rocks on one side, sandbars on the other. In the middle of the channel stands a single rock that rises above the water — easy enough to steer around, and on top of it they have built a tower with a permanent garrison. The real danger is the other rocks, the ones hidden below the surface. Only the natives know the safe passage, so any stranger who tries to enter the bay without one of their pilots is courting shipwreck. Even the Utopians themselves could not get through safely without certain landmarks on the coast to steer by. And if those markers were ever quietly moved, an enemy fleet — no matter how large — would be lured onto the rocks and destroyed, every ship of it.
The outer side of the island has plenty of harbors too, but the coast there is so well defended, by nature and by engineering alike, that a handful of men could hold off a great army trying to land.
Now, here is something remarkable — and they say the evidence is still visible, which makes it believable. Utopia was not originally an island at all. It was part of the mainland. The man who conquered it was named Utopus, and the island still carries his name (before that it was called Abraxa). Utopus took a rough, uncivilized people and brought them under such good government, and raised them to such a level of culture, that they now outshine practically everyone else on earth.
Once he had subdued the place, Utopus decided to cut it off from the continent entirely and bring the sea all the way around it. So he ordered a channel dug — fifteen miles long. And so that the natives would not feel he was treating them like slaves, he put not only the local inhabitants to work on it but his own soldiers as well, right alongside them. With that enormous workforce, he finished the job faster than anyone thought possible. His neighbors on the mainland had laughed at the whole project as a piece of folly. When they saw it completed, the laughter stopped. What replaced it was admiration — and fear.
There are fifty-four cities on the island, all of them large and well built, and all sharing the same language, manners, customs, and laws. They are even laid out on the same plan, as nearly as the ground each one stands on will allow. The closest cities are at least twenty-four miles apart; the farthest are still near enough that a person can walk from one to the next in a single day.
Once a year, every city sends three of its wisest senators to Amaurot to confer about the affairs of the whole island. (The name Amaurot, in Greek, means something like "dim city" — and the river it stands on is called the Anider, "no-water.") Amaurot is the chief town of the island, and since it lies near the center, it is the most convenient meeting place for everyone.
Each city's territory extends at least twenty miles in every direction, and more where the cities are spaced farther apart. No town has any desire to push its boundaries outward, because the people think of themselves as tenants of the land rather than its owners.
All across the countryside they have built farmhouses, well designed and stocked with everything needed for farm work. People are sent out from the cities, by turns, to live in them. No country household has fewer than forty men and women in it, plus two slaves. Each household is run by a master and a mistress, and every thirty households are overseen by a magistrate.
Every year, twenty members of each farm household move back to town, having finished a two-year stay in the country, and twenty fresh replacements come out from town to take their places. The newcomers learn farming from the people who have already been there a year — and a year later, they teach the next batch in turn. This way, the farms are never run entirely by beginners, and no one makes the kind of rookie mistakes that could ruin a harvest and leave everyone short of grain. And though this annual rotation exists so that nobody is forced to spend too long at hard country labor against his will, plenty of people genuinely enjoy the life and ask permission to stay on for years.
These farmers work the land, raise cattle, and cut timber, hauling it to the towns by road or by water, whichever is more convenient. They also raise chickens in astonishing numbers, and by a very clever method: the hens do not sit on the eggs. Instead, huge batches of eggs are kept at a gentle, even warmth until they hatch — and the moment the chicks are out of the shell and able to walk, they treat the people who feed them as their mothers, following them around the way ordinary chicks follow a hen.
They breed very few horses, and the ones they keep are high-spirited animals used only to teach the young people horsemanship. All the actual work — plowing, hauling — is done by oxen. Horses are stronger, they admit, but oxen last longer, get sick less often, and cost less to feed and care for. And when an ox is finally too worn out to work, it still makes a good dinner.
They plant grain only for bread, because their drink is wine, cider, or perry — and often plain water, sometimes boiled with honey or licorice, which they have in abundance. They know exactly how much grain each town and its surrounding district will consume, yet they deliberately plant far more, and raise far more cattle, than they need — and the surplus they simply give away to their neighbors. When country people need something the land doesn't produce, they go fetch it from town without bringing anything to trade for it, and the town magistrates see that they get it, no questions asked. Most of them go into town anyway once a month, on a festival day.
When harvest time approaches, the country magistrates send word to the towns of how many extra hands they'll need for the reaping. The requested workers are sent out — and the whole harvest is usually brought in within a single day.
If you know one of their towns, you know them all — they are that much alike, except where the lay of the land forces a difference. So I will describe just one, and no town suits the purpose better than Amaurot. None outranks it, since all the others defer to it as the seat of the national council, and none was better known to me — I lived there for five full years.
The city sits on the slope of a hill, or really more of a gentle rise. Its shape is nearly a square. One side runs up almost to the hilltop; from there the city slopes down for two miles to the river Anider, and it stretches a little wider along the riverbank itself. The Anider rises about eighty miles above Amaurot, starting as a small spring, but other streams feed into it — two of them fairly large — so that by the time it passes Amaurot it has grown half a mile wide. It keeps widening from there until, sixty miles further on, it empties into the ocean. Between the city and the sea, and for some miles upstream of the city too, the river ebbs and flows every six hours with a strong tidal current. The tide pushes in about thirty miles with such force that it drives the fresh water back and fills the river with nothing but salt water. Above that point the water is brackish for a few miles, but a little higher up, where it runs past the city, it is entirely fresh — and when the tide goes out, it runs fresh the whole way down to the sea.
A bridge spans the river — not timber, but handsome stone, carried on a series of stately arches. It stands at the end of the city farthest from the sea, so ships can dock all along the city's waterfront with nothing in their way.
There is a second river too, small but pleasant. It rises out of the very hill the city stands on and runs down through the streets until it joins the Anider. Because its source lies a little outside the walls, the inhabitants have fortified the springhead — so that if the city were ever besieged, no enemy could cut off the water, divert it, or poison it. From there the water is carried in earthenware pipes to the lower parts of town. And wherever the pipes cannot reach, they keep great cisterns that collect rainwater, which serves just as well.
The city is ringed by a high, thick wall studded with towers and forts. Around three sides runs a broad, deep, dry moat, planted thick with thorn bushes; on the fourth side, the river does the moat's job for it.
The streets are laid out to be convenient for traffic and well sheltered from the wind. The buildings are solid and so uniform that an entire block looks like a single house. The streets are twenty feet wide, and behind every house lies a garden — large gardens, each one enclosed by the backs of the surrounding houses, whose fronts all face the street. So every house has two doors: a front door onto the street and a back door into the garden. The doors are double doors that open with a push and swing shut behind you on their own — and since nothing there is private property, anyone may walk into any house he pleases. Every ten years they trade houses, by drawing lots.
They tend their gardens with great care, growing vines, fruit, herbs, and flowers, all so well arranged and so beautifully kept that I have never seen gardens anywhere so productive and so lovely at the same time. And this passion for gardening is fed not only by the pleasure of it, but by competition: the residents of the different streets vie with one another over whose gardens are finest. Honestly, you will find nothing in the whole city that is at once so useful and so delightful. It seems the city's founder cared about nothing so much as these gardens — for they say the whole plan of the town was laid out from the start by Utopus himself, but he left its decoration and improvement to the generations after him, judging that too much for any one man to bring to perfection.
Their records, which hold the history of the town and the state, are kept with exacting care and run back seventeen hundred and sixty years. From these it appears that the first houses were low and shabby — mere cottages thrown together from whatever timber was handy, with mud walls and straw-thatched roofs. But now their houses stand three stories high, with fronts faced in stone, plaster, or brick, and the space between the facings filled with rubble. The roofs are flat and coated with a kind of plaster that costs almost nothing, yet is mixed so cleverly that it will not catch fire and stands up to weather better than lead. They have glass in great quantities, and they glaze their windows with it; they also use a thin linen cloth in their windows, treated with oil or gum so that it keeps out the wind while letting in the light.
Every year, each group of thirty families elects a magistrate to oversee them. In the old language he was called a Syphogrant, though nowadays the title is Philarch. Over every ten Syphogrants — and all the families under them — stands a higher magistrate, anciently called a Tranibor, though lately the title has become Archphilarch. (So a Syphogrant oversees thirty families, and a Tranibor oversees ten Syphogrants; those are the two ranks of Utopian magistrate, and I'll stick with the old names.)
The Syphogrants, two hundred in all, elect the city's governor — the office Europeans would call a prince, though he is no monarch — choosing from a list of four candidates named by the people of the city's four districts. Before voting, every Syphogrant swears an oath to choose the man he honestly believes best suited for the job. The ballot is secret, so no one knows how anyone else voted. The governor serves for life — unless he falls under suspicion of plotting to make himself a tyrant and enslave the people, in which case he is removed.
The Tranibors are elected fresh every year, though in practice they are usually re-elected. Every other office in Utopia lasts just one year.
The Tranibors meet with the governor every third day — more often if something urgent comes up — to discuss public business, or, on the rare occasion it happens, to settle private disputes among the people. Two Syphogrants always sit in on the council chamber, and they are different ones each day. There is a fundamental rule of their government: no decision touching public affairs can be finalized until it has been debated in the council on three separate days. And it is a capital crime to meet and discuss state business anywhere outside the regular council or the general assembly of the people.
All these arrangements exist for one reason: to make sure the governor and the Tranibors can never conspire together to overturn the government and enslave the people. That is why, whenever anything of real importance comes up, it is sent down to the Syphogrants, who lay it before the families in their districts, talk it over among themselves, and then report back to the senate. On the greatest questions of all, the matter goes before the council of the whole island.
The council follows one more rule: never debate a proposal on the same day it is first introduced. It always waits until the next meeting. The reason is that men who speak up too quickly, in the heat of the moment, can lock themselves into a position — and then, instead of weighing what is best for the public, they spend their energy defending their first opinions. Out of a perverse, backwards sort of pride, a man like that would sooner put his country at risk than his reputation, rather than let anyone suspect he hadn't thought things through the first time. So to head all that off, they make sure their deliberations are deliberate, not sudden.
Farming is the one skill everybody in Utopia understands. No one — man or woman — is ignorant of it. They learn it from childhood, partly in school and partly in practice: children are taken out into the fields around town, where they don't just watch others work but get their hands dirty themselves.
Beyond farming, which everyone shares, each person learns a particular trade — working wool or flax, masonry, smithing, carpentry. There's no other kind of trade the Utopians consider worth much.
Across the whole island, everyone wears the same kind of clothing. The only differences are the ones needed to tell men from women and the married from the unmarried. The style never changes. It isn't ugly or uncomfortable, it suits the climate, and it works for both summer and winter. Every family makes its own clothes.
But everyone, women as well as men, learns one of the trades I mentioned. Women mostly handle the wool and flax, as the lighter work better suited to them, leaving the heavier trades to the men. A trade usually passes from father to son, since inclination tends to run in families. But if a young man's talent points another way, he is adopted into a family that practices the trade he's drawn to — and when that happens, his father and the magistrates both take care to place him with a respectable, decent man. If someone who has mastered one trade wants to learn a second, that's allowed too, and arranged the same way. Once he knows both, he follows whichever he prefers — unless the city happens to need the other one more.
The chief business of the Syphogrants — almost their only business — is to see that nobody sits idle, and that everyone works steadily at his trade. But steadily does not mean endlessly. Nobody is worn down with labor from dawn to dark like a pack animal. That kind of life is slavery, plain and simple — and yet it's the standard lot of working people almost everywhere except Utopia.
Here is their schedule. They divide the day and night into twenty-four hours and set aside just six of them for work: three before the midday meal, three after. Then comes supper, and at eight o'clock — counting from noon — they go to bed and sleep a full eight hours.
Six hours of work a day. Hold that number; I'll come back to it.
All the remaining time, beyond work, meals, and sleep, is each person's own. Not that they're free to waste it on luxury and laziness — they're expected to spend it on some worthwhile pursuit of their choosing, and for most of them, that means reading. Public lectures are held every morning before daybreak. Only those formally marked out for scholarship are required to attend, but great crowds of men and women of every rank come anyway, each to whatever lectures suit their interests. And if someone who isn't built for book-learning would rather spend that hour at his trade — and many would — nobody stops him. In fact he's praised for it, as a man putting himself to use for his country.
After supper they spend an hour relaxing: in their gardens in summer, in winter in the common halls where they eat, entertaining each other with music or conversation. Dice and other such foolish, ruinous games are completely unknown to them. They do have two games rather like our chess. In one, numbers battle numbers, and one number captures, so to speak, another. The other stages a battle between the virtues and the vices — and it's rather cleverly done. It shows how the vices quarrel among themselves yet unite against virtue; which vices oppose which particular virtues; how vice attacks virtue openly or undermines it by stealth; and how virtue, in turn, holds its ground.
Now, about those working hours. You need to look at them closely, or you'll jump to the wrong conclusion: surely, with only six hours of work a day, they must run short of necessities? The truth is exactly the opposite. Six hours isn't merely enough to supply them with plenty of everything they need or could want — it's actually more than enough. And you'll see why the moment you consider how enormous a share of the population in every other nation does no work at all.
