In Utopia in 1516, Thomas More had written that taking land from a people that “does not use its soil but keeps it idle and waste” was a “most just cause for war.”58 But Locke, spurred both by a growing commitment to religious toleration and by a desire to distinguish English settlement from Spanish conquest, stressed the lack of cultivation as a better justification for taking the natives’ land than religious difference, an emphasis with lasting consequences.
