e? Why tinker creeds, constitutions, and laws, and disturb the good
old-fashioned order of things in church and state? The idea of making
the world better and happier is to them an absurdity. He who entertains
it is a dreamer and a visionary, destitute of common sense and practical
wisdom. His project, whatever it may be, is at once pronounced to be
impracticable folly, or, as they are pleased to term it, _Utopian._

The romance of Sir Thomas More, which has long afforded to the
conservatives of church and state a term of contempt applicable to all
reformatory schemes and innovations, is one of a series of fabulous
writings, in which the authors, living in evil times and unable to
actualize their plans for the well-being of society, have resorted to
fiction as a safe means of conveying forbidden truths to the popular
mind. Plato's "Timaeus," the first of the series, was written after the
death of Socrates and the enslavement of the author's country. In this
are described the institutions of the Island of Atlantis,--the writer's
ideal of a perfect commonwealth. Xenophon, in his "Cyropaedia," has also
depicted an imaginary political society by overlaying with fiction
historical traditions. At a later period we have the "New Atlantis" of
Lord Bacon, and that dream of the "City of the Sun" with which Campanella
solaced himself in his long imprisonment.

The "Utopia" of More is perhaps the best of its class. It is the work of
a profound thinker, the suggestive speculations and theories of one who
could

"Forerun his age and race, and let
His feet millenniums hence be set
In midst of knowledge dreamed not yet."

Much of what he wrote as fiction is now fact, a part of the frame-work of
European governments, and the political truths of his imaginary state are
now practically recognized in our own democratic system. As might be
expected, in view of the times in which the author wrote, and the
exceedingly limited amount of materials which he found ready to his hands
for the construction of his social and political edifice, there is a want
of proportion and symmetry in the structure. Many of his theories are no
doubt impracticable and unsound. But, as a whole, the work is an
admirable one, striding in advance of the author's age, and prefiguring a
government of religious toleration and political freedom. The following
extract from it was doubtless regarded in his day as