What measure of liberty Bacon would have granted to the people of his perfect state we cannot say; his work breaks off before he comes to describe their condition.  But we receive the impression that the government he conceived was strictly paternal, though perhaps less rigorous than the theocratic despotism which Campanella, under Plato’s influence, set up in the City of the Sun.  But even Campanella has this in common with More—­and we may be sure that Bacon’s conception would have agreed here—­that there are no hard-and-fast lines between the classes, and the welfare and happiness of all the inhabitants is impartially considered, in contrast with Plato’s scheme in the Laws, where the artisans and manual labourers were an inferior caste existing less for their own sake than for the sake of the community as a whole. [Footnote:  This however does not apply to the Republic, as is so commonly asserted.  See the just criticisms of A. A. Trever, A History of Greek Economic Thought (Chicago, 1916), 49 sqq.]

It may finally be pointed out that these three imaginary commonwealths stand together as a group, marked by a humaner temper than the ancient, and also by another common characteristic which distinguishes them, on one hand, from the ideal states of Plato and, on the other, from modern sketches of desirable societies.  Plato and Aristotle conceived their constructions within the geographical limits of Hellas, either in the past or in the present.  More, Bacon, and Campanella placed theirs in distant seas, and this remoteness in space helped to create a certain illusion, of reality. [Footnote:  Civitas Solis, p. 461 (ed. 1620).  Expectancy of end of world:  Ib. p. 455.] The modern plan is to project the perfect society into a period of future time.  The device of More and his successors was suggested by the maritime explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the later method was a result of the rise of the idea of Progress. [Footnote:  Similarly the ideal communistic states imagined by Euemerus and Iambulus in the southern seas owed their geographical positions to the popular interest in seafaring in the Indian Ocean in the age after Alexander.  One wonders whether Campanella knew the account of the fictitious journey of Iambulus to the Islands of the Sun, in Diodorus Siculus, ii. 55-60.]

6.

A word or two more may be said about the City of the Sun.  Campanella was as earnest a believer in the interrogation of nature as Bacon, and the place which science and learning hold in his state (although research is not so prominent as in the New Atlantis), and the scientific training of all the citizens, are a capital feature.  The progress in inventions, to which science may look forward, is suggested.  The men of the City of the Sun “have already discovered the one art which the world seemed to lack—­the art of flying; and they expect soon to invent ocular instruments which will enable them to see the invisible