Start with women — half the human race — who in most places do little; and where the wife happens to be industrious, the husband is usually idle in her place. Then add the great army of priests and so-called religious men, all idle. Add all the rich, especially the great landowners, the ones we call noblemen and gentlemen — and their households with them, those whole crowds of retainers kept for show rather than use. Add the strong, healthy beggars who invent some disease as a license for begging. Tally it all up, and you'll find that the number of people whose labor actually supplies mankind is far smaller than you ever imagined.
Now consider how few even of those who do work are doing anything genuinely useful. Because we measure everything by money, we've spawned whole trades that are pointless and wasteful, existing only to feed extravagance and luxury. If the people who work were set only to the things life actually requires, goods would become so abundant and so cheap that workers couldn't live on what they earned. But suppose you took everyone laboring at useless things and moved them to useful work — and then forced into labor all the people who currently rot away their lives in sloth and idleness, each of whom consumes as much as two working men. You can easily see that a very small amount of time would produce everything mankind needs for necessity, for comfort, even for pleasure — real pleasure, the natural kind.
Utopia proves it. In a major city and all its surrounding territory, you'll scarcely find five hundred people — men or women — who are fit for work by age and strength and aren't doing any. Even the Syphogrants, though legally exempt, don't exempt themselves; they work to spur on everyone else by example. The same exemption goes to those whom the priests recommend and the Syphogrants, by secret ballot, release from labor so they can devote themselves entirely to study. If any of these scholars fails to live up to his early promise, back to work he goes. And it cuts the other way too: a workman who uses his free hours so well that he makes real progress in learning is released from his trade and promoted into the ranks of the scholars. It's from this class of learned men that they choose their ambassadors, their priests, their Tranibors, and the governor himself — anciently titled Barzenes, but lately called Ademus. (Another of the island's sly Greek names: Ademus means "without a people." A ruler with no people, governing a no-place.)
So: nearly everyone works, and no one is allowed to work at anything useless. From that alone you can estimate how much gets done in those few required hours. But there's more. The essential trades there take less labor than they do anywhere else.
Take building. Among us, putting up and repairing houses devours endless labor, because a wasteful heir lets the house his father built fall apart, and then his successor has to restore at huge expense what could have been maintained for almost nothing. Or a man builds a house at enormous cost, and the next owner — fancying himself a finer judge of architecture — lets it crumble and builds another at no less expense. In Utopia everything is so well managed that new construction on fresh ground is rare. They're quick to repair their houses, and quicker still to prevent decay before it starts, so their buildings last for ages with very little upkeep. The builders often have almost nothing to do except cut timber and square stone in advance, so that when a building is needed, it can go up fast.
As for clothing, notice how little labor it takes. At work they wear leather and skins, cut loosely, which last a full seven years. In public they throw a cloak over the work clothes — and these cloaks are all one color: the natural color of the wool. So they use less woolen cloth than anyone else, and what they use costs less. Linen they use more, but it takes less labor to make, and they judge cloth by one standard only — the whiteness of the linen or the cleanness of the wool — caring nothing for fineness of thread. Elsewhere, one man can hardly get by with four or five woolen coats in different colors and as many silk vests, and the fussier sort think ten aren't enough. In Utopia every man is content with one cloak, which usually lasts him two years. And why would he want more? More cloaks wouldn't make him one bit warmer or one jot better-looking.
So, since everyone is employed at useful work, and everyone is satisfied with less, the result is abundance in everything. Often, in fact, they run out of things to do, and great crews are sent out to repair the highways. And when there's no public project at all, the working hours are simply shortened. The magistrates never keep people laboring unnecessarily, because the whole aim of their constitution is this: once the public's needs are met, every citizen should have as much time as possible freed from bodily service and devoted to the cultivation of the mind. That, they believe, is where the happiness of life is found.
Now it's time to explain how these people deal with one another — their trade, and the rules by which everything gets distributed.
Each city is made up of households, and each household is made up of relatives. When the women grow up, they marry and move into their husbands' homes; but the men — sons and grandsons alike — stay in the family house, under the authority of the oldest male. If age has dulled his mind, the next oldest takes his place.
To keep any city from growing too large — or from being emptied out by some disaster — they've set limits: no city may contain more than six thousand households, not counting the farming district around it. And no household may have fewer than ten adults or more than sixteen. (There's no fixed number for children, naturally.) The rule is easy to keep: when one couple has more children than their quota allows, some are simply transferred to a family that has too few. By the same method, cities that grow slowly are topped up from cities that grow fast.
And if the whole island's population swells beyond its limits? Then they draw a number of citizens from the various towns and send them across to the neighboring continent. Wherever they find the locals holding more land than they can actually farm, they plant a colony, inviting the inhabitants to join their society if they're willing. Those who agree blend in quickly — they take up the Utopian way of life, follow Utopian rules, and both peoples are better off for it, because under Utopian management the same soil that was too thin and stingy to support one nation now feeds two comfortably.
But if the natives refuse to live under their laws, the Utopians drive them out of the territory they've marked off for themselves — by force, if they resist. They consider it a perfectly just cause for war when a nation keeps others from using soil it leaves idle and uncultivated itself, since by the law of nature every man has a right to whatever unused portion of the earth he needs to stay alive.
If some disaster shrinks one of their towns so badly that it can't be refilled from the others without draining them too much — which has happened only twice in their whole history, they say, both times from plague — they make up the loss by recalling citizens from the colonies. They would rather abandon a colony entirely than let any town on the island waste away.
But back to their daily life together. The oldest man of each household, as I've said, is its head. Wives serve their husbands, children serve their parents, and the younger always serve the older.
Every city is divided into four equal quarters, and in the middle of each quarter is a marketplace. Everything the households produce is brought there and carried into warehouses, where goods of each kind are stored together. And there every father of a household goes and takes whatever he or his family needs — without paying for it, and without leaving anything in exchange.
Why would anyone be refused? There's plenty of everything. And why would anyone take more than he needs? He has no reason to, since he knows he'll never run short. Think about it: what makes any creature greedy and grasping is the fear of want. In humans there's one extra ingredient — pride, the itch to outshine everyone else in show and excess. But under Utopian law, pride of that kind has nowhere to operate.
Next to these markets are food markets, stocked not only with vegetables, fruit, and bread, but with fish, poultry, and meat. The slaughtering happens outside the towns, at designated spots near running water where the blood and filth can be washed away — and it's done by slaves, because the Utopians don't let their citizens butcher animals at all. They believe that pity and kindness, among the finest feelings we're born with, get worn down by the killing of animals. Nor do they allow anything dirty or rotting to be brought inside the towns, in case foul smells taint the air and damage people's health.
Along every street, spaced at equal distances, stand great halls, each known by its own name. A Syphogrant lives in each one, presiding over the thirty households assigned to it — fifteen on one side of the hall, fifteen on the other. These halls are where everyone gathers to eat. The steward of each hall goes to the marketplace at a set hour and carries home provisions according to the number of people his hall serves.
But the sick get the best care of anyone. They're housed and looked after in public hospitals — every town has four of them, built outside the walls and so large they could pass for small towns in their own right. The size serves two purposes: however many people fall ill, there's room to house them comfortably, and patients with contagious diseases can be kept far enough from the rest that there's no danger of infection spreading. The hospitals are stocked with everything that might ease a patient's recovery, the nursing is tender and attentive, and skilled physicians are constantly on hand. No one is ever sent there against his will — and yet there's hardly a person in town who, falling ill, wouldn't rather go to the hospital than lie sick at home.
After the hospital steward has collected whatever the physicians prescribe for the sick, the best of what remains in the market is divided among the halls in proportion to their numbers — except that the governor, the high priest, the Tranibors, and any ambassadors or foreign visitors are served first. (Visitors are rare, in fact; but when they do come, fully furnished houses stand ready for them.)
At dinnertime and suppertime a trumpet sounds, and the whole Syphogranty gathers to eat together — everyone except those in the hospitals or sick at home. Once the halls have been supplied, no one is stopped from carrying food home from the market; they know nobody does that without a good reason. Anyone who wants to may eat at home — but nobody really wants to. It's considered a bit ridiculous to go to the trouble of cooking yourself a second-rate dinner when a far better one is waiting just down the street.
All the heavy and dirty work around these halls is done by slaves, but the cooking and the running of the tables belong entirely to the women, with every family taking its turn. Depending on their numbers, they sit at three or more tables. The men sit with their backs to the wall, the women on the outer side — so that if a woman is suddenly taken ill, as often happens in pregnancy, she can get up without disturbing anyone and go to the nursery. The nurses are there with the infants, and the room is always supplied with clean water, cradles to lay the babies in if needed, and a fire to change and dress them by.
Every child is nursed by its own mother unless death or sickness prevents it. When that happens, the Syphogrants' wives find a substitute nurse quickly — which is never difficult, since any woman who can do it volunteers gladly. They consider it an act of real mercy, and the child she nurses comes to regard her as its mother.
All children under five sit with the nurses. The older boys and girls, up to marrying age, either wait on the tables or — if they're not yet strong enough for that — stand by in complete silence and eat whatever is handed to them. That's the whole of their dining ceremony.
In the middle of the head table, which runs across the upper end of the hall, sit the Syphogrant and his wife — the place of honor, in full view of the room. Beside them sit two of the eldest, since they always dine four to a group. If the Syphogranty has a temple in it, the priest and his wife sit with the Syphogrant, above everyone else. The rest of the seats mix old and young together, deliberately: young people are placed among their elders rather than bunched with each other. The idea, they say, is that the dignity of the old, and the respect owed to them, will keep the young from any rude words or behavior.
The dishes aren't set out for the whole table at once. The best food goes first to the elders, whose seats are marked out from the rest; then everyone else is served alike. And if some delicacy arrives in quantities too small to go around, the old men share it out among the younger people sitting near them.
So the old are honored with special respect — and yet everyone eats equally well. Both dinner and supper open with a short reading on some moral subject, kept brief so that it never becomes a chore to sit through. The elders pick up its theme and carry the conversation on in useful and pleasant directions — but they don't hog the talk for the whole meal. Quite the opposite: they draw the young people out on purpose, because free conversation at the table is how they discover what each one is made of and take the measure of his character.
They eat dinner quickly, since work comes after it, but they linger long over supper, since sleep comes after that — and sleep, they believe, helps the stomach do its digesting properly. No supper passes without music, and fruit is always served after the main course. While they sit at table, incense is burned and perfumes and scented waters are sprinkled about — in short, nothing is left out that might lift their spirits. They give themselves generous license in this respect, and indulge freely in every pleasure that brings no harm with it.
That's how they live together in the towns. In the country, where households lie far apart, everyone eats at home — and no farm family lacks for anything, since they're the ones who supply the food the towns eat in the first place.
If anyone wants to visit friends in another town, or simply feels like seeing the country, he can get permission easily from the Syphogrants and Tranibors — as long as there's no particular need for him at home. Travelers carry a passport from the governor, which certifies that the trip is authorized and sets a date for their return. They're given a wagon and a slave to drive the oxen and look after them, though unless there are women in the party, they usually send the wagon back as more trouble than it's worth. They carry no provisions on the road, and yet they never lack anything, because wherever they go they're treated as if they were at home. If they stay anywhere longer than a night, each man simply takes up his own trade, and the local craftsmen in that line welcome him warmly.
But if a man leaves his own city without permission and is caught wandering around with no passport, he's treated harshly: punished as a runaway and marched home in disgrace. If he's caught at it a second time, he's condemned to slavery.
If a man only wants to ramble around the countryside belonging to his own city, he's free to do so — with his father's permission and his wife's consent. But at any country house he visits, if he expects to be fed, he has to pitch in with the work and follow the household's rules. On those terms he can roam the whole district, and he's just as useful to his city out there as he would be inside its walls.
So you see how it is: there are no idle people among them, and no excuses for dodging work. There are no taverns, no alehouses, no brothels — no opportunities for corruption, no dark corners to slip into, no secret cliques to form. Everyone lives in full view of everyone else, so everyone is bound to do his daily work and to spend his free hours decently. A people organized this way can't help living in great abundance, and since everything is shared out equally, no one can be poor or be driven to beg.
In their great council at Amaurot — to which every town sends three representatives once a year — they review which towns have surpluses and which are running short, so that one can supply the other. And this is done freely, with no exchange of any kind: each town gives according to its plenty and receives according to its need, so that the whole island is, in effect, one household.
Once they've provided for the whole country and laid up stores for two years — insurance against a bad season — they export the surplus: grain, honey, wool, flax, timber, wax, tallow, leather, and cattle, usually in great quantities. A seventh of everything they ship is given free to the poor of the country they're trading with; the rest they sell at moderate prices. In exchange they bring home the few things they lack — and really, almost the only thing they need is iron — plus a great deal of gold and silver. They've run this trade so long that the size of their treasury is hard to imagine, and at this point they hardly care whether they're paid in cash or on credit.
