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Title: The Man from Mars: His Morals, Politics and Religion

Author: William Simpson

Release date: April 14, 2018 [eBook #56979]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by MFR, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed
        Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
        produced from images generously made available by The
        Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAN FROM MARS: HIS MORALS, POLITICS AND RELIGION ***




Produced by MFR, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)









  ...THE...
  MAN FROM MARS

  HIS MORALS, POLITICS
  AND RELIGION

  BY
  WILLIAM SIMPSON

  THIRD EDITION

  Revised and Enlarged by an Extended Preface and a
  Chapter on Woman Suffrage

  Press of
  E. D. Beattie, 207 Sacramento St.
  San Francisco




Copyright, 1900, by the Author.




  TO THE MEMORY
  OF
  JAMES LICK

  who, by his munificent bequests to

  SCIENCE, INDUSTRY, CHARITY AND EDUCATION

  has indicated in the manner of their disposal, that humanity, wisdom,
  and enlightenment, arising out of the convictions of modern thought,
  which holds these, his beneficiaries to be the noblest and divinest
  pursuits of mankind, and the only possible agencies in the betterment
  of society.

  This Book is reverently inscribed

                                                          BY THE AUTHOR.




PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION.


Any one advanced in life who has enjoyed opportunities of knowledge
derived from association with men and books, and who has an inclination
to reach the bottom of things by his own independent thought, is apt to
arrive at conclusions regarding the world and society very different
from those which had been early impressed upon him by his superiors
and teachers. From a suspicion, at first reluctantly accepted, but
finally confirmed beyond a doubt, he finds that he has been deceived
in many things. The discovery arouses no indignation because he
knows that his early instructors were in most cases the victims of
misdirection themselves, and are therefore not to be held accountable
for the promulgation of errors which they had mistaken for truths. His
self-emancipation has so filled his mind with a better hope for the
future of the world, and a higher opinion of his fellow men, that the
delight and satisfaction of the discovery overcomes every sentiment
except pity for those who had been leading him astray, and if the
feeling of condemnation or censure comes to his mind at all, it is only
for those few who live and thrive upon those delusions having their
origin in the past, and whose chief purpose in life is to keep them
alive and to bolster them up among the multitude.

In the new light that has come to him, the world and society have
been transformed to his view and understanding. He discovers goodness
in many places where his teachers had denied its existence, and its
definition has become so changed, under his broader vision, that
humanity seems teeming with it everywhere, and is ruled by it, and
those departments of it most affecting society he observes to be
increasing, and that instead of like an exotic in uncongenial soil,
hard to be retained by mankind, it is perpetuated and cherished by
natural human impulses. He finds, also, that the sum of badness in
the world has been greatly exaggerated by his teachers, and that
those branches of it most interfering with the welfare of society are
gradually being lessened, and are likely to work out their extinction
by the penalties of public disapproval. These convictions make the
world seem a brighter and better dwelling place. They reveal to him
the possibilities of its future, and tend to divert his higher aims
from the obscure paths where tradition had been leading them, into more
fruitful channels. The truth will have at last dawned upon him, bearing
evidences in this age that none but the unenlightened can doubt, that
superstition, during many of the centuries past, has belittled the
world, and has discouraged humanity in improving it, under the mistaken
assumption of the world’s small comparative importance in the great
outcome; the circumstantial particulars, of which, it pretends to hold
by divine revelation. Having rid himself of these beliefs by a process
of reasoning, and the assistance of the available knowledge of his
time, he arrives at the conclusion that the best work of humanity is
not, altogether that taught by the creeds, and that its most divinely
inspired motives are those which tend to increase the knowledge of
worldly things, those which add to the sum of goodness in society by
exhibiting its practical effect toward happiness, and those also which
assist in the great end of equalizing the burdens and enjoyments of
life among all.

Having these conclusions firmly established in his mind, and the
undeserved reverence from early training removed, he becomes
especially fitted to examine these old beliefs, and to pass judgment
upon them, without that taint of blind devotional fervor which the
unremitted teaching of many centuries has rendered current in the
world. He observes of these old beliefs, that during their supremacy,
when their control of society was complete and unquestioned, the
material progress of mankind was least, without any compensating
condition to make up for the darkness, and dead mental activity that
had fallen upon it; except that apparent hypnotic influence from the
doctrines taught, which made men careless of their miseries, and
indifferent to the things of the earth. He observes, further, of
these old beliefs, that as modern knowledge reduces their hold of
authority among men, the world improves as it never did before. Even
charity, kindness, and good will to men, adopted, and long taught as an
inseparable part of them, multiply more rapidly as their weight in the
management of human affairs grow less. From these well attested facts
he arrives at the conviction that those religious societies, founded
upon, and which have for centuries labored to perpetuate these beliefs,
either are not possessed with all the elements of human progress,
or, that having many of such elements, they have others of such
neutralizing and retarding effect as to render the first futile for
such a purpose. That the latter is the case, every year added to his
experience of life removes the doubt, and explains to his understanding
why the religious societies of the world have failed in any great
degree to advance the material and intellectual condition of mankind.

With a moral code, every provision of which plainly indicates the
method of a better social state, these religious societies have
indissolubly associated in their teachings certain doctrinal beliefs,
originating in a semi-barbarous age, and laden with its superstitions,
with that fatal assumption of divine authority which demands their
acceptance every where and for all time. Beliefs of such unbending
rigidity, impossible adaption or amendment, and intolerance of dissent,
on account of their pretended sacred character, that the world has
been kept in a turmoil discussing them since their introduction, and
the more salutary lessons of morality and spiritual hope have been
outranked and submerged by these vain and profitless discussions.
These beautiful and attractive lessons of love, kindness, and charity,
exemplified and taught through a personality, whose gift of genius was
to see, above all other men, the needs of humanity, have attracted
men and women into these religious societies as the hungry are
attracted by stores of food. Once within their lines, and imbued with
the doctrines there found, they see but little abroad in the outside
world but the evil spirit of Sheol. To them, its shadow rests upon
much of the business of life, and with increased obscurity, upon many
of its pleasures. It even shows to them among those humanities which
are without their direction and cue. It is only however among the many
who openly deny their doctrines and authority that the evil spirit is
seen by them in all its hideous and malevolent personality, and their
especial mission is to give battle in that direction. Between he who
doubts, no matter how respectfully, and these religious societies, are
drawn their lines of kindness and charity, and with their sermons of
love, and their protestations of good will to mankind fresh upon them,
they are at any time, transformed, so far as their relations with a
doubter are concerned, into a band of hostile and relentless savages,
with inflictions of punishment, measured in degree by surrounding
enlightenment, from the actual barbaric torture of the savage, to mere
social ostracism and avoidance.

If it were the sole purpose of all Christian organizations to bring
into general practice the civilizing precepts of their founder, they
would become the most powerful agents in the world to human advancement
and the betterment of social conditions, but these precepts are made
subordinate by them, and are neither valued or estimated beyond their
jurisdiction. They count nothing as saving qualities without the
acknowledgment of certain doctrines and methods accompanying them.
Those beautiful sentiments of charity and kindness, always so precious
to the hearts of men, and growing more so as the ages advance, were
not adopted nor promulgated entirely for civilizing purposes, but
mostly with the selfish view of capturing humanity to church interests.
With a like purpose, knowing the mystic tendency of the masses, the
supernaturalisms, made a part of these attractive precepts, were
adopted and upheld; bringing into the world an endless multitude of
barren illusions, provoking acrimonious contentions among men, to
no good purpose whatever, and filling the pages of history with a
description of scenes that are a torture even to the memory.

It is given only to those now living, and who have experienced the
longest terms of life, to personally compare the past with the
present, so far as their limited sojourn in the world extends. They are
living witnesses to the wonderful changes in society and its beliefs
during the short period of two generations only. They have seen many
of these ancient supernatural dreams in all their power of authority,
and have watched them wilt, and finally disappear, under some silent
influence, after argument and reason had exhausted themselves against
them in vain. They have listened to those weekly expositions of
infernal horrors, common at one time, in all the fear and trembling of
childhood, and have later, witnessed the theories and beliefs which
inspired them, with many others equally obnoxious to reason, relegated
to silence and disuse, as antiquated and worn furniture, no longer
serviceable, is consigned to the rubbish heap. Only two generations
ago they have seen the literature of the churches in leather bound
books occupying the best filled, and most easily reached shelves of
the libraries, and now laying neglected among the dust of the cellars;
not one retained for reference, and even their titles forgotten. They
have seen, in their time, the clutches of superstition compelled to
relax its hold upon the throats of many a worthy human enterprise. They
have witnessed the triumph of science in its many skirmishes with
tradition, and have been interested lookers-on, while the famous battle
of evolution raged. They have seen it from start to finish, and the
amusing spectacle of its end, when theology, metaphorically speaking,
dragged its bruised and trembling body out of the dust; and wiping the
blood from its pale and troubled face, unblushingly declared, as it had
in every like outcome before, that there had been no conflict.

With all this, and within their own era of two generations only,
they have seen the world arise to such prodigies of advancement,
such marvels of practical charity and such activities in the pursuit
of knowledge, in so close and quick succession as to fill them with
bewilderment and wonder, and they will recognize, at least such of
them as reflect upon the matter, that after conflicts innumerable,
and setbacks and suppressions, the scientific have prevailed over
the theological methods, and are at work in all the glories of their
triumph, and that the ancient modes of thought are at last masters of
the civilized world after nearly two thousand years of battle. The
thread of civilization has been taken up and spliced at its point
of rupture sixteen centuries ago. All this activity in the building
of roads, bridges and aqueducts, this tunnelling of mountains and
rivers, this straining to make available for the services of man
all the elements of nature, this untiring search to increase the
comforts and conveniences of life, this higher regard for pure secular
learning, regardless of where it may lead, this diversion of art from
the purposes of religious expression only, to an exhibition of nature
in all her beautiful forms, this greater toleration of opinion, this
coming back to the earth in short, after a long period of phantom
chasing in the clouds, is neither more nor less than the revival of
paganism. But paganism with its brutalities filtered out, and the best,
and only civilizing parts of christianity, its hope of immortality,
its lessons of virtue, its brotherhood and socialism retained, the
superstitions of paganism buried forever, and those of christianity
gradually dropping one by one into their graves.

He, who now at three score and ten, remembers when the sound of the
flint and steel was a necessary prelude to the morning fire, when the
open fire place with its crane and pot hooks was the only resource for
warmth and cooking, when the largest city on the American continent
was without sewers or water conduits, when a river steamer was a
wonder upon which the curious gazed, and ocean ones unheard of, when
railroads were in an experimental stage, when the belief that ghosts
flitted about the graveyards was unquestioned and undenied, when
Satan was said to have stalked upon the earth in person, his presence
seriously considered and accounted for by many of the churches, when
witchcraft, only in the throes of death but not yet buried, had many
adherents in animated defence, when the electrical experiments of
Franklin were reckoned in some places as the trifling of an infidel
with the spirit of evil, can best appreciate, by the comparison which
reminiscence affords, of these wonderful changes in thought, and
the significant accompaniment of increased mental activity in all
things benefitting the race. The close relations exhibited in this
comparatively brief period between the growth of rationalism, and that
accelerated movement all along the line of science, learning, and
everything tending to place humanity on a higher plain, is more than
a mere coincidence. It is the operation of cause and effect, better
understood and acknowledged upon a closer examination.

The bursting forth, as it were, during this century of the united
energies of mankind in the direction of knowledge, is an expansion
after the removal of a pressure that has borne down upon them for
ages. Those great things that men have accomplished lately, they
were as capable of centuries ago, and it is not surprising that they
had not until recently made greater advances, when we estimate the
weight of opposing forces. There had been for centuries nothing more
discouraging to the formation of scientific hopes and ambitions than
the theological methods of thought, and the atmosphere which surrounded
them. The more that atmosphere was saturated with the doctrines of
the churches, the more repellent it was to any intellectual effort
toward outside things, and especially one requiring such a monopoly of
mental energy and attention as to interfere with the Christian ideas
of constant and unremitting devotion. There was no cultivated field,
during the thousand years of supreme church jurisdiction, where an
independent scientific ambition could germinate. Within the church
such an ambition was impossible. It was not only against the spirit,
but the very letter of its teachings. Its foundation was laid by its
victory over science, in its overcome of which, it proclaimed divine
assistance and authority. It already possessed a knowledge of all
things appertaining to the earth and the “firmament” above it which
the Almighty desired men to know. The earth was not round, it was the
center of the universe. It stood still while the sun moved daily over
its surface, getting back each morning into its place with the help of
angels. The rainbow was a sign placed in the heavens for a purpose.
Every known phenomenon of nature was accounted for by scriptural
reference. The method of the creation of the world and the origin of
man and of woman also, the church possessed in circumstantial detail.
The moment true science began its work, and ran counter to any of this
fund of knowledge, assumed to have been furnished by the Almighty,
the trouble began. But the trouble was not altogether with the honest
investigator. If his discovery tended to disprove what was known as
scriptural truth, and inadvertently had been allowed to gain the
public ear, every prelate in the church began contriving to refute it.
A new opportunity for fame was opened to every ambitious theologian,
and there immediately began in rebuttal a spinning of texts, and a
style of metaphysical argument, from one end of the church to the
other, which remain to this day as the most remarkable curiosities of
sinuous reasoning and constrained thought on record. All questions of
a scientific character had but one method of settlement, were they
authorized or denied by scripture? If denied as they usually were, the
disturber was either burned at the stake or made to recant. Fame, that
chief incentive to all high effort, offered none of its rewards beyond
theological circles, and during the ten centuries of complete church
supremacy, any advance in knowledge which did not stir the animosity
of theologians gained less public attention and applause than the
wearing of a hair shirt or a crown of thorns. During a thousand years
the church had kept the world slumbering in the darkness of barbarism
and superstition punishing with death those it could not convince. Any
doubter of generally accepted beliefs, either in religion or science,
who can support his position with plausable argument, is entitled at
least to the consideration of being a thinker. The constant taking off
of every such one, during a term counted by centuries, could have no
other effect than to reduce the average of intellectual vigor in the
whole. The husbandman, who removes from his acres of growing grain
the tallest and heaviest stalks, and instead of saving them for seed,
destroys them, insures, in time, the misfortune of dwarfed fields
and diminished harvests. The church, since its complete victory over
paganism in the fourth century, had not produced with its supreme
control over all learning a single noted man of science, or one
promising to be such, whom it had not either suppressed or tortured to
death, not a painter or poet who had not devoted his genius principally
to superstition or sensuality, not a historian whose veracity is not
doubted, and not a single towering man of letters. This, too, in a
people, among whom mingled the descendants of the Greek masters of
literature and philosophy. When, about four centuries ago, secular
learning and free thought began their first open advances since pagan
days, the church, finding in every such movement some disturbance of
its traditions, and making no account of their benefit to mankind,
brought all its powers to bear for their suppression. In laying to do
so it pursued the same cruel policy it had adopted in former contests.
These cruelties and intimidations were practiced at a time when within
the church were openly perpetrated corruptions of the most glaring
character; which together, loosened its hold upon the consciences
of men, and made possible that revolt and division known as the
Reformation, early in the sixteenth century. Coming nearer our own
time, and having to deal with theological conditions not yet entirely
removed, a little more detail is necessary.

The quarter century before and the century following the Reformation
was a remarkable era in the world’s history. It was noted throughout
as a desperate and continuous struggle by men of science to dispel
the darkness that had so long enveloped the Christian world. The
art of printing, then recently discovered, and just coming into
practical working effect, and the thoughts of men thereby communicated
from one to the rest with a facility never before known, had the
effect of arousing mental activities everywhere. From a load only
partially removed men began exploring regions of science that had been
interdicted, and a great movement in positive knowledge began. The
most enlightened men of the time went over to the Reformation, and if
within that body, they had found the shelter and encouragement they
deserved, the sixteenth century and the one following it would have
been the most brilliant period on record except our own, for scientific
discoveries and the world’s advancement. Such a conclusion is justified
by taking note of the wonderful men of genius who came into the world
during that time, who, with all the restrictions and limitations cast
about them by the two churches, laid such new foundations in truth and
learning, that nothing was to be done by subsequent workers in the same
lines but build upon them. Buffon, who may justly be called the father
of natural science, with powers of research and gifts of presenting
results showing genius of a high order, by his simple statement of
truths which are to-day truisms in science, was dragged forth by the
leaders of the Reformation, and forced to recant publicly and to print
his recantation. “I abandon everything in my book respecting the
formation of the earth, and generally all which may be contrary to the
narrative of Moses.” Linnaeus, the founder of a scientific system in
botany, and the discoverer of sex in plants, was constantly hampered
and constrained in his thoughts by the threats of the Reformation. A
pretended miracle of turning water into blood appeared in his vicinity,
and after looking into it carefully he reported that the reddening of
the water was caused by dense masses of minute insects. When news of
this explanation reached the ears of the Protestant bishop he denounced
this scientific discovery as a “Satanic Abyss.” “When God allows such
a miracle to take place,” said he, “Satan endeavors, and so does his
ungodly and worldly tools, to make it signify nothing.” Descartes,
the founder of modern philosophy, and ranked among the foremost
mathematicians of his day, yet, his constant dread of persecution from
Protestantism led him steadily to veil his thoughts, and to suppress
them when they threatened to interfere with theological beliefs.
Leibnitz, the great thinker, who came so near to the discovery of
evolution, Spinoza, and later Hume, Kepler, Kant, Newton and many
others, which want of space prevents mention were likely to have
done much more for science had not the theological atmosphere of the
Christian churches been so unpropitious.

The true story of Galileo, the monumental shame of Christianity, cannot
be told without implicating the younger with the older church. The
Reformation looked on complaisantly and approvingly while this crime
was being committed. It was in complete accordance with its beliefs and
methods. The Copernican system, on account of the adoption of which,
Galileo was persecuted was as strenuously and bitterly denounced by
Protestants as Catholics. Luther says “People gave ear to an upstart
astrologer, who strove to show that the earth revolved, and not the sun
and moon. This fool wishes to revise the whole system of astronomy,
but sacred scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand
still, and not the earth.” The recantation of this venerable scientist,
worn out with imprisonment and sorrow, and in fear of torture and
death, is as follows: “I Galileo, being in my seventieth year, being a
prisoner on my knees before your eminences, having before my eyes the
Holy Gospel, which I touch with my hands, abjure, curse and detest the
error and the heresy of the movement of the earth.” As the sphericity
of the earth was suggested by Aristotle, and its movement had been a
matter of earnest discussion by theologians for ages, we see fit to
transcribe here the argument of one of them, made a long time ago it
is true, but nevertheless a fair sample of the theological methods of
thought. It is copied from a book written by one Scipio Chiaramonti,
and dedicated to Cardinal Barberini. “Animals which move have limbs
and muscles, the earth has no limbs and muscles, therefore it does not
move. It is angels who make Saturn, Jupiter, the Sun, etc., turn round.
If the earth revolves it must also have an angel in the center to set
it in motion; but only devils live there; it would therefore be a devil
who would impart motion to the earth.” All branches of the Protestant
church condemned the theory of the earth’s movement. Calvin asked,
“Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of
the Holy Spirit?” Wesley also denounced the new theory, declaring it
to “tend toward infidelity.” The grand men who were coming forward in
their efforts to advance knowledge unavoidably encroached upon many of
the “truths of scripture” and both churches were equally engaged in
their efforts to suppress them, by argument if possible, but if not, by
fire and stake. The Protestant church, which has always made a claim of
especial enlightenment, vied with the other in its cruel and relentless
warfare upon what is known among the churches as heresy, the proper
definition of which is reason and common sense. We have said that the
case of Galileo was the monumental shame of Christendom; the case of
Servetus was a monumental crime, which Protestantism alone must answer
for.

The persecution of Michael Servetus by John Calvin, one of the leaders
of the Reformation, was one of the most unjust and inhuman exercises of
religious authority that the world has seen. There were many features
in this tragedy of burning at the stake, that were out of the common.
The victim was a man of unblemished character, of great learning,
and a scientist, with a genius for investigation. He was a skilled
practitioner of medicine, out of which profession he derived his
income. He had made some advances in medical science, coming so near to
a discovery of the circulation of the blood, that it is quite likely,
but for his untimely death, he would have reached it instead of Harvey,
many years afterward. His active mind had led him to devote much of his
leisure to the study of theology, and, laboring among its problems, he
strove to reconcile a number of orthodox beliefs and doctrines with
the scientific knowledge of his time, not combating them or contriving
at their destruction, but by changing the sense of words, to make
them apparently accord with known elements of truth. He was an ardent
supporter of the Reformation, and a friend and admirer of Calvin, and
he began and maintained for some time, a correspondence with him, with
the view of obtaining his advice and support. The proposed modification
in the sense of scriptural texts, was not favorably received by Calvin,
and the two were drawn into a controversy, which finally became
acrimonious. The world, at present, partially recovered from its long
period of hypnotized reason, is able to appreciate the small value of
the questions which engaged these two men, and which led one to strike
the other down to death, and it is also able to judge how much Servetus
was in advance of his adversary in their discussions.

Calvin maintained, that under instructions from God, through the
Bible, an infant, dying without baptism, could not escape the tortures
of Hell, a locality described by the same authority, as a place of
horrors, of endless burning amid sulphurous fires, of never ending
thirst, and of a “weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth” through all
time to come. Servetus expressed his doubts of the justice of this
infliction upon sinless infants, and attempted to show that it was
not authorized by the Sacred Book. He also denied the doctrine of the
Holy Trinity, as it was commonly received. He did not deny a kind of
Trinity in the unity of God, but believing that it was merely formal,
and not personal, mere distinctions in the divine essence, and that, as
generally understood, it was a dream, and an invention of the Fathers
of the Church. He also asserted, upon good authority, that there was a
Christian doctrine before there was any adoption of the Hebrew legends;
that these legends did not become a part of the church, until nearly
a century after the great moral teacher had met his cruel death. He
also came as near as he dared, to expressing his belief, that the Son
was merely a man, with the divine inspiration in a large degree. Such
advanced ideas as these, asserted with the positiveness of conviction,
and backed with unanswerable argument, were the cause of his undoing.

Calvin, at this time, was at the head of a church already powerful. He
ruled it with an autocratic will, and upon all questions of doctrinal
beliefs, he was the last court of appeal. He had long accepted the
homage of his followers, as one selected by the Almighty for their
spiritual guidance, and, with the common weakness of humanity, he
became arbitrary and despotic in his management of church affairs. He
was always ready to advise and direct, and in his first letters to
Servetus, assumed some show of argument while denying his doctrines.
Servetus answered him, not with that deference that his adversary
usually received, but in all the spirit of earnest debate. Nothing
more exasperating to Calvin could have occurred, and to cap the
climax of affront, his adversary, a mere layman, published a book
“Christianity Restored” setting forth his advanced views, and with a
reckless temerity, sent the reformer a copy. The controversy between
them immediately degenerated into mutual recrimination and abuse.
Calvin’s anger was raised to a white heat, when he saw the errors and
blasphemies, as he regarded them, and which he had vainly sought to
combat, confided to the printed page, and thrown broadcast upon the
world. Besides the alleged heretical matter of the book, he found
himself taken to task, declared to be in error, and his most cherished
doctrines controverted. But he discovered withal some matter in the
book which pleased him. His enemy had committed himself in abusing the
Papacy: evidence sufficient to convict him at once of blasphemy in the
Roman Catholic city of Vienne in France where Servetus then resided,
and he proceeded at once to put the cruel scheme of his death into
execution. By information to the authorities at Vienne through dictated
letters, he succeeded in having Servetus thrown into prison there, from
whence he escaped, and became an outcast for months. The malignant and
inhuman manner in which this Christian leader followed his innocent
victim, could scarcely have occurred upon any other question but a
religious one, and his murderous intent, from the first, is shown by a
letter from Calvin to a friend in which he says, “Servetus wrote to me
lately, and besides his letter sent me a great volume of his ravings,
telling me, with audacious arrogance, that I should find there things
stupendous and unheard of until now.” He offers to come thither if I
approve; but I will not pledge my faith to him; for, did he come, if I
have any authority here, “I SHOULD NEVER SUFFER HIM TO GO AWAY ALIVE.”
And he proved himself, in this instance, true to his word.

The Roman Catholic authorities of Vienne, discovering after a while
the connivance of Calvin, in putting the execution of his enemy on
them, contrived, it is said, to make his escape easy. They had no
mind to have this work thrust upon them. They probably felt that the
reformers should take care of their own heretics. Servetus, after his
escape, wandered about from place to place, all the time his life in
imminent danger, and finally brought up in Geneva, the home of Calvin,
disguising himself, and hiding in the outskirts. What induced him to
take such desperate chances is not positively known. His intention
is supposed to have been to go to Naples, and to be gone from Geneva
on the first favorable opportunity. Weary of confinement, and always
piously inclined, he ventured imprudently to show himself, at the
evening service of a neighboring church, and being there recognized,
intimation of his presence was conveyed to Calvin, who, without loss
of a moment, demanded his immediate arrest, making his arraignment
himself, and industriously working until the end, as chief prosecutor
and witness. The barbaric cruelty during imprisonment to this famous
man, in an eminently Christian community, and by a Christian leader is
shown by the following letter from his prison cell. “Most noble Lords,
it is now three weeks since I petitioned for an audience, and I have to
inform you that nothing has been done, and I am in a more filthy plight
than ever. In addition, I suffer terribly from the cold, and from colic
and my rupture, which causes me miseries. It is very cruel that I am
neither allowed to speak, nor not have my most pressing wants supplied;
for the love of God sirs, in pity give orders in my behalf.” And here
is another one: “My most honored Lords, I humbly entreat of you to
put an end to these great delays, or to exonerate me of the criminal
charge. You must see that Calvin is at his wits ends, and knows not
what more to say, but for his pleasure, would have me rot here in
prison. The lice eat me up alive, my breeches are in rags, and I have
no change, no doublet, and but a single shirt in tatters.” Thirty-eight
articles of impeachment were drawn up by Calvin, and after a protracted
trial, wherein he acted as chief interrogator, this unhappy victim
was sentenced to be burnt at the stake. Servetus, during his whole
examination, showed himself to be a brave, conscientious, religious
man. His answers to each one of the articles was able, consistent, and
would have been considered in this day unanswerable, and what is more
his views have since been adopted by the most advanced of the Christian
sects. The following is a description of his execution recorded at that
time.

“When he came in sight of the fatal pile, the wretched Servetus
prostrated himself on the ground and for a while was absorbed in
prayer. Rising and advancing a few steps he found himself in the hands
of the executioner, by whom he was made to sit on a block, his feet
just reaching the ground. His body was then bound to the stake behind
him by several turns of an iron chain, whilst his neck was secured in
like manner by the coil of a hempen rope. His two books--the one in
manuscript sent to Calvin in confidence six or eight years before for
his stricture, and a copy of the one lately printed at Vienne--were
fastened to his waist, and his head was encircled in mockery with a
chaplet of straw and green twigs bestrewed with brimstone. The deadly
torch was then applied to the fagots and flashed in his face; and the
brimstone catching, and the flames rising, wrung from the victim such a
cry of anguish as struck terror into the surrounding crowd. After this
he was bravely silent; but the wood being purposely green, although the
people aided the executioner in heaping the fagots upon him, a long
half hour elapsed before he ceased to show signs of life and suffering.
Immediately before giving up the ghost, with a last expiring effort he
cried aloud, ‘Jesus, thou Son of the eternal God, have compassion upon
me!’ All was then hushed, save hissing and crackling of the green wood,
and by and by there remained no more of what had been Michael Servetus,
but a charred and blackened trunk, and a handful of ashes.” So died in
advance of his age, this victim of religious fanaticism and personal
hate, a fitting triumph of the theological over the scientific methods
of thought, the result among many thousands like it of the adoption of
the Jewish legends by Christianity, and in this case, brought about
by a Christian leader, the founder of a creed, in which to this day,
enough of his spirit remains to make it the greatest enemy of free
thought and liberal opinion, among all the creeds of Protestantism. Of
this disgraceful tragedy was it the spirit of the Master which led the
inhuman crowd to vie with each other in piling on the fagots, or was it
the malign influence of a vindictive and cruel Hebrew God?

Every conflict between science and theology since the days of
Copernicus has resulted in an unequivocal victory for the former.
Both churches resisted the truth of the rotundity and movement of
the earth as though their existence depended upon it. They fought
each question as it arose in the same spirit. The Mosaic account of
the creation, the age of the world, the deluge, the length of man’s
sojourn upon the earth, are questions as effectively settled adversely
to the “truths of scripture” as the one for which Galileo suffered.
And yet Christianity lives, and will continue to live and flourish,
solely on account of the inherent and increasing affinity of the human
heart as civilization advances for the precepts and example of its
founder. If Christianity were destined to fall by the undermining of
its legends it would fall now with the recent destruction of one upon
which its existence appeared to depend, which has, more than any
other, shaped its course and laid the foundation of its rituals. The
doctrine of evolution now established as a truth is the most serious
and apparently destructive one that theology ever met. The fact that
man has ARISEN from a condition of brutality, instead of FALLEN from a
state of perfection is, to ecclesiasticism, a raking blow from stem to
stern, compared with all previous battles with science as the shot of
a modern thirty-two pounder with old fashioned ordinance. The legend
of the fall of man, compared with all others, is the vilest. It was
brought from Assyria, by the Hebrews, who obtained it during their
captivity, from a barbarous people, among whom it was current for ages,
and was thus inserted in our Sacred Book, proofs of which have recently
been found in deciphering the Ninevite records. A suspicion is not
entirely without warrant that it may have been adopted with a purpose
of creating miseries and sorrows in the multitude for the profitable
occupation of a divinely authorized few in the business of consoling
them, and right well has it fulfilled its mission. It has changed the
facial expression of Christendom. It has deepened the furrows of sorrow
upon old age, and fixed lines of care upon the features of youth. It
has brought the undeserved dejection of criminality, and the downcast
of shame, where of right belongs the reflection of hopefulness and
the light of expectancy. It has incalculably multiplied the sorrows
of life, and created for each death a nightmare of imaginary horrors.
This legend is the foundation and inspiration of most of the evil
and cruelty that Christianity has inflicted on human kind. Fabulous
itself, it has been the parent of unrealities, witchcraft and magic for
instance, from which millions of innocent victims have been sacrificed
to torture and death. It has transformed reasonable enjoyments of life
into crimes by the invention of a word, which with the latitude given
its definition, has kept in trembling uncertainty the innocent and
harmless. To the parent it has bestowed the agony of dread for the fate
of departed offspring, guileless infants, as well as the matured. This
legend of the fall of man has established in the paths of life its drag
net Sin, a word of such unlimited theological definition, that any
one of average rectitude, by some trifling inadvertance of thought or
action, is likely to bring upon himself the condemnation of a frowning
God; so that, the worthy as well as the unworthy, may not escape the
services of theological assistance and intercession. But for the doubt
that exists, and has probably always existed, except among the ignorant
and sluggish minded, of the truth of this puerile invention, it would
have reduced humanity long ago to a state of universal hopelessness and
despair.

