The Utopia of Sir Thomas More - 1895 Author:Thomas More Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: And so More, whose sagacious eye foresaw the rapid approach of that state of things which we fmd Starkey and others lamenting, a few years later on, as having ac... more »tually come to pass, could devise no more effectual remedy than the spread of a wide spirit of communism. He professes, indeed, to argue against—this opinion, which he puts into the mouth of Hythloday. But, as desperate diseases require desperate remedies, it is pretty certain that he wished these doctrines to work in the minds of the thinkers of his age, if only as an antidote to the policy, as blind as it was selfish, which turned adrift farm- labourers and discarded serving-men to steal or beg, and then hanged them, by twenty on a gallows, for stealing. § 3.—Framework Of The Story. There can be no doubt that for the groundplan of his story More was indebted to the Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci. He himself says of his imaginary narrator, Hythloday, that 'for the desire he had to see and knowe the farre countreyes of the worlde, he joyned himselfe in company with Americke Vespuce, and in the iii. last voyages of those iiii. that be nowe in printe and abrode in every mannes handes, he continued styll in his company, savyng that in the last voyage he came not home agayne with him. For he made suche meanes and shift . . . that he gotte licence of mayster Americke (though it were sore against his wyll) to be one of the xxiiii. whiche in the ende of the last voyage were left in the countrey of Gulike V After the departure of Vespucci from this last-mentioned settlement, Hythloday is represented as starting, with five Gulikian natives, in quest of fresh adventures. He roams through many countries, and at last, ' by merveylous chaunce, ' reaches Tapro- bane (feppaaft, whence he gets to Caliquit on the Malabar coast, and ...« less