Sir Thomas More’s Utopia has very many of the characteristics
of The Republic. There is in it the same wonderful power of
shaking off the prejudices of the place and time in which it was
written. The government of Utopia is described as founded on
popular election; community of goods prevailed, the magistrates
distributed the instruments of production among the inhabitants,
and the wealth resulting from their industry was shared by all.
The use of money and all outward ostentation of wealth were
forbidden. All meals were taken in common, and they were
rendered attractive by the accompaniment of sweet strains of
music, while the air was filled by the scent of the most delicate
perfumes. More’s ideal state differs in one important respect
from Plato’s. There was no community of wives in Utopia.
The sacredness of the family relation and fidelity to the marriage
contract were recognized by More as indispensable to the well-being
of modern society. Plato, notwithstanding all the extraordinary
originality with which he advocated the emancipation of
women, was not able to free himself from the theory and practice
of regarding the wife as part and parcel of the property of her
husband. The fact, therefore, that he advocated community of
property led him also to advocate community of wives. He
speaks of “the possession and use of women and children,” and
proceeds to show how this possession and use must be regulated
in his ideal state. Monogamy was to him mere exclusive possession
on the part of one man of a piece of property which ought
to be for the benefit of the public. The circumstance that he
could not think of wives otherwise than as the property of their
husbands only makes it the more remarkable that he claimed
for women absolute equality of training and careers. The circumstance
that communists have so frequently wrecked their projects
by attacking marriage and advocating promiscuous intercourse
between the sexes may probably be traced to the notion
which regards a wife as being a mere item among the goods and
chattels of her husband. It is not difficult to find evidence of
the survival of this ancient habit of mind. “I will be master of
what is mine own,” says Petruchio. “She is my goods, my
chattels.”
The Perfectionists of Oneida, on the other hand, held that there was “no intrinsic difference between property in persons and property in things; and that the same spirit which abolished exclusiveness in regard to money would abolish, if circumstances allowed full scope to it, exclusiveness in regard to women and children” (Nordhoff’s Communistic Societies of the United States). It is this notion of a wife as property that is responsible for the wild opinions communists have often held in favour of a community of wives and the break-up of family relations. If they could shake off this notion and take hold of the conception of marriage as a contract, there is no reason why their views on the community of property should lead them to think that this contract should not include mutual fidelity and remain in force during the life of the contracting parties. It was probably not this conception of the marriage relation so much as the influence of Christianity which led More to discountenance community of wives in Utopia. It is strange that the same influence did not make him include the absence of slavery as one of the characteristics of his ideal state. On the contrary, however, we find in Utopia the anomaly of slavery existing side by side with institutions which otherwise embody the most absolute personal, political and religious freedom. The presence of slaves in Utopia is made use of to get rid of one of the practical difficulties of communism, viz. the performance of disagreeable work. In a society where one man is as good as another, and the means of subsistence are guaranteed to all alike, it is easy to imagine that it would be difficult to ensure the performance of the more laborious, dangerous and offensive kinds of labour. In Utopia, therefore, we are expressly told that “all the uneasy and sordid services” are performed by slaves. The institution of slavery was also made supplementary to the criminal system of Utopia, as the slaves were for the most part men who had been convicted of crime; slavery for life was made a substitute for capital punishment.
In many respects, however, More’s views on the labour question were vastly in advance of his own time. He repeats the indignant protest of the Republic that existing society is a warfare between rich and poor. “The rich,” he says, “desire 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 work and labour of the poor. And so soon as the rich decide on adopting these devices in the name of the public, then they become law.” One might imagine these words had been quoted from the programme of The International (q.v.), so completely is their tone in sympathy with the hardships of the poor in all ages. More shared to the full the keen sympathy with the hopeless misery of the poor which has been the strong motive power of nearly all speculative communism. The life of the poor as he saw it was so wretched that he said, “Even a beast’s life seems enviable!” Besides community of goods and equality of conditions, More advocated other means of ameliorating the condition of the people. Although the hours of labour were limited to six a day there was no scarcity, for in Utopia every one worked; there was no idle class, no idle individual even. The importance of this from an economic point of view is insisted on by More in a passage remarkable for the importance which he attaches to the industrial condition of women. “And this you will easily apprehend,” he says, “if you consider how great a part of all other nations is quite idle. First, women generally do little, who are the half of mankind.” Translated into modern language his proposals comprise universal compulsory education, a reduction of the hours of labour to six a day, the most modern principles of sanitary reform, a complete revision of criminal legislation, and the most absolute religious toleration. The romantic form which Sir Thomas More gave to his dream of a new social order found many imitators. The Utopia may be regarded as the prototype of Campanella’s City of the Sun, Harrington’s Oceana, Bacon’s Nova Atlantis, Defoe’s Essay on Projects, Fénelon’s Voyage dans l’Île des Plaisirs, and other works of minor importance.
All communists have made a great point of the importance of universal education. All ideal communes have been provided by their authors with a perfect machinery for securing the education of every child. One of the first things done in every attempt to carry communistic theories into practice has been to establish a good school and guarantee education to every child. The first impulse to national education in the 19th century probably sprang from the very marked success of Robert Owen’s schools in connexion with the cotton mills at New Lanark. Compulsory education, free trade, and law reform, the various movements connected with the improvement of the condition of women, have found their earliest advocates among theoretical and practical communists. The communists denounce the evils of the present state of society; the hopeless poverty of the poor, side by side with the self-regarding luxury of the rich, seems to them to cry aloud to Heaven for the creation of a new social organization. They proclaim the necessity of sweeping away the institution of private property, and insist that this great revolution, accompanied by universal education, free trade, a perfect administration of justice, and a due limitation of the numbers of the community, would put an end to half the self-made distress of humanity.
The various communistic experiments in America are the most interesting in modern times, opportunities being naturally greater there for such deviations from the normal forms of regulations as compared with the closely organized states of Europe, and particularly in the means of obtaining land cheaply for social settlements with peculiar views. They have been classified by Morris Hillquit (History of Socialism in the United States, 1903) as (1) sectarian, (2) Owenite, (3) Fourieristic, (4) Icarian.
1. The oldest of the sectarian group was the society of the Shakers (q.v.), whose first settlement at Watervliet was founded in 1776. The Harmony Society or Rappist Community was introduced into Pennsylvania by George Rapp (1770–1847) from Württemberg in 1804, and in 1815 they moved to a settlement (New Harmony) in Indiana, returning to Pennsylvania again in 1824, and founding the village of Economy, from which they were
