neither to be sold, nor made burthensome
by a great expense; since otherwise those that serve in them would be
tempted to reimburse themselves by cheats and violence, and it would
become necessary to find out rich men for undergoing those employments
which ought rather to be trusted to the wise. These laws, I say, might
have such effects, as good diet and care might have on a sick man, whose
recovery is desperate: they might allay and mitigate the disease, but it
could 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 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? For as the
hope of gain doth not excite him, so the confidence that he has in other
men's industry may make him slothful: 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 delighted with
them, that indeed I should 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,"--"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 thei