The island of Utopia is in the middle two hundred miles broad, and holds almost at the same breadth over a great part of it, but it grows narrower towards both ends. Its figure is not unlike a crescent. Between its horns the sea comes in eleven miles broad, and spreads itself into a great bay, which is environed with land to the compass of about five hundred miles, and is well secured from winds. In this bay there is no great current; the whole coast is, as it were, one continued harbour, which gives all that live in the island great convenience for mutual commerce. But the entry into the bay, occasioned by rocks on the one hand and shallows on the other, is very dangerous. In the middle of it there is one single rock which appears above water, and may, therefore, easily be avoided; and on the top of it there is a tower, in which a garrison is kept; the other rocks lie under water, and are very dangerous. The channel is known only to the natives; so that if any stranger should enter into the bay without one of their pilots he would run great danger of shipwreck.

I think putting thieves to death is not lawful; and it is plain and obvious that it is absurd and of ill consequence to the commonwealth that a thief and a murderer should be equally punished; for if a robber sees that his danger is the same if he is convicted of theft as if he were guilty of murder, this will naturally incite him to kill the person whom otherwise he would only have robbed; since, if the punishment is the same, there is more security, and less danger of discovery, when he that can best make it is put out of the way; so that terrifying thieves too much provokes them to cruelty.

When Raphael Hythloday had thus made an end of speaking, though many things occurred to me, both concerning the manners and laws of the people, that seemed very absurd, as well as their way of making war, as in their notions of religion and divine matters, together with several other particulars, but chiefly what seemed the foundations of all the rest, their living in common, without the use of money, by which all nobility, magnificence, splendor, and majesty, which, according to the common opinion, are the true ornaments of a nation, would be quite taken away.

I have described for you as accurately as I can the structure of the commonwealth of Utopia, which I believe to be the only the best social order in the world, but the only one that can properly claim to be literally a commonwealth. Everywhere else people talk about the public good but pay attention to their own private interests. In Utopia, where there is no private property, everyone is seriously concerned with pursuing the public welfare. Both here and there people act with good reason, for the outside Utopia there can't be anyone who doesn't realize that unless they take care of their own welfare they may die of hunger, no matter how much the commonwealth prospers.

They have but few laws, and such is their constitution that they need not many. They very much condemn other nations whose laws, together with the commentaries on them, swell up to so many volumes; for they think it an unreasonable thing to oblige men to obey a body of laws that are both of such a bulk, and so dark as not to be read and understood by every one of the subjects.

There are several sorts of religions, not only in different parts of the island, but even in every town; some worshipping the sun, others the moon or one of the planets. Some worship such men as have been eminent in former times for virtue or glory, not only as ordinary deities, but as the supreme god. Yet the greater and wiser sort of them worship none of these, but adore one eternal, invisible, infinite, and incomprehensible Deity; as a Being that is far above all our apprehensions, that is spread over the whole universe, not by His bulk, but by His power and virtue; Him they call the Father of All, and acknowledge that the beginnings, the increase, the progress, the vicissitudes, and the end of all things come only from Him; nor do they offer divine honours to any but to Him alone. And, indeed, though they differ concerning other things, yet all agree in this: that they think there is one Supreme Being that made and governs the world, whom they call, in the language of their country, Mithras . They differ in this: that one thinks the god whom he worships is this Supreme Being, and another thinks that his idol is that god; but they all agree in one principle, that whoever is this Supreme Being, He is also that great essence to whose glory and majesty all honours are ascribed by the consent of all nations....

This law was made by Utopia, not only for preserving the public peace, which he saw suffered much by daily contentions and irreconcilable heats, but because he thought the interest of religion itself required it. He judged it not fit to determine anything rashly; and seemed to doubt whether those different forms of religion might not all come from God, who might inspire man in a different manner, and be pleased with this variety; he therefore thought it indecent and foolish for any man to threaten and terrify another to make him believe what did not appear to him to be true. And supposing that only one religion was really true, and the rest false, he imagined that the native force of truth would at last break forth and shine bright, if supported only by the strength of argument, and attended to with a gentle and unprejudiced mind; while, on the other hand, if such debates were carried on with violence and tumults, as the most wicked are always the most obstinate, so the best and most holy religion might be choked with superstition, as corn is with briars and thorns; he therefore left men wholly to their liberty, that they might be free to believe as they should see cause.

Therefore I must say that, as I hope for mercy, I can have no other notion of all the other governments that I see or know, than that they are a conspiracy of the rich, who, on pretence of managing the public, only pursue their private ends, and devise all the ways and arts they can find out; first, that they may, without danger, preserve all that they have so ill-acquired, and then, that they may engage the poor to toil and labour for them at as low rates as possible, and oppress them as much as they please; and if they can but prevail to get these contrivances established by the show of public authority, which is considered as the representative of the whole people, then they are accounted laws.

