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 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 labor 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 toiling poor are reduced to a life so wretched that even a beast's life seems enviable."
Turning from this pitiful picture of the English laborer of the sixteenth century, from the horrible social tyranny that found expression in every page of the English statute book, More tells us that in Utopia the aim of legislation is the true social, industrial, moral, and intellectual welfare of the whole community, of which the labor-class is the most important. As work was compulsory with all—no class of idlers, called "noble" and "gentle,"