In fact, a great part of their fortune is now held in bonds. But no private individual ever signs these contracts; the paper is always drawn up in the name of the town. A town that owes them money collects from its own private debtors, deposits the sum in its public treasury, and gets the use of it until the Utopians call it in. And mostly they don't call it in — they'd rather leave it in the hands of people who can put it to work than collect it for themselves. Though if some other neighbor turns out to need it more, then they call in the debt and lend it on.
War is the only occasion when their treasure earns its keep. They hold it for great emergencies and sudden dangers, and above all for hiring foreign soldiers — whom they'd much rather expose to danger than their own people. They pay these mercenaries extravagantly, knowing that money like that works even on the enemy: it tempts soldiers to switch sides, or at least to desert, and it's the surest way of setting enemies plotting against one another. For this purpose they keep an unbelievable fortune.
But they don't keep it the way you'd keep a treasure. They keep it in a manner I'm almost afraid to describe, because you'll think it too outlandish to be true. And I have good reason to worry about that — because if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, no one could have made me believe it either.
It's a fact that things strike us as incredible exactly in proportion to how far they differ from our own customs. But anyone who thinks it through won't be surprised that a society so unlike ours measures gold and silver by a completely different standard. Since they have no use for money among themselves, and keep it only against emergencies that may or may not ever come, they value it for precisely what it's worth — which is to say, by its usefulness. By that measure, iron obviously beats gold and silver hands down. Men can no more live without iron than without fire or water. But Nature gave the precious metals no function we couldn't easily do without. It's only human folly that has made scarcity itself a source of value. Nature, like an indulgent parent — that's how they see it — put all the truly best things right out in the open and in abundance, like water and earth, and buried the vain and useless things far out of reach.
Now, if they locked these metals up in some tower, ordinary people would get suspicious — that old foolish mistrust would set in, the rumor that the governor and senate were scheming to cheat the public for their own gain. If they worked it into dishes and fine plate, they were afraid people would grow too fond of the stuff and balk at melting it down when a war made it necessary to pay the soldiers.
So they hit on a solution that fits the rest of their system perfectly — and is so unlike ours that you'll hardly believe it, you who hoard gold and guard it so tenderly. They eat and drink from earthenware and glass — handsome pieces, though cheap and breakable. And the gold and silver? They make it into chamber pots and toilet seats. Not just in the public halls, either, but in private homes. They use the same metals for the chains and shackles of their slaves. Criminals are made to wear a gold earring as a badge of disgrace, or a gold chain, or even a little gold crown. By every means they can think of, they make gold and silver marks of shame.
The result is that while other nations give up their gold as painfully as if you were tearing out their guts, the Utopians, if the day ever came to hand over every ounce on the island, would feel it about as much as we'd feel the loss of a penny.
They find pearls on their beaches, and diamonds and rubies in their rocks, but they never go looking for them. If they stumble across one, they polish it up and give it to the children, who are thrilled with these decorations and show them off proudly — while they're small. As they grow up, they notice that nobody but little children wears such trinkets, and without any prompting from their parents they quietly put them away, embarrassed — exactly the way our children, when they get older, abandon their dolls and toys.
I never saw a clearer demonstration of how differently customs shape people's minds than the case of the ambassadors from Anemolia, who arrived in Amaurot while I was there. They came on serious diplomatic business, so the deputies from several towns had gathered ahead of time to receive them. Now, ambassadors from nations near Utopia know the local customs — they know fine clothes earn no respect there, that silk is held in contempt and gold is a badge of disgrace — so they make a point of arriving dressed as plainly as possible. But the Anemolians lived farther off and had dealt with the Utopians very little. All they had heard was that the Utopians dressed coarsely, and all alike; so they assumed the islanders simply didn't have any finery. And being a vain people rather than a wise one, they resolved to deck themselves out so gorgeously that they'd look like gods, and dazzle the eyes of the poor Utopians with their splendor.
So in came the three ambassadors with a hundred attendants, all in bright multicolored clothes, most of them in silk. The ambassadors themselves — noblemen back home — wore cloth-of-gold, with heavy gold chains, gold earrings, gold rings, and caps dripping with strings of pearls and gems. In short, they had decorated themselves with everything that in Utopia is either the gear of a slave, the badge of a criminal, or the plaything of a child.
It was quite a show, watching them strut as they compared their finery with the plain clothes of the Utopians — who had poured into the streets to watch the procession — and then watching just how badly their grand entrance misfired. To every Utopian who had never traveled abroad, the whole spectacle looked ridiculous. They bowed respectfully to the shabbiest-dressed men in the procession, taking them for the ambassadors, while the actual ambassadors, loaded down with gold chains, they took for slaves and didn't salute at all.
You should have seen the children — the ones just old enough to have given up their own jewels — nudging their mothers and pointing: "Look at that great big fool, wearing pearls and gems like a little kid!" And the mothers, in complete earnest: "Hush now — I expect that's one of the ambassadors' clowns." Others stood around critiquing the gold chains: useless, they observed — too flimsy to hold a slave, who could snap them easily, and anyway hanging so loose that he could slip them off and run away whenever he liked.
But after the ambassadors had spent a day or two in the city, things changed. They saw enormous quantities of gold lying around as cheap as dirt, held in exactly as much contempt there as it is honored everywhere else. They saw more gold and silver in the chains and shackles of one runaway slave than their entire wardrobes were worth. And their plumage drooped. Ashamed of all the glory they'd been so proud of, they packed it away — especially once they'd talked with the Utopians long enough to learn their customs and what they really thought of such things.
The Utopians find it amazing that any man who can look up at a star — let alone the sun — could be enchanted by the weak glitter of a little stone. Or that anyone could think himself nobler because his coat is spun from finer thread, when, however fine the thread, it was once on a sheep's back, and the sheep was still just a sheep the whole time it wore it.
They're equally amazed that gold, useless in itself, is now prized everywhere so highly that man himself — who gave it its value, and for whose use it exists — is valued less than the metal is. It comes to this: some leaden blockhead with no more sense than a fencepost, and as wicked as he is stupid, commands the service of many wise and good men, purely because he happens to be sitting on a heap of gold coins. And if by some accident, or some trick of the law — which upends fortunes as readily as chance does — all that money were shifted from the master to the lowest servant in his household, the master would soon be waiting on his own former footman, as if he were just an accessory to the cash, obliged to follow it wherever it goes.
But what they marvel at most, and detest most, is the folly of people who pile honors on a rich man they don't owe a thing to and don't depend on in any way — purely because he's rich — all the while knowing perfectly well that he's so mean and tightfisted that not one penny of that whole fortune will ever come their way as long as he lives.
These views come to them partly from their upbringing — they're raised in a commonwealth whose customs and laws are the exact opposite of all such nonsense — and partly from their reading and study. True, in each city only a handful of people are excused from labor entirely and devoted to scholarship full-time, and those are the ones who show extraordinary talent and appetite for learning from childhood. But the children all study, and a great part of the nation, men and women alike, spend their free hours, all their lives, in reading.
They do all their learning in their own language, which is rich and pleasant and fully capable of expressing anything a person thinks; it's spoken across a wide stretch of that part of the world, though not equally purely everywhere. Before we came, they had never so much as heard the names of the philosophers who are so famous in our part of the world — and yet they had made the very same discoveries as the Greeks in music, logic, arithmetic, and geometry.
In fact, while they match the ancient philosophers in nearly everything, they leave our modern logicians far behind — for the simple reason that they have never invented even one of the hairsplitting absurdities our young men are forced to memorize in those trifling schools of logic we maintain. They're so far from chasing phantoms and imaginary mental constructions that when we tried to explain "man in the abstract" — universal man, common to all men everywhere yet distinct from every single one of them — not one of them could see him, even though we spoke of him as something we could practically point to, this colossus, this giant. For all their ignorance of such empty notions, though, they know their astronomy thoroughly. They understand the motions of the heavenly bodies, and they've built cleverly designed and finely calibrated instruments for tracking the courses and positions of the sun, the moon, and the stars with great accuracy. But as for the fraud of telling fortunes by the stars — reading destinies in oppositions and conjunctions — it has never so much as crossed their minds.
They have a real knack, built on long observation, for forecasting the weather: they know when to expect rain, wind, and other changes in the air. But on the theory behind such things — what makes the sea salty, why the tides ebb and flow, how the heavens and the earth began and what they're made of — they argue partly along the lines of our own ancient philosophers, and partly from new hypotheses of their own; and there, just as they differ from the ancients, they don't entirely agree with one another either.
On moral philosophy, they have the same debates we do. They examine what things are genuinely good, for the body and for the mind, and whether anything external can properly be called "good," or whether that word belongs only to the qualities of the soul. They investigate the nature of virtue and of pleasure. But their chief debate is about human happiness: what is it, and does it consist in one thing or in many? And here they lean — more than you might expect — toward the view that places all of human happiness, or at least the main part of it, in pleasure.
Stranger still, they draw arguments for this rather indulgent position from religion itself, for all its severity and sternness. They never discuss happiness without bringing in principles of religion alongside natural reason, because they hold that without religion, any inquiry into happiness is guesswork, and bound to fall short.
Their religious principles are these: that the human soul is immortal; that God in His goodness made it for happiness; and that He has therefore appointed rewards for virtue and good deeds, and punishments for vice, to be handed out after this life. Although these beliefs come down to them by tradition, they think reason itself is enough to lead anyone to accept them. And they say frankly that if you took these principles away, nobody would be fool enough not to chase pleasure by every means available, lawful or not — minding only two cautions: never let a lesser pleasure crowd out a greater one, and never pursue a pleasure that drags a load of pain behind it. Because they think it's the maddest thing in the world to pursue virtue — a sour, difficult business — and not only give up the sweetness of life but volunteer for pain and hardship, if you expect nothing in return. What possible reward is there for spending your whole life without pleasure — in misery, even — if there's nothing waiting after death?
Mind you, they don't locate happiness in every kind of pleasure — only in those that are good and honest in themselves. One school among them places happiness in virtue alone; others say that virtue is what our nature uses to lead us to happiness, which is mankind's highest good.
They define virtue as living according to Nature, and they believe God made us for exactly that. A man follows Nature, they say, when he pursues things or avoids them as reason directs. And the first thing reason kindles in us is love and reverence for the Divine Majesty, to whom we owe everything we have and everything we can ever hope for. Next, reason tells us to keep our minds as free from anxiety and as cheerful as we can, and to consider ourselves bound, by simple kindness and common humanity, to do all we can to advance the happiness of everyone else. After all, there was never any pursuer of virtue so grim, any enemy of pleasure so severe — however hard the rules he set, however much pain and fasting and rigor he demanded — who didn't also tell people to do everything possible to relieve and comfort the miserable, and who didn't praise gentleness and good nature as lovely qualities.
From this they draw an inference. If a man is obliged to promote the welfare and comfort of the rest of mankind — and there's no virtue more naturally ours than easing other people's misery, lifting their troubles, and supplying them with life's comforts, which is to say, with pleasure — then surely Nature urges him all the more strongly to do the same for himself. Because a life of pleasure is either a genuinely bad thing, in which case we shouldn't help others toward it but should steer them away from it as harmful and deadly; or else it's a good thing, in which case we not only may but ought to help others to it — and then why on earth shouldn't a man start with himself? No one can be more obligated to look after another's good than after his own. Nature cannot possibly tell us to be good and kind to our neighbors while being merciless and cruel to ourselves. So, since they define virtue as living according to Nature, they conclude that Nature prompts everyone to seek pleasure as the goal of everything we do.
They also observe that Nature, to support the pleasures of life, draws us into society — for no man stands so far above the rest of mankind as to be Nature's only darling. On the contrary, she seems to have set everyone of the same species on the same level. From this they conclude that nobody should chase his own advantages so greedily that he tramples on other people's. That's why they believe all private agreements should be honored, and likewise all laws — provided they've been duly enacted by a good prince, or consented to by a people that is neither crushed by tyranny nor tricked by fraud — laws whose whole purpose is to distribute the conveniences of life, which are the raw material of all our pleasure.
They consider it sound wisdom for a man to pursue his own advantage as far as the law allows; they consider it piety to put the public good ahead of one's private interests; but they consider it plain injustice to grab your pleasure by snatching someone else's away. On the other hand, to give up some advantage of your own for another person's benefit — that, they say, is the mark of a gentle and generous soul. And a good man loses nothing by it, because the pleasure comes back another way. He can expect the same kindness from others when he needs it; and even if that fails, the consciousness of a good deed, and the memory of the love and gratitude of the people he helped, give the mind more pleasure than the body would have gotten from whatever it gave up. And finally — religion easily persuades a well-disposed soul of this — God will repay the loss of these small, short pleasures with immense and endless joy.
