While any man may travel if there is no particular occasion for him at home--whether he wishes to visit friends or see the rest of the country--it is necessary for him to carry a passport from the Prince. If he stay in any place longer than a night he must follow his proper occupation; and if anyone goes out of the city without leave or is found wandering around without a passport, he is punished as a fugitive, and upon committing the offense a second time is condemned to slavery. This is a plain example of unimaginative harshness; and it is hard to explain away; indeed, I have no intention to. Apparently More could not conceive of a perfectly happy commonwealth for the majority of men if they still had to perform certain filthy daily tasks, like the slaughtering of beef; and so he attempts to kill two birds with one stone: he creates a class of slaves, and he fills this class by condemning to it people who have committed venial crimes. In doing this, he overlooks the final objection to slavery in all its forms; namely, that it tends to corrupt the master. Since we are discussing the conditions that undermine More’s commonwealth, we may remark that war, too, remains; the difference being that the Utopians attempt to do by strategy, corruption, and what we should now call propaganda what less intelligent people do by sheer force of arms. If the Utopian incubator anticipates the modern invention, their method of conducting war likewise anticipates our modern technique of undermining the enemy’s morale: these Utopians, in the good and the bad, are our contemporaries! Among the just causes of war the Utopians count the seizure of territory, the oppression of foreign merchants, and the denial of access to land to nations capable of cultivating it. They take considerable pains to keep their “best sort of men for their own use at home, so they make use of the worst sort of men for the consumption of war.” In other words, they regard war as a means, among other things, of weeding out undesirable elements in the community. It is a relief to turn away from these residual iniquities to marriage and religion! In marriage there is a curious mixture of the personal conception of sexual relations, which is the modern note, with a belief in certain formal specifications which was the distinctly mediæval quality. Thus on one hand the Utopians take care that the bride and the bridegroom are introduced to each other, in their nakedness, before the ceremony; and the grounds for divorce are adultery and insufferable perverseness. When two people cannot agree they are permitted to escape the bond by mutual agreement under approval granted by the Senate after strict inquiry. On the other hand, unchastity is sternly punished, and those who commit adultery are condemned to slavery and not given the privilege of a second marriage.