Aristopia/Chapter 9
The Flora arrived again about the middle of September, bringing ninety-two immigrants, of whom eighteen were women and twenty-four children. Among the men were two carpenters, one blacksmith, and one tailor. There was also a young physician. Hitherto Ralph Morton had acted as physician to the colony. There was, too, a clergyman, a young man who, without powerful connections, had despaired of getting a "living" in England, and had concluded to trust Providence in America. He had been informed that he could expect no tithes nor anything for his religious services except voluntary contributions, but that he would be paid a fair salary for teaching the children of the colony as long as he chose, if he would agree to teach until another teacher could be procured. His theology was of a somewhat mild type, rather inclining to a doctrine of love than delighting to deal damnation to heretics, as was the fashion and the passion of the times in theology. Ralph Morton was very glad of this, and encouraged the pastor all he could. It must not be supposed that the colony had gone without religious services all this time. In such a body of Englishmen at that time there were always to be found men able and willing to lead in such services as reading the liturgy and the Bible, singing psalms, and praying. A leader in all things else, Ralph Morton was a very modest follower here.
Among the first immigrants to the Jamestown colony were half a dozen tailors, several perfumers and barbers, and four goldsmiths, jewelers, and "refiners." With the exception of the one tailor, there were no such people in the Mortonia colony. But there was one artisan on the Flora many years ahead of any of his guild in any other colony of America—a printer.
The reason of his coming thus early was that Ralph Morton had determined to reform the English language in spelling and grammar, at least so far as it was to be used in his new nation. In his study of several languages he had often cause to wonder at the perverse folly of people in retaining so tenaciously the bewildering irregularities of their grammar, when regularity would have been so much easier and better. He determined to make the conjugations of all verbs, the comparison of all adjectives, and the plurals of all nouns quite regular in all the printing done in his new nation.
The spelling of English of that day was a marvel of confusion. There was no dictionary or other authority or standard of spelling. Although the spelling of a large number of words was somewhat fixed in a barbarous and bungling way, most words were spelled according to the caprices of the writers, and it was no uncommon thing to find the same word spelled two or three different ways in the same paragraph. Then, too, the u's and the v's took each other's places in the most bewildering manner.
Ralph had made a very careful study of the sounds of the language. He saw how utterly inadequate to represent all those sounds were the twenty-six letters of the Roman alphabet. The only hope of a rational spelling was to invent new characters. So he invented eleven new characters, both print and script; six vowel and five consonant letters. The new vowel letters were mostly small changes in the old letters to represent the cognate sounds of those old letters. In the old vowel letters the principal rule was to use each one to represent that sound which it most frequently represented in the common spelling. Then each letter must always represent one and the same sound, and each sound he invariably represented by the same letter. This would give order, system, and regularity instead of the present disorder, confusion, and chaos. The letters q and x and the long's were rejected as useless.
Ralph had ordered from Venice (where were then the best type-cutters) the dies for his new characters in all ordinary sizes of type. The type were to be cast in Holland, for greater convenience of shipping. In this cargo was only a hundred pounds of the size now called great primer. This was intended for printing elementary reading-books. Ralph had spent considerable time in his ocean voyages writing two well-graded reading-books for beginners, lessons of short, familiar words and simple ideas. No such sensible books then existed. With the type was a press. There were also all other necessary materials for printing, including plenty of paper. The printer, who was also a bookbinder, was immediately set at work on a child's primer.
The greater part of the colonists now in Mortonia and those to come spoke some uncouth dialect of English, and few of them could read, so they were not likely to make objection to the innovation. The only objections came from the teachers and the few educated persons; but these were so much under Ralph Morton's influence and so dependent on him that they yielded, and when they became accustomed to the innovation were its most zealous supporters.
As before said, the first colonists were all employés of Ralph Morton. He had paid them from the day of their embarking such wages as they were accustomed to receive in England, considering the food and lodgings furnished them. On the arrival of the second company, however, Ralph called them all together and proposed to them to form a new commonwealth, better than the world had ever seen before. The opportunity, in a virgin world, was before them; the means, he solemnly assured them, he held in his hands; he would devote all those means and his life to establishing such a commonwealth—a commonwealth not a mockery of the name, as England was, where the rich idlers revelled in luxury on the proceeds of the toil of the wretched and drudging poor. In an ideal republic, after it was established, the governor should be chosen by the people for a stated term and be removable. But this commonwealth was first to be established, and for such establishment, and to insure the proper application of the vast means he held ready, it was necessary that he should be governor for life. What he had already done in bringing them all over free and maintaining them so far was but a grain of sand on the seashore to what he would do. But they must adopt the system of government he proposed. He was willing to spend his wealth and his life for no other. He had drawn up a constitution and a code of laws. The code might be added to and altered by the representatives of the people or the people themselves, but the constitution was not to be altered without the consent of the governor.