The theologians have but little left now but the miracles to defend,
and although it must be conceded by them that the miracle of Joshua
has fallen, others whose fallacy cannot be so well demonstrated by
science, are held to with the tenacity of desperation, and in utter
disregard of reason and common sense. Fortunately, in the interest of
truth, we are given an opportunity to study the evolution of miracles,
in a case so modern that every statement in proof of their fallacy can
be substantiated by the current literature of the time. Saint Francis
Xavier was an earnest, sincere and truthful Jesuit, whose religious
services were performed in the middle of the sixteenth century. He
gave up a promising career as professor in a Paris academy, and in
his enthusiasm and devotion to Christianity, went as missionary to
the Far East. Among the various tribes of lower India, and afterward
in Japan he wrought untiringly, toiling through village after village
collecting the natives by means of a hand bell. After twelve years of
such efforts seeking new converts for religion, he sacrificed his life
on the desert island of San Chan. During his career as missionary he
wrote great numbers of letters, which were preserved, and have since
been published, and these, with the letters of his contemporaries,
exhibit clearly all the features of his life. No account of a miracle
wrought by him appears either in his own letters or any contemporary
document. More than that, his brother missionaries, who were in
constant and loyal fellowship with him, make no illusions to them
in their communications with each other, or with their brethren in
Europe. This silence regarding his miracles was clearly not due to any
unbelief in them, because these good missionary fathers were free to
record the slightest occurrence which they thought evidence of Divine
favor. One of them sends a report that an illuminated cross had been
recently seen in the heavens; another that devils had been cast out
of the natives by the use of holy water; others send reports that
lepers had been healed by baptism, and that the blind and dumb had
been restored by the rites of the church; but to Xavier no miracles
are imputed by his associates during his life, or during several years
after his death. On the contrary we find his own statements as to
his personal limitations and the difficulties arising from them fully
confirmed by his brother workers. It is interesting for example, in
view of the claim afterwards made, that the Saint was divinely endowed
for his mission with the “gift of tongues” to note in these letters
confirmation of Xavier’s own statement utterly disproving the existence
of any such Divine gift, and detailing the difficulties which he
encountered from his want of knowing various languages, and the hard
labor he underwent in learning the elements of the Japanese tongue.
With all this evidence, and much more available if necessary, to prove
that Xavier never performed a miracle the church began building them up
for him, unmindful of the fact that he lived in an age of literature,
books and printed correspondence, and not in those remote times when
it held supreme control of all learning and communication by letters;
accordingly, the first of the Xavier miracles began to appear about ten
years after his death. They multiplied from time to time beginning,
it is reasonable to suppose, about the gossiping hearth and eagerly
confirmed by the cloister, until they began to be mentioned in church
literature. The first of which, a letter twenty years after his death
by a Jesuit father entitled “On religious affairs in the Indies” says
nothing of Xavier’s miracles. The next, a publication called “History
of India” thirty-six years after his death by another Jesuit father
dwells lightly on the alleged miracles. The next, sixty years later, a
“Life of Xavier” shows an increase of his miracles, and representing
him as casting out devils, curing the sick, stilling the tempest,
raising the dead, and performing miracles of all sorts. Since Xavier
was made a Saint many other lives of him appeared, one of them one
hundred and sixty years after his death, the best so far written and
now esteemed a classic, in which the old miracles were enormously
multiplied. According to his first biographer he saves one person from
drowning by a miracle, in this one he saves, during his life time,
three. In the first he raises three persons from the dead, in this one
fourteen. In the first there is one miraculous supply of water, in
this one three, and so on, until this date when the Xavier miracles
are counted by hundreds. This case of the evolution of miracles is
largely copied from a recent publication of President White of Cornell
University. It is not only highly instructive as indicating the process
by which these deceptions are evolved, but also tends to the pleasant
and welcome conviction that many of the earnest and self-sacrificing
workers in the field of Christianity, to whom miracles are imputed were
guiltless of them. But more than all it shows the way to a reasoning
mind by which, through the present and coming rationalism, a pure and
worshipful personality shall retain his hold upon the affections of men.

Those men of science and independent thought who went over to the
Reformation, expecting encouragement and protection under it, were
doomed to be disappointed. It was not a movement caused by the pressure
of enlightenment. At that period, both Germany and England were far
below Italy in their conditions of knowledge and learning. It was a
rebellion caused by the oppression of evils, and a desire for change in
the management of church matters only. Every one of the superstitions
of the old church were transferred to the new one. The same, in fact a
stricter literal adherence to the words of scripture in managing the
affairs of life, and in deciding questions of science, were maintained,
the same incessant watchfulness toward those men of learning who were
threatening the “truths of scripture” in their scientific labors, and
the same cruelties invoked for their suppression, and the extinction
of heresy. No more intellectual freedom was permitted, except upon
minor doctrinal points of beliefs, and upon these there began those
controversies which soon broke up the movement into factions or creeds.
The intention of the new church was to do away with those rituals and
ceremonies, which had been adopted from paganism as a compromise in the
second and third centuries, and to bring their church back as far as
possible, to that simplicity which characterized the first teachings of
Christianity. But the leaders of the Reformation never attempted nor
had they any desire to bring back that entire freedom of thought and
expression which existed in the early days. No one with immunity would
be allowed to deny the doctrine of the Holy Trinity or the truth of
Immaculate Conception, as the old Greek philosophers were wont to do.
Such vital questions it was torture and death to adversely consider,
Servetus being an early victim to such temerity. There were questions
enough however within the limits of safe discussion, to set agoing
those unending controversies which distinguished Protestantism to this
day. The newly acquired privilege of discussing sacred affairs among
laymen as well as others, were indulged in to such an extent that
debate between the sects, in defense of their several interpretations
of scriptural texts, monopolized in society its hours of intercourse
and conversation. When their leaders were indulging in such discussion
as the dialogue between Eve and the Serpent; whether the Serpent stood
erect on his tail, or in its natural coil when it was addressing Eve;
fixing the hour of this remarkable event; accounting for the manner
in which Noah fed the animals in the ark; how fishes appeared before
Adam to be named by him, and such troublesome problems, laymen were
mostly engaged in the examination of those doctrinal points which were
dividing the movement into sects. Questions that had been settled
centuries before by authority in the old church were dragged forth
to renewed discussion. Luther was describing his frequent interviews
with the devil in his bed room. Demons and witches were poisoning the
air, and bringing calamity and misfortune, against which there was but
one safeguard and remedy, reading texts of scripture and prayer. But
however the sects might differ in their understanding of the sacred
language, upon a number of things they were all agreed; every text of
scripture was to be taken literally; heresy could not be too severely
punished; a curtailment of the pleasures of life increased the chances
of heaven; the world was a “sink of iniquity” destined for early
destruction, and presided over by a God who never smiles, and troubled
by a devil who never sleeps, the latter with millions of offspring, man
pursuing demons, inflicting insanity, sickness and many other of the
misfortunes of life.

In these beliefs the two churches were in entire accord and must
equally answer for the miseries and cruelties they have inflicted upon
humanity in enforcing them. Theories and doctrines so persistently
advanced and upheld by both churches, and which have proved so
disastrous to humanity do not properly belong, and should have no
place in Christianity. They are not only without the authority of the
Master, but are mostly in opposition to his teaching and example.
The most harmful of them owe their origin to the fables and myths
introduced into the sacred book second-hand from Egyptian and Oriental
sources, centuries before the Christian era, and it is not surprising
that legends due to the faculty of romance in the minds of some
barbarous Assyrians or Pharos, far back in the cradles of humanity,
when introduced as foundations for rules of life, and as explanations
of the mysterious processes of nature along the whole line of human
advancement should have been constantly rejected and denied by the
reasoning portion of mankind, and it is scarcely conceivable that now,
within a few months of the twentieth century, they should be upheld by
both churches as inspirations of the Deity. Not so surprising either
when we consider that for seventeen centuries, the undeveloped minds
of youth in all Christendom, have been moulded into the acceptance of
beliefs, which, had they been presented without that gradual absorption
in which reason takes no part would have been long ago rejected on
account of their improbability. In no place is this better understood
than among the churches, and as a consequence, they have been in
perpetual contention with each other for the early education of youth.

The most inspiring and hopeful spectacle in all humanity is an
assemblage, wrapt in the devotional exercises of Christianity,
listening attentively to the eloquent ministrations of an earnest
leader, who pleads the cause of virtue and charity as it is exhibited
in the written life and character of the Model Man. The great central
story never wearies in interest, and never grows old; a willing
sacrifice and suffering for the benefit of mankind. Such never
failing kindness, such lessons of brotherhood, such love for men,
such tenderness for children, such consideration beyond his time for
women, and with such a pathetic and suffering end as to capture their
emotional natures for all time. And above all bringing the tidings of
a hope, that comes to men, as a boat of rescue comes to a storm-tossed
ship slowly sinking into the depths; so cherished in Christian
households as to become a worshiped member of them, to be defended as
one of them, upheld if need be by force of arms and sacrifice of life.
And the lesson of it all, and the hopefulness and inspiration of it
all is, that wherever mankind dwells, be it in castles or cottages,
amid the crowds of cities, or among quiet country fields, there are
laurels everywhere among them all for him who will sacrifice himself
that others may gain; esteem and veneration among them all for him,
whose life is pure, and whose ways are ways of kindness and charity.
Vice can never reign supreme but for a time amid such inherent affinity
for goodness implanted in every human heart, and as the days of general
consent and unobstructed knowledge enlighten and control the affairs of
men, more and more certain, as time rolls on, will come protests and
rebellions against the temporary triumph of evil.

Of that entrancing story which has captured civilization, and has come
to be a part of it, what is there in the Master that deserves such
barbaric surroundings; such inconsequential details of obscure and
barbarous lives; such vindictive retaliations and brutal conflicts,
sacrilegiously involving the Deity as a promoter of them; wild fictions
of early ages, inventions of the infancy of man, conflicting accounts
of historical events, fragmentary parts by different persons at
different periods; explanations in many branches of science, now known
to be mistaken and absurd, and containing texts, that either openly
sanction or have been twisted into service of the most stupendous
outrages that humanity has suffered.

“Considering the asserted origin of these records--indirectly from
God himself--we might justly expect that they would bear to be tried
by any standard that man can apply, and vindicate their truth and
excellence in the ordeal of human criticism. We ought therefore to
look for universality, completeness, perfection. We might expect that
they would present us with just views of the nature and position
of this world in which we live, and that, whether dealing with the
spiritual or material, they would put to shame the most celebrated
productions of human genius, as the magnificent mechanism of the
heavens, and the beautiful forms of the earth are superior to the vain
contrivances of man. We might expect that they would propound with
authority, and definitely settle those all important problems, which
have exercised the mental powers of the ablest men of Asia and Europe
for so many centuries, and which are at the foundation of all faith and
all philosophy; that they should distinctly tell us, in unmistakable
language, what is God, what is the world, what is the soul, and
whether man has any criterion of truth; that they should explain to
us how evil can exist in a world, the Maker of which is omnipotent,
and altogether good; that they should reveal to us in what the affairs
of men are fixed by destiny, in what by free will; that they should
teach us whence we came, what is the object of our continuing here,
what is to become of us hereafter. And since a written word claiming
a divine origin must necessarily accredit itself, even to those most
reluctant to receive it, its internal evidences becoming stronger and
not weaker, with the strictness of the examination to which they are
submitted, it ought to deal with those things that may be demonstrated
by the increasing knowledge and genius of many anticipating therein his
conclusions. Such a work noble as may be its origin, must not refuse,
but court the test of natural philosophy, regarding it not as an
antagonist but as its best support. As years pass on and human science
becomes more exact and more comprehensive, its conclusions must be
found in unison therewith. When occasion arises they should furnish us
at least the foreshadowings of the great truths discovered by astronomy
and geology, not offering for them the wild fictions of earlier ages.
They should tell us how suns and worlds are distributed in infinite
space, and how, in their succession they come forth in limitless time.
They should say how far the dominion of God is carried out by law,
and what is the point at which it is his pleasure to resort to his
own arbitrary will. How grand would have been the description of the
magnificent universe written by the omnipotent hand! Of man they should
set forth his relations to other living beings, his place among them,
his privileges and responsibilities. They should not leave him to grope
his way through the vestiges of Greek philosophy, and to miss the truth
at last, but they should teach him wherein true knowledge consists,
anticipating the physical science, physical power, and physical well
being of our own times, nay, even unfolding for our benefit things that
we are still ignorant of. The discussion of subjects, so many and
so high, is not outside the scope of a work of such pretensions. Its
manner of dealing with them is the only criterion it can offer of its
authority to succeeding times.”[A]

How unlike this is our asserted Sacred Book, with its fables, its
myths and legends, its deadly texts that have scourged mankind. By its
pretension of divine authority, carrying forward into our civilization
superstitions, that otherwise would have melted away under the light of
knowledge; putting a limit to learning, obstructing it, and denouncing
it, in many of its branches; paralyzing thought, and substituting in
its stead a blind faith, instituted and cultivated by ecclesiasticism,
to bring men under its control; holding up as an example of divine
favor, the low moral standard of barbaric times; recounting murders,
incests, adulteries and obscenities, that would have banished the book
long since from the regions of refinement and civilization, but for
its assumed origin, and which serve, by their easy and undenied access
to young minds, as a stimulation to destructive pruriency; sanctioning
human slavery, and encouraging bloodshed by battle; setting an example
of extortionate tithes for the support of ecclesiasticism; uttering
the most heart-rending curses, as coming directly from the Almighty,
for failure to comply with his assumed commands, and which have
been made the example, authorizing the horrible cruelties inflicted
upon mankind by the churches, literary models as they are of those
anathemas, interdicts, and excommunications, by which the older church
terrorized humanity for fifteen hundred years. “I will also do this
unto you, I will even appoint over you terror, consumption, and the
burning ague, that shall consume the eyes, and cause sorrow of heart,
and ye shall sow your seed in vain; for your enemies shall eat it.”
“I will also send wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your
children, and destroy your cattle, and make you few in number, and your
highways shall be desolate.” “For they went and served other gods, and
worshiped them, gods whom they knew not, and whom he had not given unto
them; and the anger of the Lord was kindled against this land to bring
upon it all the curses that are written in this book.” “Do not I hate
them O Lord that hate thee, yea I hate them with a perfect hate.” “Thou
shalt not suffer a witch to live.” “A man, also or a woman that hath
a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death.”
“And ye shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the
sword.” Solely on the authority of such deadly texts as these, and the
book is full of them, the world has been overspread in blood. It was
these that gave Spain a pretended sanction of the Lord to exterminate
fifteen millions of people in Mexico and Peru, with a better and
higher civilization than itself, and to rob them of their wealth and
possessions. It was these, and such as these, that authorized and
instigated the Inquisition, which from 1481 to 1808, put to torture
and horrible death by burning, 340,000 human beings. It was these that
induced the massacre of St. Bartholomew with its 30,000 victims of
fire and sword; the English persecutions under Bloody Mary, in which
three hundred fellow-creatures perished; the almost total annihilation
of the Albigenesis in the south of France. This war was carried on
with more ferocious cruelty than any ever recorded in history; the
fanatical fury of the soldiers was stimulated by the exhortations of
the clergy. At the storming of Baziers, when it was proposed to spare
the Catholics, a monk exclaimed, “Kill all, God will recognize his
own,” and the atrocious precept was but too well observed. The war
terminated by the complete devastation of the country, and the almost
complete extermination of its inhabitants. Following along in the
bloody path of these barbaric scriptural commands, we have to record
the witch burnings of Europe and America, during the term of Christian
supremacy, calculated in the hundreds of thousands; the Crusades, and
purely religious wars since the time of Constantine, whose victims are
beyond computation; and all this to no other purpose or end, but that
the world should be forced into the belief of, what is known to be,
the theological system of a low social development; this the terrible
cost to humanity, for the adoption and systematic retention by the
churches, of the ancient Jewish beliefs and modes of thought; this the
infliction, that ecclesiasticism might prevail, using the sermon on the
mount to capture the consciences of men, and scourging them with the
mandates, curses and punishments of a Hebrew divinity, to bring them
into line for its purposes. In taking these Jewish annals to its heart,
making them a part of itself, as objects of example and worship, has
not Christianity retarded the advance of mankind? Has it not, by them,
obstructed knowledge, prevented a greater expansion of human sympathy,
and prolonged the betterment of social conditions?

In these days of enlightenment and higher thought, the vestiges are
everywhere seen of our fifteen centuries of misdirection. Almost every
Christian life bears the impress of these cruel Hebrew traditions. The
commander of a battleship in the war with Spain, after his slaughter
of numbers of the enemy, assembles his men to give “thanks to the
Lord,” and the next moment cautions them not to cheer because “the poor
fellows are dying,” illustrates, that mingling of Jewish superstition
with the teaching and example of the Master, to be observed everywhere
in our present civilization. The inherent religious impulses of
mankind--natural religion--some of which, finding no more congenial
quarters, is attracted to the churches, regard war with feelings of
greater repulsion than does orthodox theology, indoctrinated in the
belief of its divine sanction, and consequently, the success of the
American arms, so plainly due to natural causes, was celebrated by the
churches in the usual ancient Hebraic method by “thanks to the Lord.”
The supreme intolerance of Christianity which has wrought such havoc
with mankind, is plainly due to the suggestions of Hebrew scripture,
and it is only the natural religion within the churches, and that large
portion outside of them, which is forcing Christianity into a purer
worship, and destroying its superstitions. It demands for all things,
holy as well as unholy, the right of critical examination, and it
sees but little else in our Sacred Book worth preserving, outside the
sermon on the mount, and its extensions. It is this natural religion
of conscience, encouraging and encouraged by science and reason, which
has wrested the control of civilization from ecclesiasticism. Its
intellectual strength prevails at last over the intellectual strength
of theology; but the unthinking of the multitude are many, and the
battle commencing four centuries ago still lingers, theology backed by
its weak numbers, its old weapons destroyed, and science by its strong
men with searchlights.

But the searchlights of science can not disturb the heart of
Christianity. Its doctrine of atonement, destroyed by the established
truth of evolution; its account of the creation and the deluge, proved
to be fables; its miracles discredited, and many of them demonstrated
by science to be untrue, it still holds within itself, an element which
is in harmony with the aspirations of mankind for the coming betterment
on earth and hereafter. All these things that it has lost are but
perverted offrisings from its body, not a part of the body itself.
“Love one another. Do unto others as you would that others shall do
unto you,” are the golden words that have established it in the world
as a living moving power. Of these its soul and life are composed, and
these no arrow of science can reach. Its dogmas aside, every human
being within the precincts of civilization is born a Christian, and
but for its early perversion at the hands of a crafty priesthood, its
intolerant and cruel career from forced and unworthy association, all
men, learned as well as unlearned, would be working in its ranks.

It came into the world and entered society, making its way from below
upward. Like all movements coming out of the lower levels, it was
socialistic. Its originator, for he cannot be called its leader,
was the first person who had ever appeared in the world as the
instigator of a great reform movement benefitting the whole of mankind
without some apparent or suspected motive, in denial of his absolute
unselfishness, and the movement in its early stages, partaking and
wholly composed of his inspiration, was a pure unselfish socialism.
Its members were bound together by the closest brotherhood, loving and
caring for each other by divine command; declared equal by a mandate
of Heaven, in an age when three-fourths of mankind were outcasts,
uncared, neglected, and abused by a cruel oligarchy, slaves and
dependents, among whom it was a misfortune and misery to have been
born, and having a religion so purposeless and unpromising as to afford
nothing but a momentary spectacular display. To these people the new
religion was as congenial and welcome as the warm sunshine and verdure
of summer after a long sojourn in the Arctic. Its doctrines touched
society where it had most need of their humane precepts and uprising.
For nearly a century no system of dogmas, no doctrine of atonement, no
extensive church authority had been determined, and the whole stress of
religious teaching was directed toward the worship of a moral ideal,
and the cultivation of moral qualities. Its numbers, which had been
looked upon until then, by the higher and governing class with either
contemptuous silence, or occasional argumentative opposition, were
become so increased that their political weight gave promise of a new
field for the exercise of authority and power, and from thence on began
that addition of intellectual forces which have so completely changed
its character.

Every change instituted by its new leaders was with the sole purpose
of increasing its numbers and of augmenting its political weight. They
began by making a compromise with paganism in adopting some of its
rituals, pandering to the imaginations of the uncultivated multitude
by spectacular display, inventing a system of church government with
an executive head, adopting the Jewish annals for its organic laws
and modes of thought, cultivating a belief in miracles and increasing
them on every opportune occasion, until with the one end in view of
overcoming the world as Cæsar did with his legions, more bloody than
Cæsar, taking into their hands a movement full of humanity, instituted
by men in the lower walks of life to soften their hard lines and
give them new hopes, and to increase their sympathies and feelings
of brotherhood, it became, and in many parts of the world remains to
this day, under its attached dispensation of ecclesiastical dogma and
control, a handmaid of kings and emperors in oppression, an upholder
of deadly superstition, an intimidator of free thought and free
learning, an unconcerned looker-on upon the miseries of life beyond
its proselyting interest, careless of the whole world and its affairs,
except so far as it can profit by its theory of exclusive salvation,
and the mouth piece in cant phrases, which have long since lost their
force and meaning, of a lingering barbarism.

And yet the world was never so much in need of a pure Christianity.
An expanded benevolence cherished and assisted as much by skepticism
as the churches is one of the characteristics of modern society.
Although the physically strong do not prey upon the physically weak
as pitylessly as in the olden time, the financially strong are
preying upon the financially weak with as little conscience, and the
intellectually strong are preying upon the intellectually weak with
as much cunning, as they were in barbaric times. Civilization has
increased the two last mentioned evils. The straggling masses under
a load of grinding wealth, in their better knowledge are no longer
appeased by the promises of an adulterated and composite Christianity,
whose chief business for centuries has been to set before them an
awaiting paradise, in recompense for their earthly wrongs; but now, the
multitude impressed with a knowledge belonging to these times, is proof
against these allurements. The toiling millions who make easy places
for the few, and increase their wealth, and who have carried out to a
successful end the brilliant material advancement which surrounds us,
is the world proper, all the rest are merely dependants. Into this
world and down among these quarters from whence it came Christianity
must prepare itself to re-enter, and of this the shadow is already
to be seen. It must discard its dogmas and superstitions, which it
has even now consigned to partial obscurity and silence, and in place
of them, take on the things of the world. It must go among the money
changers of the temples, and into the halls and by-ways of legislation,
giving battle everywhere with evil; for it is through these that the
world is given or denied its betterment, and it must set science on its
right hand, recognizing it as an attribute of the Deity. Christianity
with this companion, its pure ideal recovered from its ecclesiastical
mists, setting out on its new journey through the world, blazing the
way for truth instead of suppressing it, conforming itself in all ways
to the natural religion of mankind, would become to humanity what
the sun is to the earth, comforting the souls of men by its hopes,
enlarging their charities by its precepts, and warming into life many a
germ of virtue and goodness, which else, would never have blossomed, to
shed its moral fragrance on the earth.

The foregoing was written to indicate that line of thought, whose
convictions are briefly expressed, here and there, through the pages
of this little book, now offered to the public in its third edition.
It is always safer and pleasanter to deal with received theology in
the spirit of reverence, usually found in literature; thus offending
no one, and meeting the approval of a worthy and influential class;
but, there are other reasons why an adverse criticism of theological
methods and beliefs, are not so often publicly exploited as their
importance to society deserves. In the first place experience has
shown that errors of religious belief, fixed upon the mind in infancy
and youth, are seldom removed by discussion. We are not yet arrived
at that stage, when the love of truth so predominates in the minds of
men, that they will sacrifice every prejudice, and reject all opposing
influence to obtain it. Christianity has imposed an elaborate system of
prejudices on every young mind within its jurisdiction and they have
become entwined with all the most hallowed associations of childhood,
appealing so strongly to the affections, that any expressed denial of
their exact truth excites, in most cases, a feeling of resentment, and
often stirs to petty persecution. A large majority of the human race
accept their opinions from authority, and all authority heretofore has
encouraged beliefs, which appear so inseparably connected with the
moral well being of society, and which hold in continued supremacy,
institutions and modes of thought whose subversion it is alleged
would be in many ways dangerous. Yet, the fact remains that it is
mostly through its inroads upon these old beliefs that the world has
arrived at its present stage of progress, and the opinion of orthodox
theologians that they should be retained in their entirety, or of
others that they should be abolished, cuts no figure; because, whether
for good or evil in the opinions of men, Providence has ordained, that
those only which represent the truth shall live, and knowing this of a
certainty, it becomes of the greatest interest to discover what society
is likely to lose or gain by that modification of religious beliefs,
wherein only the truth shall remain. If we cannot foretell this future
condition with certainty, it is largely foreshadowed by past and
present experience. What the world has lost in the modification of
religious beliefs, would be hard to find, what it has gained would
take volumes to recount. In the most important of all human interests,
liberty of person, liberty of conscience, and liberty of speech,
there has been, as yet, no adequate acknowledgement by mankind of
the great services of the silent and avowed skepticism which brought
about the consummation of these blessings. The writings of Moses, the
recorded wisdom of Solomon, the encyclicals of popes, and the sermons
of bishops and priests, both Protestant and Catholic, in their rising
up of the lowly, in their encouragement of brotherhood, and in that
exact and even justice to all men, so far as their practical services
to humanity in these directions can be measured, sink into an empty
insignificance, when compared with those organic declarations and
laws, upon which this great republic was founded, and which were the
outcome and product of a then recent enlightenment, due to the combined
efforts of European skeptical writers, who by their genius of sarcasm
and incisive argument, were disturbing the old theological modes of
thought, and awaking the world to wide strides in rationalism. That
these new American rules of political equality, beacons of liberty for
men to follow and admire, obtained their inspiration and incentive from
those new lights in literature, which, at that time, were stirring the
world of thought, there can be no question. In these famous American
documents, were embodied the practical carrying out of principles,
enunciated, and suggested by the European writers, and the most active
of the men engaged in the noble work of forming the new government,
are known to have been disciples of these leaders of anti-theologic
thought. Our Declaration of Independence and Federal Constitution,
stand, to-day, grand achievements of modern scientific thought, and
conspicuous triumphs of rationalism, over old methods, foreshadowing in
these, its great works, a better wisdom to govern the affairs of men,
than all the ages guided by Hebrew tradition. Yet, in these documents
will be seen an overflowing of natural religion, and the spirit of the
Master. “Do unto others as ye would that others shall do unto you.”

If we have for more than fifteen centuries, yielded ourselves to
doctrines, conveyed to us through all the highways of life, so
assiduously, that neither infancy, youth, manhood or old age, have
escaped their tireless importunities for acceptance; doctrines, which
consign seven-eighths of humanity to eternal torture for no faults to
most of them but a lack of opportunity, which under Providence has been
denied, it is not unreasonable to conclude, with this experience of
the mutability of human understanding, that there are other beliefs
fastened on our minds by ages of custom and mistaken thought, equally
untenable, which may be as justly placed in our catalogue of errors.
Where then shall we look for truth? Authority, as we have seen, is
not an infallible guide. We shall never know how much the industrious
promulgation of error is due to the selfish love of corporate power,
how much to a pure benevolence. Neither are the brightest minds safe
monitors in all things of thought. Aristotle defended slavery, Hobbes
persecution, Johnson witchcraft, and Gladstone religious superstition;
but, for all that, we shall never arrive at the extremity of despair;
for a cultivation of the mind, the deductive use of positive knowledge,
and the untrammeled exercise of reason, lead to truth, as directly,
as the line of gravity points to the center of the earth, and only by
these will its reign be established in the world.

                                                                   W. S.




INTRODUCTORY.


My habitation is upon the plateau of a mountain in California. I
entered this region and became a settler by a fortuitous event. About
thirty-five years ago, I took a summer outing from a close application
to business in the metropolis, and came here for a deer hunt. One of
those beautiful animals that I had wounded with my rifle led me further
into this wild and picturesque locality than I had intended to go, and
I thus arrived upon this spot, as I believe, the first white man that
ever set foot upon it. Reaching here late in the afternoon, I found
myself too far out of my path to return by daylight, and so, building
a fire, I spent my first night alone in this weird place. It was the
first time in my life that I had slept where some human creature was
not within the sound of my voice, and from that night I date a change
of sentiment, thought, and feeling, which has altered my career, and
made me, what I have chosen to be, a recluse.

I had been living in the world about thirty years amid the artificial
surroundings of a city. I had scarcely looked upon the sky and heavens,
except between the margins of opposite house-tops. I had viewed from
infancy, without emotion, the rising and setting of the sun from a
horizon of chimneys and steeples; and when these exhibitions first
presented themselves to me here in this crystal atmosphere, with
an expanse from this altitude so new to me, they appeared like a
revelation. I seemed to have been suddenly ushered into the world,
and to be looking for the first time in my life upon the stupendous
phenomena about me.

