There is, just at the close of the period with which this book deals, a rising school of reformers who can be grouped round More's _Utopia_. Some foreshadowed him, and others continued his speculations. Men like Harrington in his _Oceana_, and Milton in his _Areopagitica_, really belong to the same band; but life for them had changed very greatly, and already become something far more complex than the earlier writers had had to consider. There seemed no possibility of reforming it by the simple justice which St. Antonino and his fellows judged to be sufficient to set things back again as they had been in the Golden Age. The new writers are rather political than social. For them, as for the Greeks, it is the constitution which must be repaired. Whereas the mediaeval socialists thought, as St. Thomas indeed never wearied of repeating, that unrest and discontent would continue under any form of government whatever. The more each city changed its constitution, the more it remained the same. Florence, whether under a republic or a despotism, was equally happy and equally sad. For it was the spirit of government alone which, in the eyes of the scholastic social writers, made the State what it happened to be.
In this the modern sociologist of to-day finds himself more akin with the mediaeval thinkers than with the idealists of the parliamentary era in England, or of the Revolution in France. These fixed their hopes on definite organisations of government, and on the exact balance of executive and legislative powers. But for Scotus, and Wycliff, and St. Antonino, the cause of the evil is far deeper and more personal. Not in any form of the constitution, nor in any division of ruling authority, nor in its union under a firm despot, nor in the divine right of kings, or nobles, or people, was security to be found, or the well-ordering of the nation. But peace and rest from faction could be achieved with certainty only on the conditions of strict justice between man and man, on the observance of God's commandments.
Any description of mediaeval socialistic ideals which contained no reference to mediaeval notions of almsgiving would not be complete. Almsgiving was for them a necessary corollary to their theories of private possession. In the passage already quoted from St. Thomas Aquinas (p. 45), wherein he sets forth the theological aspect of property, he makes use of a broad distinction between what he calls "the power of procuring and dispensing" exterior things and "the use of them." We have already at some length tried to show what economists then meant by this first "power." Now we must establish the significance of what they intended by the second. And to do this the more clearly it will be as well to repeat the words in which St. Thomas briefly notes it: "The other office which is man's concerning exterior things is the use of them; and with regard to this a man ought not to hold exterior things as his own, but as common to all, that he may portion them out readily to others in time of need."