So when they work the whole question through, this is where they land: all our actions, and even all our virtues, aim in the end at pleasure, as our chief goal and our greatest happiness. And they define pleasure as any state or motion, of body or of mind, that Nature teaches us to delight in. But notice the care in that definition. They limit pleasure strictly to the appetites Nature actually leads us toward — the ones that reason endorses along with the senses, that injure no one else, that don't cost us some greater pleasure down the road, and that drag no troubles along behind them. As for the delights that people call pleasures by a foolish though very common mistake — as though you could change the nature of a thing as easily as you change its name — the Utopians say these don't advance real happiness at all. They block it. Once these false pleasures get hold of a mind, they fill it so completely with a counterfeit idea of pleasure that there's no room left for pleasures of a truer and purer kind.
There are plenty of things that have nothing genuinely delightful in them — quite a lot of bitterness, in fact — and yet our perverse appetite for forbidden things has not only enrolled them among the pleasures but made them the great projects of a whole life. Among the people chasing these counterfeit pleasures, the Utopians count the ones I mentioned earlier, who think themselves genuinely better for wearing fine clothes. Here, they say, a man is mistaken twice over: once about his clothes, and once about himself. If you consider what clothes are actually for, why should a fine thread be any better than a coarse one? Yet these men strut about as if they had some real advantage over everyone else, rather than a head full of error. They fancy themselves more valuable. They expect respect to be paid to them for the sake of an expensive coat — respect they would never have dreamed of claiming in plainer dress — and they take it as an insult when they don't get it.
And isn't it equally foolish to be charmed by empty marks of respect, which mean nothing at all? What true or real pleasure can one man get from another man taking off his hat or bending a knee to him? Will another man's bowing knees give any ease to yours? Will his bare head cure the madness in yours? And yet it's astonishing how this false notion of pleasure bewitches people — the ones, for instance, who hug themselves over their own nobility, delighted by the thought that they descend from a line of ancestors who were rich for a few generations and held great estates. That, by the way, is all that nobility means these days. And they don't consider themselves one bit less noble even if their parents left them none of that wealth, or if they squandered it away themselves.
The Utopians have no better opinion of people obsessed with gems and precious stones, who count it a happiness just short of divine to get hold of an especially rare one — especially of whatever kind happens to be in fashion at the moment, since the same stone isn't equally prized in all times and places. And no buyer will take it still set in its gold. The jeweler has to post a bond and solemnly swear that the stone is genuine, so that with all this careful ceremony a fake can't be passed off as the real thing. But here's the joke: examine the stone yourself, and your eye can find no difference between the counterfeit and the true one. They're exactly the same to you — as much the same as if you were blind.
And what about those who pile up a useless mass of wealth, not for anything it will ever do for them, but purely for the joy of gazing at the heap? Do they enjoy any true pleasure? The delight they feel is only a false shadow of joy. And no better are the ones whose error runs the other way — who hide their money for fear of losing it. What else can you call burying gold in the ground but giving it back to the earth it came from? It's cut off from being useful to its owner or to anyone else alive. And yet the owner, having hidden it carefully, is happy, because now he thinks it's safe. Suppose it were stolen, and he lived ten more years knowing nothing of the theft. What difference would it make to him whether the gold was there or gone? Either way it was exactly as useless to him.
Among these foolish chasers of pleasure they also count everyone who delights in hunting, in fowling, or in gambling — madnesses they know only by report, since they have none of these things among them. But they have asked us about it. What sort of pleasure can men possibly find in throwing dice? If there were any real pleasure in it, surely doing it so many times would have cured them of it by now. And what pleasure can there be in hearing dogs bark and howl — sounds that seem disgusting rather than delightful? Nor can they understand why there's more pleasure in watching dogs chase a hare than in watching dogs chase each other. If it's the running that entertains you, the running is the same in both cases; your eye gets identical value either way. But if the pleasure lies in watching the hare killed and torn apart in front of you, then the right response is pity, not delight — a weak, harmless, frightened hare devoured by strong, fierce, cruel dogs.
That's why the whole business of hunting, in Utopia, has been handed over to the butchers — who, as I've already told you, are all slaves — and why they consider hunting the lowest part of a butcher's work. The other parts, they say, are more useful and more honest, since the butcher kills animals that mankind actually needs; the hunter seeks nothing but his own amusement from the killing and mangling of a small, miserable creature. This appetite for watching bloodshed, even the blood of animals, they regard as the sign of a mind already corrupted by cruelty — or one that will sink into cruelty soon enough, fed by a steady diet of so brutal a pleasure.
So although the mob of mankind counts these things, and countless others like them, as pleasures, the Utopians — finding nothing in them that's truly pleasant — conclude flatly that they don't belong on the list. It's true that such things give a certain tickle to the senses, which might seem to be what pleasure is. But that tickle, they argue, doesn't come from the thing itself; it comes from a depraved habit, and habit can so corrupt a person's taste that bitter things pass for sweet — the way pregnant women sometimes find pitch or tallow tastier than honey. Yet a man's senses, however warped by sickness or bad custom, can't change the nature of anything else in the world, and they can't change the nature of pleasure either.
The pleasures they call true ones they sort into several kinds: some belonging to the body, some to the mind. The pleasures of the mind lie in knowledge, and in the delight that comes with contemplating truth; to these they add the happy memory of a life well spent, and the confident hope of happiness to come.
The pleasures of the body they divide into two sorts. The first gives the senses some immediate, real delight. Sometimes that happens when nature is restocked — when eating and drinking replenish the parts that feed the body's inner fire of life. Sometimes it happens when nature is relieved of a burden pressing on it: when we unload what the body must discharge, when sudden pain stops, or when we satisfy the appetite Nature wisely planted in us to lead us toward producing the next generation. But there is another pleasure of this first sort that comes neither from the body receiving what it needs nor from its being relieved when overloaded — a pleasure that works on us by some secret, invisible power, stirring the senses, raising the passions, striking the mind with noble impressions. That is the pleasure of music.
The second sort of bodily pleasure is the kind that comes from a calm, vigorous constitution — when life and lively spirits seem to animate every part of you. This glowing health, when it's entirely free from any mixture of pain, gives an inward pleasure all by itself, with no help from outside delights. It doesn't hit the senses as hard as some of the showier pleasures do; and yet it may be the greatest pleasure of all. Nearly every Utopian counts it the foundation and ground floor of every other joy in life, since health alone makes life calm and worth wanting, and where health is missing, a man can't really enjoy anything else. Mere freedom from pain, without genuine health behind it, they consider a kind of numbness rather than a pleasure.
They have picked this question apart very thoroughly. It was once debated among them whether sound, settled health could be called a pleasure at all. Some argued there's no pleasure without a felt stirring in the body — some active sensation. But that opinion was thrown out long ago, and now they almost universally agree that health is the greatest of all bodily pleasures. Their reasoning goes like this. Sickness contains pain, and pain is the sworn enemy of pleasure, just as sickness is the enemy of health; therefore health must carry pleasure within it. If someone objects that sickness isn't itself a pain but merely brings pain along with it, they call that a lawyer's quibble that changes nothing. To their mind, it comes to the same thing whether you say health is a pleasure in itself or that it produces pleasure the way fire produces heat — as long as you grant that everyone in full health has a true pleasure in the enjoyment of it.
And they press the argument further. What is the pleasure of eating, they ask, except this: a man's health, which hunger had weakened, takes on food as an ally, fights off the hunger, and recovers its old strength — and as it revives, it takes pleasure in the struggle? If the struggle is a pleasure, the victory must surely bring a greater pleasure still — unless we imagine that the moment health wins what it was fighting for, it goes numb and can no longer recognize or enjoy its own well-being. As for the claim that health can't be felt, they deny it absolutely. What man in good health doesn't feel it, every hour he's awake? Is anyone really so dull and dead as to admit no delight in being healthy? And what is delight, except another name for pleasure?
But of all pleasures, the ones they prize most live in the mind, and chief among those are the pleasures that grow out of true virtue and the testimony of a clear conscience. Of the body's pleasures, they give the crown to health. Eating, drinking, and every delight of the senses they consider worth wanting only insofar as they create or preserve health; such things aren't pleasant in themselves, but only as weapons against the constant quiet assaults of our bodily weaknesses. A wise man would rather avoid disease than need medicine, and rather be spared pain than reach for remedies; and in the same way it's better not to need this sort of pleasure at all than to be forever indulging it. If anyone thinks real happiness consists of such enjoyments, he'll have to admit that the happiest man alive would be one whose life was perpetual hunger, thirst, and itching — and therefore perpetual eating, drinking, and scratching. Anyone can see that such a life would be not just degrading but miserable. These are in fact the lowest of all the pleasures, and the least pure, for we can never taste them except mixed with their opposite pains. The pain of hunger has to buy us the pleasure of eating — and the pain outweighs the pleasure. It's more intense, and it lasts longer too: it starts before the pleasure does, and it doesn't end until the pleasure that extinguishes it ends, and the two of them expire together.
So pleasures of this kind, they hold, shouldn't be valued beyond what necessity demands. And yet they take joy in them all the same, and gratefully acknowledge the tenderness of the great Author of Nature, who planted in us appetites that make the very things we need for survival delicious to us as well. How miserable life would be if hunger and thirst — those daily diseases — had to be cured the way our rarer diseases are, with bitter drugs! As it is, these gifts of Nature, as pleasant as they are necessary, keep our bodies strong and lively.
They also enjoy the other delights that come in through the eyes, the ears, and the nose, as the seasonings and garnishes of life — set aside, it seems, by Nature especially for mankind. No other kind of animal contemplates the shape and beauty of the universe; no other is charmed by scents except as a way of telling one food from another; no other can tell harmony from discord. Still, in every pleasure whatsoever they keep two rules: a lesser joy must never get in the way of a greater one, and pleasure must never breed pain — which, they say, is what dishonest pleasure always does.
Beyond that, they think it's madness for a man to wear down the beauty of his face or the strength of his body, to let sloth and laziness rot his vigor, or to waste himself with fasting — madness to break his own constitution and refuse Nature's delights — unless by giving up his own satisfaction he can serve the public or advance the happiness of others, with hope of a greater reward from God. Otherwise such a life of self-punishment marks a mind that is cruel to itself and ungrateful to the Author of Nature, as though, refusing to owe Him anything, it threw all His blessings back in His face: a man tormenting himself for the empty shadow of virtue, or for no better purpose than to be ready for misfortunes that may never arrive.
This, then, is their idea of virtue and of pleasure, and they believe that human reason, unaided, can reach no truer one — unless some revelation from heaven should inspire a person with loftier notions. Whether they're right or wrong in all this, I don't have time to examine now, and I don't think I need to; I undertook only to describe their commonwealth to you, not to defend every one of their principles. But of this much I'm certain: whatever you make of their philosophy, nowhere in the world is there a better people or a happier government.
Their bodies are vigorous and full of life, though they're only of middle height, and their island has neither the richest soil nor the purest air in the world. But they fortify themselves so well against their climate by temperate living, and improve their soil so well by sheer industry, that nowhere will you find more abundant grain and cattle, healthier bodies, or fewer diseases. You can see practiced there not only all the standard arts of the farmer for coaxing a poor soil into bearing, but something more: whole forests pulled up by the roots in one place and new ones planted in another. They do this not for the timber's sake but for transport — so the wood will stand near their towns, or close to the sea or the rivers, where it can be floated to wherever it's needed; for wood is far harder to haul long distances over land than grain is.
The people are industrious and quick to learn, as well as cheerful and good-humored. No one can bear more labor when labor is necessary — but except in that case, they love their ease. In the pursuit of knowledge they never tire. When we gave them some hints of the learning and literature of the Greeks — and it was only the Greeks we bothered to teach them, since we knew there was nothing among the Romans, apart from their historians and poets, that they would much value — it was astonishing to see how eagerly they threw themselves into learning the language. We began reading a little Greek with them, honestly more to stop their pestering than out of any hope they'd profit much by it. But after a very short trial we saw our work was going to succeed beyond anything we had expected. They learned to form the letters and pronounce the words so exactly, picked things up so quickly, remembered them so faithfully, and used the language so readily and correctly, that it would have looked like a miracle — except that most of our students were men of exceptional ability and the right age for study, chosen from among their scholars by the chief council, though some took it up on their own. In three years they were masters of the whole language and could read the best Greek authors with precision. My own suspicion is that Greek came easily to them because it's related to their own tongue. I believe they were originally a Greek colony: their language is closer to Persian, but they keep many names for their towns and magistrates that are clearly Greek in origin.
It happened that on my fourth voyage I carried a good cargo of books with me instead of trade goods, because I had so little intention of coming back soon that I rather expected never to come back at all. So I gave them my whole library: many of Plato's works and some of Aristotle's, along with Theophrastus's book On Plants — sadly damaged, to my lasting regret, because I'd left it lying about during the voyage and a monkey got hold of it and tore out pages here and there. For grammar they have only Lascaris, since I didn't bring Theodorus, and for dictionaries nothing but Hesychius and Dioscorides. They prize Plutarch highly, and they were delighted with Lucian's wit and his entertaining way of writing. Of the poets they have Aristophanes, Homer, Euripides, and Sophocles, in the editions of Aldus, the great Venetian printer; and of the historians, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Herodian. One of my companions, Thricius Apinatus — another of those names, I'm told, that means something like "trifles and nonsense" — happened to have with him some of Hippocrates's works and Galen's Microtechne, which they treasure. For though no nation on earth needs medicine less than they do, none honors it more. They count medical knowledge among the most delightful and most profitable branches of philosophy. By it they search into the secrets of nature, which they find not only deeply satisfying in itself but pleasing, they believe, to nature's Author. He, like the human inventors of ingenious machines, has set this great engine of the universe on display before the only creatures capable of appreciating it; and surely, they reason, a careful and curious observer who admires His workmanship is more acceptable to Him than some member of the herd who, like a beast without reason, stares at the whole glorious spectacle with dull, unconcerned eyes.