Until this moment I had not approached a realization of the
magnificence and prodigious wonders which the heavens afford to our
observation. It was here also that I began for the first time to
enjoy those beautiful and curious processes of nature, where the
bursting germs, ascending gradually out of the soil, change their
shapes, multiply their organs, and after a time crown themselves with
brilliant and deliciously flavored flowers. In my new observation and
intimacy with plant growth, with some previous knowledge of the science
appertaining to it, and with a newly discovered delight in marking the
changes of position and the characters of the heavenly bodies by the
greedy acquirement of all the information within my reach, I have come
to forego, without regrets, the social pleasures of life.

By the liberal laws of my country, I have become possessed of this
attractive spot, and thus far, I have chosen to retain it in its
natural state. I came here a young man. I am now old. Thirty-five years
of my life have been spent on this elevation, with a self-banishment
from society, without in the least abating my interest in human
affairs. My communication with the world is mostly through books. A
weekly newspaper or two, and such other publications as I may order,
are left for me in a hollow tree several miles away by the district
messenger; and thus no important event or new discovery in the world
escapes me.

I have constructed with my own hands a cabin, having much convenience
and comfort, and also some outhouses, which shelter my poultry and a
pair of gentle cows, which latter, finding abundant food in the natural
grasses about, come to me regularly at milking time, seemingly as much
for the pleasure of being caressed, as to furnish me the principal
nourishment of my life.

There is a trout steam in the center of my possession, with expansions
here and there, which serve as bathing places for myself, and out of
which pure and cool drink is supplied to the few domestic animals
about me. This stream makes its way through the bottom of a hollow,
and is so overhung by the lofty branches of trees which grow upon its
borders that the sunlight only enters in patches, and is so reflected
by the restless surface of the water as to mark its devious way with
the appearance of a line of flashing mirrors. The surrounding dense
body of foliage, from at least a hundred varieties of trees and
shrubs, is tinted with a variegation of color seldom seen outside the
tropics. This charming spot has its voices, as restless as the lights
and shadows which play about within. Each miniature waterfall has its
liquid note; while during certain hours there comes from every quarter
of the foliage above a confused melody of birds, who, I have reason to
believe, assemble there for entertainment and gossip.

Outside of this watered region, my homestead is interspersed with
openings, where the rich loam only awaits the labor of cultivation
to produce a wealth of grain or fruit. Every tree and shrub within
my possession of half a mile square, by long familiarity, seems to
have become a part of myself. We are living and ageing together. I
have watched in them the development of infancy, the slow and gradual
approach to youth, and the turning point from maturity to old age.
Among these old monarchs of the woods is here and there one tipped with
the signs of superannuated decay. About their feet lay many of their
withered, sapless limbs. They have lost their symmetry, and stand in
scraggy outline. I see from year to year their gradual giving up of
life, while beside them a new generation arises. There is a fellow
feeling between us. My hair grows thin and white and my step is no
longer firm and elastic. Like them my share of life is growing to a
close, and yet I am an infant in years compared to many of them. I bow
to them with a sentiment of reverence. They are my old men. The younger
ones are my children--mine! What a grand thing it is to have these in
my possession,--to hold in my own right such a choice piece of this
blossoming earth, where all the mysterious forces are at work day and
night for me alone!

I have come also to have an abiding interest in the creatures who by
nature are inhabitants of this place. Long ago have I laid aside my
gun as an instrument of destruction, and it rests now on its pegs
above my pillow only as a defense. By slow degrees I have gained a
confidence with the native birds and animals which surround me, so that
it is wonderful how many of them welcome me and enjoy my presence.
There swarm to my poultry fold at feeding time myriads of quail and
other birds, who with an amusing assurance, run about my feet and
dispute for the crumbs that I scatter. The gray squirrels may be often
seen scampering down from their hiding places in the trees to meet
me, in expectation of their accustomed relish of wheat grains, which
are stowed away for them in my pockets. I have three pet deer, quite
tame and domesticated, whose intimate acquaintance was brought about
in a singular way. Sitting on my doorstep one bright afternoon, I had
listened for some time to the baying of hounds in the neighboring
mountains, when presently there came bounding toward me, in terror,
a trembling doe, and with her beaming eyes fixed upon me, seeming to
invoke my pity, she literally threw herself into my arms. Taking in
the situation at a glance, I tried to force her into my door before
the dogs arrived. Too late for that, I could only arm myself with
a stick from my woodpile, when the whole yelping pack were upon us.
It was a hard fight, and only after many bites and scratches from
the disappointed hounds did I beat them off. I kept her in a secure
outhouse for a few days, where two beautiful fawns were born to
her; and ever since the mother and offspring have been my favorite
pets, following me about like children. My acquaintance with other
of the creatures about, though not so intimate, is still of such a
confidential kind that they manifest no terror at my approach, and I am
thus enabled to realize, by this free exhibition of them, how teeming
with animal life is the earth in its most favored parts.

In my earlier years I have felt the cold blasts and torrid heats of
other climes. I now rest myself in the happy satisfaction that I
have found in this equable temperature and agreeable surroundings a
place where one may look upon life as a blessing. I have acquired
enough knowledge of some of the sciences to make an instrument or
two of service to me, and I take especial interest in my telescope
of three inches aperture, in the use of which I spend many an hour
which otherwise might hang heavily on my hands. I have also a good
microscope and field glass. Through the latter I bring to view the
distant hillsides and mountain tops, observing, frequently, groups of
deer grazing tranquilly, and at times a family of panthers gamboling
on the green carpet of an opening, or an eagle feeding her young upon
the inaccessible brink of a precipice; and on rarer occasions, a bear
complacently munching acorns under some prolific old oak a mile away.
My microscope has revealed to me a world of wonders. I have discovered
by it the limitable range of our senses, and how far below as well
as above us the infinite extends. I grope about in the darkness of
my understanding between an atom and the outside limit of the stars,
every step toward either showing an increase of distance. These things
I pursue, not with the spirit and application of a student, but
rather for the entertainment which they furnish and the meditation
they invoke. I have learned all that is known of the motions and
eccentricities of heavenly bodies within my telescopic vision, and
I never look upon them without rapture. What are all other shows to
this? How many of these countless worlds are inhabited? What beings are
upon them? How do they compare with us? Has it been given to them to
comprehend eternity? Is knowledge with them intuitive or acquired? Thus
do I lose myself in these bewildering fancies.

It may appear that I have avoided my share in the cares and duties of
human association. If I have, it is from no lack of sympathy with my
kind. I look upon my fellow-men from my distant and somewhat isolated
point of view, without the usual diversion of active affairs, and both
my pity and admiration are aroused. The sufferings and sorrows of my
kind seem appalling to me from this position, while their heroism in
the struggle for knowledge seems to me grand beyond expression. I
feel myself in the midst of civilization, and yet apart from it. If
I have been a loser from that lack of social attrition which arouses
the activities of thought, it is, nevertheless, certain that I have
not been submitted to a combination of those influences which render
an error plausible. The opinions and thoughts of the world come to
me, and I pass them in review with a full sense of the fallibility of
individual opinion, as well as an abiding faith in the steady approach
of that collective truth, which, sooner or later, will overspread the
world.




THE MAN FROM MARS.




CHAPTER I.


My telescope is mounted in an apartment adjoining my cabin, with an
elevated exposure, and has some extra contrivances for the convenience
of adjustment, designed and constructed by myself. The instrument can
be raised and lowered at pleasure, and is protected by a movable dome,
which is easily laid aside by means of a couple of pullies. It is a
good one, and for its size has remarkable power. I have been enabled
to reach with it double stars of the sixth magnitude, frequently
observing even Orion, with its beautiful double and multiple systems.
I can easily discover with it the most distant planet Neptune, and by
their progressive displacement, I have seen and recognized with it
most of the asteroids. I can get with it a fine view of Jupiter, that
magnificent planet fourteen hundred times larger than our Earth, and
have observed the black spots upon its surface, and the transit of its
moons. The grand spectacle of Saturn and its rings is brought to my
observation with remarkable clearness. I have so frequently looked into
the dismal caverns and upon the towering mountains of our satellite,
the Moon, that its marks and bounds are as familiar to me as the
neighboring hills. But life is short, and amid all this illimitable sea
of worlds, I have fixed my attention upon but one, for that special
study which my few remaining years will permit. The heavenly body which
most engages my attention is, excepting our satellite, the nearest one
to us, our neighboring planet Mars.

I believe that body to be inhabited by beings in many respects like
those of the earth. My conclusion is adduced from many known facts
concerning it. Mars has an atmosphere like ours. Its density does not
differ materially from the Earth. The heat it derives from the sun,
possibly modified by atmospheric conditions, is quite likely the same
as ours. It has zones of varying temperature, and seasons of summer and
winter like the Earth. Its days are about the same length as ours. The
ice and snow of its polar regions are plainly perceptible, and vary in
arrears exactly in accordance with its changing positions and distances
from the sun. From which we may infer, without a doubt, that its
atmosphere contains moisture of the same chemical composition as ours,
and is condensed into rain and snow as with us.

There are striking points of difference, however, between Mars and the
Earth. Its diameter is a little less than half that of our planet, and
its surface is only about a quarter of ours, while its volume is but a
seventh part of our globe. Furthermore, instead of a single satellite
like ours it has two moons, which revolve in opposite directions around
it, neither of which in point of size can be compared to ours.

My knowledge of astronomy not being profound, it has been the greatest
pleasure and gratification to me to verify, by my own observations,
the calculations and theories of the abler scientists. Appertaining
to Mars, it is perhaps needless to say that there is a diversity of
opinion among astronomers touching its physical conditions. The unusual
red color of its reflected light, its bright and dark spots, and the
variation which is observed in the forms overspreading its disc, are
differently accounted for. It is among such questions as these, then,
that my imagination and ingenuity are free to exercise themselves,
and the desire to settle some of these disputed points to my own
satisfaction increases the eagerness of my observation.

I have watched for many years, with anticipations of pleasure, when
Mars would be in opposition,--or in other words, when, during its
revolution upon its orbit, it comes nearest to the Earth. These
occurrences of about every two years are holidays of pleasure and
enjoyment to me. There are, however, rarer oppositions of Mars, which
occur only twice in a century, when the distance between us is reduced
to the smallest limit; and it has been my good fortune to get a finer
view of this heavenly body at this shorter distance than will few human
beings at present alive.

It can well be imagined what a supremely interesting event this was to
me. Days before its culmination did I watch its progress approaching
nearer and nearer to the Earth. Each succeeding night exhibited to me
its slowly magnifying proportions, and the greater distinctness of
objects on its surface. Here was a world of beings, no doubt, with aims
and enterprises like ours, rolling headlong through the heavens with
a known velocity of fifty-four thousand miles an hour. This planet
was now approaching, hourly, its greatest possible proximity to the
Earth. That I should lose no time in devouring, as I may say, this
unusual spectacle, I had provided my telescope with a kind of clockwork
contrivance, by which it exactly kept pace with Mars on its westward
course. During these few days, I had forgotten everything else in my
eagerness to feast my eyes on this rare show. The nights had been
favorable to observation; and each evening after turning my instrument
on the rapidly approaching planet, my interest became so transfixed and
absorbed that all my ordinary physical wants were suppressed. I had
lost in these few days of mental excitement all inclination for food
and sleep. No one could be freer from superstition than I, yet my mind
was uneasy under an unaccountable premonition. It gave some anxiety to
think that on the very night of culmination, when my interest would be
at its height, a change of weather might cut off the scene. But aside
from this, in my somewhat feverish condition, I could not restrain a
sense of some impending and momentous event in my personal affairs.
Some strange influence seemed to be disturbing the usual tranquil and
placid condition of my mind. I aroused myself from this, however, and
became thoroughly myself when the sun went down on the evening of
my hope, and left an atmosphere that was as perfect as I could wish
for. The sky was calm and clear, with just enough moisture in the air
to increase its transparency. The ordinary evening sounds appeared
stilled. Neither nighthawk nor owl seemed abroad, and the usual
rustling of leaves and swaying of tree-tops was suppressed by a calm
that struck me as strange. The day had been moderately warm, and the
sun-distilled odors of the firs and pines, condensed by the coolness
of twilight, were filling the air with an agreeable perfume, as though
Nature was burning incense in the celebration of some ancient rite,
during which every living and breathing thing about seemed bowed in
silent reverence. I had never known until now what assurance there was
in the natural sounds which nightly fell upon my ears. In my mountain
home no feeling of loneliness ever came over me before. I felt an
especial longing now for the sound of a human voice, for a companion
upon whom I might discharge myself of the suggestions and beliefs
appertaining to the subject of my investigation and study. My mind was
filled with conclusions touching the physical condition of Mars, which
each new observation tended to corroborate. I had my theory to give of
its rose-colored light. I had seen the clouds moving upon its surface,
its polar snows, and its very atmosphere. I had no doubt whatever,
now, that it was inhabited, and the anticipation of soon seeing it in
its most favorable opposition with the Earth, was accompanied with
a yearning that some human creature might share with me the rare
spectacle.

As the twilight faded, I looked with my naked eyes toward the east,
and my other world was showing its red light near the horizon like a
rising sun in miniature. At midnight it would reach its culmination,
when viewing it through the least possible thickness of our atmosphere
in its vertical position, I would see it as no human being could
see it again for over half a century. The oppressive silence and
tranquility remained unbroken, and as I seated myself in my observatory
and adjusted the telescope, I felt myself not quite in my accustomed
vigor of health. The temperature had perceptibly raised, when it had
usually fallen as the night advanced. The air was sultry. A sensation
of qualmishness came over me. It came to my mind now that I had abused
myself by a long neglect of sleep and regular meals. But no sooner
had I brought my instrument to a focus than I was myself again. Our
beautiful neighbor was mounting the heavens, reflecting the sun’s
light in a delicate crimson tint, and in size of outline beyond my
expectation. I could plainly mark its rotation upon its axis by
noting the slow movements of spots upon its disc, and their sudden
disappearance over its limb. The hours seemed minutes to me. My fatigue
and illness were forgotten. In my rapture of enjoyment the lingering
wish increased that some fellow creature might share it with me. My
telescope, in tracing the planet’s course had very nearly obtained
a vertical position, when I was astonished to see the distant world
suddenly disappear, and begin to vibrate back and forth over the
aperture of my instrument. A moment’s reflection explained the matter.
The Earth had shaken. So trifling, however, was the disturbance about
me that it had not been felt. But I had lost my focus, and Mars was
already on its backward journey. My grand holiday was over.

I immediately lowered the telescope and replaced its protecting dome.
Gathering the few hasty notes I had prepared during my observation,
for future reference and elaboration, I made my way to an apartment
of my cabin which serves me for a library and bed chamber. A number
of shelves filled with books occupy one of its sides. My bed rests
in a corner. An easy chair stands besides a table in the center, and
under a window, proportionately large, fronting the south, is placed
a cushioned lounge of some pretentions to comfort and luxury. I threw
myself upon this, after laying away my papers, and the lower panes of
my window being on a level with my head, I looked out into the night.

The moon in its last quarter was just peeping over a near mountain.
Its light, partly obstructed by a network of tree-tops, was throwing
figures of light and shade over the adjacent opening, so that the
ground appeared to have spread upon it a colossal carpet, with
fantastic decorations of ebony and silver. The air had grown a trifle
cooler. A gentle breeze was stirring out of the West, and the silence,
that had recently fallen so mysteriously upon me, was being followed
now by a normal condition of unrest. As the moon rose higher, its
fanciful shadows upon the ground dissolved, and the level plateau
adjacent to my window was uniformly covered with a clear, bright light.
Looking again, and quite sensibly impressed with the changed condition
of things about me, I descried the figure of a man, not far from
my window; and, strange to say, I was neither alarmed nor startled
at his presence. His face, of which I saw but little more than its
profile, was turned upward looking at the moon, and its expression was
unmistakably one of admiration and wonder. His long, and apparently
well-cared-for hair and beard, reflected a golden sheen under the light
above. His arms were folded, and his shape and attitude impressed me as
being majestic.

While fixing my gaze intently on this strange form, an expression
of something wanting about it took possession of me, when presently
I observed with surprise, that although standing under the bright
and unobstructed light of the moon, no shadow was visible about it.
He remained for some time as immovable as a statue, gazing upon our
satellite as one who had never before looked upon so wondrous a
sight, and then, with the air of one on unfamiliar ground, he made an
inquiring survey of my cabin, and then directed his careful footsteps
toward my doorway.




CHAPTER II.


This strange figure entered my cabin, and without introduction or sign
of salutation seated himself in my easy chair as though he were a
member of my household, an apparent rudeness which will be explained
as I proceed. I had now the first opportunity to get a good survey of
my visitor. He was a person of surpassing loveliness. His face was of
that spiritual kind which is seldom seen off the canvas of some of
our art masters, and it reflected a kindness of heart that is never
realized except by the purest religious fancy. His form was so high
and elaborate in its development, that I have only seen an approach to
it in the best models. His singular attractiveness I can only compare
to that affinity which comes of pure sexual love, captivating the
beholder with a presence which drives away all thought but it. His
complexion had that ruddy clearness and transparency indicative of
perfect health. The hair of his head and beard,--both long and waving
over shoulders and breast,--was of a hue that can be best described as
the color of the ripe filbert, with the fineness and lustre of unwoven
silk. His hands, although scrupulously clean and finely shaped, bore
the unmistakable signs of manual toil; and yet he had the superior air
and manner of one whose mission it was to instruct. As he sat before
me I felt like a child in the presence of a loved and loving parent.
My impression of him was entirely correct, since his first word of
utterance to me was a term of endearment.

“My brother,” said he, “you have a beautiful world. That moon of yours
is magnificent.”

To me this was a happy beginning. Here was, thought I, a man after my
own heart, whose soul was above the common things of life. I could
compare notes with him touching my study of Mars. Providence had then
sent me, at last, what I had so wanted,--some one to share and enjoy
with me the triumphs of my labor; so I immediately said to him: “As
to the moon, it is certainly very serviceable as a night reflector of
the sun’s light; but, since its size is comparatively insignificant,
and its surface desolate and uninhabited, it is thus an object of
very little importance among heavenly bodies. Speaking of magnificent
planets, what do you think of Mars?”

“Mars suits me,” said my visitor.

Thinking my question too general, I inquired: “Do you think Mars
inhabited?”

“I am a good proof that it is,” said he. “I left that planet--let me
see--by your time, about one hour ago.”

“I either misunderstood you, or you are not serious. It is impossible.”

“Ah, my brother,” said he, “you are very little advanced in a knowledge
of the properties of intelligence. I am here by a process as yet
unknown to you, and which may be best described in your language as
reflection. I am here by reflection. That is to say, my natural body
is at my home, on the planet, which you call Mars. Its spiritual
counterpart is here. You have already an inkling of this strange
faculty of transferring intelligence, in some of the phenomena on which
is founded your spiritualistic creed. We, of the planet Mars, have been
in the enjoyment of this discovery for centuries; and while you of the
Earth are only able by your appliances of science to measure the size
of our planet, compute its distance, estimate the shape and extent
of its orbit, and indulge in some vague conjectures appertaining to
its condition, we have been making a close and interesting study of
your social affairs, including, of course, your morals, politics and
religion. You have only measured us as a planet. We have measured you
as a people, and at least one of us, as you perceive, has mastered your
language. Besides, our development is over ten thousand years ahead of
yours. We can tell you more of your history than you know yourselves.
At a period of yours described by your writers as the stone age, we had
converted electricity into a motor and illuminating agent. I know your
thoughts. You are surprised at what I have said, and wish me to tell
you something of the planet upon which I reside.

“It will interest you to know that about the equatorial regions of
Mars is found its highest civilization and densest settlement. Your
torrid zone, and the corresponding section of our planet, are widely
different. In ours, the climate is delightfully and evenly temperate.
The extent of our surface, as you know, is very much less than yours,
but the uniform quality of our land for cultivation, and the smaller
water surface, compared with yours, supports a population whose numbers
would astonish you. You may as well discharge your mind of the many
conjectures which ascribe to each planet a quality of matter and
intelligence peculiar to itself. The whole universe is a unit, as
your spectroscope, and the bodies from space that fall from time to
time upon your surface, must have suggested to you. Variable states
of density and temperature modify the forms and organs of animal and
vegetable life, but matter is everywhere the same.

“Your chemists have just arrived at that point of knowledge where ours
were forty centuries ago. Yours recognize over sixty forms of matter as
simple and elementary, while ours have reduced them all to one,--the
unit out of which all creation is formed. From this you may infer that
our discovery of the compound nature of the metals enables us to make
them at pleasure. This was a most fortunate and timely knowledge for
us, since they are distributed very sparsely on our planet. It will no
doubt be a strange thing to tell you, that we make gold at a less cost
than iron, and that consequently it is the cheapest metal in use. You
are about to ask me whether we make diamonds. We have made them for
centuries. Our factories turn them out in masses for the ornamental
parts of buildings, for which they are remarkably adapted on account of
their brilliancy and indestructibility.”

My strange visitor rested a little here, with the evident intention
of reading my thoughts, and of enjoying my surprise. While I was
marvelling what great things chemical science must have done in other
ways, he appeared to anticipate my question.

“My brother,” said he, “we are indebted to the science of chemistry for
more than I can readily enumerate. With us, as with you, a large number
of common and abundant substances differ only a trifle in chemical
composition from others which are in great demand for the purposes
of life. The science of chemistry enables us to convert one into the
other at will. Thus, from wood we manufacture sugar, starch, and any
number of other useful commodities. By the double decomposition of air
and water we generate a heat which, for economy and easy regulation,
is better than anything the universe affords. The clumsy, unclean and
inconvenient use of wood and coal for fuel is with us a practice of the
past.

“But chemistry has done for us an immeasurably greater service. It has
enabled us to provide for ourselves a food supply by the process of
synthesis, which, in the extremity of crop shortage or failure, we can
resort to as a means of averting famine. You are aware, in your present
stage of chemical knowledge, that all food products are composed of
four simple ingredients, Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen and Nitrogen, found
in abundant supply in the atmosphere and its natural mixture. These,
with two or three earthy matters from the soil, are the constituents
of all food. We forestall the slow assimilation of these by the organs
of animals and plants, and by our chemical skill are enabled to
combine them in proper proportion to form the proximate elements of
all varieties of food, wanting in nothing but the taste and flavor of
the natural supply, and on that account, only used when compelled by
necessity.

“Our advance in synthetic chemistry has enabled us to imitate nature’s
products in many of their organic forms. Besides those nitrogen
compounds which we manufacture as life sustainers, we produce many
substances which are equivalent to those you obtain exclusively from
animal and vegetable life. We obtain in this way substitutes for
leather, horn, ivory, and also fats and oils, albumen, gluten, starch,
etc., etc.; most of these better and in more convenient forms for
industrial and culinary uses than nature furnishes them. Our textile
fabrics are entirely derived from vegetable growth, and we give them
a quality of slow or quick conduction of heat to accord with their
purposes of summer or winter wear.

“You may safely infer from what I have said that we slaughter no
animals for food or raiment. Such demoralizing cruelty we have never
practiced. The ferocious examples of beasts and birds of prey we have
never known, and we have no extensive wastes over which they could live
and flourish. Our animals which are limited in variety compared with
yours are all domesticated, and our treatment of them is so uniformly
kind, that instead of avoiding us they court our society. We have a
clean and beautiful creature, much smaller than your cow, which gives
us milk. It is remarkably intelligent, and is often admitted into our
households to nurse our infants, who become very fond of them. Our city
parks are provided with these animals and it is a common sight to see
them gamboling with children and quietly submitting themselves to their
nourishment.

“It is a part of our religion to believe that every living creature
is related, though distantly, to ourselves, and to those of them
especially which are brought into our service, we owe not only an
obligation of kindness, but the care of attention in sickness and old
age. We have accordingly established places of retirement for them. The
kind relations existing for ages between us and all animal kind has
modified their conduct to us in a way that would be striking to you,
and would lead you to believe that they possess more intelligence than
you have given them credit for. They come to us in their troubles, and
submit in the most human way to medical treatment in their hospitals.
You would be interested to note the friendly familiarity existing
between us and our birds, who in brilliancy of plumage and song are far
ahead of yours. They abound in our city parks, and one has only to open
the window and whistle and they will come flying into the apartment,
engaging themselves in a concert of song, perched about on the
furniture, as a happy privilege. On any other occasion when one comes
silent and alone we know what it portends, and it is tenderly carried
to the bird hospital.”

“You have,” I ventured to enquire, “railroads and boats for
transportation?”

“We have neither,” answered my visitor, “nor do we require them, for
reasons easily explained. There are two conditions of our planet
which render the navigation of the air entirely safe and successful.
They are the greater density of our atmosphere, and the diminished
force of gravity compared with yours. Our air ships, as you would call
them, are easily made to sustain and move large cargoes, by vacuum
chambers and electric motors. Our inventors have long since surmounted
the difficulties of adverse wind currents, and these vessels, of both
public and private use, may be seen constantly moving about in all
directions, and at all altitudes, with but few serious accidents.

“There are no large oceans like yours on Mars, and our rivers are so
small as not to serve the purposes of commerce. You will perceive,
then, that our facilities for navigating the air were bestowed upon us
as a means of transportation, in lieu of the convenient waterways which
you enjoy. As you may anticipate, from the small size of our rivers,
there are no extensive mountainous water sheds upon our surface.
Instead of your immense, desolate, and storm-beaten seas, we have a
series of lakes, everywhere varying in size, but none of them larger
than seventy-five of your miles long, and forty broad.

“The relative density between water and an animal body being such
on our planet as to render the possibility of drowning by accident
impossible, the fear and horror existing with you of involuntary
immersion in the depths is entirely unknown. Our numerous lakes
are therefore scenes of the most enjoyable, and what would be with
you, reckless diversion. The upsetting of a boat with its load of
excursionists, no matter where, results in merely a harmless frolic.
The human body there sinks in the water only a little above its
middle, and we have contrived, by web-like fastenings to the hands and
feet, a means of propulsion so rapid as to nearly equal our speediest
locomotion on the land. During our long summers, when the temperature
of the water is agreeable, lake journeys, especially by the young, are
among the most popular amusements. This, to you, strange condition of
density is productive of a state of affairs partaking of the humorous,
although leading to much domestic perplexity and annoyance. Our
children take to the water in the summer season as naturally as your
water fowl, and the loss of offspring upon the lakes, at that tender
age which precludes their knowledge of the return direction, is the
source of an immense amount of parental disturbance and worry. The
straying of children upon the waters is attended, however, with but
little danger; since, if by any possibility they remain undiscovered
during the night, they can, owing to the buoyancy of their bodies,
sleep tranquilly and delightfully upon their backs, resting upon the
cushions of the waters until rescued, as they are sure to be on the
succeeding day, by one of the numerous airships constantly skimming the
surface.

“Our land is generally rolling, and there is a constant water movement
in the channels connecting these small bodies of water, not in a
uniform direction toward the sea, as with you, but in all directions,
thus saving to us a power for mechanical purposes than which nothing
better can be conceived.

“Our cities, as you may imagine, are not located as yours are; but,
since one place is as good as another for a distributing point, the
rule has been to build them up where conditions are favorable, chiefly
considered of which have been the health, comfort, and pleasure
of their inhabitants. It would be doing us injustice to believe
that, with our long period of development and progress, we have not
achieved something far ahead of you in the sanitary and labor-saving
appliances about us, especially in our metropolitan districts. In
the first place, we use no wood whatever in the construction of our
buildings, having discovered long ago a tendency during its slow decay
to absorb and retain the germs of disease and uncleanliness. Neither
is its durability satisfactory; and its ready inflammability and lack
of strength render it unfitted for our purposes. We use, instead, a
metallic alloy unknown to you, which is susceptible of a high polish,
as inoxidizable as gold, and with that character of penetrability which
permits fastening with nails and shaping by tools, with even greater
exactness than you work with wood.

“Our cities are built with uniformity. Their growth is invariably from
the center outward. Their location is not a matter of chance, as yours
generally is. No site is chosen without the thorough examination and
approval of a sanitary commission, whose knowledge and sincerity we
respect. Their foundation is made by the laying out of a large circular
enclosure for the location of all public buildings, among which, in
the center and more magnificent than all in its imposing loftiness and
artistic finish, is our temple of worship. From this center radiate a
set of wide and uniform thoroughfares, and these are crossed at regular
intervals by circular ones, which begin at the center and are repeated
to the circumference as a series of concentric rings.”

The man from Mars became silent for a moment, and I observed that for
the first time his face was clouded a little. He had spoken of a temple
of worship, and it had started in my mind a wish to hear something of
the society and morals of his people, and how they compared with us; so
I said to him: “I am grateful to you for your kindness in describing
some of the material surroundings of your people, but I would like
very much to know something of your inner lives, of your thoughts and
beliefs, and how they affect your social condition.”

“My brother,” said he, “you wish me to make a comparison between our
society and yours. I can scarcely do so without the risk of giving you
pain. With our greater advancement, we look back upon you as travelers
over the same rough paths. Your journey is even a more difficult one
than ours. In your present state, you appear to us as a world of
discord, confusion, and strife. While we were long ago resolved into
a single, homogeneous people, you are still divided into nations and
countries, unridden yet of the barbarous pride of combat. We have but
one religion. Yours are many and antagonistic. I shall briefly make for
you the comparison you wish, hoping that it may bring no sense of pain
to you, for, to speak the truth, the cruelty, the intense individual
selfishness, and the strange superstitions of the inhabitants of the
Earth will pass away out of the ages to come.”




CHAPTER III.


“Comparing your society with ours,” began my celestial visitor, “is
like describing the difference between your present intellectual
condition, and the state you were in during your cave-dwelling period.
In review of your progress, we recognize two chief agencies at work
which have regenerated us, viz.: the steady growth of human sympathy,
and the fading out of old superstitions. In our advanced development,
with the first of these, we have achieved a state of things in our
society quite likely beyond your hopes. For instance, that feeling of
regard and affinity for each other which is seldom found among you,
except in the midst of family ties, we hold one for another among
all. If I were to select from among you a domestic circle, the most
refined and correct, its disturbance and anxiety from the sorrows and
misfortunes of one of its members would scarcely represent the feeling
in a body of our people for the misfortunes of any. We are shocked at
your cruel indifference to the feelings of one another. When we see one
of you sinking by the wayside, by means of one of the evils which you
naturally inherit; or overwhelmed, perhaps, with the penalties of a
misadventure, and looked upon by his fellows regardless of his smitten
condition, we can find no parallel to it among ourselves, except in the
traditions that have come to us out of our remote ages.

