Utopia

geas, for indeed law and right today, and for a long time now in Papal sanctions, and law and equity in civil codes and the decrees of princes, differ as much as the institutions of CHRIST, the founder of human affairs, and the rites of his disciples, differ from the decrees and edicts of those who think that the piles of wealth belonging to Croesus the legendary wealthy King of Lydia and Midas the mythological king who turned all he touched to gold are the end goal and the sum of happiness. Indeed, if you wish to define justice now in the way it pleased the ancient authors—namely, that it renders to each his own—you would either find it nowhere in public, or (if I may be permitted to say so) you would have to admit that it is a sort of kitchen steward, whether you look at the morals of those who command, or the affections of citizens toward one another. Unless, indeed, they contend that this law has flowed from a genuine and worldly justice (what they call natural law), so that the more powerful a man is, the more he possesses; and the more he possesses, the more he ought to stand out among his citizens. From this it happens that we see it accepted now by the law of nations that those who can neither assist their fellow citizens and countrymen through art nor through memorable industry, provided they hold those contractual bonds and legal knots by which the patrimonies of men are bound—and which the ignorant masses and men devoted to the humanities, and who are far from the marketplace for the sake of their spirit or the search for truth,