But More knew that it would be a hard matter to make things better in England.  As he makes Hythlodaye say, it is no use trying to improve things in a blundering fashion.  It is of no use trying by fear to drive into people’s heads things they have no mind to learn.  Neither must you “forsake the ship in a tempest, because you cannot rule and keep down the winds.”  But “you must with a crafty wile and subtile train, study and endeavour yourself, as much as in you lieth, to handle the matter wittily and handsomely for the purpose.  And that which you cannot turn to good, so to order it that it be not very bad.  For it is not possible for all things to be well, unless all men were good:  which I think will not be yet in these good many years.”

The Utopia is divided into two books.  The first and shorter gives us what we might call the machinery of the tale.  It tells of the meeting with Hythlodaye and More’s first talk with him.  It is not until the beginning of the second book that we really hear about Utopia.  And I think if you read the book soon, I would advise you to begin with the second part, which More wrote first.  In the second book we have most of the story, but the first book helps us to understand More’s own times and explains what he was trying to do in writing his tale.

At the beginning of this book I told you that we should have to talk of many books which for the present, at least, you could not hope to like, but which you must be content to be told are good and worth reading.  I may be wrong, but I think Utopia is one of these.  Yet as Cresacre More, More’s great-grandson, speaking of his great-grandfather’s writing, says, he “seasoned always the troublesomeness of the matter with some merry jests or pleasant tales, as it were sugar, whereby we drink up the more willingly these wholesome drugs . . . which kind of writing he hath used in all his works, so that none can ever by weary to read them, though they be never so long.”

And even if you like the book now, you will both like and understand it much better when you know a little about politics.  You will then see, too, how difficult it is to know when More is in earnest and when he is merely poking fun, for More loved to jest.  Yet as his grandson, who wrote a life of him, tells us, “Whatsoever jest he brought forth, he never laughed at any himself, but spoke always so sadly, that few could see by his look whether he spoke in earnest or in jest.”

It would take too long to tell all about the wonderful island of Utopia and its people, but I must tell you a little of it and how they regarded money.  All men in this land were equal.  No man was idle, neither was any man over-burdened with labor, for every one had to work six hours a day.  No man was rich, no man was poor, for “though no man have anything, yet every man is rich,” for the State gave him everything that he needed.  So money was hardly of any use, and gold and silver and precious jewels were despised.