“Your national antagonisms, your cruel wars, and the immense sums
wasted by you in maintaining millions of your people, trained for the
sole purpose of slaughtering their fellows, we regard as the one most
disgraceful relic of your former supremely barbarous state. While,
by the process of social development, all your most cruel brutalisms
have disappeared within the range of your higher civilization, the
remaining one, of sending masses of your people into deadly combat for
the settlement of political and religious questions, is retained for
reasons which are not wholly in concurrence with our sense of right. In
the first place, no element of justice enters into the arbitration of
a question, whose settlement rests entirely upon the physical strength
of the contestants; and all international settlements by this means
are but temporary, when the winning party has not coincidentally a
prevailing sense of justice in its favor. All your wars and battles,
without a result on the side of equity and truth, have been fought
in vain. Your bloody misjudgments of one century often are, and are
ever like to be, reviewed and resubmitted to the same sanguinary and
delusive arbitration in a succeeding one. In these brutal encounters
you stain your hands and garments in the blood of your fellow men
without remorse, because the wild instincts of your nature have
never been suppressed in that particular direction. Those of you in
authority, both civil and religious, have this to answer for. For the
sake of a concurrence in the selfish schemes of your rulers, they have
instituted a series of glittering rewards for the most skillful of
their wholesale murderers and you have in that way been educated to
honor most, those who could deal the heaviest blows.

“We cannot take a survey of the motives which have instituted nearly
all these sanguinary and dreadful encounters among you, without a sense
of horror. Your civilization has witnessed only a single one of these
terrible conflicts, wherein a purely humane question was involved. Your
religions have not only been used to sanction this dire carnage, but
have even themselves been participants in the slaughter of millions of
your people. You are not yet freed from the savagery of your remote
fathers, who, ages ago, entered those fierce contests between tribe and
tribe, with strong personal interests in the outcome. The loss or gain
of a battle meant to them either a share of spoils or probable torture
and death. Yet you have kept alive this inclination to collective
combat, when individual loss or gain seldom cuts any figure in the
incentive which impels you to battle. And even beyond these physical
encounters, your struggles of life appear, from our point of view, to
be divided between defense and attack, like the beasts of prey which
still linger on your borders.

“Your society presents to us the spectacle of a continuous skirmish
among yourselves, your whole mass struggling to mount the summit of
their individual hopes and ambitions, wounding and bruising each other
with cruel unconcern. Our experience has taught us that this unhappy
social condition is entirely due to the crude and imperfect stage of
your development. Each of your new epochs brings some approach towards
a better terrestrial life; but you have not fairly considered nor
endeavored to surmount the chief obstacle to your progress in that
direction. You have not yet learned to deal justly with one another.
By your system of unequal advantages, one class is permitted, and
even encouraged, to prey upon another one. One or more of you will
enter upon a scheme of personal gain without the slightest concern for
its effect upon others. You have permitted, from time to time, the
passage of laws having a direct and unmistakable tendency to throw your
wealth into the hands of a few, and as a consequence, to increase the
hardships of the many. Your generation exults over all preceding ones
in its progress in science and knowledge; but even that has not served
to soften or remove the asperities of your lives, for the reason that
most of the available material of this new advance has been prostituted
to serve the interests of the few.

“The growth of your social betterment rests almost entirely upon
the total of your disciplined thought, yet by your methods, correct
thinking is the rarest thing among you. Your social field, instead of
being evenly stirred and seeded, is cultivated in spots and patches.
Even your knowledge has been converted into a weapon of tyranny
and oppression, and it is oftener pursued in the love of self than
for the benefit of kind. Out of the helplessness of your neglected
and unfavored masses, come the greater number of your individual
accumulations of wealth.

“In our stage of progress such a state of things is impossible. The
performance of an act inflicting injury or even discomfort upon one
or more fellow beings in our society, brings its punishment in the
general condemnation and disgrace which follows. Active benevolence,
which is with you an impulse, sporadic and exceptional, is with us an
ever-present emotion, and upon it we have founded the chief pleasures
of life. We have no eleemosynary establishments, because they are not
needed. There can be no suffering from destitution among us, since
each person finds in his own surroundings the ready, helping hand.
No neglected orphan wanders about uncared for, because each family
finds its pleasures increased by the opportunity to bestow shelter.
Each dwelling is open to all, and no assuring salutation is needed
to welcome the visitor. He enters the house of the stranger, as the
stranger would enter his, by the right of the universal brotherhood
which prevails.

“The love of our kind forms the corner stone of our single religion,
just as the like is made the foundation upon which your many creeds
are built. But while your religious teachings have brought no great
fruits, ours have yielded a harvest of glorious consequences. If it
will interest you, I shall tell you why.”




CHAPTER IV.


At the dawn of, and during the first stages of their civilization,
the people of the Earth found themselves surrounded with natural
forces which, in their scant knowledge of the laws of the universe,
were ascribed to the arbitrary and willful caprices of a great hidden
being. They found a mysterious power above them, and everywhere an
overwhelming evidence of design. The unthinkable and unknown character
of the infinite and eternal was not then acknowledged; and the failure
of any to explain this unseen intelligence and power incited their
imaginations to do for them what the closest investigation had failed
to accomplish. As may have been expected, they clothed their imaginary
deity with the qualities, propensities, and passions of themselves. Any
violent convulsion of nature was taken by them as a certain sign of his
anger; while the normal state of rest, and the undisturbed processes
of animal and vegetable development and growth were looked upon as
concessions in their special favor. From a belief in the supervision
of the deity over every single one of the innumerable processes of
nature, they naturally imbibed the idea that they each were objects of
his personal watchfulness and attention, and as a consequence, that all
the fortunes and vicissitudes of their lives were dependent upon his
moods. It may very well be supposed that with this conception of the
deity, the chief purpose of life would be to find favor with Him, to
discover his wishes, and to learn his commands; since, in accordance
with this simple and crude idea, every one’s success and comfort in
life depended upon his conciliation. With these views of nature and
the universe, they came in due time to observe that within themselves
were feelings and sentiments entirely apart from the ordinary epicurean
impulses which governed them. We may imagine in those cruel times
the warrior standing over his prostrate victim with upraised club,
stayed in the act of killing him by a sentiment of pity, and enjoying
afterward as a result of his compassion a pleasure which was as strange
and unaccountable to him as his first sight of a comet. There was no
apparent motive whatever for his humane act. On the contrary, it had
deprived him of spoil, and reduced the honor of his victory. And so,
all the inclinations to virtue which brought no material and immediate
rewards were regarded as mysterious and inexplicable as the great
hidden power, and by a very natural sequence of reasoning, a part of it.

As your civilization advanced, it was to be seen that the virtues, and
especially those which had a direct influence upon material welfare,
grew and enlarged. The path to honor was no longer exclusively through
carnage and victory, and the possession and cultivation of certain
virtues brought consideration and respect. It was at this critical
stage of your progress that there was inflicted upon you an evil
greater than any your people have known. You were not content with
viewing the deity as we do from afar, and with accepting the impulses
of virtue as a part of yourselves, instituted for the wise purpose of a
continuous self-development toward a better earthly life; but instead,
in your unreasonable yearning to communicate with the supreme Author,
you surrendered yourself to the wiles of the seers, and became the
willing dupes of their delusions.

There is nothing more unhappy to tell of you than the consequences
of this grave error. Your assumed possession of the commands and
wishes of the Deity in the shape of a revelation, has proved more a
misfortune than a blessing to you. In the first place, it has lowered
your conception of the Deity below ours. It has turned your religion
into a contest. It has rendered possible the establishment of certain
ecclesiastical bodies among you, who, while assuming entire control
of the morals of your people, are beset in their internal parts with
all the vices which come from cruelty, cupidity, and love of power.
Besides, your formulated conditions of punishments and rewards have
degraded religion from a cultivation of virtue for itself, and the
immediate good it brings, to a selfish scramble, each one struggling to
shoulder his way into the midst of celestial delights.

It can be easily understood why your religion, with all its crudities
and superstitions, has taken so firm a hold upon your society. You are
constituted as we are, with the same inherent elements of progress.
The steady increase of your affinity for the virtues, and those who
practice them, is a marked quality of your career, and as they all
lead, in one way or another, towards that union of interests which
constitutes the perfect social state, you are thereby impelled by a
natural and providential desire to build them up. So that, as a matter
of fact, there being an inherent love of goodness ingrafted in your
very natures, your religious creeds have attracted you to them, and
held you in fetters, under the false theory that the good within you is
but a contribution from their exclusive and abundant sources of supply.

It has been your misfortune to be held captive throughout your progress
by the shrewd designs of your seers and prophets, who have not failed
until recently to supply you with an occasional change of supernatural
pabulum, to meet the new wants of a steadily advancing development.

When at a certain stage of your civilization, about two thousand years
ago, you had attained a point of intellectual culture among the few,
the fruits of which have been reflected upon you to this day, in some
of the grandest recorded achievements of human thought, and while
the masses were left to take their undirected way among the empty
superstitions which conceded nothing to the growing human sympathy, a
seer appeared among you, who served rather as a suggestion than as an
immediate success. After the lapse of sufficient time from his death to
allow full scope for romance, there was built up out of his memory by
your seers a picture of all the virtues which had been growing within
your hearts, so entirely adapted to the new age that all the pent-up
forces of human sympathy within its scope and influence surrendered to
it. But what might have been a triumph and a boon to you in the new
impetus to a better and broader humanity, unfortunately held concealed
within itself the subtle machinery of your seers and prophets, and
was guarded by their evil eyes, so that with this tremendous lever
to move you in the direction of their purposes, instead of advancing
you, they have turned your civilization back upon itself more than a
thousand years. No historical fact is more capable of demonstration
than this. None has been more persistently and ingeniously denied, and
no natural sequence ever followed more directly a moving cause. From
a free and independent exercise of the intellectual activities in the
direction of science, art, philosophy, and all knowledge pertaining to
yourselves, the Earth upon which you dwell, and the universe, so far
as your vision extends, the whole current of your thoughts was turned
by the new doctrines toward a paradise, compared with which all things
of the Earth were trifles. When you were brought by the fascination
of these promises, and the unflagging efforts an interested body of
ecclesiastics, to a general belief in these doctrines, you sank into an
intellectual torpor, from which you only emerged by a protest of your
reason not yet wholly suppressed.

You cannot fail to see the utterly dehumanizing tendency of the
influences which surrounded you for so many centuries. The common aims
and purposes of your lives were submerged by the one engrossing wish
to reach heaven; and while your imagination was carried away by its
picture, you were led, without hesitation, to place your feet upon the
neck of any earthly enterprise that seemed to stand in its way.

From the beginning of your history you have accepted one object of
worship after another, each an ideal impersonation of the goodness
which was inseparately a part of yourselves, and which was given to you
for the wise purpose of making your society possible, and to perfect
it; just as the parental instinct was bestowed upon you to protect your
infants. All these subjects of adoration have perfectly reflected your
intellectual condition, and have been discarded, one after another, as
they outlived their uses; until you are just now beginning to realize,
that for all these many centuries you have been virtually worshipping
yourselves. Your present ideal will, in time, share the fate of those
which preceded it, and in the absence of a prevailing superstition,
your seers luckily cannot build up for you another one. Your long
period devoted to the pursuit of phantoms is rapidly passing away, and
your new age of rationalism is approaching. You have no just conception
of the evils it will remove, and the glories it has in store for you.

The difference between your present and future religion can be easily
outlined. Your present religion, from a long course of erroneous
teaching, is intense, aggressive and hysterical. It feeds and fattens
itself upon the miseries of life, which it does not undertake to
remove, except in a meretricious way for effect. Your religion of the
future will be tranquil and voluntary, and its chief mission will be
to permanently reduce the evils and misfortunes of life to a minimum.
The impulses of your present religion are entirely apart from the
moral sense, a significant fact easily substantiated by a glance over
the every-day life of your people. Except in their observance of
religious forms, your devout are not distinguished from your profane.
The practical virtues are no greater among believers than among
unbelievers. Your coming religion will be founded upon the moral
sense, and will be inseparable from it. It will support no doctrine
of a ready and convenient atonement for bad acts, as the present one
does. It will teach you that there can be no complete reparation of an
evil deed except in its undoing, and that such an act, once performed,
spreads its dire consequences in accordance with its enormity over a
part or the whole career of the doer. It will not undertake to unburden
the conscience of a crime, nor to give assurance of celestial bliss
to the most heinous of offenders, upon the trifling and fallacious
compliance with religious forms.

Your peculiar religious beliefs have so shaped and moulded your
character that we have observed, what you are not likely to see of
yourselves, certain traits or inclinations which are not promising as
factors in your ultimate regeneration. Your churches, with the shrewd
purpose of rendering their services invaluable, have given you to
believe that your natural tendencies are evil, and that the unavoidable
misfortunes and sorrows of your lives are but penalties for your many
misdeeds. The general acceptance of this belief has lowered your
pride, and given you, to some extent, that character of dejection and
submissiveness which is entirely subversive to the attainment of any
destiny to be reached by yourselves.

There is a quality of mind which we acknowledge as, above all others,
the one which has assisted us to our present very desirable social
condition, and that is the feeling to resist the perpetration of a mean
or bad act, on account of the sense of degradation it inflicts upon
the feelings of the doer. This motive of conscience, so plainly the
offspring of self-esteem, and growing out of a cultivation of the mind
alone, without any regard whatever to creed influences or teachings, is
totally ignored, either as a promoter of virtue or preventive of vice,
by all the religions that have existed upon your planet. The reason
for this is easily explained. Under the knowledge that a cultivation
of the mind and conscience, without creed influence, was capable of
doing for you a better service in the advancement of your morals than
your churches have performed, it has been made a part of their doctrine
to belittle and abuse your purely intellectual faculties, under the
unwarranted and unreasonable imputation that the free exercise of your
reason was an assumption beyond your right. And all this, too, in face
of the overwhelming evidence about you, that the most corroding and
dangerous of your vices germinate and seed themselves only in places
where the mind lies in fallow.

There comes to us from our remote ages, through tradition and history,
an account of some superstitious beliefs, but it has been our good
fortune never to have had them built up into a system so overbearing
and harmful as yours has been. It cannot be said of us that we ever
denounced honest intellectual efforts in any direction, or that we ever
regarded the expression of opinions founded on the dictates of reason
as crimes, and your punishment of such, with all its atrocious and
heart-rending details, serves as a lesson for the whole universe of
worlds never to put trust in the smooth tongues and insinuating ways
of the seers, for the spirit of fairness and truth is not in them.
Your restrictions and punishments of the free expression of thought,
inaugurated by the corporate organization of your present religion,
and maintained with more or less rigor to the present, has left its
blighting effects upon your society by encouraging some of the meanest
of your vices. The assumption that one of you shall not have the right
to convey to another his opposing convictions upon any religious
question is so outrageously unjust, that it never could have been
carried out in any other way than by the general belief that it was in
accordance with the wishes and purposes of the Almighty. Such a denial
of the natural right of mankind could only be enforced when a majority
of the multitude became converts to the doctrines which favored it.
The leaders of religious persecution, during the centuries of church
control, were merely carrying out the wishes of this majority. The
spirit of intolerance, once abroad, became the parent of those habits
of concealed thought, moral cowardice and hypocricy, which even to the
present, so rule among you, that sincerity in expressing religious
belief is not universal. In deference to the lingering opinion among a
large body of your people that a dissension from old modes of religious
thought is displeasing to the Almighty, and dangerous to society, many
of you are constantly led to veil their thoughts on these questions,
in dread of the social consequences which would follow their frank
avowal. Many of skeptical tendencies are thus induced to hide their
convictions in fear of disturbing their safe and comfortable positions
in society. By silently working the penalty of withholding their
political and social support, your great illogical multitude backed by
their vigilant church organizations still maintain a terrorism over
you. Consequently, your writers are guarded in their lines, your public
speakers in their language, your teachers in their instruction, and
your statesmen in their legislation, that each shall not get beyond
the soundings of orthodox religious belief, while with the knowledge
of your time, most of them are conscious in their inner thoughts that
they are trimming to avoid truth, in the full knowledge, that to this
day upon the earth, the surest human preferment is only for those who
support error in this direction.

The most lamentable instances to be found among you of this evasion are
your chief institutions of learning. Of all places these should be the
first to lead in truth, as they are best provided in all the equipments
to find it; yet under the prevailing terrorism their predicament
is embarrassing and pitiful. While holding class instructions in
evolution, geology, astronomy and kindred sciences, they hesitate to
openly deny those scriptural fallacies to which their knowledge is
opposed, and the farcical spectacle is daily enacted among many of them
of a ceremonious reverence for these fallacies, and at all times an
artful evasion of any denial of their truth, every one of which it is
their especial business to disprove in the course of instruction.

I hope you will not infer from what I have said that the people of Mars
have not great reverence and veneration for the Deity. Indeed, it is
the universal belief amongst us, that the animus which is within us to
do good to ourselves, and to make pleasant the ways of life among each
other, is but the prompting of that divine presence which is leading
us aright in the direction of the still better things to come. As we
see in all living things a constant development upward toward a state
of perfection, and having, of all creatures else, that within us most
susceptible and easy of advancement in the universal march, we simply
take our place in the line. What we have accomplished in that direction
in our government, society, and morals, gives us new heart to further
efforts, and if our methods may be of any service to you, I will give
you some further account of them.




CHAPTER V.


The people of Mars are impressed with the belief that the governments
of the Earth have made no great advance in the benefits and usefulness
of their legislation during the last two thousand years. We recognize
amongst you, only as movements of progress, some provision,
particularly in your own country, for the free education of the people,
a few sanitary attentions, and a slight awakening to the interests of
your laboring class, as about all worth mentioning. It is true that
your governments, after originating themselves with only the simplest
duties, have come in time, as your civilization advanced, to take on
increased and complicated services. But in the multiplication of their
duties, there is unfortunately little to be seen but an extension,
in various directions, of their first purposes; which may be briefly
stated as a defence of assault from without, and a protection of
person and property within. We have come to regard the obligations
of government as something beyond these, and this difference of view
affords a marked instance of our development and advance.

Our idea of life is, that since it is all we are given to know from
the first to the last stages of our consciousness, it is our duty and
privilege to improve it, and enjoy it to the fullest innocent and
rational extent; and that to this end there can be no separation of the
moral and material interests; for it is but an honest acknowledgment
to say, that constituted as we all are, the crown of contentment and
happiness is only for him who successfully cultivates both. Under this
belief, the general supervision of both moral and material affairs is
placed in the hands of our government. Church and State are therefore
one with us, and it is entirely due to the rationalistic character of
our religion that the alliance has proved so conducive to our progress
and happiness. There can be no such peaceable and continuous union with
you at present, because from the nature of your religious doctrines
there must be a conflict of authority; but you will come to it in time,
as out of it, more than all else,--as I will endeavor to show,--will
come the fullness of your destiny.

Your efforts for the suppression of vice and crime, since the first
stages of your history, are futile to a degree that must be appalling
to you, and the cause of your failure is due to conditions plainly
apparent to us. These conditions are that your governments, for all
these centuries, have taken no official cognizance of virtue, and
have failed to see that there existed in their patronage of good
deeds that tangible reward which would place all ambition for honor
and prominence among them on uncompromising terms with evil. You have
only attempted to suppress crime by punishment, while the powerful
stimulus to virtue which your governments afford of precept and example
have been neglected. Although, in your undeveloped state of greed and
selfishness, you find it unsafe to trust your material interests in
the hands of irresponsible bodies which you call monopolies, yet you
bestow the whole keeping and guidance of your morals upon societies
and organizations of you fellow men, who are even less responsible to
authority than they. Under this state of things, how can you expect
anything better than your present chaotic state of religion, and the
loose, unguided, unrewarded, and wholly spontaneous morality of your
people.

Our government, in the furtherance of its religious duties, has for
centuries made a special recognition of the virtues, and particularly
those which bestow good upon others, and it is only by the practice of
such that public honors are achieved. One of the happiest consequences
of this has been, to elevate only the most exemplary of our people
to the head of public affairs, and from this comes a confidence and
regard between our representatives and people, which you can scarcely
appreciate after your experience. Goodness therefore, as we understand
it, is the only path to honor, and the necessary high character of all
holders of public trust reflects a distinction greater that those of
any other positions in life. This in turn, as you may readily perceive,
induces a spirit of emulation to reach such elevated places, beyond all
considerations of emolument.

As a part of our moral system, we hold the education of our people to
be an indispensable and necessary adjunct. In that we go a great deal
further than what appear to us your narrow and mercenary views. In a
representative government like your own, you have been constrained
to adopt a system of free education, for the purpose of securing the
safety and permanence of your institutions; and with no other motive
even, it is surprising that you will be divided in opinion touching
the extent to which learning may be profitably imparted for this
end alone; because, to us it seems that when you have conveyed to
your youth no more than the elementary branches of learning, you have
provided but little else than a convenience to them in the business
affairs of life. It is only when the higher branches are acquired
that the government receives an equivalent for its outlay, in the
well-disciplined and safe citizen returned to it.

We have, however, motives beyond all this in the education of our
masses, and chief among them is the purpose to furnish knowledge to
the minds of all, out of which good may be naturally evolved; and
thus you will see at once how learning has become the chief part of
our religion. You are slow to acknowledge the great value of your
purely secular education as a moral agent, because of its disturbance
recently with your cherished traditions; but this reason, great as it
is, is supplemented with another one, which fully accounts for the
earnest opposition of your ecclesiastics. So long as the learning
of your schools was mixed up with creed influence and teachings, it
was virtually a part of the church, and in harmony with it, but on a
separation of the two, they became enemies by a well known social law;
your churches with their avowed purpose of improving your morals,
and your secular schools, while in the performance of their duties,
occupying the same competing field.

You may easily imagine that, with the religious impulse added, we have
carried our education a good deal further than you. We consider the
proposition unjust, that learning should only be bestowed in accordance
with the occupation or station in life. Your planet has always been
beset with the evil of social classes, which only increases with the
advance of your civilization. You can never rid yourselves of this
fruitful source of disturbance except by our method, which, as a matter
of public policy, pushes the education of every individual to the
point of his capacity. In this way we have completely obliterated the
class interests and feelings. We have been enabled to do this under
conditions which you do not at present possess. Instead of the military
or martial spirit which prevails with you, and which is cultivated for
purposes which appear to us unworthy of your age, we have generated
among ourselves an ambition in the ways of knowledge which takes its
place.

We have leaders and heroes as you have, but not one who has not gained
his honors by some act in furtherance of the material, intellectual,
or moral progress of his race. The memories of your greatest men are
more honored by us than by yourselves. Men go down to their graves
yearly among you whose achievements are the admiration and talk of our
whole people. He of you who discovered the theory of planetary motion,
he who found the law of gravitation, and he also who ascertained the
principle of evolution in organic life, are scarcely known upon the
Earth, except among the cultivated few; while the whole world of Mars
is impressed with the services they have bestowed, and discuss the
great and everlasting effects of their work.

We have found much in the path of science that would astonish you, and
at each discovery the achievement was applauded and echoed from one
side of our planet to the other. At each one of these advances we feel
ourselves getting nearer to the Deity. A triumph of science with us is
a triumph of religion, and while we go on strengthening ourselves, and
taking new heart at each step in the direction of knowledge, a like
progress with you only brings the superstitious framework upon which
your religion is built into decay.

Our religious devotion is essentially buoyant, even joyous. The
sorrows of life which are not the direct and indirect results of
indiscretions, and violations of natural laws, we regard as an
inheritance and not a punishment, and we endeavor in all conceivable
ways to lighten them and make them easier to bear. For those in
sickness among us, the hand of love and sympathy is never absent; and
among the firm and undisturbed convictions of philosophic thought,
death is only a regret and never a terror. Your creeds administer to
the final end in all ways to a point of agony; they have ingeniously
devised a theory of horrors for it, out of which has been made to come
their chief sustenance and support. The path of life which they declare
as the only one leading into the promised eternity of bliss, is the
tortuous and difficult footway winding like a maze among the shadows of
their churches.

Although attentively guided throughout in this prescribed journey
of life by your ecclesiastical teachers, and your entrance and exit
made difficult without their help, yet, by the very nature of their
doctrines, they could only bestow upon you at the last scene of
all a torturing doubt. We have promoted the serenity of death by
removing as far as possible its sorrow. With us, the individual in
his last moments is not overcome with any sympathetic dread of that
approaching suffering for the wants of life among dependents, which
so often couples the agony of separation with an overwhelming sense
of despair, as your society is constituted. The end comes placidly to
us, in the belief that as we came from the Deity, so in the last we
go back to Him; that the life beyond must be a higher life, because
the moral sense grows constantly within us; and that the region ahead
of us must be a free, open, and hospitable one, with no agonizing
barriers separating families and friends, because, in the growth of
our tenderness and attachment to each other, we can safely predict the
evolution of a better and happier state.

Prayer, in the sense that it is understood and performed by you, we
regard as mere superstition. It is an outcome of your lowest stages
of mental evolution. It is the spirit of that willing self-abasement
and fear, which prostrates the savage before his idol, soliciting
aid in his works of carnage, or immunity from some violated law of
nature, or safety from some convulsion of the air, land or sea. Carried
forward into your civilization, it has become no less unreasonable.
For thousands of years you have been daily calling on the Deity for
favors, not one of which has been granted, except seemingly by a
coincidence. The most conclusive tests have failed to convince the
devout among you of the fallacy of prayer, because, as an institution
of your churches, under their theory of atonement, it furnishes a ready
escape to the conscience; and for the reason also that it affords to
the imagination, in its striking and novel situations of converse with
the author of worlds, a semblance of that pleasure which the lowly feel
for concessions from the great.

It is quite in keeping with your conceptions of the Deity that you
should grovel and debase yourselves before Him. The whole tenor
of your religious thought has been made to take on this color of
self-degradation, which, while serving to throw you more completely
into the hands of your theological superiors, is not warranted by any
possible relations with the being you address. You represent upon the
Earth, as we do on our planet, the very highest form of life. We both
are the triumphant outcome of a process established by the great Author
infinite ages ago. On us only, among all beings, has He bestowed the
wonderful attributes of thought and reason, which make us a part of
Himself. We are the only inheritors, by his own beneficial act, of the
power to discover and enjoy his beautiful methods of work, and those
magical transformations of mind and matter which convert, out of the
dead ashes of the past, the blooming present, with its assuring hope of
a fruition to come.

What hint have we, therefore, in all his works, that He has created us
otherwise than as a labor of love, and as the fullest expression of an
evolutionary skill, which marks all things about us? By what authority,
then, are you called to bow yourselves in constant self-abasement
before your great Father, who, with parental solicitude, has thrown
open the whole Earth for your household, has given you the power of
domination over all creatures upon it, and has taught you to make
playthings of the very elements which surround you? By what authority,
except the unworthy example of your own barbarian instincts, which
demand for place and power a homage, whose degree of prostration marks,
with a singular exactness, your career all along, from the savage ruler
to the cultivated monarch?

Outside of the fact that your continuous mendicancy has accomplished
nothing for you, you have an abundance of negative evidence to hint
that your incessant supplication, instead of bringing to you favors
from the Deity, has shadowed upon you in an unmistakable manner the
signs of his displeasure. For as he has raised you gradually out of
the lower forms, and enlarged your capacities, until in the last he
has taken you into his confidence so far as to teach you the methods
of his work, and to deliver up to you the hitherto pent-up forces for
your convenience and use, yet in the progress of these concessions it
is to be noted as a significant fact, that your prayers have served
rather to obstruct than to promote them. Indeed, as there is nothing
so conclusively the evidence of divine presence and help as material
and intellectual progress, it will be difficult to show, in the record
of terrestrial things, that the supremacy of prayer has not invariably
been followed by a temporary withdrawal of this divine assistance and
support.




CHAPTER VI.


Our veneration for the Deity, which is truer and more sincere than
yours, arises from a widely different conception. Looking back upon
the ages, and what they have brought to us, we perceive that each new
development in matter brings an increase of those qualities which give
us pleasure to behold. Beginning with the most unattractive shapes,
this process of change in organization and symmetry, by an unalterable
law of the Creator, bring to us out of the ugliness of the past the
beautiful of the present. Since, therefore, we see Him constantly
at work, transforming the ugly into the beautiful, we believe He is
pleased with the colors, shapes, and qualities of things which delight
our own cultivated senses. Acting then on this conviction, we surround
ourselves with the beautiful in nature and art.

The change, in the form of matter, is not more instructive than
the steady modification of intelligence, which, from its primitive
ignorance, superstition, and brutality, has gradually been raised
step by step to its present higher grade of thought and action. We
recognize here a fact most important and significant to us. While the
divine energy is steadily at work, converting lower forms of matter
into higher ones, we are given no part in the proceeding. It goes on
without our assistance, and we have no power to diminish or accelerate
its steady onward course. It is widely different with intelligence.
That is given into our hands, with all its grand possibilities.
In that, we have evidence of the divine confidence to promote its
advancement in view of the blessings it holds in store. Taking this
view, we have for centuries cultivated the mind in all directions of
knowledge and feeling, as the chief part of our religion. The motion of
the spheres is not more certainly the work of this great being, than
are these progressive changes in mind and matter.

We believe vice and ugliness to be convertible terms, the latter a
quality due to imperfectly developed matter, and the first a property
of intelligence in the same imperfect state; just as beauty and virtue
describe together, or separately, the same advanced evolution.

But while working in harmony with the Deity, and assisting in his
purposes, we have constantly in view, as an incentive to action, the
consummation or goal to which all these changes tend. We believe the
outcome to be a spiritual life with all things knowable, and a state
of perfection and happiness beyond our present conception. Happiness,
then, being a religious aspiration, we promote it in all ways to the
innocent and reasonable inclinations of our present state.

