Counties, society was unstable and liable to these social commotions; in England all throughout the century of the Tudor Sovereigns, when the monarchs were strong and the people sturdy and warlike, we find repeated insurrections of the people to maintain their rights to the land; risings against the clearances and the practice of enclosures by the great landowners, who thought they should be able to do as they chose with their own in the former case, and who, in the latter, were not over-scrupulous as to what was their

own.

The rising against the practice of clearances, of turning arable into pasture land, and driving away the cultivators has been described as an insurrection against economic causes and laws. In reality it was a rising against an attempt to deprive the tillers of the soil of the means of life, and against the attempt of the landlords to exercise absolute rights of property in the land which they never really possessed, and could not be permitted to exercise at the cost of the existence of the people. The strong Tudor sovereigns, Henry VII. and Henry VIII, saw this clearly, and attempted by statutes to check the practice, though with only partial success. One permanent social result followed from these practices together with the confiscation of the property of the religious communities, namely, a great increase in the destitute poor, so great that at last a permanent provision had to be made for them; and a new Communistic institution in the shape of Poor Laws was devised in place of the old Communistic institutions dissolved.

The great increase of the poor and their hardships roused the pity and sympathy of Sir Thomas More,

who in his "Utopia" goes back to the Communism of the Gospels and in some respects of Plato's Republic as the only radical cure. No punishment, however severe, he contends, is able to restrain those from robbing who can find no other means of livelihood, which must be the plight of many under an economic system which drives men from the land, and does not provide employment for them. Apparently Sir Thomas had not come to the Elizabethan alternative of levying a portion for the unemployed poor from the resources of the rest of the community. In a remarkable passage near the close of his book we find the eternal argument of the Communists given in the clearest and most striking words, and the argument of the modern Socialists anticipated. Excepting only with the Utopians, he says, " May I perish if I see anything that looks either like justice or equity, for what justice is there in this, that a nobleman, a goldsmith, a banker, or any other man that either does nothing at all, or at least is employed at things that are of no use to the public, should live in great luxury and splendour upon what is so ill acquired; and a mean man, a carter, a smith, or a ploughman, that works harder even than the beasts themselves, and is employed in labours so necessary that no commonwealth could hold out a year without them, can only earn so poor a livelihood, and must lead so miserable a life, that the condition of the beasts is much better than theirs. For as the beasts do not work so constantly, so they feed almost as well, and with more pleasure; and have no anxiety about what is to come, whilst these

men are depressed by a barren and fruitless employ ment, and tormented with the apprehension of want in their old age. The Government does ill to be so prodigal of its favours to the high-placed and idle, and those who minister to the satisfaction of the rich, and on the other hand to take no care of the meaner sort, such as ploughmen, colliers, smiths, without whom it could not subsist." And when the public has used up their bodies and their services it leaves them "to die in great misery." Not only so: "The richer sort are often endeavouring to bring the hire of the labourers lower, not only by fraudulent practices, but by the laws which they procure to be made to that effect; so that, though it is a thing most unjust in itself to give such small rewards to those who deserve so well of the public, yet they have given these hardships the name and colour of justice, by procuring laws to be made for regulating them."

Here is the argument of the Socialists anticipated three hundred years ago; the following breathes the very spirit of Rousseau and the modern Revolutionists: "Therefore, I must say that, as I hope for mercy, I can have no notion of all the other governments that I see or know than that they are a conspiracy of the rich, who, on pretence of managing the public, only pursue their private ends, and devise all the ways and arts they can find out; first that they may, without danger, preserve all that they have so ill acquired, and then that they may engage the poor to toil and labour for them at as low rates as possible, and oppress them as much as they please. And if they can but prevail to get these contrivances established by the show of

public authority, which is considered as the representative of the whole people, then they are accounted laws."

The book made no impression at the time, because first it was written in Latin for the learned. Again, when it was rendered into vigorous English, near the end of the sixteenth century, it was still confined to the few, and by them regarded as an ingenious exercise of the fancy, not seriously to be taken, and impossible of realization out of Utopia or the land of Nowhere whose customs it describes.

The work nevertheless presents a remarkable example of suspended vitality which, three centuries after its first conception, has produced effects; for the book is now read, and existing Socialists draw both arguments and practical hints from it. It is, in fact, the first true work on Social Philosophy in the English language, with the true marks of genius upon it, originality and the perception of permanent truth, moral and social, and all the more remarkable as coming from an English Lord Chancellor.

Other philosophers besid s More exercised their minds in devising Ideal Commonwealths, or in bodying forth "Visions of the Perfect State;" in fact, for a century and more, the construction of political Utopias was a favourite species of literary effort, and the first form of political speculation, cast in the fanciful form probably in part out of deference to the established order of things, and for fear of giving offence to the powers that be, partly because the materials for scientific treatment were not accessible, nor the philosophic habit and faculty of generalizing

common until later. Campanella, Fénélon, Harrington, Bacon, and others produced works of this species; and in most of them private property is found the social stumbling-block and the cause of social ills, and communism of some sort the only cure.

III.

IT was not difficult to devise Ideal Commonwealths, the example once set; but as it was found in time to be profitless, the practice became discredited, the writer was called a political projector, and Utopias ceased to be produced. It was more to the purpose to discover, if possible, how actual commonwealths and societies came into being, and their continued raison d'étre, and this was the problem to which philosophers next addressed themselves, a really philosophical and most important problem, but, for the solution of which unfortunately, as Sir Henry Maine remarks, the historical knowledge of the seventeenth and eighteenth century was quite insufficient, so that the philosophers were obliged to supplement their imperfect knowledge by ingenious guesses and to substitute hypothesis for history, drawing therefrom the most plausible deductions they could.

For a century and a half the human mind sat down obstinately in front of the problem of the origin of Civil Society and Government. Hobbes, Locke,

Filmer, Rousseau, all inquire into it, and the first two, as well as Rousseau, base the origin upon an original covenant covenant or social contract. All three discuss likewise the best form of political Constitution,