Once the Utopian mind is armed with this love of learning, it proves wonderfully inventive in discovering whatever arts can carry learning further. Two things they do owe to us: the making of paper and the art of printing — though even there, a good share of the invention was their own. We showed them some books printed by Aldus, and we explained how paper is made and the mystery of how printing works; but since none of us had ever practiced either craft, our explanations were crude and superficial. They seized on the hints we gave them. At first they couldn't get it right, but trial after trial they found and fixed every error and beat down every difficulty. Before this they had written only on parchment, on reeds, and on the bark of trees; now they have paper mills and printing presses, so that if they only had a good supply of Greek authors, they'd soon have copies to spare. As it is, they have no more than the ones I've listed — but by repeated printings they have multiplied those into many thousands of volumes.
Any traveler who comes to them with some extraordinary talent, or who has seen the customs of many nations in his wanderings — which is what earned us our warm reception — is welcomed heartily, for they are hungry to know the state of the whole world. Very few come to them for trade, though. What could a merchant bring them but iron, or gold, or silver? And merchants would rather carry those things home than haul them to a foreign country. As for their own exports, they think it wiser to handle the shipping themselves than to leave it to foreigners: that way they learn more about the condition of their neighbors, and they keep up their skill in navigation, which nothing preserves but constant practice.
The Utopians do not make slaves of prisoners of war, unless those prisoners were captured in a battle fought against Utopia itself. They do not enslave the children of slaves, and they do not buy people who were enslaved in other countries. Their slaves are of one kind only: people condemned to that condition for committing some crime — or, more commonly, foreigners whom Utopian merchants find under sentence of death in the countries where they trade. These they sometimes buy at a low price, and in some places they get them for nothing. Such slaves are kept at constant labor and are always in chains, with one distinction: native Utopians who fall into slavery are treated worse than the rest. They are considered the more hopeless cases — people who had every advantage of an excellent upbringing and still could not be kept from crime — and so they are judged to deserve harsher treatment.
There is one other class of slaves: poor laborers from neighboring countries who volunteer, of their own free will, to come and serve in Utopia. These are treated well — in almost every respect like citizens — except that a heavier load of work is placed on them, which is no hardship to people who are used to it. If any of them wish to return home, which seldom happens, they are not forced to stay, and they are not sent away empty-handed.
I have already told you how carefully they look after their sick, so that nothing is left undone that could contribute to their comfort or recovery. Those with fixed and incurable diseases they tend with every possible kindness, making their lives as comfortable as they can — visiting them often, taking great pains to help the time pass easily. But when a patient is gripped by a torturing, lingering pain, with no hope of either recovery or relief, the priests and magistrates come to him with a proposal. He is no longer able, they point out, to carry on the business of living. He has become a burden to himself and to everyone around him. He has, in effect, outlived himself. Why keep feeding such a rooted disease? Since living can mean nothing for him now but misery, he should choose to die instead — confident that if he frees himself from his torture, or allows others to free him, he will be happy after death. Since he gives up none of life's pleasures, only its pains, they consider such a choice not only reasonable but an act of religion and piety, for it follows the advice of the priests, who are the interpreters of God's will.
Those who are persuaded by these arguments either starve themselves voluntarily or take opium, and so die without pain. But no one is forced to end his life this way, and if a patient cannot be persuaded, they do not slacken in the least in their attendance and care of him. They believe that a voluntary death, chosen on such authority, is highly honorable. But if a man takes his own life without the approval of the priests and the Senate, they grant him none of the honors of a decent funeral. They throw his body into a ditch.
Their women do not marry before eighteen, their men not before twenty-two. Anyone caught in forbidden embraces before marriage is severely punished, and the right to marry at all is denied them unless they obtain a special pardon from the governor. Such a scandal also falls heavily on the master and mistress of the household where it happened, since they are presumed to have failed in their duty. The reason they punish this so harshly is their belief that unless people were strictly held back from every roving appetite, very few would ever commit to marriage — a state in which you stake the peace of your whole life on a single person, and must put up with all the inconveniences that come with the arrangement.
In choosing their wives they follow a custom that struck us as completely absurd and ridiculous, but which they observe without fail and consider perfectly wise. Before the marriage, a respectable older woman presents the bride — naked, whether she is a virgin or a widow — to the groom. Then a respectable older man presents the groom, naked, to the bride. We laughed at this and condemned it as indecent. But they, for their part, marveled at the folly of every other nation on earth. When a man buys a horse, they pointed out — a purchase of small value — he is so cautious that he inspects every part of the animal, stripping off the saddle and all the tack, in case some hidden sore lies underneath. Yet in choosing a wife, a decision on which the happiness or misery of the rest of his life depends, he proceeds entirely on trust, seeing only a hand's-breadth of her face while all the rest of her body stays covered — under which may lurk something contagious as well as repulsive. Not all men are wise enough to choose a woman for her good qualities alone, and even wise men consider the body no small addition to the mind. It is certain that clothes can hide a deformity bad enough to turn a man completely against his wife when it is too late to part with her. If such a thing is discovered after the wedding, a husband has no remedy but patience. So the Utopians think it only reasonable to take solid precautions against fraud of this damaging kind.
They had all the more reason to regulate this carefully, because they are the only people in those parts of the world who allow neither polygamy nor divorce — except in cases of adultery or insufferable perverseness. In those cases the Senate dissolves the marriage and grants the injured party leave to marry again; but the guilty party is publicly disgraced and never permitted a second marriage. No one is allowed to put away a wife against her will because of some calamity that has struck her body, for they consider it the height of cruelty and treachery to abandon a spouse exactly when she most needs her partner's tender care — above all in old age, which brings so many diseases with it and is a kind of disease in itself.
It does happen, though, that a married couple simply cannot get along, and then, by mutual consent, they separate and find other partners with whom they hope to live more happily. But even this is not done without the Senate's permission, and the Senate never grants a divorce until the senators and their wives have made a strict inquiry into the grounds for it. Even when they are satisfied that the reasons are good, they proceed slowly, for they believe that making it too easy to move on to a new marriage would badly shake the affection of married people everywhere.
Those who defile the marriage bed are punished severely. If both offenders are married, both marriages are dissolved; the injured parties may marry each other, or anyone else they please, while the adulterer and the adulteress are condemned to slavery. Yet if either of the injured spouses cannot shake off their love for the guilty one, they may continue to live with them in that condition — but they must follow them into the labor the slaves are sentenced to. And sometimes the repentance of the condemned, together with the unshaken devotion of the innocent and injured partner, has so moved the governor that he has lifted the sentence. But those who relapse after being once pardoned are punished with death.
For other crimes, their law sets no fixed penalties; the Senate weighs each case and fits the punishment to the circumstances. Husbands have authority to correct their wives, and parents to discipline their children, unless the offense is so serious that a public punishment is thought necessary to strike terror into others. For the most part, slavery is the punishment even for the worst crimes. They reason that slavery is just as terrible to the criminal as death would be, while keeping him alive in servitude is far more useful to the commonwealth than killing him — his labor benefits the public more than his death ever could, and the long sight of his misery is a more lasting warning to others than any execution. If slaves rebel and refuse to bear their yoke and do the work assigned to them, they are treated like wild beasts that neither prison nor chains can hold, and are finally put to death. But those who bear their punishment patiently — who are so worked on by the weight pressing on them that they show themselves more troubled by the crimes they committed than by the miseries they suffer — are not without hope. In the end the governor, by his own authority, or the people, by their intercession, may restore them to liberty, or at least greatly lighten their slavery.
A man who tempts a married woman to adultery is punished just as severely as one who commits it, for they hold that a deliberate intention to commit a crime is equal to the deed itself. The fact that the attempt failed does not make the man who failed any less guilty.
They take great pleasure in fools. While it is considered base and shameful to treat them badly, there is nothing wrong with being amused by their folly — and in their view, this actually works to the fools' advantage. For if people were so grim and humorless that they took no delight at all in a fool's ridiculous behavior and silly sayings — which is the only way a fool can recommend himself to anyone — fools could hardly expect to be so well provided for, or handled so tenderly, as they are.
If a man mocks another for being misshapen or imperfect in some part of his body, the disgrace falls not on the person mocked but on the mocker, who is held in contempt for ridiculing what no one can help. They consider it a sign of a lazy and sluggish nature not to take care of one's natural beauty — but it is equally a disgrace among them to use makeup. They all know from experience that no beauty recommends a wife to her husband so much as honest character and an obliging temper; a pretty face may catch a few men, but only those other excellences hold everyone.
Just as they frighten people away from crime with punishments, they draw them toward virtue with public honors. They put up statues in their marketplaces to the memory of men who have served their country well — both to preserve the memory of their deeds and to spur their descendants to follow the example.
Any man who campaigns for public office is guaranteed never to get it. They all live easily together, for none of their magistrates are arrogant or cruel to the people. They prefer to be called fathers, and because they actually behave like fathers, they deserve the name. The people pay them every mark of honor all the more freely because none is demanded. Even the governor has no special distinction — no robes, no crown. He is known only by a sheaf of grain carried before him, just as the High Priest is known by the wax candle carried ahead of him.
They have very few laws, and their constitution is such that they need few. They strongly condemn other nations, whose laws and legal commentaries swell into endless volumes. They think it outrageous to bind men to obey a body of law that is both so enormous and so obscure that no ordinary subject can read and understand it.
They have no lawyers at all. They consider lawyers a class of people whose profession is to disguise the facts and twist the laws. Far better, they think, for every man to plead his own case and trust it directly to the judge, the way people elsewhere trust it to an attorney. This cuts out endless delays and gets at the truth more reliably: each party lays out the merits of his case without the tricks lawyers love to whisper, and the judge weighs the whole matter himself, taking care to support plain, well-meaning people against the clever men who would otherwise run them down. In this way they escape the evils so glaring in every nation that staggers under a vast load of laws.
Every Utopian is skilled in their law — it is a very short course of study, and the plainest meaning the words can carry is always taken as the law's true sense. Their reasoning runs like this: laws are published for one purpose only, so that every man may know his duty. Therefore the plainest, most obvious reading is the one that should stand, since a subtler interpretation can be grasped by only a few, and would just make the laws useless to most of mankind — and especially to the people who need their guidance most. It comes to the same thing whether you make no law at all, or write one in terms so dark that only a quick mind and long study can dig out its meaning; for most people are too slow, and too busy with their trades, to have either the leisure or the capacity for that kind of inquiry.
Some of their neighbors — free peoples who long ago, with Utopian help, threw off the yoke of tyranny, and who admire the virtues they see in the Utopians — have taken to asking Utopia to send out magistrates to govern them, some replacing them every year, others every five years. When a magistrate's term ends, they escort him back to Utopia with great honor and esteem, and bring home another to govern in his place. In this, it seems to me, these nations have hit on an excellent recipe for their own happiness and safety. Since the good or ill condition of a nation depends so heavily on its magistrates, they could not have chosen better than men whom no advantage can sway. Wealth is useless to a Utopian governor, since he must soon go home where money buys nothing; and being a stranger in the country he rules, he is tangled in none of its feuds and factions. Wherever courts of justice are bent by greed or partiality, the result is the dissolution of justice itself — the chief sinew of society.
The Utopians call the nations that come asking for magistrates their Neighbors; those they have served in some more particular way they call Friends. But while every other nation is forever making alliances and breaking them, the Utopians make no treaties with any state at all. What use is a treaty, they ask? If the common ties of humanity will not bind men together, no faith in promises will. They are confirmed in this view by what they see among the nations around them, who are not exactly strict observers of leagues and treaties.
We all know, of course, how religiously treaties are kept in Europe — above all in the lands where the Christian faith is received, where they are sacred and inviolable! This is owing partly to the justice and goodness of the princes themselves, and partly to the reverence they pay to the popes, who, being the most scrupulous keepers of their own promises, command all other princes to keep theirs — and when gentler methods fail, compel them by the severity of pastoral censure. Nothing, after all, could be more indecent than for men who bear the very title of "the Faithful" to break faith in their treaties.
But in that new-found world — as far from us in manners and way of life as it is in distance — no one trusts a treaty, however much pomp and sacred ceremony attended the signing. On the contrary, the ceremony only speeds the breaking, for some loophole is always found in the wording. Indeed, the terms are deliberately drafted in language so ambiguous that no party can ever be bound tight enough; there is always some gap to slip through, and so they break both the treaty and their word. And here is the impudence of it: the very statesmen who pride themselves on suggesting these tricks to their princes would, with lofty scorn, denounce such craft — or to speak plainly, such fraud and cheating — if they caught private men using it in their bargains, and would readily declare that such men deserved to be hanged.