Our religion is consequently more jubilant than solemn. We have no
torments in store in it, nor long drawn agonies and mortifications of
the flesh. Its only business with death is to smooth its pillow, and to
reduce its attendant sorrows to the minimum. To the misfortunes of the
present our religion extends its hand of sympathy and material help.
To what purpose should it introduce and dwell upon the miseries and
sorrows of the past? We let the dead ages rest. We can find nothing
in their ashes to compare with the living. The present is better than
the past, as the future will be better in exact measure with the new
truths discovered, and the old fallacies cast aside. You rake among
the emanations of an early and imperfect development for monitors and
guides, and do honor to them for the mysteries they invoke. You place
the withered hand of the mummy into the warm palm of the living, and
your ceremony of introduction is a prayer that the living body may
never depart from the dead form.

The untenable and unsupportable premises upon which your religions are
based will lead to their decay. Nothing of them will remain to you but
their spirituality. Shorn of their superstitions, and guided by the
intellect, the spiritual part of them will be retained by you as a
jewel repolished and in a new setting.

The orthodox among you are suspicious of the inroads of science,
unaware of the fact that in due time it will fix upon your belief the
conviction of a future spiritual existence without the shadow of a
doubt. When you will have arrived at that point, your ways of morality
and progress will be so much increased, that you will regard your
previous advancement as trifling. To some, your science appears to
lend encouragement to materialistic beliefs. This is only your half
knowledge. For some time to come your discoveries will tend in that
direction of thought, but all this will be superseded with a firm
conviction of the existence of the Deity, and your steady approach to
Him. The period of danger to you will arrive when you will have made
the discovery, as we have centuries ago, of what may be described in
your language as the universal diffusion of intelligence amongst all
matter, inorganic as well as organic.

It may be a startling proposition to announce to you that the quality
which gives you the power of abstract thought is possessed in a lower
degree by, for instance, the stones which lie beneath your feet; yet
such is the case, for we have demonstrated beyond a doubt that the
chemical forces and affinities are nothing else but low, restricted,
and insensible forms of intelligent action. The fact is best shown by
the building up of organic bodies in their multiplication of cells.
Each cell arranges itself in place, and makes way to its successor,
under an inherited impulse of action from which it is unable to
depart. What are known among you as natural forces, are merely forms
of unconscious and restricted intelligences, which have only the power
to act in limited directions. They both build up matter and tear it
down for us. They shape the crystal with mathematical uniformity, and
mark out the form of the plant with unerring precision. The character
of the agency bears no proportion to the magnitude of its work. These
low, unconscious forms of intelligence, which inspire the plant cell to
build up its fanciful elevations, and the infinitesimal atom to seek
after and embrace its affinity, are precisely the same as that which
directs the sea of worlds upon their swift and unvarying paths. And yet
with all their exactitude and infinity of scope, they are as much below
that independent, self-conscious intelligence which guides our thoughts
and actions, as the protoplasm is beneath the most highly organized and
perfect form.

Your theology has degraded you with the belief that you are mendicants,
enjoying the favors of life as mere concessions from an all-powerful
and exacting master; and that your position in the cosmos bears a
close relation to the insignificance of your material bodies, and
your feeble power in the stupendous energies which surround you. Your
science will elevate you with the knowledge that you are peers in the
great universe, and that your stature has no comparative measure for
its proportions in the height and breadth of your material world. It
will teach you that by slow degrees, and through millions of ages, you
have become that elimination of the spiritual out of the vast number
of divided intelligences which have built up and governed your natural
world; that you are the harvest and the fruition of the innumerable
lower intelligences, which were sown broadcast in the beginning to do
their potent work.

In pursuing these matters, your scientists will arrive at a number
of important truths, entirely in opposition to some of your present
apparently established theories. In your speculations touching the
future state, there is a tendency which I cannot designate by any other
name in your language than narrowness. You have come so recently to
realize the immense sizes and distances of the heavenly bodies, that
their comparison with your former constricted views in that direction
has produced a sense of helplessness in the attempt to fathom these
infinite spaces. But ages of contemplation will serve to broaden your
views, as well as to expand your hopes. Encompassing or beside this
broad universe we have evidence of a spiritual region, like the firm
land bordering upon your own great ocean, which great body of water to
the lower animal life within it is just as limitless and profound as
the great cosmos is to yourselves.

You have but recently discovered a process of nature, by whose slow
changes, animal life has been altered, and its species modified and
improved. You know that the atmosphere, which encircled your Earth
at the beginning, was not of a composition to support its present
highly organized respiring life, and that consequently, behind the
ages the only living and moving things upon your planet were the scant
air-consuming creatures, who inhabited the water. Among the dark and
cavernous depths of your oceans, and the slimy ooze of your rivers
and lakes, were located the cradles, where nature began moulding the
present graceful living and moving forms which now roam over your
solid surface. The Creator’s delicate laboratory, for the beginning
of animal life, was placed among the equable temperatures, and soft
walls of water below the variable and desiccating atmosphere, which
everywhere surmounted it. Yourselves, as well as all other living and
breathing creatures, had your foundations of life laid in the waters
of the earth, a fact, of whose significant reminder is, that nature
has continuously provided for the protective presence of water in your
embryo womb growth.

In your germal life, the universe seemed to you nothing but a vast and
unlimited expanse of water. The submerged earth upon which you lay and
rested, with its murky surroundings, and the expanse of sunless liquid
clouds above you, was the only world and universe you knew. By what
authority of reason or science then do you conclude, that the stage of
evolution, which brought you out into the glorious sunshine and free
air, and adapted you with the form and comprehension you possess, is
the end? From the cold, sluggish, and unconscious, to the warm, alert,
and intellectual, is no greater a step of progress, than the coming
one, which will make clear to your understanding the mysteries of life
and nature, so unknowable and unthinkable in your present immaturity.
Out of your next stage of spiritual supremacy, you will look back upon
the present, with all its conditions, so condemned by the contrast
of better things attained, that it will be but little more to you
than is now the repulsive uncanny, and incommunicable habitat of your
beginning.




CHAPTER VII.


The confidential relations between our government and people have given
it a parental character. It has consequently been the study of our
legislation for ages past to assuage, as far as possible, those natural
evils which creep in as the result of unrestricted social forces.
Regarding the whole mass of our inhabitants as a family, the government
could never feel that its duty was faithfully performed, while a number
of its people were, relating to the ordinary enjoyments of life,
in a state of suppression from any removable cause. You began your
civilization, just as we began ours, by the crystallization of society
into two classes. Those who at first, by thrift, acquisitiveness, or
strong arms, became possessed of sufficient property to escape the
necessity of daily toil for the sustenance of life; and those who, by
the absence of these qualities or from other causes, were obliged from
day to day to exercise their muscular and nervous energies for the
benefit of those who found it profitable to use and pay for them. This
condition of society is a natural and just one, and there is nothing
whatever in it to prevent the largest possible amount of happiness
to all. But before many ages we discovered that the interests of
the property class and the labor class were not equally equipped to
maintain a fair and equitable relation with each other. We found that
the interests of labor in the many bore no comparison in its political
weight with the great power of wealth in the few; and foreseeing that
subjugation in time, of one by the other, which your experience has
shown, we made wide provision against it.

We acknowledge as the foundation of all material progress that the
honest accumulation of wealth should be the privilege of all; and that
the rights of property should be protected, and the enjoyment of it
secured to everyone. Yet with these principles firmly and successfully
carried out in our government, we have for many centuries, considered
it necessary to support and sustain the interests of the labor
class by special legislative attention. You have pursued a directly
opposite course. From the beginning of your history the privilege of
wealth to hold labor in subjection, and to use it as an instrument of
accumulation, with about the same regard for its well being as the
horse in the collar or the ox under its yoke, has prevailed, without
the enactment of any sincere and effective law to assist and sustain
it in its unequal contest. On the contrary, your statute books are
filled with oppressive laws against the labor class; and while in your
most civilized districts these unjust enactments are nearly obsolete,
there yet remains an average over your planet of such legal and social
suppressions of the class whose strong arm supports you, as to be
reckoned by us as the most unhappy and discreditable feature of your
social state.

It matters not how your economists may examine and discuss the
relations of labor with its co-operative interests, so long as they
offer no proposals of relief to it in the unjust burthen it bears of
the hardships of life. Your common view that labor must be unavoidably
submitted to the law of supply and demand, and that, consequently,
eighty per cent of your people are to be helplessly left to take
their chances of distress and suffering at each unfavorable turn of
the labor market, is peculiar to the planet upon which you live, and
is one of the most mistaken and unwise conclusions among you. This
heartless notion of yours is plainly the inheritance of your early
cruel ages. With such a state of things you can never have a very
high state of civilization. With so many of you constantly under the
vicissitude of such adverse changes of condition, there can be no
steady progress of the whole, and but little encouragement to thrift; a
lack of ambition must prevail in all the higher purposes of life, and
a general surrender to improvidence and the vices which follow. For
that class which has created your wealth, and is constantly renewing
it, and which constitutes so large a portion of your whole population,
you can show nothing of legislative effort in its favor except
indirectly, through some of the purposes to smooth the way and increase
the profits of capital. The opportunities of your comparatively small
capitalistic class to use for its purposes, in an entirely heartless
way, the larger body of wealth producers, have been made easy by
natural conditions which would have been removed or corrected long
ago, under a more humane and unselfish administration of your affairs,
and if your governments had not been exclusively in the hands of the
smaller class mentioned. We know of nothing more heartless and cruel
of the governing classes of the Earth, than their careless submission
of its wage-earners to the unrestricted influence of competition for
employment, under the compromising condition of a necessity for bread.

In our philosophy we recognize only two honest ways of accumulating
wealth. One is the saving of wages, and the other the profits of
capital; and our legislation has been chiefly directed to make the
chances of wealth by these two methods as even as possible. To perform
this service effectually, our greatest efforts have been directed
toward the labor interest. We feel ourselves justified in this, because
the welfare of about seven-eighths of our people is connected with this
interest; because to the labor class is entirely due the creation and
constant renewal of all the wealth on our planet. Because, also, that
capital has natural advantages over labor, which are first, its choice
of time and place for investment; second, its capacity to wait for
opportunities without the risk of physical suffering by its owners, and
the leisure for thought and knowledge it affords to those who control
it. Also, that capital, holding the position of a voluntary employer,
naturally assumes the rights and privileges of master, which labor, in
its constrained and dependent situation, is obliged to acknowledge.

We have long since considered these unequal relations and tendencies,
and have proceeded to remedy them. Our legislation in behalf of the
labor classes is the happiest and most satisfactory of any that we
have. Without it our present civilization would be impossible. Before
describing our methods, let me direct your attention to the immediate
and indirect causes which bear down upon the labor classes of your
planet.

Prominent among these is the promiscuous ownership of land. The
surrendering of the Earth’s surface to the control of individual
ownership is one of the most serious mistakes of your civilization.
It is not to be mentioned alone as the greatest objection to this,
that the planet upon which you were born is the natural inheritance of
all of you, from whose surface each and every one of you is destined
to derive a sustenance, and that a monopoly of it by the few is as
plain a violation of justice as it would be to hold the atmosphere in
private use by sections, were such a thing possible. But it is chiefly
to be taken into consideration, that your land policy enables the few
to dominate the many, suppresses one class and elevates another, and
insensibly transfers an undue portion of the earnings of labor into the
pockets of your land-holding classes.

Almost every influence now at work in the progress of your society
tends to throw money into the hands of your land holders, not fairly
earned by themselves. While the products of labor are cheapening
from day to day, partly due to increased skill, and the appliance of
machinery in their manufacture, and partly, also, by the competition
of labor, owing to increase of population, yet even by these very
operations the value of landed property goes up.

You already estimate rent as a considerable element of cost in the
production of your food materials, and you are gradually approaching
a period, when by the growth of population the cost of food will be
very much increased by rent charges. You have all along submitted to
this monopoly of land from causes plainly apparent. In the early days
of your history all private ownership of land was acquired and held by
force, and it may be safely asserted that no title at present exists in
any of your older countries that is not founded on violent conquest,
and that has not been maintained by an organized and armed authority,
whose existence depends upon retaining the system of ownership in
vogue. It is plain to see that when the demand of justice to all shall
be the basis of political action, and especially when the cost of your
food supply shall become greatly increased by the charges of rent, your
present system will not be quietly endured.

In your own more favored region of the Earth may be found temporary
conditions which tend not only to tolerate your present land ownership
system, but to render it popular. Your large area of unoccupied
agricultural surface, from which any of your citizens are permitted at
small cost to select a portion with a title in perpetuity, destroys
for the time being the monopolizing character of private ownership;
and while these governmental acts of land distribution are the most
remarkable concessions to labor in human history, we fail to discover
anything in the practice but a temporary compromise between the
interests of capital and labor. As your society progresses you must
arrive at the time when your landless class will be as effectually
excluded from the privilege of ownership as they are at present in the
older countries of the world.

Your own country in the newness of its human possession, by the lavish
distribution of its territory into private hands, has alleviated the
burdens of labor elsewhere, as well as within itself. It has effected
this in two ways: first by withdrawing from the surplus population of
densely inhabited districts abroad, and second by supplying from its
rich agricultural lands a cheaper food supply to the older countries of
the Earth than they were able to furnish from their own soils. But the
most unreasonable among you cannot fail to perceive the speedy limit
to these operations in the interests of labor, which after all must be
considered as merely effecting a truce between that conflict of the
laboring and landless many and the land-holding few which your people
will surely witness in time. We manage these things very differently on
Mars.




CHAPTER VIII.


The planet Mars is held to be the inheritance of those who are born
upon it. Admitting the self evident and uncontrovertible justice of
this view, our government ages ago assumed the ownership and property
control of it in trust for the equal benefit of all. It has proceeded
in accordance with this view to grant its uses for all the purposes of
industry and pleasure, in such a manner as to bestow the income of its
rent equally upon every living inhabitant. I can only give you some
outlines of our admirable manner of accomplishing this purpose.

Our agricultural districts are divided into small farms, even in size,
with graded rents in accordance with the richness of their soils, and
other conditions. Sub-letting is not allowed, and a chief purpose in
making these allotments is, that the family residing upon each farm
will be able to perform all the labor required. This is in accordance
with a principle which our government carries out in all possible ways,
to bring labor and capital into partnership. The cultivator of the
soil goes on with his improvements, in the assurance that they are as
secure to him as though his title were perpetual; for in the event of a
change of tenancy, which is exceedingly rare, a fair value is returned
to him for all the fixed property which is the product of his labor.
It is provided that there shall be no competition in the occupancy,
and as the rent is but a nominal sum, he feels no insecurity in his
possession. Agricultural rents are graded annually, and are payable
shortly after harvest. They may be either higher or lower than those of
the preceding year, depending entirely on profits.

Landlordism, as it exists with you, is unknown amongst us. The rapacity
which under your unjust system is admitted to an ownership in which
no competition can possibly exist, and at the same time is permitted
to avail itself of that unlimited competition which the pressure of
public necessity induces, has neither foothold nor abiding place upon
our planet. Under our system, you will perceive that any increase of
the profits of land is met by the tenant with an increase of rent, and
all those natural causes which advance the value of landed property
add to the government income, and in that way are shared by all. Our
government derives its sole support from rent, and no other tax or
exaction is known. With a percentage of the profits from the use of the
land, which is never burdensome to the tenant, it has been enabled, and
has found it to its interest, to carry out agricultural and municipal
improvements and enterprises which individual ownership would never
undertake. It has drained our marshes, and reclaimed our desert lands
in the most efficient manner, without the necessity of creating, as
with you, an exacting monopoly, which would claim of industry its
lion’s share of profits from the work.

The government interest in our municipal progress, by virtue of its
holdings, has led it to carry out in the most complete manner those
sanitary enterprises which render city life safe and enjoyable. With
its advantages of sole ownership of city land, it is enabled to enforce
certain uniform rules of taste in house and street construction, which
have made our cities as complete and harmonious as single works of art;
their symmetrical combinations of lines and curves as consistently
meeting each other as in a separate architectural elevation.

As I have already hinted to you, a cultivation of the beautiful in
art and nature is a part of our religion, and we indulge in the
gratification of esthetic inclinations as one of the greatest charms
of life. Our government erects no buildings except public ones, and in
their construction and fittings is manifested that universal love of
the grand and beautiful which everywhere prevails. Your imagination is
scarcely able to conceive the magnificence of our temples of worship,
and the charming perspectives of our streets and highways. Yet even
our industrious attention to all this pleasing effect for the eye is
held to be a matter of secondary importance, when compared with the
health-giving measures and regulations which prevail.

From the ground rents alone of every municipality, free and abundant
water, light and heat are supplied to every inhabitant; and from
the same source of income a complete insurance is furnished against
individual loss from accidents, and all our dead are disposed of
without cost to relatives and friends. We place no dead bodies in the
earth as you do, considering such a practice not only barbarous, but
dangerous to the health of the living. On the contrary, we extinguish
them in a manner which you cannot follow from a lack of the required
advance in chemical science. Ever since our discovery of the elementary
unit we have had the power to reduce all matter into its original
state, and it serves us well, that with our chemical appliances and due
solemnity not a vestige of the dead is left to be preserved, except
their memories.

For the purpose of exhibiting to you the marked difference of effect
on labor and industry between private and government ownership of
land, let us trace the institution and progress of one of your cities
in comparison with one of ours. These combinations of individual
enterprise are to be found upon your planet in all stages of growth,
and may be most conveniently observed by you in this vicinity in their
earlier periods of development. They are instituted mostly with you
in a fortuitous way, a few individual interests forming the nucleus
around which capital and labor are attracted, under the outlook of
increased population and trade, to supply and create the various
products of industry demanded. The whole land surface of your new city,
including its prospective limits, is immediately appropriated at a
trifling cost, by a single one or a smaller number of owners, under
laws conveniently designed for their purposes. From this time forward
the most extraordinary exactions from industry begin. Every stroke of
the hammer and revolution of the fly wheel adds to the value of these
possessions, until in a short time there is no limit to the price or
rent of them, but the ability of industry to stand the tax.

During the earlier stage of your city’s growth, conditions exist which
disappear later. Labor is specially favored. The demand for it is as
great as the supply, if not greater, and its savings enable it to get
a share, by small investments, in the steady advance of land values.
Your new city, supposing it to be a metropolis, is invested with all
the elements of prosperity. Capital comes to it abundantly from abroad,
induced by the opportunities of profitable investment, and labor is
equally attracted by high pay. Population increases, together with all
the enterprises of industry, and your land, conveniently divided into
small lots, changes hands from one purchaser to another, each realizing
a satisfactory and handsome profit. The monopolizing influences of
land ownership are not generally felt, because of the large and
unoccupied area of surface, and the facility to all in the acquirement
of titles. Labor enjoys an era of remarkable prosperity outside as well
as within the limits of your city. Your government has donated to it
millions of acres of fertile agricultural lands, whose surface, for
the most part, requires no great outlay of capital to fit it for the
uses of husbandry; and altogether, the general contentment and thrift
indicate that all material interests are equally equipped and uniformly
successful in the struggle of life. Labor goes cheerfully to its daily
toil, and returns to its abundant board with a hope and ambition it has
seldom known before. All human purposes appear in a flourishing state,
except, it may incidentally be observed, that your religion at this
period droops, without its usual attention and support.

You are now, we shall suppose, at the end of the second decade in the
history of your city, and many changes are observable, due to the
progress of your society and civilization. Your metropolis may contain
now about one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants. The market value
of its land surface, about three miles square, has increased, from
the government price at which it was purchased by the single or half
dozen purchasers, from about seven thousand to three hundred and fifty
millions of dollars, and the whole value of the products of industry
upon it may be reasonably estimated at a like sum. With the privileges
and partnership which labor has enjoyed in this great increase of
values, it is so far quiet and satisfied; but unfortunately the
inevitable outcome is not so promising to it. The evil effects of your
private ownership become more and more apparent as your city advances,
and when, under the promptings of human greed and selfishness, your
landlords have fairly commenced their raid upon the industries of
the city. They now exact from you a tax in the form of land rent
alone which consumes yearly the twentieth part of all the products of
industry upon their possessions. This enormous tax is exacted without
the return of any service whatever except the privilege of a dwelling
place.

Your inhabitants are called upon also to provide for the necessities
of government, and an additional tax is levied therefore, which takes
from the profits of labor and capital an amount equal to the tenth part
of all their savings. Because the privilege of becoming a land owner
is equal to all, and is the hope of most of you, you have permitted
the transformation of this gift of nature into a monopoly, the most
arbitrary and consuming that can be conceived.

This gift of nature, however, is not the only one diverted from its
equitable distribution, and permitted to become the material of
unrighteous exaction. The process of the water, heat, and light supply,
so manifestly among the duties of your government to institute and
superintend, is given, like your land, to the management and control
of private individuals; thus converting these indispensable elements
of life and comfort into money getters for wealth, and subtracting to
an unnecessary degree from the profits of industry and the savings of
labor.

We shall now suppose that your city has arrived at the termination
of its fourth decade. Its population has increased two-fold, and its
land value has quadrupled; but it is noticeable that your products
of industry have not kept pace in their value with this enormous
appreciation, and your ground rents alone now consume every ten years
the whole cost of all buildings and their contents. In other words,
every vestige of the accumulated labor of your city goes into the
pockets of its landlords every ten years. Change now becomes apparent
in social life. Competition has now reduced the wages of labor, and
it has very nearly lost its ability to share in some of the minor
operations of capital. The struggles of increasing numbers, precisely
the same influence which has depressed wages, have advanced land.
Labor has lost much of its old buoyancy and hopefulness. While raiment
and food, the products of its own industry, have fallen in price, with
a tendency to make up for its reduced income, every other one of its
living expenses is greatly increased. Allowing it its proper place
with matrimonial ambitions and hopes, the remarkable proportion of
one fourth of its hard-earned wages is demanded of it in land rent
alone, for a dwelling spot in the midst of a region which nothing
else but its own energies have produced from a wilderness. Every
single one of the bounties of nature, except the air and sunshine, are
inaccessible without the charges of an intercepting medium. The heat,
and light-giving materials of the earth, together with water, the most
useful and abundant of all, are served out to it burdened with all the
costs and profits levied by an organized and irresponsible few.

The capital engaged in your industries adjusts itself to all these
burdens, and is quiet under them, because it can readily reimburse
itself by transferring all expenses and costs to prices. There is no
such escape for labor, which not only pays these monopoly exactions
directly, but as a consumer is obliged by an indirect method to foot
a large share of these bills for capital. Capital remains contented
under these extraordinary demands for another reason. All monopoly
enterprises, and especially that one of land, furnish the safest and
most profitable reservoirs of investment for its surplus earnings, and
when it does not already participate it looks forward to a partnership
in their profits.

You can readily understand, then, why the toilers of your city, at
this period of its history, should show signs of sinking back into
that dependent condition which characterizes them elsewhere upon your
planet. A few among them, with great fortitude of restraint and large
acquisitiveness, manage to lay by some of their earnings, but the
margin between income and expense is so narrow that such a practice
is not general. So that from the disabling vicissitudes of life,
and a carelessness of habit induced by lack of ambition, comes that
distressful state of existence, unknown on our planet, but common
enough on yours, where a human being, with abundant stores of food
and raiment surrounding him, suffers for enough of them to supply his
moderate wants. Poverty, which before had been only exceptional and
sporadic, assumes now the proportions of a numerous class among you,
and out of which, by a lack of the opportunities of knowledge, crime
as naturally appears as weeds in a neglected husbandry.

Another and significant change now becomes apparent in your social
state. During the first stages of your city’s existence, there had
been no money invested except as capital. Every dollar laid out in
that way had been shared by labor. Any increase in the volume of
capital brings a corresponding prosperity to those who toil; but the
accumulations from the profits of capital have not generally been
added to it, and in many cases the capital itself has been led away
into the many profitable monopoly enterprises which abound. These now
flourish as they never did before. Increase of population and trade
has stimulated the various industries to increased supplies, but the
prices of all commodities instead of being raised are lowered. The
free and open competition within the precincts of capital and labor
has effected this; not greatly to the detriment of either, because the
producer in one department of industry is a consumer in many of the
others, and capital has increased its volume of business to make up for
smaller profits. But you have within the borders of your city those
money-making contrivances peculiar to your planet, wherein the natural
effect of competition is entirely reversed, and where the universal
law of supply and demand is completely abrogated. The worst and most
disastrous of these is your system of land ownership.

Into this, and the other of your monopolies, capital pours its
surplus, and finally retires to them with its accumulations, deserting
its partnership with labor, and appearing on the scene in the new
form of wealth. From a few instances, so rare as to be conspicuous,
your holders of large money accumulations become now a numerous and
influential class. While your society at one end has been sinking into
poverty, it blooms at the other with signs of unusual thrift. With an
increase of luxury on one hand, and of want on the other, your city
is now approaching the normal state. A few decades more it will have
established within itself those relations between wealth, capital,
and labor which are as inevitably the outcome of your land ownership
system, as drouth and famine are the outcome of a lack of moisture in
the soil.

We shall say now that your city contains a half million of inhabitants.
Its surface is not extended in proportion with its increase in
population, the cost of space inducing a greater crowding of houses
and people. Your labor products, and the land upon which they rest,
have been so constantly receding from each other in values, that now,
with all the forced economy of space, your piles of goods, merchandise,
and houses, if sold at their market value, would not furnish more than
a quarter enough of money to purchase the ground beneath them. This
enormous increase in the value of your city land is mostly the result
of the opportunities its owners enjoy to prey upon the industries, and
at this stage the following very remarkable conditions may be observed:
While the city’s capital, properly so called, is about three hundred
millions of dollars, and the number of its workers in industrial
pursuits about one hundred thousand, the aggregate earnings of both
labor and capital combined have one quarter of the whole swept away
by the demands of your landlords, estimating ground rent alone. And
this enormous exaction, remember, is imposed without rendering any
service in return. None of your economists will deny that this large
drain does not come directly from the industries of your people, and
its exhausting effects are daily seen in the gradually hardening lines
in the lives of those who toil. In an early period, twenty persons in
every hundred of your workers owned a portion of your city’s surface.
Now only four per cent are land owners, and within a few decades not
more than five in a thousand will dwell or pursue their avocations
without the virtual consent of some superintending ground owner, upon
whose mercy in abstaining from ejectment or extortion they will remain
in constant uncertainty.

The ownership of your city lots will now have gone almost exclusively
into the hands of your leisure class; and the vast sums of money drawn
monthly for rent, instead of being, as formerly, partly returned as
capital, to assist labor in the various industrial enterprises is now
either dissipated in luxury, expended in new possessions, or invested
in some of the many monopoly undertakings of the day. The effects of
this unjust burden are daily apparent. It reduces the possible savings
of labor and the accumulations of industry to such a minimum that
success in these is the exception rather than the rule. It is mostly
because of this monopoly of land that life among your masses is a
continuous and uninterrupted struggle; and to this more than all else
is due that unequal distribution of wealth which affords only the few
that cultivation and knowledge which elevates them, and that dooms the
many to an unceasing wear of nerve and muscle to sustain themselves.

You cannot fail to have observed, as one of the most promising signs of
your destiny, that wherever humanity in the midst of civilization is
freest from the cares of sustenance supply, it inclines to devote its
leisure to a cultivation of the mind. The crudeness and vulgarity of
some, and the refinement of others, are entirely due to difference in
opportunities of development, and between these two there must always
exist a great repulsion. What good can you therefore expect of mankind
as a whole, so long as by your methods a few only are vouchsafed the
opportunities for knowledge?

The forces at work within your society have now, we we will say,
brought up your population and general conditions to the standard
of those which may be found in the older portions of the Earth.
Your poverty is more intense and widespread, with its corresponding
increase in crime, while your wealth has become more munificent
and ostentatious. Impelled by the necessities of life and a brave
emulation, all your industries will be found in the highest strain of
action. The accumulated products of labor and its multiplied activity
have given to you a semblance of prosperity and success. But while in
the course of your progress you have created new necessities and wants,
you have made no just provision by which they could be, as near as
possible, equally shared; and as a consequence the apparent as well as
the silent and concealed miseries of human life were never greater.

There is to be observed now a marked increase in the spread and
influence of your religion. As the hope of success in life becomes
lessened, and as the heartaches and distresses increase by your uneven
struggles, the suffering and disappointed masses turn naturally to
another existence for what has been denied them in this; and it can
be said of all your religious theories, that their contrivances to
make you suffer uncomplainingly the outrages of authority are the best
that could have been devised. The few among you enjoying the bounties
of life, surrounded by that want and privation whose voices they
cannot escape, and whose strong arms they cannot fail to observe, turn
instinctively to your religious doctrines with a sense of safety and
protection. The few favored ones, looking over the vast multitude of
their less fortunate brothers, are conscious that the superabundance
they enjoy has been doubtfully acquired, and they are quick to embrace
that convenient justification, which ascribes the greater ills and
burdens of the many to a preconceived and unalterable arrangement of
the divine will.




CHAPTER IX.


Before bringing into comparison one of our cities it will be necessary
to explain to you some of the processes which have rendered our present
civilization possible. You already have a hint, from what I have said,
of the very striking difference between the society of Mars and that
of the Earth, in their handling of labor interests. While with your
careless and indifferent treatment, labor remains degraded, we have
raised it to a point of honor. We have arrived at our methods of its
treatment by that philosophical induction which has interpreted to us
the many reliable and unerring decrees of the divine will. Nature, upon
whom we depend for all we know of the supreme wishes, has furnished
indubitable signs that physical diligence is a saving and wholesome
quality, inseparable from intelligence, in its extended sense as we
know it, upon which the very existence of all material things rests.
But even the activities of nature are not more indispensable to the
firmness of the Earth, than individual mental and physical energy is
to the well-being and progress of your society. Since one of these
energies is as useful as the other in the economy of the world, we can
conceive no reason why you should allow one of them to dominate the
other; nor how you can justify yourselves in bestowing upon one all the
honors and emoluments, while to the other you pursue a course denying
opportunities, and in all ways bringing upon it an inferior social
scale.

