that a work equal to that of past centuries may he done in a few future years.
Thomas More spent his childhood in the household of Cardinal Morton, a brother of one of Ralph Morton's ancestors (which fact perhaps helped to attract Ralph's attention to More's work), where his precocious ability was a constant marvel. At Oxford his career did not belie the old Cardinal's prophecy of his future greatness. One of the most religious of men, even to asceticism, bigots called him a freethinker. Entering Parliament at twenty-six, he was instrumental in the rejection of a heavy subsidy demanded by Henry VII. Leaving Parliament, he became a prominent lawyer. Under Henry VIII he was a trusted counselor and a diplomatist. It was in one of his diplomatic missions to Holland that, as his story goes, he met the ancient mariner, a companion of Amerigo Vespucci, who had discovered, in the depths of the virgin continent, the republic of Utopia. In Utopia human virtue (which theologians esteem as naught) had attained the true ends of society—liberty, equality, fraternity, and security. In England, More truthfully said, "the whole of society is but a conspiracy of the rich against the poor.