By this means justice has come to be regarded as a low-spirited, vulgar virtue, far beneath the dignity of royal greatness. Or rather, two kinds of justice have been set up. One is mean and creeps along the ground; it suits only the lower sort of people, and must be fenced in by many restraints so it never wanders past the bounds assigned to it. The other is the special virtue of princes — more majestic than the kind that fits the common crowd, and therefore far freer in its range, so that for princes the only measure of lawful and unlawful is pleasure and interest.
It is this behavior among the princes who live around Utopia — men who set so little store by their own word — that seems to have settled the Utopians against entering any confederacy. Perhaps they would change their minds if they lived among us. And yet, even if treaties were faithfully kept, they would still dislike the whole custom of making them. For the custom rests on a false assumption the world has adopted: that no natural tie unites one nation to another — as if a mountain or a river between them dissolved the partnership of nature — and that all peoples are born enemies, free to do their neighbors any harm not expressly forbidden by treaty. And on that assumption, even a signed treaty does not end the hostility or restrain the plundering, wherever clumsy drafting has failed to nail down an effective clause against it.
The Utopians judge otherwise. No man is to be counted an enemy who has done us no injury. The partnership of human nature stands in place of any treaty. And kindness and good nature bind men together more effectually, and with greater strength, than any formal agreement ever could — for the engagement of the heart is stronger than the bond and obligation of words.
The Utopians detest war. They consider it an utterly brutal business — and they point out, to the shame of human nature, that no kind of beast practices it as constantly as man does. Against the opinion of nearly every other nation on earth, they hold that nothing is less glorious than glory won in war. And yet they drill every day. Military exercise is part of the routine — not just for the men, but for the women too, so that in an emergency no one is completely useless. Still, they never rush into a war. They fight only to defend themselves or their friends against unjust aggressors, or — out of plain human sympathy — to help an oppressed people shake off the yoke of a tyrant.
They will help their friends in offensive wars as well as defensive ones, but only under strict conditions: they must have been consulted before the quarrel broke out, they must be satisfied that the cause is just, and every demand for reparation must have been refused, so that the war is genuinely unavoidable. And by a just cause they don't only mean one neighbor invading another on official orders and carrying off plunder. They also mean cases where the merchants of one country are abused in another — fleeced under the cover of unjust laws, or by the dishonest twisting of good ones. In fact they consider that the stronger ground for war of the two, precisely because the injury comes dressed up in the colors of law.
That was the sole cause of the war they joined a little before our time, fighting alongside the Nephelogetes against the Aleopolitanes — the "Cloud-Folk" against the "People of Nowhere," for those names are more of More's Greek. The Nephelogete merchants believed they had suffered terrible injustice among the Aleopolitanes, and whether the complaint was right or wrong in itself, it set off a dreadful war that pulled in many of the neighboring states. The fury with which it was fought was matched by the strength that sustained it, and by the end it had shaken some very prosperous nations and badly battered others. After a long chain of disasters it finished with the total conquest and enslavement of the Aleopolitanes — a people who, before the war, had been superior to the Nephelogetes in every respect, and were beaten anyway. And though the Utopians had carried them to that victory, they claimed not one share of the spoils.
But notice the contrast. However fiercely they help their friends recover damages in disputes like these, when frauds of that kind are committed against the Utopians themselves — so long as no one is physically harmed — their whole revenge, once satisfaction is refused, is to stop trading with that nation. This is not because they care more about their neighbors than their own citizens. It is simple arithmetic. Their neighbors' merchants each trade on their own private capital, so a fraud is a wound that individuals feel keenly. Among the Utopians, only the public treasury loses — and since they export nothing but their surplus, goods they have in abundance and barely need, the loss scarcely touches anyone's life or livelihood. They think it would be monstrous to avenge an inconvenience that small with the deaths of many people.
But if any of their own people is wrongfully killed or wounded — whether by a government's order or by private men — the response is different. The moment they hear of it, they send ambassadors to demand that the guilty be handed over. If that is refused, they declare war. If it is granted, the offenders are condemned to death or slavery.
A bloody victory troubles and embarrasses them. They consider it a fool's bargain — like paying far too much for goods, however valuable. The victories they truly glory in are the ones won by skill and good management, without bloodshed. For those they hold public celebrations and put up monuments to the men responsible. Their reasoning: a man acts according to his own nature when he defeats his enemy in the one way no other creature can — by the strength of his understanding. Bears, lions, boars, wolves, dogs, and all the rest fight with their bodies, and many of them are stronger and fiercer than we are. Yet every one of them is mastered by human reason.
The Utopians have only two aims in any war: first, to obtain by force the very thing which, if it had been granted in time, would have prevented the war; or, failing that, to punish the offenders so severely that they will be terrified of ever trying it again. Every plan is measured against those two ends, and managed so that anyone can see it is not appetite for fame or glory driving them, but a sober concern for their own security.
Now, their methods. The moment they declare war, they arrange — secretly, and in many places at once — for a great number of notices, sealed with their official seal, to appear in the most conspicuous spots all over the enemy's country. These notices promise enormous rewards to anyone who kills the enemy prince, and smaller sums, scaled accordingly, for killing the other men on the list — the ones the Utopians judge, after the prince himself, most responsible for the war. Whoever delivers one of these marked men alive instead of dead collects double. And the marked men themselves are offered not just pardon but rewards, if they will turn against their own side.
The effect is immediate. The men named on the lists begin to suspect their fellow citizens, then each other; the whole leadership is soon half-paralyzed by fear. And with reason — it has happened many times that these men, the prince included, were betrayed by the very people they trusted most. The rewards the Utopians offer are so staggeringly large that there is no crime men cannot be tempted into by them. They calculate the risk a would-be assassin runs and price the job to match: not just heaps of gold, but income-producing estates in safe locations among friendly nations, where the man can retire and enjoy them in perfect security. And the Utopians keep these promises with absolute, religious exactness.
They thoroughly approve of this business of buying their enemies, though other nations call it vile and cruel. To them it is simply wise — a way of ending what would otherwise be a long war without risking a single battle. And they call it merciful too, even humane: by the death of a few of the guiltiest men, it prevents the mass slaughter that would otherwise consume both armies. They pity the enemy's rank and file hardly less than their own people, because they know most of those soldiers did not choose the war. They were driven into it by the passions of their prince.
If the assassination notices don't do the trick, they sow discord instead. They encourage the prince's brother, or some ambitious noble, to make a play for the crown. If they cannot split the country with internal feuds, they turn to its neighbors and get them to dust off some old territorial claim — and princes never lack an old claim when they need one. These allies they supply generously with money, and very sparingly with troops; for they so cherish their own people that they would not willingly trade one Utopian for the enemy's prince himself.
Their gold and silver, remember, is kept for precisely this occasion, so when it arrives they spend it freely — life at home would not change a bit if they spent every coin. And besides the treasure on the island, they hold a vast fortune abroad, since many of the surrounding nations are deep in their debt. So they hire soldiers from everywhere — but above all from the Zapolets, a mercenary people living five hundred miles east of Utopia, whose Greek name means roughly "born sellers"; and what they sell is themselves.
The Zapolets are a rough, wild, ferocious nation, happiest in the forests and rocky hills where they were born and raised. They are hardened to heat, cold, and toil, and know nothing of life's comforts. They don't farm; they don't care about their houses or their clothes; cattle are the only property they bother with. Mostly they live by hunting and plunder. They seem built for war and nothing else — they watch for every chance at it and seize any that's offered. Great crowds of them regularly march out and hire themselves, dirt cheap, to anyone who will pay. The only trade they know is the taking of life.
They serve their employers bravely and with great loyalty — but they will not sign on for any fixed term. Their standard terms allow them to walk over to the enemy tomorrow for better pay, and walk back the day after for a raise. There is hardly a war anywhere in which Zapolets don't make up a good part of both armies. So it routinely happens that men who are blood relatives, who were hired out of the same district and lived side by side as friends for years, end up killing each other — forgetting kinship and friendship alike, for no reason except that princes with opposing interests paid them a little money to do it. A difference of one penny a day will make them switch sides. That is how completely greed has them. And yet the money they prize so highly is almost useless to them: what they buy with their blood they promptly squander on luxury — and a shabby, miserable sort of luxury at that.
This nation will fight for the Utopians against anyone alive, because the Utopians pay better than anyone alive. And here is the maxim the Utopians work by: just as they seek out the best men for their own use at home, they use these worst of men for war to consume. They lure them with promises of enormous rewards into every kind of danger, and most of them never come back to collect. To those who do come back, the Utopians pay every penny, scrupulously — which keeps them eager for the next adventure. As for how many Zapolets get killed, the Utopians lose no sleep at all. They reckon they would be doing the human race a real service if they could scour the world clean of such a foul and vicious people — the drain, as it were, into which human nature empties.
After the Zapolets, their armies are filled out by the troops of the nation they have gone to war for, then by auxiliaries from their other friends, and last of all by a small contingent of their own citizens, from whom they appoint some man of proven and outstanding character as commander-in-chief. Two others are sent along with him who hold no rank at all while he commands — but if he is killed or captured, the first steps into his place, and if the same misfortune strikes him, the third. War being full of accidents, this ensures that whatever happens to their generals cannot throw the whole army into confusion.
Their own troops are volunteers, drawn from each city only from those who freely offer themselves. No one is forced into a foreign war against his will, because they believe a coward pressed into service will not only fight feebly himself but spread his fear to the men around him. If Utopia itself is invaded, however, they do use such men — provided they're able-bodied — posting them on ships, or on the city walls, where running away is simply impossible. Then shame, the heat of battle, and the absence of any escape route overwhelm their cowardice; they make a virtue of necessity and often fight well, because nothing else is left to them.
And just as no man is forced abroad against his will, women who want to accompany their husbands to war are not prevented — they are encouraged and praised, and they often stand right beside their husbands in the front line. They also station relatives together: parents and children, kindred, families joined by marriage, all side by side — so that the people nature has given the strongest instinct to protect one another are nearest at hand to do it. It is considered a deep disgrace for a husband to come home without his wife, or a wife without her husband, or a child to outlive a parent on the field. The result is that once Utopians are committed to close combat, they fight to the last man as long as the enemy stands before them.
Notice the pattern: they use every prudent means to keep their own people out of danger, letting the hired troops absorb the fighting wherever possible — but when they must engage in person, they charge with exactly as much courage as they showed caution before. The attack is not furious at the first onset; it builds. The longer the action lasts, the more stubborn they become, pressing harder and harder, far readier to die than to give ground. What frees them is certainty: they know their children will be fully provided for after their death, and so the anxiety that breaks even very brave men has no hold on them. Their spirit is noble and effectively unbreakable. Their training sharpens that courage, and the sound principles drilled into them since childhood, by the laws of their country, give it backbone: they do not hold life so cheap that they throw it away carelessly, nor so dishonorably dear that they cling to it by shameful means.
In the hottest part of a battle, a band of their bravest young men, sworn to this one duty, single out the enemy general. They go at him openly or by ambush; they hunt him across the whole field; as one group tires, fresh men relieve them and never let the pursuit drop, striking at him with hand weapons when they can close in, and with missiles when others get in the way. Unless he saves himself by flight, they almost never fail in the end to kill him or take him prisoner.
When they win, they kill as few as possible. They would far rather take prisoners than cut down men who are running away. And they never let the pursuit pull their own army apart: one full body of troops always stays in formation. If they only carried the day by committing their last reserves, they will let the entire enemy army escape rather than chase it with their own ranks in disorder. They remember — because it has happened to them — what a reserve can do: their own main force completely beaten and broken, the enemy scattered in a gleeful, disorderly chase, sure the day was won; and then a small Utopian reserve, waiting for its moment, fell on the stragglers, turned the whole battle, and wrenched a certain, settled victory out of the victors' hands — the conquered suddenly conquering.
It is hard to say whether they are better at setting ambushes or avoiding them. They will sometimes appear to flee when flight is the last thing on their minds; and when they really do mean to retreat, they disguise the intention so well it is nearly impossible to detect. If they find themselves badly positioned or facing hopeless numbers, they either slip away by night in total silence or escape by some trick. If they must retreat by daylight, they do it in such good order that attacking them on the move is as dangerous as attacking them in line of battle.
They fortify every camp with a deep, wide trench, throwing the excavated earth up into a rampart. And this is not slaves' work — the whole army digs, everyone except the men standing guard. With so many hands at it, a long, strong fortification goes up in a time you would scarcely believe. Their armor is excellent protection yet light enough not to wear them down on the march — they can even swim in it; everyone trained for war practices swimming. Cavalry and infantry alike rely heavily on the bow, and are expert with it. They carry no swords; instead they fight with a pole-axe, sharp and heavy, lethal for either a thrust or a downward blow. They are very clever at inventing war machines, and they camouflage them so well that the enemy never knows they exist until he feels them — which means he can never prepare the defense that would make them useless. The chief design requirement for these machines is that they be easy to transport and handle.