We met these natural tendencies ages ago, by a determination to
equalize, as far as possible, the burdens of life among all classes,
and to this end we have chiefly directed our efforts to sustain the
interests of those who, by a struggle for the necessities of life,
are obliged to toil. Some very remarkable results have followed. We
have achieved that degree of justice where the skillful artisan, by
virtue of his manual cunning alone, can acquire a certain elevation
in our society, and whose occupation is not subordinated by any other
on our planet. We have a very numerous class amongst us, known by the
best interpretation of your language as officers of industry, who
secure truer and more lasting honor than your military heroes. Our
admiration of them arises from the fact that they assist to build up
and restore the waste of those industrial products which sustain our
lives. The official grades among these compare somewhat with your
military system. Their insignia of office is permanently worn on their
dress, and to achieve distinction in this line is the hope of all,
since without having worn the badge of office in some of these grades,
social or political distinction is difficult. By methods, long ago in
vogue, we have united our intellectual and manual training so that
there should be no social separation between them. But while equal
distinction awaits the skillful pursuit of either path, the highest
honors are achieved by those who excel in both. Consequently our
youth, encouraged by their parents and teachers, become emulous of the
qualities of physical endurance attached to labor, and serve their
terms among the toilers with a will that nothing but a high ambition
could create. This greater respect and consideration for physical
industry than yours would have been impossible, were it not that we
have avoided the various causes which either suppress or degrade it.
In the first place, we have decreed that it shall receive a fair share
of its earnings. Chiefly in furtherance of this, we have ordained that
no individual holder of land shall rob it by taking to himself that
appreciation in values which its diligence produces. To this end also
we have provided that wealth and capital shall not bear down upon it
in the various monopoly exactions common with you. But a measure of
justice, scarcely less effectual than these to elevate and sustain
labor, is our governmental system of fixing its rates of wages.

From what has been said it will not be hard for you to believe that a
working man holds a very different position in society with us than
with you. Upon the Earth, driven by the necessities of life, and a
cruel and unrestrained competition, he is obliged to forego nearly
all those opportunities which refine and elevate the mind. He has
little of leisure, without the depression of muscular fatigue. His
habiliments are the badges of inferiority in your social scale, and he
trudges along on his tiresome, hopeless journey, bearing his condition
as one under the prohibition of better things by an inexorable fate.
No competency rewards his unremitting toil, though with the skill of
his hands he is building the wealth of the world. To the sordid and
cunning comes fortune in possessions and estates; while to him comes
only the privilege to dwell in another’s house, and to partake of that
fare whose chief quality shall be its capacity to restore the wasting
energies of his body.

With us the pursuit of manual labor is attended with better conditions.
By securing to industry its rightful rewards, it has been adopted by
choice instead of compulsion, as the best way to gain independence.
Having no road to wealth, except through the sterling qualities of
industry and prudence, industry and probity are the indispensable
qualities which lead to the upper stratum of our society. Thus, you
will perceive, the natural laws of progression and development are
encouraged to work out their beneficial results in the life of every
individual.

Since, from the cradle to the grave, all are surrounded with the living
rewards of goodness, we have no need of sermons. We know no gilded
vice. It bears no fruits with us but destruction. You preach against
it and reward it in the same breath. You denounce it in empty words,
and at the next moment honor it with a bow. You sanction the wholesale
injury which your system inflicts upon each one, hoping in the scramble
to pocket the losses of others. The most desirable condition of life
with you is that in which the attainment of wealth shall furnish
personal gratification, the accomplishment of which, in most cases, is
through a line of public and private wrongs. The better conditions of
life with us are acquired in the fertilization of innumerable schemes
for the common welfare.

You are not to make the mistake by supposing that our society has
arrived at the dead level of equality. We have no castes, as you have,
holding apart from each other with marked distinctions of wealth. But
we have social grades, as you have, with the great difference that each
one enjoys unenvied the pleasures within reach; not the least of which
is to share the cares as well as the delights of life with each other.
The feeling of contempt for one another is entirely unknown among the
people of Mars. We have provided that there shall be no unlettered and
vulgar substratum in our society to pity or condemn, as you have. The
even justice of our system has bestowed upon all equal opportunities of
knowledge and cultivation. As a result, there is no individual living
upon our planet who is superior to another, except by a more assiduous
exercise of mental or physical gifts, or a higher cultivation of his
spiritual nature.

A marked indication of our advanced social development is, that we
utterly refuse the performance of any act which is an injury, even in a
remote degree, to our fellows; while in the intense selfishness of your
present state, you are constantly sacrificing each other’s interests.
With sentiments like these prevailing, it is easy for you to understand
why we have no class among us perpetually under less favored conditions
than another class, and why, acting under the great lesson of nature
which has sent us all into life upon an equality, we have ordained in
all possible ways that the journey thereafter shall be fair and equal
to all.

It is not possible for you to thoroughly understand or appreciate what
I am to lay before you, in a description of our society in municipal
life, without a further knowledge of some of our methods. One of the
most important of these, is the perfection which we have brought to
our science of statistics, and the indispensable service it is made to
perform in our political economy. This branch of science is pursued
by us as the most serviceable and practical of all. We learn from it
in a positive way many truths which your economists fail to reach,
and we have discovered by it many errors which have existed as the
result of sophistical reasoning. We use it as a rule and square to
measure the speculations of philosophy, as well as an every-day guide
in the practical affairs of life. Its better value for us lies in the
fact that our conclusions from it are adduced out of the records of
centuries. It is to social science what analysis is to chemistry.
It is only by a systematic and orderly record of the occurrences of
nature, and the changes and events of society, that we have arrived
at the many profound truths so deeply concerning our lives. By it
we have discovered how astonishingly nature holds, concealed from
common eyes, so many of her processes, coquetting with us, as it were,
in withholding her greatest favors without prolonged and incessant
interrogation. But although our store of scientific knowledge has
been increased by these statistical labors, we hold them of no less
importance in managing the practical affairs of life.

Our bureau of statistics is without question the most valuable
department of our government. It has been brought to its perfected
condition by centuries of practice and improvement, and upon it rests,
in a great measure, the prosperity and happiness of our people. By
it, mainly, we are enabled to save our population from the distresses
of over-production, and the chance occurrences of uneven labor
demand. Your experience has shown you that in times of depression the
causes were plainly apparent. We have merely arranged to anticipate
these causes, to sound the general alarm, and to forestall them.
Outside of the defects of your currency, and your speculation, which
are most prolific sources of industrial disaster, comes that blind
over-production, entirely undirected by any reliable or authoritative
knowledge of the existing capacity to consume. You are having at
times a large amount of misdirected labor in the form of products
slow of sale; and for the time being a supply, so much in excess of
demand, does not return a full equivalent for the labor invested.
These frequent errors of production depress wages, and are altogether
more calamitous to labor than to capital; because labor is variously
skilled, and cannot readily transplant itself from one department of
production to another, and is obliged, under the conditions, either
to accept reduced wages or to remain idle. Capital does not suffer as
labor does in these constantly occurring over-supplies. On the other
hand, it finds its opportunity, either by waiting from a low to a high
market for its returns, or by changing its field of investment. In
these frequent partial or complete suspensions in the production of
over-supplied commodities, labor is therefore the chief sufferer.

We have nearly a complete remedy for this in our system of statistics.
Our planet in all its habitable parts is divided into districts,
in each of which is kept an accurate and systematic record of all
available labor, as well as an account of its different classes, with
the separate capacity of each for production. In connection therewith
is also kept an account of all products turned out. The information
furnished in this way determines the surplus or deficiency of all
commodities produced.

We are enabled thereby to know, almost at a glance, the drift of all
labor energies, and to direct them safely from any great redundancy of
supply. When engaged in the production of food supplies, where nature
becomes of necessity a party to this great co-operative arrangement, we
have devised a method that saves those who toil from the embarrassment
and the frequent distress of an intermittent cost of living. We had
observed that the tendency of cheap food to lower the wages of labor,
and of dear food to raise them, was not equal, wages being much more
easily lowered than raised under this natural influence. Our government
has undertaken therefore to establish a fair and equitable adjustment
between the cost of living and wage rates, to be modified when occasion
requires.

You are not to expect me to go into detail in these matters; but as it
may seem impracticable to you, how any arbitrary rate of wages may be
made to rule fairly among so many different people, I will give you
some account of our system of grading labor, by which this difficulty
is overcome. We have formed out of the three qualities of SKILL,
STRENGTH and ACTIVITY a basis upon which to reckon the value of all
individual labor. Each of these is divided into three grades, and the
highest valued workman is he who stands first in all. The first grade
in skill is considered equal to both the first and second grades of
strength and activity in estimating wages; and there is no first grade
of skill allowed, except in those industrial operations requiring much
manual training.

The workman begins his career usually in the lowest grades of each,
although at times strength and activity are raised one grade at the
beginning. The wages of all labor are uniformly established by the
government, in accordance with the standing of the individual and the
certificate he holds, according him his status under this method of
estimating his ability. From middle life to old age changes usually
occur in his grade, and his apportionment of wages is consequently
modified; but so long as he retains his skill it goes far to keep up
the allotment of fair wages against the loss of strength and activity.

This is merely an outline of our system. Its importance will be
understood, when you consider that by it we have established a uniform
rate of wages for all, and have saved our workmen from helplessly
submitting themselves to the natural competition of dependent numbers,
and to the exacting patronage of a selfish and independent few.
Although we have achieved this desideratum of uniform wages we are
not unaware of the economic impossibility of rendering them constant,
and we have accordingly arranged that the rate shall be changed to
correspond with the varying cost of living. Each year therefore, after
the gathering of our harvests, our statistical bureau makes a report
of food supply; when any change, if necessary, is made in the rate of
wages for the ensuing year, thereby determining that labor shall enjoy
a fair share of the wealth which it produces.

Outside of the handicraft of the workmen, we have established a scale
for estimating a just rate of pay for all employees in professional and
business pursuits. This arrangement is based upon the qualities of
TALENT, INTELLIGENCE and CAPABILITY. Each one of these is divided into
three grades, and whoever stands first in all of them is entitled, of
course, to the highest pay for his services. Usually, however, these
high qualifications secure a reward beyond the scale. This system of
rewarding labor has a far-reaching effect in our political economy,
and is a complete uniformity with the general tendency of our efforts
to promote steady values. The most important element of cost in all
commodities offered for sale is labor, and that can never be cheapened.
We have not a single product of industry in our list which represents
in its labor cost, as many of yours do, the underpain, gaunt and
hopeless toil of some fellow creature struggling for the scanty means
to live.

Owing to our many concessions physical industry has been curtailed
of that excessively wearisome and exhausting character known to you.
Without the oppressions which bear down upon it on your planet, its
pursuit never reaches that forced extremity which brings the bent form
and care-worn face.

A considerate custom has fixed our period of daily labor at six hours;
one-half of which, under the equitable adjustment of our wage rates,
affords sufficient pay, under ordinary circumstances, to furnish a
liberal enjoyment of life. Under our system three hours of work each
day affords a share of wealth somewhat in excess of the share usually
obtained by the workmen of the Earth for their average of ten hours’
labor. Our industrial force has, therefore, a facility of expansion and
contraction, without distressful results, which yours does not possess.
No serious changes are wrought with us by a reduction of working force
to half time, and consequent half pay; while more or less pinching and
misery are sure to follow such an occurrence with you.

From these careful attentions to the interests of labor, we have
brought it into repute as one of the most honorable as well as the
most profitable pursuits of life. I have endeavored to show you some
of the ways by which this grand purpose has been attained. I must not,
however, omit to remind you, that as our government takes upon itself
to perform innumerable enterprises, which on the Earth are left to
individuals and organizations of men, its direct dealings with those
who toil are more intimate and extensive than yours. It is better
enabled thereby to carry into operation those methods which distinguish
our system. The greater part of the energies of our government and
the wisdom of our statesmanship have been directed to this end of
supporting labor, and out of it, without question, comes the general
serenity and contentment which prevail.




CHAPTER X.


When it is decided by our authorities that a new city shall be built
to meet the requirements of increasing numbers, and to establish that
convenient co-operation in branches of industry and trade which close
association affords, its location is left entirely to the judgment of a
board of government officers, of sanitary and civil engineering skill.
If, as is frequently the case, the proposed site is already occupied
by one or more tenants in rural pursuits, they are scrupulously
indemnified in all losses which result from their dispossession.

I wish to impress upon you here, that a tenant, under our government,
has even greater security of possession than your land owners.
The prevailing sense of justice, and a widespread interest, have
established the right of a renter to hold and enjoy, against all
competition, his allotment during his life. He has also the right,
under our custom, to convey its possession by will; and it is more
generally the case on our planet than on yours, that a piece of land
is held for generations in the same family. Our government exercises
some rights of interference, to the end that the size of a farm shall
conform, as near as possible, to such dimensions as to employ no great
excess of labor over that capable of being supplied by the family of
the occupant. In a general way, the tenant enjoys the same rights of
ownership which are held by your individual holders in fee, except that
he cannot convey title, and does not take to himself any emolument
arising from increased value. His rent is simply an equivalent to
your tax, with the very important difference, that its amount depends
entirely on the season’s productiveness, and is never a burden.

Once decided upon, the proposed city becomes the subject of universal
interest. Its plans are submitted and approved, just as your proposals
for a single edifice. All its parts must conform with each other; the
choice of its location chiefly depends upon drainage and water supply,
and it possesses these advantages in the highest perfection. Every
house must be erected in conformity with rules. Work is commenced by
the erection of public buildings in the center, and the laying of
drain, water, heat and electric conduits through its newly surveyed
streets. People come to it, as they come to your new cities, for the
purpose of gain in trade and industry, and locate themselves as they
choose under a fixed and uniform land rental. They erect edifices as
you do, varying them as they like in their internal structure, but
strictly conforming in their outer elevations to the style adopted
by our architectural commission, which supervises also the material
employed, and the safety and durability of the work. Any disreputable
or depraved quarter is of course impossible under this plan; nor could
such an encouragement and propagation of crime exist in one of our
cities, as they do in yours, even had we the class of tenants to people
them. It must be charged among the evils of your landlordism, that it
not only promotes vice through its tendency to impoverish your masses,
but is ready at all times to multiply it, by affording quarters for
convenient association.

The spectacle of our city in course of construction is very different
from yours. The government has set aside, what may be computed in
your way as millions of money for the institution of various works
designed for the health and comfort of the new population, and people
are arriving in thousands from all quarters to do the work. Every one
of them is impressed with that feeling and interest which can only
arise from ownership, and there is not a single one of them who is not
performing some of the work. No one of them has a hope for honor and
wealth by getting a monopoly of the land. No rich man comes with his
accumulations to get a perpetual lien upon the industries that are
just now springing up, and to hold for himself and his descendants the
privilege of exacting daily for all time a larger share of the earnings
of labor than your slaveholders derive from their human chattels. All
choose to work, because it is both honorable and profitable to do so,
and also because it is a duty, the conscious fulfillment of which is
attended with a feeling of happiness.

The systematic and regular use of the voluntary muscles, without
excessive fatigue, has not only an important influence on health, but
assists as well to develop perfect and well rounded brains, out of
which can only come those evenly balanced minds which create, out of
the power of intelligence, the blessings of human progress; whence only
come those level headed men, who are distinguished among yourselves
as being never wholly the product of learning. It is an axiom with
us, that he who does not produce has no right to consume, and this
doctrine has been so carried out in our society that physical inertia,
no matter how much attended with wealth, is exceedingly rare. As a
consequence, affluence with us is not beset with the terrible penalties
of ill health. The muscular body in all conditions of life is made to
act with the brain and nerves.

We shall suppose, now, our city has reached a period of its growth
equal in time to your decade. Its grand temple is not quite completed.
Its streets stretch away in the distance, none of them narrower than
a hundred of your feet, and some of them more than twice as wide,
to accommodate the airships and the larger warehouses. The lines of
uniform house fronts, relieved on the street corners by elevated
towers, reach out sufficiently far into the gradually changing suburbs
to give a hint of the long and beautiful perspectives that are to come.
From the center outwards there are reserved, at intervals of about a
half mile, spaces corresponding with the area of two blocks, which make
a circular belt around the whole. These are cultivated and embellished
in the highest style of gardening and landscape art. Here are located
our public baths, statues, monuments, conservatories, and arenas for
athletic sports. These pleasure grounds, so convenient and accessible,
diversify our city life with a taste and flavor of the country. Our
city grows in a solid expansion. There are no straggling suburbs, like
yours. Blocks are erected together, and always in continuation of the
appropriated space adjoining them. The intercourse and demeanor of our
population are, as you may expect, unlike yours. The general air of
serenity and contentment, the uniform politeness, and the absence of
degradation, with its frequent unpleasant and disgraceful episodes,
mark the difference between your city population and ours.

It concerns us most, however, to make a comparison of our wealth
producing agencies, and the channels of their distribution, and for
this purpose we shall take our metropolis as it stands in its maturity.
It contains, now, like your city of advanced growth, about three
hundred thousand inhabitants. Its land rentals have been subjected
to constant modification, and are in some places very much higher
than they were at first. In certain localities, where trade has
concentrated, the public fund has been increased by a considerable
advance of rent to store keepers, but there is no exorbitant demand
of rent for such favored places as there is with you. The purpose
of rent with us being only to meet the expenses of government, its
total is limited; and consequently, while in the mercantile and trade
districts, where wealth and capital are most heavily engaged, it has
been materially advanced, a corresponding reduction has taken place in
the residence portions. The direct and immediate effect, therefore,
of an appreciation of land value, is to reduce living expenses among
the masses by curtailing their rents. In the absence of any monopoly
of private ownership, there is no case, even in the most concentrated
places, where rent forms anywhere near so large a proportion of
business expense as with you. By your land ownership methods, landlords
have an access to both pockets of the tenant. Out of one they take to
the limit of their greed whatever sum they choose for the privilege of
business quarters, or a dwelling place, and from the other a tithe on
everything consumed by the enhanced cost of its distribution.

As our material wants and needs are very much like yours, it is not
hard to make a comparative estimate of the savings of industry. We
produce more wealth than you in a given time, even with our shorter
daily periods of work, because, with few exceptions, all are engaged
in the business of production. By this increased productiveness every
consumer is richer. He is able by a smaller amount of labor to procure
a greater amount of the objects of desire. Our production is more
perfect than yours, by the use of more perfect machinery. Our division
of labor is more complete than yours. Our workmen having abundant
leisure for intellectual development, all the practical advantages of
knowledge and science are immediately brought into effect. By avoiding
your great waste of capital by excessive government expenditures, it is
constantly so abundant with us that its proportion to labor makes labor
remunerative.

We have now assumed for the purpose of comparison that the two
cities, one of Mars and one of the Earth, have each three hundred
thousand inhabitants; and that, allowing for women and children not
engaged in productive industry, one hundred thousand of each city is
actively engaged in industrial pursuits. As the general prosperity
of each city depends upon the earnings of this one hundred thousand,
and the accumulations in capital and wealth upon the amount saved
by these productive classes, let us make a relative estimate of the
opportunities each possess in individual savings. Having no common
medium of exchange upon which to base our estimate, let us take the
value of a day’s labor for that purpose. The income of a city is
derived from two sources, the aggregate wages of its inhabitants,
and the combined profits of its capital. The latter, however, being
entirely derived from consumers, is largely contributed to by the
inhabitants themselves. And for the reason that all imported products,
as well as those exported, bear the profits of capital in their rates
of sale, we may safely say that an amount very nearly equal to the
whole profits of capital of a city is paid by the consumers within
its limits as capital profits. The chief source of your city’s yearly
income then is about thirty-one million days’ labor. Out of this you
must pay for expenses, under your system, two million days’ labor for
government taxes, fifteen million days’ labor for ground rent, two
million days’ labor for water, two million days’ labor for insurance,
and with the balance of ten million days’ labor you must pay the cost
of food, raiment, fuel, the portion of rent estimated in buildings,
together with the various incidentals of furniture and house lights.
You will observe that all these expenses except the first are largely
loaded with the profits of capital, so that with the income and expense
as set forth you may be in a progressive condition, as that term
is defined by you. That is to say, your capital may increase, and
your wealth may be very greatly augmented. The enormous proportion
of your earnings carried away by rent, although drawn very largely
from your business districts, is contributed equally by the whole
in the increased cost of all products consumed. Of your one hundred
thousand producers, it is safe to say that twenty thousand of them have
capital investments. Among these is divided the whole of the surplus
of the city’s earnings. The eighty thousand engaged in the business
of directly creating wealth are doomed, under your cruel system, to
sweat and toil from sun to sun without accumulations. You accept this
condition of things as inevitable, and your economists contend that the
real or natural remuneration of labor is the bare means of subsistence.
We have seen the unrighteous origin of this prodigious fund, which
absorbs one third of the earnings of labor at least: let us examine its
perpetual effects upon the interests of those who toil.

Looking upon your civilization, we find in its modern aspects a
wonderful increase in all the appliances and conditions which
accumulate wealth. Among these may be specified a better and more
economical division of labor, the discoveries of science, labor
saving inventions, and altogether as a result, greatly increased
productiveness.

Added to these contributions of knowledge and science in the interest
of the working class, you have, during the last century, experienced
the most remarkable acquisition in favor of labor that was ever known
upon your planet. I allude to the accession of new and fertile lands,
over which the boundaries of civilization have been extended, and out
of which, by the new methods and contrivances both of husbandry and
transportation, the food supplies of the Earth have been made to flow
in a steady stream toward the districts of their consumption. These
immense advantages could not fail to have, in some degree, a beneficent
effect upon your labor class. Inasmuch as your workmen of to-day are
enabled to obtain more of the comforts of life than formerly, real
wages may be said to have considerably advanced. Their share, however,
of the wealth produced is as small a portion as formerly. By the modern
necessities which custom has rendered difficult to avoid, they have
become larger consumers, which in itself has enabled your capital, with
its undue advantages, to increase its store out of all proportion to
a fair division of the wealth produced. But the greater and cheaper
food supply, and the abundant capital of your recent times, while
serving to neutralize the depressing effect of increase of population
in the labor ranks, and to institute a condition of general prosperity
in trade and mercantile pursuits, has at the same time offered to all
your monopolists of land the opportunity to extort, under the pressure
of competition, the whole surplus of the earnings of your workmen.
Precisely the same happy conditions which have brought a modicum of
prosperity to them have created a richer field for your monopolists,
and especially for those of them who by their ownership of city
land can exact from the extended demands of business, and a rapidly
multiplying population, an unfair portion of the wealth produced. The
unlimited privilege of appropriating to themselves the utmost share
of the profits of industry, gives a speculative value to the holdings
of your landlords, and serves in turn to furnish them the excuse of a
parallel in their charges for rent to the current rate of interest on
money. If industry can be forced to make over to them a third of its
earnings now, the possibilities of the future shadow golden dreams,
which promise no less to them than the power of your imaginary
Midas--dreams which encourage an easier wealth-making than was
possessed by your olden barons, who by force of arms were enabled to
hold,--what your modern law and custom equally allows,--the privilege
of sapping the industry of millions of busy hands of all else but a
bare sustenance and a shelter from the elements.

That rent does not to any great extent enter into the cost of your
agricultural products, is due to the abundance of new land coming
constantly under cultivation, and to that equalizing of situations
which your railroads promote. An increase in the demand for food,
and the promise of an advance in its price, brings under cultivation
lands of lesser fertility or those more remote from your markets. The
monopoly power of agricultural land ownership is thereby effectually
destroyed. So long as these favorable conditions exist, the cost of
your food staples will be governed by the value alone of the labor
employed. The profits of capital, therefore, take no part in them
until they leave the hands of the producer. There is no value in your
cultivated lands of the lesser fertility, except in the opportunity
they afford for labor to exchange its services for money. This class of
land fixes the price of and cheapens the food of the Earth. The value
of all lands from these upwards in degrees of fertility is estimated
by the amount of produce derived from a given amount of labor, and
except in a few favorite situations there is as yet no monopoly value
in your cultivated lands. To this, more than anything else, is due the
comparative cheapness of your food, and the steady and unrestricted
increase of your population. In time, however, for reasons to obvious
to require mention, rent must enter into the original element of cost
among your food staples, just as it now so largely takes a part in the
cost of their distribution. The fullest manifestation of the evils of
your private ownership system will then take place. The signs of what
may occur at that rapidly approaching critical period are to be seen
in the completely merciless character of your wealth holders, who, in
the face of a divine intelligence, which has so charitably provided an
even abundance to all, attempt to subvert the natural laws of trade
by unfair combinations, known among you as trusts and syndicates,
wherein the common welfare is made a sacrifice to their determined and
unscrupulous love of gain.

You have perhaps not fully considered how it has come to pass that
your wealth is so generally without the best feelings and impulses
of humanity. The desire to accumulate which pervades all classes can
accomplish nothing in the ranks of labor, except for those who possess
it in an inordinate degree. The anxiety for gain must be so intense as
to overwhelm the wish for gratifications within reach, and to produce
a fortitude of restraint which denies every dispensable want and
pleasure. Is is only the few who have this power of abstinence that
can escape a life of drudgery. The ranks of capital and wealth are
largely recruited from this body of abstainers. Under the depressing
effects of your monopolistic condition, ordinary prudence and moderate
abstemiousness are not, as a rule, capable of laying the foundation of
wealth. You have, consequently, by a natural process of selection, the
ranks of your moneyed classes filled up, for the most part, by the most
aggressively mercenary and acquisitive of your race; while the better
part of humanity, where the self-sacrificing and generous impulses most
prevail, must pay the penalty of its virtues in unrelieved dependence.
Your successful moneyed class, coming in time to that place of power
which its wealth procures for it, shapes and directs your legislation;
which, as you might expect, instead of being devoted, as it should
be, chiefly to the support of measures to equalize and ameliorate the
conditions of all classes, works the machinery for government for its
own selfish ends, making easy and comfortable paths for those schemes
which multiply its wealth.

While the wish to accumulate is acknowledged to be the fountain head of
all material progress, its accomplishment, under our system, is mostly
the reward of those qualities of the mind which are not safe lessons
for common acceptance. Your examples of material success are not good
studies, if charity and the true public spirit are to be considered as
worthy of being enlarged by precept.




CHAPTER XI.


Our more advanced civilization and truer democracy exhibit themselves
nowhere more strikingly, than in the way in which we have determined
the equal division of land interests. With our city of three hundred
thousand inhabitants, and its income during the same period of time
as yours of thirty-one million days’ labor, there is assessed by our
authorities about the sum as ground rent equivalent to eight million
average days’ pay of our workmen. For this amount in hand, our
government furnishes to its tenants, without further cost, perfected
streets in constant repair, abundance of water for household and other
purposes, lights both in houses and streets, heat by our system (to you
undiscovered), perfect drainage without cost or repair of conduits,
insurance against individual loss by fire or flood, free burial of the
dead, and a system of education bestowing upon every individual the
higher branches of study.

Besides this immense service, the government provides religious
edifices, buildings for public entertainment, and pleasure grounds.
And all this, you will bear in mind, at a less cost to our population
than your landlords exact of you for ground rent alone. Adding to this
four million days’ labor for rent, paid to private owners of buildings,
and we have left nineteen million days’ labor for living expenses not
provided by our government, and out of which come all the profit and
accumulations of capital, except those derived from rents of buildings.
You will see thereby, that with all the monopoly privileges that have
fastened themselves upon your system done away with, capital has yet
a full scope to exercise its legitimate functions in the fields of
production and distribution, apart from which it has no rights and is
entitled to no legislative consideration.

It is only by expunging the demands and profits of capital that the
government is enabled to furnish all these services mentioned at
so small a cost. We hold it to be a principle of justice, that the
natural elements should not be permitted to form the basis of corporate
management or monopoly control, and therefore instead of allowing
capital the fullest privilege to appropriate those bounties of nature
which are found ready for use, we have restricted its operations to a
mere partnership with labor, where it justly belongs. In our endeavors
to sustain labor, and equalize its opportunities with capital, we
have gone much further than this. We hold that all public necessities
of general demand, in the supplying of which large expenditures are
required in fixed capital, and which are not strictly in the line of
production, should be provided for by the government. We remove the
burdens of labor, by relieving it of those large capital enterprises
which subsist on it, and which fail to share with it a reasonable
portion of earnings. The large sums of money and the special privileges
required in these operations of supply, of which your railroad,
telephone and telegraph lines are prominent examples, obstruct the
natural tendency of competition, and capital and wealth are thereby
permitted advantages over labor which they should not of right have.

The unlimited privilege of capital in these directions has been
defended on the ground that it greatly accelerates your material
progress; that in private hands these enterprises can be more
economically managed; and that the centralization of power in a
government would be dangerously increased by the proprietorship of such
large undertakings. All of these allegations except the first are
without foundation in fact. The growing political weight, especially
in your representative governments, of all monopoly combinations, by
reason of their wealth and large individual patronage, presents to you
the choice of either a government ruled by outside influences, which
cannot be held responsible for the evils it inadvertently inflicts by
the irresistible pressure from without, or a government entirely and
absolutely liable, and to be held to a strict accountability for all
encroachments upon the common welfare while handling these services
of supply. In the latter case your remedy is an easy one; and may be
readily applied; while in the former, nothing short of a political
convulsion will serve you. No advanced government upon your Earth has
ever undertaken a public service of any magnitude for a long term,
which has not been systematized and improved by all the available
knowledge and science of its time. The difference between a public and
a private supply of a common demand is, that to one is added the costs
and profits of capital; while the other, shorn of these oftentimes
excessive exactions, is furnished at the cheapest rate possible.

Any policy of your governments, no matter how unwisely adopted,
becomes in time a fixture which is difficult to remove. The abuses
which it may be known to produce are tolerated long after its evil is
understood. Yet, there is scarcely one of these which has not had its
active defenders. The able defense of measures which have long since
been expunged for their flagrant injustice, exhibit some of the most
striking examples of mental obliquity in your annals. No government of
the Earth, however, in its long legislative career, was ever known to
favor the laboring and landless over the interests of those holding
endowments of the Earth’s surface. What seems at a superficial glance
to be in your own country such a measure, in what may be generally
termed your land policy, with its homestead provisions, becomes upon a
closer examination delusive. Every one of your laws for the pretended
purpose of bestowing your territory upon labor bears the covert design
or connivance to further the opportunities of capital. From the
inauguration of your system, capital and wealth have been gradually
absorbing your lands, and the partnership of labor in them is as
transitory and accidental as the opportunities afforded in the early
stages of your city’s growth.

