More's Utopia, translated into modern English

"Utopia" is a political romance by Sir Thomas More, and the name that he gave to an imaginary island, which he represents to have been discovered by a companion of Amerigo Vespucci, and in which existed a perfect society. He pictured a community where all the property belonged to the government, to which every one contributed by his labor, receiving therefrom a supply of his wants; where the citizen rose through all the gradations of his existence from form to form, as if in a vast public school; where gold was contemned, and all the members of the society, unswerved by passion, were fixed each in his proper place. It is little short of a miracle that the best treatise on the ills of a commonwealth, with the most suggestive thoughts as to the way of avoiding them, should have appeared in the days when absolutism was tightening its hold; and even in these days, when absolutism is bound to rise almost everywhere, we may still turn to the Utopia, and not only see, as Professor Brewer has said, the truest picture of the real condition of Europe at that period, but the most truly Christian programme ever put forward for the amelioration of human society by the diffusion of culture and the equalization of opportunity to all.