If they agree to a truce, they keep it so religiously that no provocation will make them break it. They never devastate an enemy's countryside or burn his grain; in fact, even on the march they take care that neither horse nor foot tramples the crops — because, for all they know, they may need that grain themselves. They harm no unarmed man, unless he is a spy. When a town surrenders, they take it under their protection. When they have to carry a town by storm, they do not sack it: they put to the sword only the men who opposed the surrender, enslave the rest of the garrison, and leave the ordinary inhabitants untouched. Anyone who had argued for giving up the town is rewarded out of the property of the condemned; the remainder is divided among the auxiliary troops. The Utopians themselves take no share of the plunder.
When a war ends, they never bill their friends for the costs. They collect from the conquered instead — either in cash, which they bank for the next occasion, or in lands, which pay them a permanent annual revenue. Through additions of this kind, the income they now draw from various countries has grown to more than 700,000 ducats a year. They send some of their own citizens out to manage these revenues, with instructions to live magnificently, like princes — which means a good deal of the money gets spent right there. The rest they either bring home to Utopia or, more commonly, lend to the very nation the lands lie in, calling it all in only on some great occasion, which hardly ever comes. It is out of these foreign estates, by the way, that they pay the rewards promised to the men they recruit for desperate missions.
And if any prince arms for an invasion of Utopia, they do not wait for him. They strike first, and make his country the theater of the war. They will not willingly let any war set foot on their island — and if one ever did, they would meet it with their own people alone, and call in no foreign troops at all.
There are several different religions on the island — not just in different regions, but within every single town. Some people worship the sun, others the moon, others one of the planets. Some worship men who were famous in earlier ages for virtue or glory, honoring them not just as ordinary gods but as the supreme god himself.
But the greater and wiser part of them worship none of these. They adore one eternal, invisible, infinite, incomprehensible Deity — a Being far beyond anything our minds can grasp, spread through the whole universe not by physical size but by power and influence. Him they call the Father of All. They acknowledge that the beginnings, the growth, the changes, and the end of all things come from Him alone, and they offer divine honors to no one but Him.
In fact, however much they differ about everything else, they all agree on this one point: there is a single Supreme Being who made the world and governs it, and in their own language they call him Mithras. Where they disagree is here: one person thinks the god he worships is that Supreme Being, while another thinks his own idol is that god. But all of them accept the same principle — whoever this Supreme Being is, He is the one great essence to whom all nations, by common consent, ascribe glory and majesty.
Little by little they are drifting away from this patchwork of superstitions and converging on the one religion that seems best and most widely respected. In fact, the other religions would no doubt have vanished long ago, except for an awkward pattern: whenever someone urged his neighbors to abandon one of the old superstitions, and then happened to suffer some misfortune, people took the accident as punishment from heaven. They became afraid that the god whose worship had nearly been abandoned had stepped in to take revenge on those who scorned him.
When they heard from us about the teaching of Christ, His way of life, and His miracles — and about the astonishing constancy of so many martyrs, whose freely offered blood did more than anything else to spread the faith across so many nations — you cannot imagine how eagerly they took to it. Maybe this came from some secret inspiration of God. Or maybe it was because Christianity seemed so close to their own most cherished and distinctive principle: the community of goods. They noticed that Christ and His followers lived by that rule, and that it is still kept up among the sincerest sorts of Christian communities. Whatever the reason, the fact is that many of them came over to our religion and were baptized into it.
But two of our company had died, and none of the four of us who survived was an ordained priest. So we could baptize them, but — to our great regret — they could not receive the other sacraments, which only priests can administer. They have been taught about those sacraments, and they long for them intensely. In fact they have had serious debates among themselves about whether a man they chose as priest themselves would thereby be qualified to perform everything that belongs to the office, even without any authority derived from the Pope. They seemed determined to choose someone for the job, but they had not yet done it when I left.
Those who have not accepted our religion do not frighten anyone away from it, and they mistreat no one who converts. In all my time there, only one man was ever punished in connection with it. He was newly baptized, and despite everything we could say to stop him, he began disputing publicly about the Christian religion with more zeal than sense. He got so heated that he went beyond preferring our worship to theirs: he condemned all their rites as profane and shouted that everyone who clung to them was wicked and sacrilegious and bound for everlasting fire. After he had preached like this many times, he was arrested, tried, and sentenced to banishment — not for insulting their religion, but for inflaming the people toward riot. For this is one of their most ancient laws: no one may be punished for his religion.
The law goes back to the very founding of their government. Utopus learned that before he arrived, the old inhabitants had been locked in constant quarrels over religion — so divided that he found them easy to conquer, since instead of uniting against him, every religious faction fought on its own. Once he had subdued them, he made a law: every man may follow whatever religion he pleases, and may try to win others over to it by force of argument, in a friendly and modest way, without bitterness toward those who think differently. He may use no force except persuasion, and must mix in neither insults nor violence. Anyone who broke this rule was to be sentenced to banishment or slavery.
Utopus made this law partly to preserve the public peace, which he saw was being torn apart by daily quarrels and unforgiving hatreds. But he also believed religion itself required it. He thought it unwise to settle such questions rashly, and he seemed to suspect that the different forms of religion might all come from God — that God might inspire different people in different ways and actually be pleased by the variety. So he considered it both insolent and foolish for anyone to use threats and terror to make another man believe what didn't strike him as true.
And suppose only one religion is actually true and all the rest are false. Even then, Utopus reasoned, the natural force of truth would eventually break out and shine on its own — provided it was backed only by argument and received by gentle, unprejudiced minds. Whereas if the contest were fought with violence and uproar, then — since the worst men are always the most stubborn — the best and holiest religion might be choked out by superstition, the way grain is choked by briars and thorns. So he left people entirely free to believe whatever they found convincing.
He made only one solemn and severe exception: a law against anyone who sinks so far beneath the dignity of human nature as to believe that the soul dies with the body, or that the world is governed by blind chance rather than a wise, overruling Providence. The Utopians have always believed that after this life the good are rewarded and the wicked punished, and they regard anyone who thinks otherwise as barely qualifying as human — since he degrades something as noble as the soul to the level of a beast's. Such men, they think, are unfit for human society, let alone for citizenship in a well-ordered commonwealth. A man with those principles is bound to despise all their laws and customs whenever he dares, because — there's no question about it — a man who fears nothing but the law, and expects nothing after death, will not hesitate to break every law in his country, by fraud or by force, whenever it serves his appetites.
So they never raise anyone who holds these views to honors or offices, never employ them in any public trust, and despise them as men of low and sordid minds. But they do not punish them, because they hold it as a maxim that no one can make himself believe whatever he chooses. Nor do they use threats to make anyone hide his real opinions — so no one is tempted to lie or wear a mask, which they abhor as a kind of fraud. They do take care to keep such men from arguing for their views in public, especially in front of common people. But in private, with a priest or other serious men, they allow it — even encourage it — confident that reason, laid out plainly, will cure them of such madness.
There are also many who run far in the opposite direction, and since their opinion is considered neither wicked nor unreasonable, no one discourages it. These people believe the souls of animals are immortal too — though far below the dignity of the human soul, and not capable of so great a happiness.
Almost all of them are firmly convinced that good men will be infinitely happy in the next life. So although they are compassionate toward anyone who is sick, they do not mourn a death — unless they see the dying man clinging desperately to life. That, they think, is a very bad sign: as if the soul, conscious of its own guilt and out of hope, were afraid to leave the body because of some secret hint of misery to come. They think such a man's arrival before God can hardly be welcome — summoned, he does not go cheerfully, but hangs back, unwilling, practically dragged. When they see someone die this way they are horrified, and they carry the body out in silence and sorrow, praying that God will be merciful to the errors of the departed soul, and lay it in the ground.
But when someone dies cheerfully and full of hope, no one mourns. They sing hymns as they carry out the body, earnestly commending the soul to God; the whole occasion is solemn rather than sad. They burn the body and set up a pillar where the pyre stood, with an inscription honoring the dead. Walking home from the funeral, they talk about his good life and worthy deeds — and nothing comes up more often, or with more pleasure, than his serenity at the hour of death.
They think this kind of respect paid to the memory of good men is both the strongest incentive for others to follow their example and the most acceptable form of worship that can be offered to the dead themselves. For they believe the dead are actually present among us — invisible only because human sight is too weak — and that they hear everything said about them. It would be inconsistent with the happiness of departed souls, they reason, not to be free to go wherever they wish; and they cannot imagine the dead being so ungrateful as not to want to see the friends they loved most in life. Besides, they are convinced that in good men, these affections — like all other good dispositions — are increased after death rather than diminished. So they conclude that the dead move among the living and observe everything they say and do. This belief gives them greater confidence in all their undertakings, since they trust in their ancestors' protection; and the sense that their ancestors are watching restrains them from secret wrongdoing.
They despise and laugh at auguries and all the other vain, superstitious kinds of fortune-telling that other nations take so seriously. But they have deep reverence for miracles — events that cannot flow from any power of nature — and regard them as signs of the presence of the Supreme Being. They say many such things have happened among them; and that sometimes, in great and dangerous emergencies, they have offered up solemn public prayers with full confidence of being heard, and the prayers have been answered miraculously.
They consider contemplating God in His works, and adoring Him for them, a form of worship very acceptable to Him.
There are many among them who, for religious reasons, set learning aside and devote themselves to no kind of study. They allow themselves no leisure at all but keep perpetually busy, believing that a man secures his happiness after death by the good things he does in this life. Some of them visit the sick. Others repair highways, clean ditches, mend bridges, or dig turf, gravel, and stone. Others fell and split timber and cart wood, grain, and other necessities into the towns. They serve not only the public but private individuals too — working harder, in fact, than the slaves themselves. Whenever there is some rough, hard, filthy job that frightens others off by its drudgery and unpleasantness, if not by the sheer hopelessness of it, these men take it on cheerfully and by their own choice. They ease everyone else's burden by punishing themselves, spending their whole lives in hard labor. Yet they take no credit for it and never run other people down to raise their own standing. And by stooping to such menial work, far from being despised, they are honored all the more by the entire nation.
These men come in two kinds. The first live unmarried and chaste, and eat no meat of any sort. Weaning themselves off every pleasure of this present life, which they regard as harmful, they pursue the blessedness they hope for in the next by the hardest and most painful methods possible — and the closer they get to it, the more cheerful and eager they become. The second kind are less willing to wear themselves out. They prefer marriage to celibacy, and while they don't deny themselves its pleasures, they consider having children a debt owed to human nature and to their country. They avoid no pleasure that doesn't interfere with work, and they eat meat all the more willingly because they find it makes them stronger for labor. The Utopians regard this second kind as the more sensible, but the first as the more holy. Indeed, if anyone chose celibacy over marriage, or a life of toil over an easy one, on grounds of pure reason, they would laugh at him; but when men do it from religious motives, they revere and admire them. On no subject are they more careful than this: giving a firm opinion about any form of religion. The men who lead these severe lives are called, in their language, Brutheskas — roughly what we would call religious orders.
Their priests are men of exceptional piety, and for that reason there are very few of them: only thirteen in each town, one for each temple. When the city goes to war, seven of the thirteen march out with the army, and seven substitutes are chosen to fill their places. When the war priests return, they resume their old posts, and the substitutes attend on the high priest — for one priest is set over the rest — until vacancies open up by death. The priests are elected by the people, just like the other magistrates, by secret ballot to prevent factions; once chosen, they are consecrated by the college of priests.
The priests are responsible for everything sacred: the worship of God, and the oversight of public morals. It is a disgrace for a man to be summoned by one of them, or to be spoken to by one in private, because that always raises suspicion. But all the priests can actually do is exhort and admonish; the power to correct and punish wrongdoers belongs entirely to the governor and the other magistrates. The harshest thing a priest can do is exclude the desperately wicked from worship — and no punishment is more dreaded. It covers a man with disgrace and fills him with secret terror, so deep is their reverence for religion. Nor does his body stay out of trouble for long: if he doesn't quickly convince the priests that he has genuinely repented, the Senate seizes him and punishes him for impiety.
The education of the young also belongs to the priests, and they care less about filling children's heads with book learning than about forming their minds and characters rightly. They use every method they can to plant, very early, in the tender and flexible minds of children, opinions that are both good in themselves and useful to their country. Impressions made deeply at that age follow people through their whole lives, and do a great deal to preserve the peace of the state — which nothing damages more than the vices that grow out of bad opinions.
The wives of their priests are the most exceptional women in the whole country. And sometimes the women themselves are made priests — though it happens rarely, and only elderly widows are eligible for the order.
No magistrates receive greater honor than the priests. Even if a priest commits a crime, he is not brought to trial: his punishment is left to God and to his own conscience. They do not think it lawful to lay hands on any man, however wicked, who has been dedicated to God in so special a way. And they find this causes no great problems, partly because the priests are so few, and partly because they are chosen with such care. A man raised to that high dignity purely for his virtue, because he was esteemed singularly good, is very unlikely to sink into corruption and vice. And even if it should happen — for human nature is changeable — the priests are few and hold no power beyond the respect that is paid to them, so nothing seriously harmful to the public can come from the immunity they enjoy.