The fact appears that, in your present development, the general sense
of individual acquisitiveness among your governing classes is too
great to deal fairly with the whole body of your people under such
seductive opportunities for self-gain. You cannot prevent, under
your present system of private ownership, the lands now held by your
people from drifting into a comparatively few hands. This process,
although going on for years, gradually accelerates, and will rapidly
become apparent when the last of your public territory shall have
passed out of the hands of your government. The owners of your lands
always have, and will continue to govern the countries of the Earth.
No representative government can exist long without a system which
prevents the monopoly of its territory by wealth.

No other idea appears to have been held by the founders of your nation,
but that your land was a chattel, to be disposed of for money, and
as much a subject of barter and speculation as merchandise, and like
it, liable to that depression in value which a superabundant supply
produces. Its unequalled advantages as a subject for speculation
became more and more apparent as your population increased. It is a
striking illustration of the irresistible influence of the mercenary
impulse on your planet, that those who were prominent in establishing
so many advances toward equalizing the conditions and privileges of
their fellow-men held, in the aggregate among themselves, the title
and possession of which they stood ready to defend, an area of the
Earth’s surface equal to about eight million of your acres, one
hundred thousand acres being in possession of him who became the first
presiding officer of your republic. I do not refer to these facts in
a spirit of censure to those men, so enlightened and liberty loving
beyond their times; but only to show that singular limit of vision
which sincerely proclaimed the equality of all men, which fostering a
political method which must in time enslave or pauperize the majority.

There can be no doubt but that the unlimited privileges of capital
in these directions have greatly accelerated your material progress.
The speedy utilization of the immense resources of your own republic
has hidden and disguised the evil it was gradually producing. The new
fields of labor opened by the many monopoly enterprises have satisfied
and quieted it; and the open invitation, for the time being, of a
partnership with capital in the occupancy of the soil for purposes of
cultivation, leaves no apparent ground of complaint among the masses
who toil. Thus have your demands for labor been so much greater than
the supply, that large accessions have been drawn from the older
countries of the Earth. These furnishing the bone and sinew for still
more rapid development, your progress has become the wonder of the
age. You will perceive, however, that the general prosperity among all
classes of your society, and the absence of any great public grievance,
is just that condition which render the incursions of capital and
wealth easy, so that during all your enormous accumulations by the
hands of your workers, out of which they have little to show of gain
besides their living expenses, the most stupendous moneyed fortunes
of history have fallen into the hands of the few. Unlike the older
countries of the Earth, where the increasing poverty of the masses
is a natural and unavoidable sequence of the large accumulations of
wealth in few hands, your poor do not grow sensibly poorer during
this unequal distribution. Your enormous resources hold up labor to
a condition of comparative prosperity during all these inroads upon
it. As a consequence, of the abundance which the bounties of nature
have supplied to you, and the stimulated energies which your rewarded
industries have induced, your labor unconsciously submits to the
extraction of an unfair portion of the wealth it produces without
individual suffering. The better condition of your workmen compared
with those of other lands should not disguise the fact, however, that
capital and wealth get new assurance, and encouraged to fresh demands
upon the industries on this account. Although your poor do not yet
grow sensibly poorer, your rich are getting immeasurably richer. The
better opportunities for labor have brought millions of workers from
abroad, who in their rapid development of the country have so immensely
appreciated land values that the bosom of the Earth has been converted
into a chattel for speculation, and the chief business of wealth has
been to pocket the increase which it has not earned.

You cannot fail to have observed, that to this period your money class
has had but little to do with land in your agricultural districts,
except to buy and sell it. Capital, other than that limited quantity
which has been created on the land, has not thus far been led into
the business of its cultivation, because from the abundance and
easy acquirement of land it must come, in so doing, in such direct
competition with labor as not to leave a satisfactory margin of
profit. When, however, your public lands shall have been all conveyed
to private hands, at which time the price of land products will not
be governed as now by the willingness of labor to make out of their
production a mere exchange for fair wages, then, and not till then,
will you find capital embarking to any great extent into the business
of agriculture.

When this time arrives, a change in your economy will gradually take
place. The relations held by labor with capital, which have heretofore
been so modified by the easier conditions of the former, with its
abundance of free soil to absorb its surplus, will be driven back to
its old state of greater dependence. It will no longer experience the
great advantage it has held so long in its partnership with the fertile
earth. Its depression will reduce the earnings of innumerable monopoly
schemes, and the speculative opportunities of capital in the former
rapid rise of land values will be reduced to a minimum. The acquirement
of land for use and cultivation will then become one of the most
promising investments for capital extant. There will be a rise in the
price of food staples, and rent for the first time in your history will
enter into them as a large element of cost.

More than one easily recognized agency of your civilization will tend
to reduce the number of your small farms, and to throw the business of
food supply completely under the control of your wealthy and capital
class. Your small holders now occupying lands of the lower grades
of fertility, and who with their limited means but little more than
sustain themselves, will readily submit their titles to capitalists,
who with the advantage of costly labor saving machines, will find the
cultivation of a number of such tracts thrown into one of sufficient
profit to engage their means.

The labor saving contrivances which your ingenuity has devised for
agricultural pursuits will hasten the demand for larger holdings, and
although they greatly cheapen the expense of production, they will not
lower the market price of food. While machinery more than makes up for
its curtailment of the services of labor, by its cheaper supplies to it
in articles of manufacture, no such open and unrestricted competition
can exist in the supply of commodities which require, as a necessity of
their production, a natural agent whose possession is in every sense of
the word a monopoly.

Machinery has never cheapened the supply of raw materials which come
directly from the soil, because its use for cultivation has only been
exceptional, and it can never become general as long as land is held
in small tracts. This very condition is the one which will engage the
attention of investors in land for the profits of use, and at the first
permanent advance in the price of your food staples the operation of
turning small farms into large ones will begin.

The privilege and the hope of all to get possession of a large or small
portion of the earth’s surface, gives to your personal ownership system
an appearance of fairness not at variance with your popular aspirations
of equality, and the evil will not be generally admitted, until it gets
to be more seriously felt.

I am sorry to say of you that the principle of equality, as we
understand it, has never been sincerely considered or acted upon by any
of the governments of the earth. You have taken it for granted that a
serving and dependent class, composing four-fifths of your numbers,
must always assist to make up the sum of your population, and no
legislative measure can be found in your records which sustains this
large body of your people against the encroachments with which wealth
and capital are continually permitted to invade their interests.
Liberty itself is of but little value, when life becomes a forfeiture
of all the ways and means to improve it. There is, in fact, no liberty
in the correct sense, where all the moments of life must be bartered
for the means to live.

So far as your development has progressed, the sentiment of
brotherhood, as we know it, has never intruded itself into the spirit
of your legislation. The spectacle of four-fifths of your number
toiling from sun to sun to no purpose but that the balance may be
enriched has inspired no compassion, and evoked no measure of relief.
In the regions of your authority, where there should be some touch of
the fraternal instinct, nothing presides but the selfish and mercenary
genius of Mammon. The divine impulse for better things is among you,
but instead of laying out its work in the practical affair of life, it
has been diverted into the channels of your busy but unfruitful creeds.
You wear your religion like a holiday garment. We have learned to wear
ours as a common garb.

The past is burnt out, with a residue of but little value except as a
warning. The future is not ours, but of the universe with its hidden
and irrevocable destiny. The present belongs to us, and it is our
creed to be happy in its possession. We could have sown fears as you
have, and could have been as overwhelmed with their multiplied terrors.
We could have invented a circumstantial paradise like yours, with its
pathway of extinguished temporal hopes, and its discouragements of
the noblest ambitions to build out of the materials in sight; but to
what purpose except an unworthy one? The present is ours. Our field is
among the living things which surround us. The most of life to us is
its possibilities of happiness, and the opportunities it affords for
the enjoyment of our religious impulses to serve the Deity in advancing
ourselves and our society toward that state of perfection to which
under the supreme intelligence all things are seen to tend.




CHAPTER XII.


A notable condition of your society compared with ours is the tardy
advance of your women from that complete subjection to men which
existed in your primary state. It is not surprising that in your
present stage of progress the males of your race should continue to
usurp many of the privileges which came to them as an inheritance from
a savage and brutal ancestry of comparatively recent existence, and
your gradual awakening to a sense of justice in that direction is one
of the many evidences that you are moving along on the lines marked out
for you by the divine law of evolution in thought.

We have found certain active qualities of mind, predominating
everywhere in women, indispensable to a better progress in social
advancement, and great things have been wrought to us by our present
absolute equality of the sexes. The full value of women as factors
in social progress is not known, nor even suspected by you, because
you have never witnessed the experiment of a complete withdrawal of
those restrictions which hold them in subjection; yet, it is a fact
that in what are truly the noblest advances in humanity, they are your
superiors. They have left further behind them the brutalisms of the
past, are deeper touched with your inhumanities, and will go further to
banish them than your men.

Your estimate of the mental capacity of women is singularly erroneous.
The cropping out occasionally of their intellectual achievements, and
the marked increase of such with the multiplication of opportunities,
must have hinted to you that their silence, and apparent inferiority
in the higher mental efforts, were alone due to their long period of
subordination, during which the usages of your society have discouraged
any attempts to enter the field as competitors with men. In the full
swing of opportunity and encouragement allowed them by us, they have
raised themselves to a very high plane, especially in literature,
poetry and art. We owe to them many of our masterpieces in these
attainments, and their aptitude for study and investigation is shown
in the even place they hold with us in science and the professions.
Those feminine qualities of mind which are described by you as heart,
sympathy, sentiment and emotion, and which are generally considered by
you as out of place in affairs of state, are the very ones of which
you have the greatest need in legislation. It is principally through
the feelings mentioned that divine impulses are expressed, and yet
that part of yourselves where they most prevail are excluded from your
councils.

A model of all that is best in your governments is to be found no where
except within the family. The ready helpfulness and equal attention
to the welfare of one another within its precincts, extended into the
motives and aims of your public policies, embrace everything necessary
to a perfect government; yet, you have selected out of the family for
the sole direction of your public affairs its hardest and most selfish
part, its selfishness intensified in its dealings with society beyond
the confines of home, by those absorbing paternal responsibilities--in
great measure due to the subordination of women--which in many ways
interfere with efforts for the good of the whole.

From the nature of things your men are more easily overcome by evil
political forces than your women would be. The latter, being more
closely allied to the interests of the family, in its moral training,
and less willing to sacrifice the benefit of example, are consequently
less corruptible than men. Women have a greater natural affinity for
virtue than men, more unselfishness and a larger concern for the moral
welfare of mankind, exhibited in their more earnest support of religion.

With the enfranchisement of women the humanities of life would enter
more largely into your politics. You have proofs of this in the few
local instances where they have been granted suffrage rights. The
desirable family methods and sentiments, of which they are better
exponents than men, have never failed to come to the surface as
indications of their presence. They have invariably shown a greater
inclination than men to consider the welfare of persons in legislation
as against the welfare alone of property, which has to the present
so monopolized and corrupted your politics. Your legislation in the
hands of men alone has accomplished but little in alleviating the
distresses of humanity. The cold and calculating hand of speculation,
which invests only to call back its capital with high usury, has always
held your law making as a ready instrument for its purposes, and
without loftier views, your governments will continue to miss their
opportunities for benefitting mankind. By the admission of women the
higher sentiments would sooner find a place. It would be the first
step in bringing natural religion and politics together. The present
irrational state of your spiritual beliefs retards the adoption of a
moral code in your systems of government. With you, the State is led to
care for nothing in the interest of morality, except a punishment of
its infractions. It ignores, as no part of its duties, all incentives
to goodness, and in dealing with crime the service of its prevention,
in any other way than punishment, is not considered, principally
because other departments of society have assumed for ages the public
control and promotion of the virtues.

A wider range in the duties of government is opposed by many of you as
objectionable paternalism. Such of you overlook the fact that there can
be no paternalism in a republic. Such a system is co-operation pure
and simple, and neither good nor evil can permanently exist without
the consent of the whole. The nearer you get to complete co-operation,
the more perfect your government becomes. The greatest vices of
misgovernment among you are to be found in granting precedence of one
interest over others, that interest in most cases being a capitalistic
one, often antagonizing the welfare of many individuals. Among your
industrial class, less than one-tenth are employers, whose political
weight has so overcome the majority as to have excluded any direct
legislation in its behalf, and so far as these conditions exist, the
principle of co-operation which should be the corner stone of your
government has not been faithfully carried out. A greater, and in our
view, a more glaring violation of this principle is your exclusion of
women from the rights of representation in your government. You cannot
deny that they have separate interests to care for. You will find upon
examination of your assessment rolls that nearly one-fifth of all your
real and personal estate is owned by them, and of the greater part of
the balance they are interested by matrimonial partnerships with men.
Their property ownerships alone entitle them to the rights of suffrage,
in the denial of which you have no excuse whatever but the usage and
custom of barbaric ages extended to the present, and the prejudice of
a society grown familiar and blinded to its injustice. The struggles
of labor for better recognition, and the agitation for woman suffrage
are evolutionary movements in thought, and in your advanced government
indicate the coming of a more perfect co-operation.

The political subjection of women, and the subjection of labor
helplessly to the law of supply and demand, without legislative
assistance or attention, are at present your most prominent relics of
barbarism. They are both endured because the parties to be benefitted
have never yet enjoyed the privileges due them. Neither one or the
other are consequently aroused to action in their own behalf, and
when these rights are acquired by them it will be more owing to an
enlightened public opinion than to any concerted action by themselves.
It is well known that your slaves had little to do with the abolition
of slavery, and it is therefore not a proper argument against the
granting of these privileges that the persons to be benefitted are not
all clamoring for them; or that, in the case of woman suffrage, a large
majority of women are indifferent and a few opposed.

The subjection of women to men in all the political and business
affairs of life have greatly modified the characters of both. You have
confined the lives of your women to innumerable small details. Her
aspirations and powers have been confined within this narrow scope. The
absorption of their whole minds has been in a set of small ideas and
occupations, from one to the other in continuous exercise. In such a
life profound thought and loftier emotions are not encouraged. They
have but little incentive to the acquirement of general knowledge,
for it can be of no practical use to them, and being early impressed
with a sense of their dependence upon men, their lives are given up to
all the small devices for obtaining power over them in the sensuous
fields of personal adornment and display. Theirs, as well as other
human minds, must be shallowed under such conditions; yet of the two
sexes their duties are the most serious and responsible in shaping the
destinies of mankind. Theirs is the chief part in the forming of minds,
both by heredity and training, and with their limited opportunities
for broadened thought you can look for nothing more in them than those
narrow prejudices, which are in turn transmitted, and which are so
manifest in all your society. This narrowness is one of your most
unhappy traits; it is almost universal among you. Until quite recently
you have only had a man here and there capable and willing to fairly
examine a question which interferes with traditional beliefs and old
modes of thought. You have formed no conception of how much this state
of things is due to the limited mental horizon in which your women
have been confined. The intellects of your best men have not been
multiplied and reproduced as they should have been, owing to the loss
of their strength and fibre in the process of reproduction, through
your average non-high thought producing female minds.

The extended barbaric relations which your women hold to men, though
greatly modified by civilization, has carried with it enough of its
primary feelings and motives to influence a large majority of your
matrimonial engagements, where in truth, it may be said that the
attraction is sensual to a degree not willingly acknowledged, and this
being more and more the case as you descend in the social scale, you
will find here your women going through life helplessly subject to the
lingering brutalism which your customs and laws enforce. It is from
the animalism of these low life marriages that a large sum of your
miseries and crimes are produced. Your inferior men have but little
respect for those subject to their power, and in many cases use a
tyrannical authority over their defenseless wives in gratification of
a mean instinct of humanity. It is the only opportunity perhaps that
brutal husbands enjoy in their whole lives to command a grown person
who is under an obligation by law, custom and religion to obey. Such
a dangerous subjection of one human being to another could only be
excused by a certainty that the welfare of your society depended upon
it, when in fact the condition is one of the obstacles to a better
social state.

During your barbaric period, and for a long time thereafter, women made
no protest against her subordinate position in society. It has been her
place for ages to suffer more than her share of the pains and trials
of human replenishment. She has been taught to believe that this was
her only part in the world’s economy, and men have held her to it by
all the force of ecclesiastical and secular bonds. In all your glorious
modern achievements of science and general knowledge until lately
she has not even been an invited spectator. While the world in front
has been all astir in the movements of progress, she has only been
permitted to listen and wonder at the applause through the rear windows
of the nursery and kitchen; not knowing what it all meant and not
educated to approve, or even to understand, its glorious import. Having
never been accustomed to think on any great subject, she has held to
her traditions after they have been discredited and denied by the
knowledge of her times, and imparting them to childhood in all their
ancient mixture of error has assisted to keep alive those prejudices
among you which have so seriously blocked your advancement. This is
one of the penalties you have paid for your subjection of women. Those
traditions to which she so defiantly clings she will never be persuaded
to discard in her present dependent condition. It may be said to her
honor that they are mistakenly pursued as the only great method within
her reach to indulge her concern for human welfare. You must give her
new duties, and arouse in her new ambitions, before you can expect
her to take her proper place beside man in the march of progress. It
is only within the last two or three generations that a glint of the
outside enlightenment has penetrated her retired circle, and under its
revelation she is already in some quarters demanding her rights. She is
beginning to understand that procreation is not the chief purpose in
life, but only one of its incidentals; that its processes from first to
last are guided exclusively by animal instincts, among which men have
compelled her to sacrifice the best parts of her life; that although
nature has imposed upon her the larger share in these processes, and
all their pains, it has also bestowed upon her capabilities which are
clearly designed for more exalted stations than mere breeders of men
and gratifiers of their animal pleasures, so unduly stimulated on the
earth as the unintellectual and chief attraction of the sexes. You
have perhaps but little conception of how much that reckless sexual
impulse to matrimony, unrestrained by your laws, and encouraged by your
religion, has swollen your ranks of poverty, crime and imbecility. Your
women in their dependence and subjection have but one source of power
at their service, and they have used it for all it was worth. As a
consequence, even to the present period of your civilization, qualities
of mind cuts no figure against the voluptuous animalism of person in
securing husbands than it did in barbaric times.

It is the rarest thing among you to find an intellectually mated
husband and wife qualified by equal education and opportunities to
be in perfect accord and sympathy in the pursuit of high purposes.
Among your higher circles are to be found occasionally one of these
congenial matings, the happiest conditions of matrimonial existence,
where by good breeding and cultivation a man tacitly ignores his
superiority under your unjust usages; but although the wife may
be in sympathy with the ambition and purposes of her husband in
his intellectual labors she is seldom able to assist him owing to
educational differences. With us the wife has more than encouragement
to offer. Her mind becomes a part of her husband’s and increases his
capabilities. Many of our highest achievements in brain work are the
result of such collaboration of two minds working as one. The rare
cases instanced among you are only to be found in your cultivated
circles, below these, in all degrees to the bottom mental equality in
women is oftener the source of contention than happiness, and you must
expect to have this unhappy condition increased until you have granted
them their rightful position in society. So long as their subjection to
men was hopeless and they were taught by their theological superiors to
obey their husbands, and by the same advisors, their separation denied
or discouraged, they meekly submitted to abuse and suffering because
without a hope of relief; but as it is becoming more and more apparent
to you that the subjection of your women is one of the many ancient
fallacies, the gradual reasoning of them out of existence is paving the
way for woman’s liberty.

Nature has designed that women shall only devote a portion of her life
to maternity and its attendant duties. It has set her free of them at a
time when her mind and body are fully capable of most of the avocations
of life. Having fulfilled these great services to mankind, you have
ordained by custom and usage that she shall remain thereafter a mere
unconsidered supernumerary on the world’s stage. In your lower circles
she becomes a helpless drudge in the interests of her children, and
in the higher ones, either an unwelcome retainer in the household of
a daughter, or a more or less constrained member in the family of a
son; but in all of these her lot is a happy one when compared with her
utter desolation in the world when her children have departed from her
by immigration or death. You have given her no part in great affairs,
and she has but little knowledge of or interest in them. They afford
her no entertainment amid her loneliness, and by the narrow training
of her faculties, diverted only by the minor things of life,--its
personal episodes and gossiping incidents--she lives out her remaining
purposeless career. This mere lack of mind expansion has been cited
against her as a sex weakness, but it is safe to predict that if men
had been subject to such conditions, without her deep human sympathies
and her religion, they would have fallen into complete mental
imbecility, and if men for all the ages past had been confined as she
had been to duties requiring no high attainments, the present balance
of mind work could not be shown in their favor.

With us maternity is not allowed to absorb the whole of a woman’s life.
While we accord to her, in consideration of its responsibilities and
pains, an exemption from all the physically exhausting occupations,
she is encouraged in all others to which her capabilities are adapted;
accordingly with us she is an open competitor with men in many lines
of business, some of which are entirely given over to her by general
consent. By multiplying her opportunities in this way, she is not,
as with you in most cases, helpless and dependent. She moves around
among men as their equal, discussing matters of business and questions
of public policy like one of them. She joins them in out door sports
and athletics, in which she often excels, and these relations which
the sexes hold to each other, so differing from yours, entirely
changes their lines of attraction. In their closer association with
us it becomes possible for men and women to thoroughly understand
each other. They do not move in two separate worlds as with you,
artfully disguising their characters and feelings from each other,
wearing a different manner as occasions require for deception. Men
select matrimonial companions with us as they choose friends among
themselves, sympathy of feeling and sincerity being primary motives
of attraction. It is only the general untruthfulness of your society
carried into matrimony which makes it in so many cases unhappy. You
have so inculcated the arts of deception and falsehood into your lives
that they have come at last to be openly pursued as legitimate methods
of thrift. One could not find a better indication of the insincerity
of your society than this metropolitan journal on your table. Here is
a strong editorial commending truth, another a well written homily on
honesty, and on the connecting pages, authorized by the same hands,
hundreds of advertisements in all shades of deception to catch the
unwary. With the gradual decadence of force as a means of preying
upon one another, you have so cultivated falsehood to take its place
that the life of each individual among you is kept constantly on the
watch to protect his interests. Hypocrisy in religion, and deception
in matrimony, belong to those vices which at present disgrace your
civilization, and of which your women must always suffer most so long
as you keep them excluded from a free intercourse in the world’s
affairs.

The difference in our treatment of women has very materially changed
their points of attraction. While we can see no beauty in a woman
without enlightenment, and can find no full companionship in her
without her knowledge of our world and its affairs, these qualities
are not so much considered by you. The idea of a fitness to live
together, as equals in everything, is not entertained, by either the
one or the other of you, in these serious life contracts. Your women
submit their dependence as a virtue, and it is accepted, as well as
their gentleness,--so often assumed,--as a flattering offer to men’s
vanity of power. There is seldom a marriage among you without the
hidden satisfaction of a man with his new entrance into authority. Any
subsequent development of individuality or independence of character
in the women, must result in discord. We meet each other, in such
contracts, on the common ground of equality. There are no political or
domestic rights which both do not equally enjoy; consequently, women
are not tempted into blandishments, and deceptions, for the conquests
of men. Owing to their independence and helpfulness, the marriage
proposal is never accepted as an extreme opportunity, leading them to
take desperate chances, among conditions that are not promising to
happiness. This, you have forced them to do, by closing all other doors
against them.

You may suspect that the admission of women amongst us, in the affairs
of business and government, has coarsened them, and given them a
character of what is known among you as masculinity. That is not so.
Their amiability of manner, instead of being lost, is conveyed and
multiplied among our business methods. All men, among the civilized
nations of the earth, are softened by female association. Outside your
regions of degradation, this has been invariably the case, and you have
proofs of it already in the instances among you where women have taken
a hand in affairs outside the household. When, by superior intelligence
and force of character, they have made their way to success and fame
among the pursuits of men, they have carried with them, in every
case, that soft femininity of which they are naturally endowed. Your
often expressed fears of hardening, or in some injuring them, by an
admission to equal rights, is not entirely sincere. To keep on good
terms with them, and to retain their approbation, you have been led to
conceal from them many of your doubtful business and political methods,
and you hesitate to admit them into these fields with you, not more
from the dread of their contamination, than the exposure it would
bring about of ways, which you have heretofore so carefully concealed.
There is many a successful politician, or business man among you,
who poses before his wife and lady friends as a hero of finance, or
statesmanship, who could not do so, did they share with him a knowledge
of the incidents and manipulations which brought about his success.
Deference to women, and a regard for their esteem beyond that of men,
is a human attribute apparent in your whole history. It has been the
inspiration of your best poetry, and your most stirring romance. In
your middle ages, under what is known among you as chivalry, it has
led you to deeds of virtue in upholding the right, far beyond the
prevailing oppression. How much the conduct of men is modified, and
their evil tendencies checked, by a regard for the good opinion of
women, every man can judge by examination of himself. In how many
dangerous moments has temptation been cast aside, by the fear of evil
report to some fond wife, mother, sister, daughter, or lady friends,
when, to sacrifice the good opinion of men alone, would have been no
bar?

By our greater attention to the laws of health, and our governmental
restriction of unhealthful marriages, which I will describe to you
further on, we have developed a far greater average of physical
perfection in women that exists with you. In connection with this
there are other advantages which our women enjoy beyond yours, which
greatly enhance their personal attractiveness and beauty. Their equal
educational opportunities under our system, of which they are not slow
to avail themselves, the hopefulness and lack of austerity in our
religion, and the interest they are led to exhibit in great affairs,
are so marked in their demeanor and physiognomy as to render them very
different beings. As we estimate beauty, you have only a women here
and there who compares with them. Among your mass of women, the facial
expression of their long subjection, and its attendant conditions are
strikingly observable to us. Features, no matter how perfectly lined,
without the light of cultivation and knowledge, and which are destined
to become, in conjugal association, clouded with the cares of an
overwrought maternity, and dejected by a threatening and superstitious
religion, would have no charms to any member of our society. With us,
their faces reflect the consciousness of absolute equality, and are
illuminated with daily religious duties, which consist, in accordance
with our belief, in making the ways of life pleasant, and its paths
peaceful, and in assisting in all things toward the improvement of
ourselves and society, in the process of which it is our religion to
assist, and in the performance of which, they work with us as equals to
attain.




CHAPTER XIII.


You must have suspected before this that, so far as the rapid
accumulation of wealth is concerned, our society was in that
stationary condition so much dreaded by your economists as the end
of all material progress. An assumption among your thinkers that any
permanent diminishment of the production of wealth is the forerunner
of disaster to society, is one of those mistakes easily accounted
for by the surroundings of your present stage of development. Your
experience teaches you that where the wealth producing energies are
in the highest stage of action, your civilization shows all its
other forces equally advancing; and where on the other hand, capital
and wealth are restricted, there is a state of general stagnation.
These opposite conditions, however, you will find to be, more than
anything else, the result of difference in degrees of intelligence,
knowledge, and consequently ambition. Your aims, even the higher ones,
are so indissolubly connected with wealth as the means by which most
of them are promoted, that your incentives to acquire riches have
become a part of your intellectual constitution. Where the penalty of
a straightened financial condition is the forfeiture of everything
which makes life desirable, even a denial of the opportunities of
association with the better class, and a surrender of offspring to
the degradation and contempt which comes of limited knowledge, it may
reasonably be expected that the struggle for wealth would be keen.
Equally as an incentive also are the innumerable avenues of gain, which
are everywhere open for the investment of capital, and the remarkable
profits which accrue to keep up the spirit of money-making adventure.
You will certainly agree with me that this crushing, elbowing, and
treading on each other’s heels in the attempt to get money is not the
best possible form or type of society: more especially since you are
not all fairly and evenly equipped in this struggle, the mass of your
people reap no benefit from it, and its result is only to double up the
incomes of the few.

Stagnation is not necessarily a condition of the stationary state, as
many of your writers lead you to believe. It is merely a revolution in
the aims of society, brought about by changes which are inevitable,
and which your civilization is sooner or later bound to reach. Every
newly applied science and invention, and above all every acre of land
brought under cultivation, render this period so much dreaded by you
more remote; but you will come to it all the same. It will merely
be a using up of all the resources of capital to RAPIDLY multiply
itself. During your present progressive period, so far as that term is
applicable to the speedy gathering in of wealth, your society presents
to us an aspect of mercenary abandonment beyond anything we have ever
experienced ourselves, and with a full knowledge of the end that will
come we look forward with a high degree of interest to that time when
you will arrive at the stationary condition.

As you approach that period where the diminished profits of capital
will discourage the great activity and aggressiveness which now
characterize it, some very great changes will gradually be brought
about. Assuming that labor will continue to enlighten itself it will
slowly change its relations with capital, so that in the end instead of
being below, as it is now, it will be on top, as with us. Many of the
ways by which wealth now multiplies itself will be shut off, and with
its acquirement no longer indispensable to the honors of life, and the
difficulties of its attainment in any large volume increased, society
will not be given so intensely to its individual accumulation. Your
intellectual activities will be turned more in the direction of other
motives. To repair waste and provide for the necessities of the living
will be about all that is left to employ your industries, and there
will be enough for capital to do within these limits to moderately
enlarge itself; while yet within this narrowed field, limited wealth
will be able to provide itself with income enough to sustain and reward
habits of prudential saving. Although great wealth will be exceedingly
difficult to obtain, a fair competency will be within the reach of
all; since labor coming to the front, owing to the weakened powers of
wealth, will assume its deserving place in the forces of economy and
legislation, and will demand and receive a fairer share of the profits
of industry.

After the advance of civilization and knowledge beyond a certain
period, the ambitions and necessities of a people will furnish abundant
incentives to keep society in a state of activity. The energies of
life are stimulated, not so much by the large occasional rewards which
come to a few, like prizes in a lottery, as the steady and certain
remuneration of each day’s output of action to all. The ability to
obtain from industry a considerable margin beyond the daily expenses of
life is sufficient to keep alive the mental and physical energies, and
is certain to bring about that general state of hopefulness, which more
than anything else promotes thrift and stimulates ambition.

