limiting the prince that he may not grow too great, and restraining the people that they may not become too insolent, and that none might factiously aspire to public employments; and that they might neither be sold nor made burthensome by a great expense, since otherwise those that serve in them, will be tempted to reimburse themselves by cheats and violence, and it will become necessary to find out rich men for undergoing those employments for which wise men ought rather to be sought out;88 these laws, I say, may have such effects, as good diet and care may have on a sick man, whose recovery is desperate-they may allay and mitigate the disease, but it can never be quite healed, nor the body politic be brought again to a good habit as long as property remains. And it will fall out, as in a complication of diseases, that by applying a remedy to one sore, you will provoke another; and that which removes the one ill symptom produces others, while the strengthening of one part of the body weakens the rest." "On the contrary," answered I, " it seems to me that men cannot live conveniently, where all things are common. How can there be any plenty, where every man will excuse himself from labour ?89 88 He would have no property qualification for Members of Parliament. Character and abilities were, in his opinion, a better guarantee for good conduct, than the possession of any given amount of money, houses, or lands. His views are once more brought forward, and not without a probability that they may ere long be acted on. 89 He has here put a question which has never to this day been satisfactorily answered. For as the hope of gain doth not excite him, so the confidence he has in other men's industry may make him slothful. And if people come to be pinched with want, and yet cannot dispose of anything as their own, what can follow upon this but perpetual sedition and bloodshed, especially when the reverence and authority due to magistrates falls to the ground? For I cannot imagine how that can be kept up among those that are in all things equal to one another." "I do not wonder," said he, "that it appears so to you, since you have no notion, or at least no right one, of such a constitution: but if you had been in Utopia with me, and had seen their laws and rules as I did, for the space of five years, in which I lived among them, and during which time I was so de-⚫ lighted with them, that indeed I would never have left them if it had not been to make the discovery of that new world to the Europeans, you would then confess that you had never seen a people so well constituted as they are." "You will not easily persuade me," said Peter, "that any nation in that new world is better governed than those among us. For as our understandings are not worse than theirs, so our government, if I mistake not, being more ancient, a long practice has helped us to find out many conveniences of life; and some happy chances have discovered other things to us, which no man's understanding could ever have invented." "As for the antiquity, either of their government or of ours," said he, "you cannot pass a true judg ment of it, unless you had read their histories; for if they are to be believed, they had towns among them before these parts were so much as inhabited; and as for these discoveries that have been either hit on by chance, or made by ingenious men, these might have happened there as well as here.90 I do not deny but we are more ingenious than they are, but they exceed us much in industry and application. They knew little concerning us before our arrival among them. They call us all by a general name of the nations that lie beyond the equinoctial line: for their chronicle mentions a shipwreck that was made on their coast twelve hundred years ago, and that some Romans and Egyptians that were in the ship getting safe ashore, spent the rest of their days amongst them. And such was their ingenuity, that from this single opportunity they drew the advantage of learning, from those unlooked-for guests, all the useful arts that were then among the Romans, which those shipwrecked men knew; and by the hints that they gave them, they themselves found out even some of those arts which they could not fully explain to them; so happily did they improve that accident of having some of our people cast upon their shore. But if any such accident have at any time brought any from thence into Europe, we have been so far from improving it, that we do not 90 Mr. Keightley, in the introduction to his delightful little volume on the origin and transmission of Popular Fictions, has several very excellent remarks on this subject, which the reader will be profited by perusing. so much as remember it: as in after times, perhaps, it will be forgot by our people that I was ever there. For though they from one such accident made themselves masters of all the good inventions that were among us, yet I believe it would be long before we would learn or put in practice any of the good institutions that are among them: and this is the true cause of their being better governed, and living happier than we do, though we come not short of them in point of understanding or outward advantages." to us. Upon this I said to him, "I do earnestly beg of you, that you would describe that island very particularly Be not too short in it, but set out in order all things relating to their soil, their rivers, their towns, their people, their manners, constitution, laws, and, in a word, all that you imagine we desire to know; and you may well imagine that we desire to know everything concerning them, of which we are hitherto ignorant." "I will do it very willingly," said he, " for I have digested the whole matter carefully, but it will take up some time." "Let us go then," said I, "first and dine, and then we shall have leisure enough." "Be it so," said he,91 So he went in and dined, and after dinner 91 In these parts of the work, no less than in Cicero's fine Dialogue on the Orator, I miss that admirable art which distinguishes from all other productions of the kind the Dialogues of Plato. In these, whatever breaks there are, seem to grow up out of the subject, not to be made for mere convenience, as they are in the present volume. |