Utopia

Since I believed myself already sufficiently indebted to you for this, behold, you have bestowed upon me as either an appendage or a supplement to the previous favor that Utopia Nowhere-place of More, a man who is sharp above all, possessed of a pleasant wit, and an old hand in the estimation of human affairs. When I had that book in my hands while in the country, running about, being busy, and managing the work (for you know partly, and have partly heard, that I have spent much effort on rural business for this second year now), I was so affected by the reading of it, having known and weighed the customs and institutions of the Utopians, that I nearly neglected, and even cast aside, the management of my household affairs when I saw that all economic art and industry—the entire concern of increasing one's estate—is nonsense. Yet, there is no one who does not see and understand that all humanity is driven by this very thing, as if by some internal and congenital gadfly. Thus, it must be admitted that the goal of legitimate, and I would almost say civil, arts and disciplines is such that, with both livid and accurate craftiness, one person abstracts, extracts, scrapes away, denies, expresses, hammers out, carves out, extorts, shakes out, strikes out, subducts, pilfers, steals, plunders, and intercepts from another, who sometimes intervenes with the right of civility between them—partly while the laws are winking, and partly while they are the authors of the act.