Ameritopia_ The Unmaking of America - Mark R. Levin [18]
Hythloday’s underlying contention throughout the narrative is that a society in which every need is answered and every want is either met or made results in near-perfect existence. “But now will I declare how the citizens use themselves one towards another; what familiar occupying and entertainment there is among the people; and what fashion they use in the distribution of every thing” (76). Utopia is planned down to the most minor detail. There are fifty-four cities on the island, each virtually identical in size, structure, and organization. “There is in the island fifty-four large and fair cities, or shire towns.… They be all set and situate alike, and in all fashioned alike, as far forth as the place or plot suffereth” (63). The cities are approximately twenty-four miles apart. This means that no city is farther than a day’s journey by foot from any other municipality (63).
Each city has a maximum of 6,000 individuals within its borders, organized into families (63, 76). If, in any city, the number of citizens grows beyond 6,000, the excess inhabitants are forcibly relocated to other cities with fewer than the maximum number, or moved into the countryside to form a new town. “This measure or number is easily observed and kept by putting them that in fuller families be above the number into families of smaller increase. But if chance be that in the whole city the store increase above the just number, therewith they fill up the lack of other cities. But if so be that the multitude throughout the whole island pass and exceed the due number, then they choose out of every city certain citizens and build up a town under their own laws in the next land where the inhabitants have much waste and unoccupied ground, receiving also of the same country people to them, if they will join and dwell with them…” (77).
Outside of each city are identical farms with no fewer than forty people on each farm, in addition to two bondmen, or slaves. Each farm is ruled by the oldest man and woman in the family (63). Every thirty farms is ruled by a head bailiff, called a Phylarch in the Utopian language, who is elected annually by the families (68). At harvest time each year, the Phylarchs tell the magistrates within the city how many additional people will be necessary to harvest the crops; the magistrates order the requested number of citizens within the city to assist with the harvest. “When their harvest day draweth near and is at hand, then the phylarchs, which be the head officers and bailiffs of husbandry, send word to the magistrates of the city what number of harvest men is needful to be sent to them out of the city. The which company of harvest men, being ready at the day appointed, almost in one fair day dispatcheth all the harvest work” (65). The same sort of draft of citizens is also initiated by the magistrates to repair the island’s roads, if need be (76).
Because every citizen of Utopia is expected to be intimately familiar with farming and agriculture, every two years twenty people from each farm are ordered to live in the neighboring city. Every home in every city is required to have a vegetable garden (67). At the end of the two-year period, the city and farm dwellers switch places (64).
Each family has between ten and sixteen children (77). Women may not marry before the age of eighteen, men before the age of twenty-two (108). Family members in excess