Utopia

...to be beholden, behold, you have given me Utopia of More, either as an appendix or a supplement to the former favor, a man who is sharpest of all, possessed of a pleasant wit, and a seasoned observer in the estimation of human affairs. When I had this book in my hands while running about in the country, when I was struggling, when I was managing the business of the estate (for you know partly, and have partly heard, that I have spent much labor on farm business for this second year now), I was so affected by reading it, once the customs and institutions of the Utopians were known and weighed, that I nearly interrupted the management of my household affairs, and even cast it aside, when I saw that all the art and industry of economics the management of a household—all the care for increasing one's estate—were nonsense. Yet there is no one who does not see and understand that all types of mortals are goaded by a certain innate and congenital gadfly. So that, regarding the lawful and, I would almost say, civil arts and disciplines, one must admit that this is their goal: that with envious and accurate skill, one man may always lead away, drag off, scrape off, abjure, squeeze out, hammer out, file off, extort, shake off, forge, subtract, pilfer, snatch, and steal something from another—with whom a bond of civility and sometimes of kinship intervenes—and, with laws partly winking at it and partly authorizing it, carry it away and divert it. This is even more the case among those nations where the laws that are called civil and pontifical canon law have more weight in both courts. In whose customs and institutions this [behavior] has become prevalent...