In the introduction to More’s “Utopia” one gets a vivid impression of the forces that were stirring men’s minds out of the sluggish routine into which they had settled. The man who is supposed to describe the commonwealth of Utopia is a Portuguese scholar, learned in Greek. He has left his family possessions with his kinsmen and has gone adventuring for other continents with Americus Vesputius. This Raphael Hythloday is the sort of sunburnt sailor one could probably have encountered in Bristol or Cadiz or Antwerp almost any day during the late part of the fifteenth century. He has abandoned Aristotle, whom the schoolmen had butchered and had made pemmican of, and through his conquest of Greek he has come into possession of that new learning which stems back to Plato; and his brain is teeming with the criticisms and suggestions of a strange, pagan philosophy. Moreover, he has been abroad to the Americas or the Indies, and he is ready to tell all who will listen of a strange land on the other side of the world, where, as Sterne said of France, “they do things better.” No institution is too fantastic but that it might exist--on the other side of the world. No way of life is too reasonable but that a philosophical population might follow it--on the other side of the world. Conceive of the world of ideas which Greek literature had just opened up coming headlong against the new lands which the magnetic compass had given men the courage to explore, and utopia, as a fresh conception of the good life, becomes a throbbing possibility. 3 In setting out for Utopia Sir Thomas More left behind a scene which in its political violence and economic maladjustment looks queerly like our own. Indeed, there are a good many passages which need only have a few names altered and the language itself cast into modern English in order to serve as editorial comment for a radical weekly review. Consider this man Raphael Hythloday, this errant member of the intelligentzia. Life as he knows it in the Europe of his day no longer has a hold upon him. The rich are fattening upon the poor; land is being gathered into big parcels, at least in England; and turned over into sheep runs. The people who used to cultivate the land are compelled to leave their few acres and are thrown on their own resources. Soldiers who have returned from the wars can find nothing to do; disabled veterans and people accustomed to live as pensioners on the more prosperous have become destitute. Extravagant luxury grows on one hand; misery on the other. Those who are poor, beg; those who are proud, steal; and for their pains the thieves and the vagrants are tried and sentenced to the gibbet, where by dozens they hang before the eyes of the market crowds.