they can use it to pay foreign mercenaries. For themselves, they have no money, and they teach
contempt for gold by using it for chamberpots and the chains of bondmen. Pearls and diamonds
are used as ornaments for infants, but never for adults. When they are at war, they offer large
rewards to any one who will kill the prince of the enemy country, and still larger rewards to any
one who will bring him alive, or to himself if he yields himself up. They pity the common people
among their enemies, "knowing that they be driven and enforced to war against their wills by the
furious madness of their princes and heads." Women fight as well as men, but no one is compelled
to fight. "Engines for war they devise and invent wondrous wittily." It will be seen that their
attitude to war is more sensible than heroic, though they display great courage when necessary.
As for ethics, we are told that they are too much inclined to think that felicity consists in pleasure.
This view, however, has no bad consequences, because they think that in the next life the good are
rewarded and the wicked punished. They are not ascetic, and consider fasting silly. There are
many religions among them, all of which are tolerated. Almost all believe in God and immortality;
the few who do not are not accounted citizens, and have no part in political life, but are otherwise
unmolested. Some holy men eschew meat and matrimony; they are thought holy, but not wise.
Women can be priests, if they are old and widowed. The priests are few; they have honour, but no
power.
Bondmen are people condemned for heinous offenses, or foreigners who have been condemned to
death in their own countries, but whom the Utopians have agreed to take as bondmen.
In the case of a painful incurable disease, the patient is advised to commit suicide, but is carefully
tended if he refuses to do so.
Raphael Hythloday relates that he preached Christianity to the Utopians, and that many were
converted when they learnt that Christ was opposed to private property. The importance of
communism is constantly stressed; almost at the end we are told that in all other nations "I can
perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the
name and title of the common wealth."
More's Utopia was in many ways astonishingly liberal. I am not thinking so much of the preaching
of communism, which was in the