Ralph Morton had spent much thought on a model commonwealth, and brought to the task a wide knowledge of history in all ages, a mind of powerful grasp, deep insight, and long foresight, and an unselfish devotion to the good of his fellows. It was the sudden springing up of ideas inspired by this devotion that led him to conceal the existence of the mine, and not the cunning and calculating selfishness which such a course might seem to indicate.
One of the books which had given Ralph Morton many ideas of a model commonwealth was Thomas More's Utopia. This book has long been misunderstood and misrepresented. It has generally been spoken of as the scheme of a mild lunatic for upsetting all the good old order of society, and instituting in its place something as impossible for human beings with their sinful nature to attain (without first dying) as it would be for those same gross mortals to live (without first dying) in the Elysian Fields above the sunset clouds. In fair truth, More's book contained only the sane, wise ideas of a man centuries ahead of his age, a lover of humanity more than of self. One by one, as the centuries wore away, his wild imaginings, as they seemed to be, became the accomplished facts of history. Human nature was found to be capable of better things than bigoted theologians or sneering cynics thought possible. That great seer's splendid visions yet unfulfilled are no more impossible than what has been accomplished. But let us hope that the accomplishment will be accelerated, so that a work equal to that of past centuries may he done in a few future years.
Thomas More spent his childhood in the household of Cardinal Morton, a brother of one of Ralph Morton's ancestors (which fact perhaps helped to attract Ralph's attention to More's work), where his precocious ability was a constant marvel. At Oxford his career did not belie the old Cardinal's prophecy of his future greatness. One of the most religious of men, even to asceticism, bigots called him a freethinker. Entering Parliament at twenty-six, he was instrumental in the rejection of a heavy subsidy demanded by Henry VII. Leaving Parliament, he became a prominent lawyer. Under Henry VIII he was a trusted counselor and a diplomatist. It was in one of his diplomatic missions to Holland that, as his story goes, he met the ancient mariner, a companion of Amerigo Vespucci, who had discovered, in the depths of the virgin continent, the republic of Utopia. In Utopia human virtue (which theologians esteem as naught) had attained the true ends of society—liberty, equality, fraternity, and security. In England, More truthfully said, "the whole of society is but a conspiracy of the rich against the poor. The rich are ever striving to pare away something further from the daily wages of the poor by private fraud, and even by public law, so that the wrong already existing—for it is a wrong that those from whom the state derives most benefit should receive least reward—is made yet greater by the law of the state. The rich devise every means by which they may, in the first place, secure to themselves what they have amassed by wrong, and then take to their own use and profit, at the lowest possible price, the labor of the poor. And so soon as the rich decide on adopting these devices in the name of the public, then they become law. The toiling poor are reduced to a life so wretched that even a beast's life seems enviable."
Turning from this pitiful picture of the English laborer of the sixteenth century, from the horrible social tyranny that found expression in every page of the English statute book, More tells us that in Utopia the aim of legislation is the true social, industrial, moral, and intellectual welfare of the whole community, of which the labor-class is the most important. As work was compulsory with all—no class of idlers, called "noble" and "gentle," living on their stealthy robberies of the workers, as in England—the hours of labor could he shortened to nine, which would have seemed short indeed to the English laborer of that age. The hours thus saved from manual labor were devoted to the cultivation of the mind. To this end a thorough system of public education was maintained. In England few laborers could read. In Utopia every child was well educated. The physical side of life in Utopia was as attractive as the mental. While in England in More's day the common people dwelt in "low and homely cottages and poor shepherd huts made at all adventure of every rude piece of timber that came first to hand, with mud walls and ridged roofs thatched over with straw," nests of squalor, filth, and pestilence, in Utopia the houses were spacious, well lighted, airy, comfortable, and clean. "The streets were twenty feet broad"—in English towns of that day they were not half that—"the houses backed by spacious gardens and curiously budded after a gorgeous and gallant sort, with their stories one after another. They keep the wind out of their windows with glass, for it is there much used, and sometimes also with fine linen cloth dipped in oil or amber, for by this means more light cometh in and the wind is better kept out." In More's days the window of the English cottage was literally a wind-hole in the wall.
In England the petty thief received the same punishment as the murderer—death for almost every crime. In Utopia the object of legal punishment was as much to reform the criminal as to protect society. In fact, More, in Utopia, anticipates all those reforms in the treatment of criminals which distinguish the nineteenth from the brutal and savage sixteenth century.
In Utopia was that complete religious toleration which was looked for in vain in Europe until the middle of the eighteenth century. In Utopia there was political liberty, a complete democracy, while England, under the Tudor tyrants, was fast losing the little political liberty she ever had. Under the cover of Utopia, More penned a scathing denunciation of the tyranny of Henry and his servile judges. And this, too, within the very court of the king and under the eye of his ministers. No wonder that the author of Utopia paid for his devotion to liberty and humanity with his head, on Tower Hill.