For the citizens of More's Utopia the end is the pursuit of virtue for its own sake. When everyone takes delight in individual and collective virtue the state is at peace externally and internally, it is free, it is not wracked by the "conspiracy of the rich pursuing their own private interests under the name and title of the commonwealth". Public service is the noblest of callings; and More recognizes the force of a Platonic view (expressed by the character Raphael Hythloday) that the abolition of private property and a "complete equality of goods" would make possible the Utopia he described.... More himself ends on a note of doubt about such a complete system of communism, which he perceives is the 'foundation' of the Utopia Hythloday describes, that is, "their living in common, without the use of money, by which all nobility, magnificence, splendor, and majesty, which, according to the common opinion, are the true ornaments of a nation, would be quite taken away." He does not end by endorsing this latter view outright; he says he would himself like to see in his own country many of the things Hythloday describes; but he leaves open which things he would not like to see.

In Utopia, as in Plato's Republic, all things are held in common, the public good cannot flourish where there is private property, and without communism there can be no equality. More, in the dialogue, objects that communism would make men idle, and destroy respect for magistrates; to this Raphael replies that no one would say this who had lived in Utopia.

There are in Utopia fifty-four towns, all on the same plan, except that one is the capital. All the streets are twenty feet broad, and all the private houses are exactly alike, with one door onto the street and one onto the garden. There are no locks on the doors, and everyone may enter any house. The roofs are flat. Every tenth year people change houses - apparently to prevent any feeling of ownership...

In the country, there are farms, each containing not fewer than forty persons... Each farm is under the rule of a master and mistress, who are old and wise. The chickens are not hatched by hens, but in incubators (which did not exist in More's time). All are dressed alike, except that there is a difference between the dress of men and women, and of married and unmarried. The fashions never change... Each family makes its own clothes... In the case of a painful incurable disease, the patient is advised to commit suicide, but is carefully tended if he refuses to do so.

Everybody - men and women alike - works six hours a day, three before dinner and three after. All go to bed at eight, and sleep eight hours. In the early morning there are lectures, to which multitudes go, although they are not compulsory. After supper an hour is devoted to play. Six hours' work is enough, because there are no idlers and there is no useless work; with us, it is said, women, priests, rich people, servants, and beggars, mostly do nothing useful, and owing to the existence of the rich much labour is spent in producing unnecessary luxuries; all this is avoided in Utopia. Sometimes it is found that there is a surplus, and the magistrates proclaim a shorter working day for a time... The government is a representative democracy, with a system of indirect election...

As for marriage, both men and women are sharply punished if not virgin when they marry; and the householder of any house in which misconduct has occurred is liable to incur infamy for carelessness. Before marriage, bride and groom see each other naked; no one would buy a horse without first taking off the saddle and bridle, and similar considerations should apply in marriage. There is divorce for adultery or "intolerable waywardness" of either party, but the guilty party cannot remarry. Sometimes divorce is granted solely because both parties desire it.

There is foreign trade, chiefly for the purpose of getting iron, of which there is none in the island. The Utopians think nothing of martial glory, though all learn how to fight, women as well as men. They resort to war for three purposes; to defend their own territory when invaded; to deliver the territory of an ally from invaders; and to free an oppressed nation from tyranny. But whenever they can, they get mercenaries to fight their wars for them...

There are many religions among them, all of which are tolerated. Almost all believe in God and immortality; the few who do not are not accounted citizens, and have no part in political life, but are otherwise unmolested.... Women can be priests, if they are old and widowed. The priests are few; they have honour, but no power...

Raphael Hythloday relates that he preached Christianity to the Utopians, and that many were converted when they learnt that Christ was opposed to private property. The importance of communism is constantly stressed; almost at the end we are told that in all other nations "I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth."

As Thomas More approached the age of fifty, all the conflicting trends in his strange character blended into one, and produced the savage persecutor of heretics who devoted his life to the destruction of Lutheranism. To say that he suffered from paranoia on this subject would be to resort to a glib phrase, not a serious psychiatric analysis; but it is unquestionable that More, like other persecutors throughout history, believed that the foundations of civilisation, and all that he valued as sacred, were threatened by the forces of evil, and that it was his mission to exterminate the enemy by all means, including torture and lies. The worst of all the heretics were the Anabaptists, the most extreme of all the Protestant sects, who were already causing great concern to the authorities in Germany and the Netherlands. They not only rejected infant baptism, but believed, like the inhabitants of Utopia, that goods should be held in common. In 1528 More wrote to the German theologian, Cochlaeus: "The past centuries have not seen anything more monstrous than the Anabaptists"...

He was bitterly hated by the Protestants. His contemporary, Tyndale, and John Foxe thirty years after his death, picked him out, with one or two others, as the most cruel of all the persecutors. Neither More himself, nor his Catholic supporters in the sixteenth century, wished to rebut this accusation which in their eyes was creditable to him, though More denied a few specific allegations made by the Protestants. In the twentieth century, his admirers have tried to defend him from the charge of being a notorious persecutor. They have adopted two main lines of argument. The first is to deny the truth of the worst accusations, especially the story that he whipped heretics in his garden; and here they are probably right in many cases. The second is to claim that More, as a layman, cannot be held responsible for the persecution of heretics, because heretics were condemned in the court of the bishop of their diocese. This argument is exactly the reverse of that which has sometimes been used by apologists for the Catholic Church, including More himself in his Dialogue concerning Heresies - that it was the temporal power, not the Church, which burned heretics; and it is unsound.