ildren" (Nordhoff's _Communistic
Societies of the United States_). It is this notion of a wife as
property that is responsible for the wild opinions communists have often
held in favour of a community of wives and the break-up of family
relations. If they could shake off this notion and take hold of the
conception of marriage as a contract, there is no reason why their views
on the community of property should lead them to think that this
contract should not include mutual fidelity and remain in force during
the life of the contracting parties. It was probably not this conception
of the marriage relation so much as the influence of Christianity which
led More to discountenance community of wives in Utopia. It is strange
that the same influence did not make him include the absence of slavery
as one of the characteristics of his ideal state. On the contrary,
however, we find in Utopia the anomaly of slavery existing side by side
with institutions which otherwise embody the most absolute personal,
political and religious freedom. The presence of slaves in Utopia is
made use of to get rid of one of the practical difficulties of
communism, viz. the performance of disagreeable work. In a society where
one man is as good as another, and the means of subsistence are
guaranteed to all alike, it is easy to imagine that it would be
difficult to ensure the performance of the more laborious, dangerous and
offensive kinds of labour. In Utopia, therefore, we are expressly told
that "all the uneasy and sordid services" are performed by slaves. The
institution of slavery was also made supplementary to the criminal
system of Utopia, as the slaves were for the most part men who had been
convicted of crime; slavery for life was made a substitute for capital
punishment.

In many respects, however, More's views on the labour question were
vastly in advance of his own time. He repeats the indignant protest of
the _Republic_ that existing society is a warfare between rich and poor.
"The rich," he says, "desire every means by which they may in the first
place secure to themselves what they have amassed by wrong, and then
take to their own use and profit, at the lowest possible price, the work
and labour of the poor. And so soon as the rich decide on adopting these
devices in the name of the public, then they become law." One might
imagine these words had been quoted from the programme of The
International (q.v.), so completely is their tone in