They keep the number of priests small deliberately, partly so that the dignity of an order they prize so highly is not cheapened by being widely shared, and partly because they think it genuinely hard to find many men good enough for a position that demands more than ordinary virtue.
Their priests are held in no less reverence among neighboring nations than at home, and I think I can tell you what gives rise to it.
When the Utopians fight a battle, the priests who accompany the army put on their sacred vestments and kneel down during the action, not far from the field. Lifting their hands to heaven, they pray first for peace, then for victory for their own side — and especially that it come without much bloodshed on either side. When their side wins, the priests run in among their own men to rein in their fury. Any enemy who so much as sees them and calls out to them is spared; anyone who manages to get close enough to touch their garments has not only his life but his property protected. It is because of this that all the surrounding nations hold them in such regard and treat them with such reverence — for the priests have proved as able to save their enemies from the Utopians' rage as to protect their own people from their enemies'. It has sometimes happened that when a Utopian army was broken and fleeing, with the enemy rushing in to slaughter and plunder, the priests threw themselves between the two sides, separated them, and stopped any further bloodshed — and through their mediation, peace was concluded on very reasonable terms. There is no nation around them so fierce, cruel, or barbarous that it does not regard their persons as sacred and inviolable.
The first and last day of every month is a festival, and so is the first and last day of every year. They measure their months by the moon and their years by the sun. In their language the first days are called the Cynemernes and the last days the Trapemernes — which works out, in our language, to "first-feasts" and "last-feasts," the festivals that open or close a season.
Their temples are magnificent — not just beautifully built but enormously spacious, which matters, since there are so few of them. They are kept a little dark inside. That isn't a flaw in the architecture; it's deliberate. Their priests believe that too much light scatters the thoughts, while a softer, dimmer light gathers the mind together and lifts it toward devotion. Now, there are many different religions among them, but however much they vary, they all agree on the main point: the worship of the Divine Essence. So nothing is ever seen or heard in their temples that the various persuasions can't all accept. Each sect performs its own particular rites privately, at home; nothing in the public worship contradicts any sect's particular beliefs. There are no images of God in their temples, so that each person is free to picture Him according to his own religion. And they call this one God by no other name than Mithras — the common name they all use for the Divine Essence, whatever else they may believe it to be. The only prayers used are ones that anyone can say without compromising his own convictions.
On the evening of the festival that closes a season, they gather in their temples and — still fasting — thank God for their success during the month or year that is ending. The next day, the one that opens the new season, they meet early in the temples to pray for the happy progress of everything they will undertake in the period just beginning. On the closing festival, before anyone goes to the temple, wives kneel before their husbands, and children before their parents, and confess everything they have done wrong or every duty they have failed in, and ask forgiveness for it. This clears away all the little resentments in a family, so that everyone can worship with a pure and untroubled mind. They consider it deeply impious to approach worship with a disturbed heart — conscious of hatred or anger toward anyone at all — and they believe they would deserve severe punishment if they presumed to offer their devotions without first cleansing their hearts and settling all their quarrels. In the temples the sexes are separated: men on the right, women on the left. Everyone sits in front of the head of their own household — the master or mistress of the family they belong to — so that the people who govern them at home can watch how they behave in public. They also seat the young and the old deliberately mixed together; if the young people all sat in a block, they would probably fritter away the very hours in which they ought to be developing a religious awe of the Supreme Being — which the Utopians consider the greatest, and nearly the only, spur to virtue.
They sacrifice no living creature. God, in His generosity, gave these creatures their lives; they don't think it suits Him to take pleasure in their deaths or in the spilling of their blood. They do burn incense and other sweet scents, and they light a great many wax candles during worship — not because they imagine such offerings add anything to the divine nature (even prayers can't do that), but because it is a harmless and pure way of worshipping God. They find that the sweet smells and the candlelight, along with certain other ceremonies, work by some secret, unaccountable power to lift people's souls and fill them with greater energy and cheerfulness during the service.
The people all come to the temple in white. The priest's vestments, though, are many-colored, and both the workmanship and the colors are wonderful. They are made of no precious material — no embroidery, no gems. They are made of bird feathers, arranged with such artistry and such precision that their true value is far beyond the costliest fabrics. They say that hidden mysteries are represented in the ordering and placement of those feathers, passed down among the priests in a secret tradition — a kind of hieroglyphics, reminding them of the blessings they have received from God and of their duties to Him and to their neighbors. The moment the priest appears in these vestments, everyone falls flat on the ground, with such reverence and such deep silence that an onlooker can't help being struck by it, as if a deity had actually appeared. After they have stayed like this for a while, the priest gives a sign and they all stand and sing hymns in God's honor, with musical instruments playing throughout. These instruments are of completely different design from ours; many of them sound much sweeter than ours, while others are the same as ones we use. But in one thing they far surpass us: all their music, vocal and instrumental alike, is composed to imitate and express the passions, and it is so perfectly matched to each occasion that whether the hymn is joyful, or meant to calm or to trouble the mind, or to express grief or remorse, the music takes on the shape of whatever it represents — it stirs and kindles the feelings and presses the meaning deep into the hearts of the listeners.
When the singing is over, priests and people together offer solemn prayers to God in a fixed form of words — composed so cleverly that whatever the whole assembly says aloud, each individual can also apply to his own situation. In these prayers they acknowledge God as the author and governor of the world and the fountain of all the good they receive, and they thank Him for it; in particular they bless Him for His goodness in arranging that they were born under the happiest government in the world, and into a religion they hope is the truest of all. But if they are mistaken — if there is a better government somewhere, or a religion more acceptable to God — they beg Him in His goodness to let them know it, vowing to follow wherever He leads. If, on the other hand, their government is the best and their religion the truest, then they pray that He will strengthen them in it, and bring the whole world around to the same way of life and the same beliefs about Himself — unless, in the unsearchable depths of His mind, He actually prefers a variety of religions. Then they pray that God will grant them, at the last, an easy passage to Himself. They don't presume to dictate to Him how early or late that should come; but — if it can be wished without trespassing on His supreme authority — they would rather be delivered quickly and taken to Him, even by the most terrible kind of death, than be kept from the sight of Him for years by the most prosperous kind of life. When this prayer ends, they all fall to the ground once more; then, after a little while, they rise, go home to dinner, and spend the rest of the day in recreation or military exercises.
And so I have described to you, as exactly as I could, the constitution of that commonwealth — which I consider not only the best in the world, but the only commonwealth that truly deserves the name. Everywhere else, it's plain to see that while people talk about the commonwealth, every man is really pursuing his own wealth. But there, where no man owns any property, all men work eagerly for the public good. And no wonder they act so differently. In other commonwealths every man knows that however prosperous the nation may be, if he doesn't provide for himself he will starve — so necessity forces him to put his own concerns ahead of the public's. But in Utopia, where every man has a right to everything, they all know that as long as the public storehouses are kept full, no private person can lack anything. There is no unequal distribution there. No man is poor, no man is in need; and though no man owns anything, all of them are rich. For what can make a man richer than a calm and cheerful life, free of anxieties? He isn't worried about his own next meal, or worn down by the endless complaints of his wife. He isn't afraid of poverty for his sons, or scrambling to scrape together dowries for his daughters. He can be certain that he and his wife, his children and grandchildren, down through as many generations as he cares to imagine, will all live both plentifully and happily — since those who once worked but can work no longer are cared for every bit as well as those still employed.
I would love to hear anyone compare the justice of Utopia with the justice of all the other nations — among whom, I swear, I can't find a trace of anything that looks like justice or fairness. For what kind of justice is this? A nobleman, a goldsmith, a banker — a man who does nothing at all, or at best does work of no use to the public — gets to live in luxury and splendor on income so badly earned. Meanwhile a common laborer, a carter, a smith, a ploughman — a man who works harder than the beasts themselves, at labor so necessary that no commonwealth could survive a year without it — earns so poor a living and leads so miserable a life that the beasts are honestly better off. The beasts don't work as constantly, they eat almost as well and with more pleasure, and they have no fears about the future. But these men are ground down by hard, fruitless labor and tormented by the dread of a penniless old age — for their daily wages barely keep them alive in the present, consumed as fast as they come in, with nothing left over to set aside for when they are old.
Isn't a government both unjust and ungrateful when it heaps its favors on so-called gentlemen, and goldsmiths, and the rest of that idle crowd who live by flattery or by inventing the arts of empty pleasure — and at the same time takes no care at all of the ploughmen, the coal-miners, the smiths, without whom it could not exist? After the public has squeezed every advantage out of their labor, when they are finally broken by age and sickness and want, all their work and all the good they have done is forgotten, and the only reward they're given is to be left to die in utter misery. Worse: the rich are constantly scheming to push laborers' wages even lower — not just by cheating them, but by procuring laws to that very effect. So although it is plainly unjust to give such small rewards to people who deserve so well of the public, they have dressed that injustice up in the name and costume of justice, simply by getting laws passed to regulate it.
So I have to say it — and as I hope for mercy, I mean it: when I look at all the governments flourishing in the world today, I can see nothing in them but a conspiracy of the rich, who pursue their own private ends under the pretense of managing the public. They invent every method and trick they can: first, to hold on safely to everything they have so dishonestly acquired; and second, to hire the labor of the poor as cheaply as possible and grind them down as much as they please. And once the rich manage to get these schemes officially adopted under the show of public authority — which is supposed to represent the whole people — why then, they count as laws. Yet these wicked men, even after they have carved up among themselves, out of pure insatiable greed, what would have been plenty for everyone, are still nowhere near the happiness the Utopians enjoy. In Utopia, the use of money — and with it the desire for money — has been completely extinguished, and how much anxiety, how many occasions for mischief, were cut away with it! Who doesn't see that fraud, theft, robbery, quarrels, riots, brawls, sedition, murder, betrayal, and sorcery — crimes the law's severities punish but never restrain — would all simply die out if money were no longer valued anywhere in the world? Men's fears, worries, cares, labors, and sleepless nights would perish in the same instant as the value of money. Even poverty itself — the one thing money seems most needed to relieve — would vanish. To see this clearly, consider just one example.
Take any year so barren that thousands have died of hunger. I'd wager that if, at the end of that year, you searched the granaries of all the rich men who had hoarded the grain, you would find enough among them to have prevented every one of those deaths from famine; had it been shared out, nobody would have felt the terrible effects of the shortage at all. It would be so easy to supply everyone with the necessities of life — if only that blessed thing called money, which was supposedly invented for obtaining them, weren't in reality the one thing standing in the way of our obtaining them.
I don't doubt that rich men sense this, and that they know perfectly well how much greater a happiness it is to want for nothing necessary than to drown in luxuries — to be rescued from so much misery than to be buried under so much wealth. In fact I'm convinced that every man's own self-interest, joined to the authority of Christ's commands — and He, being infinitely wise, knew what was best, and was no less good in revealing it to us — would long ago have drawn the whole world over to the laws of the Utopians, if it weren't for one thing: pride. Pride, that plague of human nature, that source of so much misery. For pride doesn't measure happiness by what it has, but by what others lack. Pride wouldn't accept being made a goddess if there were no wretched people left to lord it over. Pride's happiness shines brighter, it thinks, when set against other people's misfortunes; its wealth gleams best when its display makes the poor feel their poverty more sharply. This is the infernal serpent that coils itself in the hearts of mortals — and it is wound in too deep to be easily pulled out.
So I am glad the Utopians have arrived at this form of government, and I only wish the whole world were wise enough to imitate it. They have laid down such a plan, and such a foundation of policy, that men not only live happily under it, but it looks likely to last a very long time. They have rooted out of their people's minds every seed of ambition and faction, so there is no danger of trouble at home — the one thing that has destroyed many a state that seemed perfectly secure. And as long as they keep peace at home and are governed by such good laws, the envy of all the neighboring princes — who have tried, again and again, in vain to ruin them — will never manage to shake or disturb that state in the slightest.
When Raphael had finished speaking, many objections came to my mind. Quite a few of that people's customs and laws seemed downright absurd to me — their way of waging war, their notions about religion and divine matters, and several other points besides — but above all the foundation on which everything else rested: their living in common, without the use of money. That one feature would wipe out all nobility, magnificence, splendor, and majesty, which in the common opinion are the true ornaments of a nation. But I could see that Raphael was tired, and I wasn't sure he could gracefully take being contradicted — especially since I remembered his remark about certain people who seem to think they must defend their reputation for wisdom by finding something to criticize in everyone's ideas but their own. So I only praised their constitution, and his account of it, in general terms; and then, taking him by the hand, I led him in to supper, telling him we would find some other time to dig into this subject more deeply and talk it through at length. And I truly hope I get the chance. In the meantime, while I freely admit that he is a very learned man with great knowledge of the world, I can't agree with everything he said. And yet I confess there are many things in the commonwealth of Utopia that I rather wish, than hope, to see followed in our governments.