their windows with glass, for it is there much used, and
sometimes also with fine linen cloth dipped in oil or amber, and that for
two commodities, for by this means more light cometh in and the wind is
better kept out."

[Sidenote: Crime]

The same foresight which appears in More's treatment of the questions of
Labour and the Public Health is yet more apparent in his treatment of the
question of Crime. He was the first to suggest that punishment was less
effective in suppressing it than prevention. "If you allow your people to
be badly taught, their morals to be corrupted from childhood, and then
when they are men punish them for the very crimes to which they have been
trained in childhood--what is this but to make thieves, and then to punish
them?" He was the first to plead for proportion between the punishment and
the crime, and to point out the folly of the cruel penalties of his day.
"Simple theft is not so great an offence as to be punished with death." If
a thief and a murderer are sure of the same penalty, More shows that the
law is simply tempting the thief to secure his theft by murder. "While we
go about to make thieves afraid, we are really provoking them to kill good
men." The end of all punishment he declares to be reformation, "nothing
else but the destruction of vice and the saving of men." He advises "so
using and ordering criminals that they cannot choose but be good, and what
harm soever they did before, the residue of their lives to make amends for
the same." Above all he urges that to be remedial punishment must be
wrought out by labour and hope, so that "none is hopeless or in despair to
recover again his former state of freedom by giving good tokens and
likelihood of himself that he will ever after that live a true and honest
man." It is not too much to say that in the great principles More lays
down he anticipated every one of the improvements in our criminal system
which have distinguished the last hundred years.

[Sidenote: Religion]

His treatment of the religious question was even more in advance of his
age. If the houses of Utopia were strangely in contrast with the halls of
England, where the bones from every dinner lay rotting in the dirty straw
which strewed the floor, where the smoke curled about the rafters, and the
wind whistled through the unglazed windows; if its penal legislation had
little likeness to the gallows which stood out so frequently against our
English sky; the rel