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At a later period we have the "New Atlantis" of Lord Bacon, and that dream of the "City of the Sun" with which Campanella solaced himself in his long imprisonment. The "Utopia" of More is perhaps the best of its class. It is the work of a profound thinker, the suggestive speculations and theories of one who could
The abolition of the separation between town and country is no Utopia, it is an essential condition of the proportionate distribution of the greater industry throughout the country. Civilization has left us a number of large cities, as an inheritance, which it will take much time and trouble to abolish. But they must and will be done away with, however much time and trouble it may take.
When the growth of the soul is healthy and harmonious, the cultivation of all the expansive instincts having been fully provided for, the communal instinct will evolve itself in its own season; and when the communal instinct has been fully evolved, the social order will begin to reform itself. This is what has happened in Utopia.
The kingdom of God, the refuge of the oppressed, the golden age of the new world, the real Utopia, the newest yet oldest Atlantis, the home of the children, will not open its gates to the most miserable who would rise above his equal in misery, who looks down on any one more miserable than himself. It is the home of perfect brotherhood.
We look before and after, forwards to some dim utopia, backwards to some ape-like ancestor who links us with the animal world. Our outlook is horizontal, the mediaeval outlook perpendicular. The mediaeval man looked upward and downward, to heaven and hell, when he thought of the future, to sun and cloud, land and crops, when he thought of the present.
The Utopia of yesterday is the possession of today, and opens the way to the Utopia of to-morrow.
In Utopia, any author has the option either of publishing his works through the public bookseller as a private speculation, or, if he is of sufficient merit, of accepting a University endowment and conceding his copyright to the University press.
If the prevention of war depends upon the burning into the imagination of the electorates what the consequences of war are, a high intelligence quotient and revaluation of life will count for a good deal. Man is the animal that wants Utopia. So long as human nature was looked upon as fixed constant in the ebb and flow of life, a Utopia of fine minds could be conceived only by the dreamer and poet.
Notwithstanding the liberality and freedom of his speculations upon government and religion in his Utopia, it must be confessed that Sir Thomas More, in after life, fell into the very practices of intolerance and bigotry which he condemned. When in the possession of the great seal under that scandal of kingship, Henry VIII., he gave his countenance to the persecution of heretics.
As More, in Utopia, and Rabelais, Erasmus relies already on the dictates of nature, which produces man as inclined to good and which we may follow, provided we are imbued with faith and piety. In this line of confidence in what is natural and desire of the simple and reasonable, Erasmus's educational and social ideas lie. Here he is far ahead of his times.
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