f reform had been almost exclusively intellectual and religious.
But in More the same free play of thought which had shaken off the old
forms of education and faith turned to question the old forms of society
and politics. From a world where fifteen hundred years of Christian
teaching had produced social injustice, religious intolerance, and
political tyranny the humourist philosopher turned to a "Nowhere" in which
the mere efforts of natural human virtue realized those ends of security,
equality, brotherhood, and freedom for which the very institution of
society seemed to have been framed. It is as he wanders through this
dreamland of the new reason that More touches the great problems which
were fast opening before the modern world, problems of labour, of crime,
of conscience, of government. Merely to have seen and to have examined
questions such as these would prove the keenness of his intellect, but its
far-reaching originality is shown in the solutions which he proposes.
Amidst much that is the pure play of an exuberant fancy, much that is mere
recollection of the dreams of bygone dreamers, we find again and again the
most important social and political discoveries of later times anticipated
by the genius of Thomas More.

[Sidenote: Labour and Health]

In some points, such as his treatment of the question of Labour, he still
remains far in advance of current opinion. The whole system of society
around him seemed to him "nothing but a conspiracy of the rich against the
poor." Its economic legislation from the Statute of Labourers to the
statutes by which the Parliament of 1515 strove to fix a standard of wages
was simply the carrying out of such a conspiracy by process of law. "The
rich are ever striving to pare away something further from the daily wages
of the poor by private fraud and even by public law, so that the wrong
already existing (for it is a wrong that those from whom the State derives
most benefit should receive least reward) is made yet greater by means of
the law of the State." "The rich devise 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." The result
was the wretched existence to which the labour class was doomed, "a life
so wretched t