It may be somewhat at variance with your views of political economy,
to believe that any reduction of the power and value of capital will
not in a corresponding degree depress labor. You must bear in mind,
however, that the stationary state, as exemplified by our society,
differs from your progressive condition, not in the lesser abundance
of capital, but in its better diffusion, more dependent relations,
and smaller comparative profits. It follows from this as a matter of
course, that it requires the possession of a larger amount of the
products of labor to bring about that condition of life known as a
competency than it does with you. But by a well determined arrangement
in all ways in favor of those who toil, by which a fair margin is
secured between income and expense, the coveted independence is always
within reach.

Under our system, capital becoming diffused among the masses in
comparatively small portions, and having no such extraordinary uses,
nor such high rates of interest as with you, it assumes its natural
place as an adjunct to all the enterprises of labor. All our factories
are consequently carried on by co-operation. No such a thing is known
on our planet as the owner of a manufacturing establishment depressing
at his will and pleasure the pay of perhaps a whole community of
working people. When an establishment is required for the manufacture
of some product in demand, our workmen undertake it as a business
belonging wholly to themselves, and there is never any lack of means
among them to do it.

The utter helpless condition of your workmen, as a class, is not
entirely owing to their enforced scant share in the profits of
industry. Whoever among them, by greater abstinence or otherwise,
succeeds in saving any considerable portion of his earnings,
hastens either to change his situation for that of employer, where
self-interest inclines him to favor low wages, or to seek among the
greater encouragements outside a change of occupation. By this process
capital and labor are constantly being divorced, and the ranks of your
workmen are left to contain only those whose necessities hold them
there.

In the condition of things with us, bestowing upon labor all the
emoluments of industry, it becomes the most advantageous pursuit of
life. With wages at a uniform and fixed sum, from which there can be no
deviation except to increase, the working man proceeds to lay by his
surplus, until, in a reasonable time, it can be made to do service in
adding to the fruits of his toil.

In our society there is no possibility, and no one has hopes of gaining
money by chance. We hold it to be a demoralizing evil that wealth
should be obtained without industry. The quality of mind which you
honor under the name of shrewdness, and which seldom hesitates to
profit by the losses and even the miseries of others, would find life
a burden on account of the odium attached, in any community on our
planet. The privilege to build up an individual fortune, by taking
from the substance of the whole people in any unlimited degree which
an unscrupulous ingenuity can devise, is one of the peculiarities
of your civilization. To this general license, with its very small
limitation, is to be ascribed most of your social miseries. The
lessons presented to your youth at the very first glance at the
affairs of life are calculated to impress them with the belief that
success is not so much for the strong and considerate, as it is for
the wary and cunning; and that the business of creating wealth is
of the slightest importance, when compared with the many successful
arts and schemes for capturing it after its production. The example
is witnessed everywhere among you of money-making without loss of
honor or respect, by the method of drawing from others, by taking
advantage of their necessities, excessive and unfair portions of
their substance for some sort of service rendered. The consequence is
that life with you is constantly renewed, on the one hand, by persons
with more or less inherited capital, who are educated to believe that
existence is a game, whose winning instances are the best guides to
follow; and on the other by the great mass of hereditary toilers who
submit themselves as victims under sheer force of necessity and usage.
This state of your civilization brings into play many of your lower
feelings, as indispensable instruments of success. When selfishness
is the chief promoter of thrift, practical charity is only aroused by
unusual provocation. The miseries of existence are unseen and unfelt
by others than the sufferers themselves among you, just as your senses
become oblivious to the presence of disturbing influences which you
find it unprofitable to suppress. The necessity for each one looking
out for himself in your fierce battles of life makes him unmindful
of others. Yet benevolence dwells within all your hearts as a divine
attribute, which cannot be wholly destroyed, no matter how neglected
its cultivation. Like the retarded germination of seed in a too deeply
surmounting soil, it comes to the light among you here and there, under
favorable conditions, with an increasing frequency which reveals your
destiny as unerringly as the golden horizon presages the coming of the
sun.

The difference in the degree by which each individual holds the common
welfare in comparison with his own, marks the stage of progress
towards perfection in society. You hold within yourselves, by a
divine provision, the elements to this end. Your history is full
of instances to prove that self-sacrifice is an act which inspires
a greater commendation than any other. All your normal mental
organizations are endowed with the propensity to benefit others, which
only the conditions of your society circumscribe by a conflict of
interest. What is now in your higher faculties, during your present
development, a pleasure, will become a passion by further progress
and cultivation, and, by a still more extended pursuit, a necessity
to the tranquility and enjoyment of your lives. Filial and parental
love from mere instincts have grown among you to be the most gratifying
of inclinations. Sexual affinity, from its origin of brutal desire,
has been transformed, in your higher circles, to a pure and tender
sentiment of disinterested regard. Not long ago your lunatics were
chained to stakes like beasts. Your infected were left to die upon the
roadsides. Your infirm were shut from sight, consumed with vermin among
their rags. You house, clothe, and care for all these now with almost
the solicitude that parents bestow upon children. If you should submit
yourselves now for a time to the presence of these old inhumanities,
and observe their disturbing effects upon the happiness of your lives,
it would be a fair measurement of your progress toward the stationary
state.

Supposing yourself to be one of an audience assembled for the purpose
of obtaining pleasure from a performance on the stage, your delight
would, in a large degree, depend upon the manifestations of approval
surrounding you. Any expression of dissatisfaction would spoil your
enjoyment, no matter upon what it might be founded. It might arise,
for instance, from unfair opportunities of view, or from the usurped
privilege of some to obstruct the vision of others. Your inclinations,
arising from no higher motive than self interest, would lead you to
assist in bringing about that state of general satisfaction which is
indispensable to your own comfort and happiness. This illustrates one
of the motives which, in our stage of development, impels us to arrange
that, so far possible, every individual shall enjoy equal privileges in
society. Happiness is simply not possible without it.

Your moralists might argue that to close and intimate a sympathy with
the misfortunes of others would keep us so constantly unhappy as to
make life unendurable. In answer to this, you have only to consider
that if you separate from all your ills those which either directly or
remotely are brought upon you by your imperfect social state, there are
but few left besides death and its attendant sorrows. And of these few
entirely comprised under the heads of sickness and accidents, there is
a possibility of their greater diminishment by better modes of life.

That you are slowly and gradually moving towards the stationary
condition, unmistakable evidence proves. Material as well as spiritual
indications confirm this belief. You can easily observe that wealth in
the hands of the few is losing its opportunities for rapid increase.
In your oldest advanced regions it has already worked out its resources
to the extent of endeavoring to find abroad occasions for profitable
use. But for the monopoly of land, which enables it to extract from
industry an amount for its services out of all proportion with its
value elsewhere, it would have been much further advanced towards the
stationary state.

One of the greatest obstacles opposing your approach towards the
perfect society is your propensity to theorize and speculate upon
matters which it is not given you to know. We have a saying that he who
gets his feet in the air is lost. We mean by that to convey the idea,
that all speculation not founded on positive knowledge is so utterly
worthless, that any indulgence therein is useless to society. The
opinion is unchallenged among us, that the inhabitants of the Earth are
too prone to get their feet in the air. And yet the very ease by which
this misfortune is accomplished among you is a proof of your goodness.
Your inclination to virtue is your weak side of approach, and all your
inherent and intuitive charity, which might during all these centuries
have been exercised upon yourselves, has been to a great extent wasted
upon your schemes of salvation, in which you have no assurance
whatever but the wild promises of imagination. When you come fully to
understand that happiness, true prosperity, virtue, and even beauty are
but synonyms of truth, and that misery, crime, misfortune, and ugliness
are but other names for falsehood, you will no longer have any dread or
hesitation to search for that verity which destroys old beliefs, even
though that search melts into air your most cherished traditions. You
come to understand after a while that a truth can disseminate nothing
but good; and that a falsehood, no matter how venerable with age, nor
how respectable by adoption, can generate little else than evil. Your
creeds have attracted you and plowed deep into your affections, because
in them is gathered from yourselves the divine sentiments of goodness,
out of which they are all robed in a pretended monopoly. Your virtues
are brought into service within their narrow limits, and your energies
and substance consumed in the work of enlarging their influence, while
the more fruitful material for your charities lies neglected in the
evils and miseries of your society.

The Earth is your dominion. Tread firmly upon it. Remember it has been
put into your keeping, and that your people are entirely responsible
for its social condition. He who assists to improve that, serves the
Deity better than he who spends his life in genuflections and prayers.
When you look around among the wretched criminals among you, punished
and unpunished, and the poverty-stricken, and the sad-eyed, neglected
children; see the unsuppressed temptations to evil, the unrecognized
virtue, and the uneven opportunities for individual advancement, you
should bear in mind that all these are but evidences of the violation
of the trust imposed in you by the divine intelligence. There is,
perhaps, no spectacle upon the Earth that inspires more pity among
the inhabitants of Mars, than the constant waste of your best parts
in submitting yourselves to the impositions of your seers, who lead
you away from your duties, under the theory that the Earth is merely
a battle ground and field of conquest for the perpetuation of their
doctrines, all else upon it being blank vanities. They have kept you
away from the true business of your lives, and have mesmerized you,
alternately terrifying and delighting you by unreal fancies; now
exhibiting to you a paradise and at another time a nightmare. They have
involved you in a perpetual shadow, discouraging you of all hopes of
brightness until your celestial birth. By exhibiting only your grosser
parts, and threatening the vengeance of an austere and capricious god
of their own imaginary creation, they both degrade you and belittle
your conceptions of the Deity. You could bend your faces upward with
a better sincerity, if, instead of following phantoms all these ages,
with your feet in the air, you could show a truer interpretation of
the divine purpose in establishing a happier and more perfect dwelling
together.




CHAPTER XIV.


I reside within a city of Mars which, in point of population and
grandeur, is one of the first on our planet. In accordance with our
custom of designating such places with names of quality, it would be
known in your language as the city of Good Will. As it is the type of
all others, you are already informed of a few of its general features.
I will, however, give you some fuller description of our society
and surroundings, in only the hasty and imperfect manner which this
opportunity affords.

With much the same feelings and inclinations as yours, and with that
love and cultivation of the beautiful which we have pursued as an
element of our religion, uninterrupted as with you by those delusions
which destroy art, we have advanced much beyond you in that direction.

It is to be noted, as a coincidence proving the unity of all
intelligence within the universe, that we have designed an architecture
not unlike that of your ancient Greece. Our isolated exteriors, such
as villas and country residences, bear a close resemblance to some of
your ancient styles. In our cities we have been obliged to conform to
the condition of aerial navigation, which has greatly restricted our
elevated ornamentation, and forced upon us a system of curves instead
of angles in our projections.

One of the most notable differences between your construction and ours
is the material and form of our roofs, which are uniformly of solid
glass, and dome shaped. The substance is laid on in a plastic state,
hardens in a short time, is purely transparent, and as difficult to
fracture as stone. The upper story of every house becomes by this
method the chief source of light for its interior, and by ingeniously
formed horizontal curtains can be darkened at will. We believe this to
be one of the most important sanitary arrangements we possess, and to
which may be chiefly ascribed the health and vigor of our bodies. In
these bright upper apartments we bathe ourselves in the sun, and enjoy
the constant bloom and fragrance of flowers.

By a natural adaption, these glass roofs have become inseparably
connected with our religious lives. Our interest in the wonderful
nightly exhibitions which they permit is increased by the general
knowledge we have cultivated of the character and motions of the
heavenly bodies. As a consequence, there are but few among us who
cannot describe the paths and directions of the planets; and it is
quite safe to say that a majority of our people can compute the periods
of opposition and conjunction between them. No other exhibition so
feeds and stimulates our religious impulses, as the grand display of
divine power in the unceasing motions of the spheres. We bring the
spectacle within our households, and dwell with it. It is the altar
upon which we worship the great unseen.

Each block of buildings is surmounted by a single roof of the
transparent character I have described. In this way we have utilized
all the space for dwelling or business purposes, and prevented those
unsightly back yards which disfigure the cities of the Earth and lower
their sanitary condition. Usually there are no partition walls except
in the lower stories, and these lofty upper apartments, especially if
over dwellings, have their flattened dome-shaped roofs supported by a
series of columns and arches artistically wrought and decorated, and
their interiors adorned with growing flower and statuary, so as to
furnish a delightful resort, convenient to the neighborhood and open to
all.

These extensive halls are a necessity to the social character of our
people. You may imagine how an intercourse based on perfect equality,
and with the paramount idea of obtaining pleasure by bestowing it,
would have its enjoyments enlarged by the unrestricted and unselected
numbers participating. Music and dancing are delights with us beyond
your experience. We enjoy the advantages of atmospheric conditions
and a degree of gravitating force which are peculiarly adapted to
heighten these enjoyments. Our voice tones, seldom without cultivation,
acquire an energy and brilliancy in our atmosphere unknown to you.
A combination of trained voices with us is so vastly superior to
instrumental music, that the latter is not known except as a novelty.
Since the force of gravity is less with us our bodies are much lighter
than yours, and our motions are consequently more airy and graceful. In
movements like dancing there is less muscular energy expended, and a
greater pleasure attained.

Under these vast transparent domes, looking out upon the universe of
planets and stars, we dance, and sing our hymns of praise to the Deity,
asking for nothing, but uniting our voices in the rhythms of poetry
and music in a thanksgiving for the pleasures of life, and for that
guidance which has directed us clear of the deadly superstitions of our
neighboring planet, and for that intelligence which has led us to find
our true religious duties in exercising our better impulses within our
own fields of action.

Over our business quarters these upper stories, less ornate and well
ventilated, serve the purposes of factories and work shops, where the
sun’s rays, not so intense as with you, owing to our greater distance
from it, are let in to brighten the hours of those who toil. Among
these locations of industry are conditions that would surprise you.
There is the indispensable anteroom beside the entrance of each,
where, enjoying the comfortable furniture, may be found a number of
operatives waiting for the beginning of the three-hour shift. They
are all on terms of easy familiarity, yet among them may be found the
president of the grand council, who manages the affairs of the city,
the lecturer who presides at the temple, and other prominent worthies
mingled with the others who have achieved no honors beyond the work
bench. The person who is most complimented among the number is the one
who has just been granted an advance of one grade in the skill of his
calling. He has attained what would be an equivalent in your society to
the honors of a collegiate degree, with the very material difference
in his favor, that for years to come, and perhaps as long as he lives,
his income is permanently increased by an enhanced value to his labor.
No competition will ever, under our system, render valueless this
achievement of his.

Your degrees of learning are but empty honors compared with this
profitable distinction. You insure no certain rewards for that
acquirement of knowledge which has won its parchment of approval,
and the holder enjoys only the slim advantage which his certificate
secures. His degree wins him no bread, and the honors of his career
rest uncertain, with all his struggles ahead. Our workman, at each
step of his advancement, increases his income, under the assurance and
protection of our industrial methods, with the certainty and stability
of a government pension.

But while we have found it wise to honor and protect manual skill, the
physical strength of our people has for many ages been a subject of
general attention. Among the productions of the Supreme Author which he
is engaged in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance on
your planet is surely man himself, as a being animal as well as mental.
As an indolent, weak and passive body is usually associated with a mind
of the same character, it is only by the cultivation of both together
that society improves. You have evidences enough of the inseparable
connection between mental and physical energy, and yet your cultivation
of the body has engaged but little attention. It seems to us one of the
most serious objections to your religious abstractions, that the spirit
of all of them tends to deny or belittle the great service of healthy
sinews and nerves in the progress of social improvement.

You will find intellectual stagnation everywhere upon the face of the
Earth, where incentives to muscular action are suppressed from whatever
cause, and you know by experience that the decay of mental vigor, by a
release from the necessity of bodily exercise, has obliged the brawn
and muscle of your age, in more than one instance, to come to the front
in the management of affairs.

Civilization, at a certain degree of its progress, is expected to
assume duties which until then, have been faithfully performed by
nature alone. Like a good mother she has provided, in your primitive
state, against the degeneration of your bodies by the operation of her
universal law, the survival of the fittest. In your social betterment
you can reasonably be expected to provide for yourselves some
substitute to maintain that standard of hardihood and strength which
had formerly been kept up by your primitive struggles for existence.

Your knowledge of the laws of heredity has enabled you to improve
upon the forms and qualities of all those creatures which have been
taken from their native wilds to serve your uses; and yet, with a
fatal inconsistency, you consign your own bodies to a carelessness
of procreation which totally ignores all well known methods of
improvement. The spectacle is common among you, of the skilled breeder
straining his knowledge to remedy defects of form in the lower
animals in his possession, while he and his progeny exhibit, in their
own bodies, without concern or attention, the very same physical
infirmities which he had so successfully banished in his brutes by
parental selection.

The neglect of your opportunities in this direction is more surprising,
when it is considered how greatly you are suffering from it; for
although the achievement of a more general perfection of form and
strength is invaluable to you, as laying the foundation of a larger
average of mental power and activity, yet this is not more important to
your society than the easy and certain eradication by judicious matings
of the most persistent and fatal of your diseases. It is appalling to
estimate the sum of human misery perpetually transmitted congenitally
in diseased tissues and functional defects.

This evil, which has prevailed among you until your bodily ills are
almost innumerable, you have been taught to consider as an arrangement
of the divine will, and you rest yourselves helplessly in the belief
that its endurance without remedy is the penalty of life; when, in
fact, it is perpetuated chiefly by that over-powering individual
selfishness which makes no account of the general good while gratifying
sentiments of pleasure, or greed.

I have already drawn your observation to that infallible test which
marks the progress of social development--the average willingness of
attention and sacrifice of individual interests to the common welfare.
From our achievements in that direction already described, you may
easily imagine that we have not neglected the opportunity to improve
and benefit society by the observance of some of nature’s simplest and
most easily applied laws.

We are not embarrassed as you would be by protests of an infringement
of personal liberty, because we have arrived beyond that stage where
law and its enforcement are required. Official recommendation supported
by a united public opinion, without any penalty for non-compliance
except the general condemnation, is our only resort in directing the
conduct of our people. Under such a system, any violation of individual
rights is impossible. It is enough in our society to determine that a
measure is for the common good, to secure its adoption without dissent.

Accordingly, it comes within the province of our Government Health
Department to direct, and in some degree supervise, those marital
engagements out of which our numbers are so constantly replenished.
This important business is closely associated with measures designed in
other ways to promote our health, and may be said to begin at the birth
of every child. Each infant is carefully examined by medical experts,
and registered. Every peculiarity or bodily defect is recorded, and
rules of management furnished, as remedies, if found necessary.
Every person, young or old, is required periodically to pass a like
examination. The personal health register is open to all, and the
bodily condition of every inhabitant may be in that way ascertained.
None fail to avail themselves of information so greatly concerning
themselves. Incipient diseases are in a vast number of cases remedied
by this discovery of their unsuspected presence, and the habits of life
are often changed in time to head off some latent malady, which in its
early stages, nothing but medical science could reveal.

The system establishes a public record of the physical standing,
either in lurking disease or deformity, of every individual; and as it
is made the duty of our health department to declare its judgment of
approval in every marriage contract, we have no transmitted disease
or deformities of body running through generations, and multiplying
the miseries of life, as you have. We have long ago stamped out by
this method three-fourths of the diseases which are nourished by the
habits of civilization. By this means we have secured a race of men
and women so physically perfect as to cause existence to be accepted
as a grateful patrimony. You have interrogated nature in her laws
of development, and in her processes of modification both in forms
and qualities of things, and with a knowledge so acquired, you have
cultivated a world of animal and vegetable organisms to your better
service. We have done that, too; but we have accomplished in that line
something of incomparably more importance to us, in advancing together
by due cultivation and care our animal as well as our intellectual
selves.

You cannot fail to discover in this, one of the effects of that
striking divergence between our civilization and yours, due to widely
different interpretations of the divine will. We look upon our planet
with all its appurtenances as a bequest which has been delivered into
our keeping for that assistance in progression so plainly the best and
most exalted business of our lives, and so unmistakably pleasing to the
Supreme Author that every degree of its accomplishment is rewarded by
signs of his favor. From our better demonstrated spiritual belief, we
derive the inspiration to increase and bestow upon each other the best
things of life; while you, under religious promptings from the same
high source, condemn yourselves to abstinence and austerity. You so
misconceive the true relations between spiritual and material forces,
that instead of regarding each as the nursery and builder-up of the
other, you have devised a theory which brings them into antagonism as
diverse influences; the exercise of material concerns, as you assume,
tending to lead you away from the divinity.

The effect of this mistaken view of life is plainly to be seen in
your society and surroundings. Your material progression, deprived
of the religious impulse and enthusiasm, and depending wholly upon
the lower faculty of self-gain, advances by slow degrees, frequently
retrogresses, and is not secure of a total relapse under so mercenary
a moving power. Your forward movement, instead of being compact and
co-operative like ours, drags along fitfully and laboriously, marshaled
alone by a struggling influence here and there, under the dead weight
of an indifferent and self absorbed multitude, and in open conflict
with a host of disturbed traditions.

Your doctrine of the absolute divorce of spiritual and material
interests, by wasting your best parts in the service of the
world-condemning deity of your imagination, and surrendering your
temporal affairs to the sole exercise of your lower sentiments and
feelings, has spread its dire effects, and may be traced in every phase
of your society. Out of it comes that singular disregard for each other
in all things except the spiritual, and that perverted estimate of
goodness, which has consigned your science and learning with their
influences, together with your whole world of industry, to places where
unassisted and unencouraged they must work out their own doubtfully
admitted and tardy rewards; while your best enthusiasm and most active
morality is led to waste among your many unreasoning schemes of
salvation.

What but this unwarranted dissociation of spirit and matter, of the
body and soul, of your physical and intellectual parts, regarding one
as the degrading yokemate of the other instead of the counterpart and
co-worker, has taken all the heart out of your lives, hidden from you
the moral possibilities within your worldly reach, and reduced the only
existence you are so far called upon to improve into a dead and useless
hibernation of your divinest faculties? What more readily excuses and
defends your indifference to the hard lines of human labor, and your
toleration of a system which dooms most of you to perpetual dependence,
than those mossgrown traditions which, from their selected quarters
among the supernatural and unseen, are not disturbed or interested by
your social wrongs, and which in truth find their best patronage and
most profitable employment where most prevail the miseries of life?
Just in the degree in which you are already emancipated from these
barren illusions, does your most humane work in social progress appear.

Your inspirations of goodness come to you as they come to us, without
the necessity of a revelation. Their encouragement is more faithfully
secured by the benign influence which rewards their adoption, than
those written codes among you which assume, under doubtful motives,
their direction and control. As surely as all the forces of nature may
be traced to the heat of the sun, so your impulses of virtue, your
heroism of good deeds, and your spiritual hopes, are conveyed to you
in a germinal state without any intercepting medium, with the first
breath of of your bodies; to be improved, enlarged and harvested for
the purposes and uses of society.

You turn over the surface of the Earth and gather its fruits, never
doubting the superhuman forces in conjunction which reward your labor;
and yet your intellectual tillage is left to take its chances among
circumscribed opportunities which no combined effort has attempted to
enlarge. Your progress cannot be otherwise than uncertain and your
governments will always be unstable in their foundations under your
system, which at its best furnishes scarcely one disciplined mind in a
hundred, and the acquirements of that one, too, resulting only from a
spontaneous individual impulse, with, in most cases, no higher motives
than self-gain and advancement.

Your fields are not wanting in your attentions. You bring profit
to yourselves by the thorough tillage of your acres. You multiply
by your manipulation under nature’s hints the life-supporting and
pleasure-giving properties of the fruits and flowers of the Earth to
the extremest blossoming and abundance. And yet in such a state of
general crudity is your own divine essence of reason and thought,
that to this day no superstition is too absurd, no sophistry too
transparent, and no pretended reform too ill digested to take root
and flourish, even to the disintegration of large patches of your
social life. So that while no fault can be found with your progress in
the handling of the material agents under your control, the opinion
is irresistible, from our point of view, that you are assiduously
cultivating everything but yourselves.




CHAPTER XV.


We have, like you, wealth with its self-rewarding luxuries, but its
character is very different. Its chosen pleasures and inclinations are
unlike yours. Acquisitiveness has no such controlling motives as with
you. The hope of social elevation, the anxiety to place the sufferings
of poverty beyond reach, and the love of power, are not elements in
our desire for gain. As an inducement to the accumulation of wealth,
all these motives are supplanted by the one overweening passion for
distinguishment which its possession affords, by contributing to the
well-being and happiness of others. The even opportunities of life, and
the entire absence of poverty as you have it, with its miseries, do
away with the most fertile stimulus to individual greed among you; and
the strong passion to hoard, which you call avarice, becomes with us,
from the singleness of its motives, one of the noblest of our religious
aspirations. Whatever luxuries wealth provides for itself are shared
by all; and since the nature and form of our society precludes the
necessity of alms-giving, charity, as you understand it, is unknown.
The general dissemination of self-pride and independence, as much the
result of our religious beliefs as of our political and educational
methods, secures us against those evils of indiscriminate charity
which are found to paralyze industry everywhere upon the Earth, in its
present stage of development.

In our political system we have provided so well for the even and
sufficient reward of toil, that our animal requirements, so easily
supplied, are never wanting in individual cases to the extent of
suffering. In the extremity of invalidism or other misfortune,
assistance comes, not in the form of charity as you know it, but as the
anxious and sympathetic support of a family to one of its members in
distress. The field of benevolence in wealth is, therefore, entirely
within the province of education and art; which in accordance with
our religious aspirations and beliefs, takes the same form in their
furtherance of the purposes of the Deity as your devotional enterprises
of promulgating your religious faiths.

Our rich contribute largely from their substance to the purposes of
education, with a philanthropy that is greatly intensified by the
religious enthusiasm gratified by the act; but they do not build nor
contribute to our temples of worship as yours do, since the attendance
upon these is unsolicited and voluntary, and a mere pleasurable
gratification of our spiritual hopes and aspirations. Unattended by
saving forms and conditions, as with you, the worship within our
temples is not considered of consequence to our spiritual welfare.
These religious centers, unlike yours, assume no power to condone or
compromise with evil. No burdened, unclean conscience comes to them
with the hope of absolution, to return again laden with its misdeeds
for another purging. No wholesale peculator brings a portion of his
evil gains as an atonement for the inflicted miseries of his avaricious
career. There is nothing whatever within our temples or surrounding
them, but the peace and self conscious satisfaction of the divine
co-operation in our efforts to cultivate ourselves, and the praise and
glory of our own success forms the spirit of our worship.

Our society being without exclusiveness, and the ostentation of riches
a thing unknown, there is no ambition to get beyond the general fare
in dwellings. The whole city block, surmounted by its one continuous
roof, may be either a single or a number of dwellings, to accord with
the incomes of its occupants. Under our land system the cost of rent
is such a small item in the living expenses, that all are enabled to
share alike in their housings, and to equally enjoy the benefit of our
wholesome sanitary provisions. No one amongst us dwells in a hovel.
We labor that the surroundings of all shall be uniformly pleasant
and comfortable. With us the suspicion of unseen misery is enough to
disturb the pleasures of life. Besides the unpleasant suggestions of
discomfit which a rough and incommodious dwelling would arouse, it
would be considered by us a painful violation of taste, and a sacrifice
of the opportunities of art.

Consequently within the limits of our cities you will not find any
external distinction among our dwelling places, to denote the financial
standing of their occupants. But as a whole block becomes occasionally
occupied by a single family, whose large fortune enables them to enjoy
its magnificent proportions, there is not wanting within those luxuries
of wealth urged by the prevailing tastes. The establishment becomes
the pride and pleasure of its locality. In conformity with all other
of the city’s blocks, it has three lofty stories. The lower one on
each of its facades consists of a series of Corinthian columns with
highly wrought capitals, resting upon which, and forming the second
story elevation, are a line of arches, supporting the flush outer walls
of the story above. This story, which is abundantly lighted by its
transparent roof, has its exterior surface decorated in bas relief with
architraves and cornices designed in our elaborate styles. Every block
has an arched and vestibuled main entrance at each of its four corners,
over which there rises a tower containing a powerful electric light,
illuminating at night the interior as well as the surrounding streets.
As our thoroughfares which radiate from the city’s center are straight,
and better adapted for business and the industries, they are devoted to
these purposes. Consequently, on the circular or concentric streets are
located most of our dwellings; the choicest of which, as to location,
are those fronting the parks, which, as I have already given you to
understand, circumscribe at intervals every neighborhood of the city.
It is, then, in these convex or concave fronts, standing on opposite
lines of the park belt, that the abodes of wealth are mostly to be
found.

You would discover the whole of one of these buildings, except its
middle story, devoted to the use of the public, and containing on its
first floor a number of class rooms assigned to a system of teaching
to which your kindergartens bear some similarity, and a few others in
which the scholars have advanced to a higher grade. The character of
the instruction would be indicated by the appliances and implements
of industry everywhere to be seen, the busy use of them at intervals
by the classes, and the pride and emulation of the scholars, in their
struggling efforts toward skill in their handling. In another room you
would find a smaller class, the special proteges of the owner, composed
of a few, who, by the early manifestations of an unusual promise, were
being assisted in their pursuance of some branch of science or art.

Outside of this department of instruction you would find an extensive
library, with its reading room attachments ingeniously arranged for
convenience, and a large apartment, usually in the center of the
building, well lighted from the roof, in which was collected the art
treasures, and upon which was lavished by its owner that fondness for
the beautiful which becomes him as a member of our society.

The upper story is a public assembly chamber for occasions of rejoicing
and pleasure, and is adorned with statuary, fountains, and blooming
plants. This grand apartment is so tempered in warmth by the cheap
appliances of our municipality, that it becomes a winter garden during
our long, inclement seasons, when the parks are sere and icy.

One of these establishments would suggest to your view an exaggerated
estimate of its founder’s wealth. In most cases his income extends but
little beyond the support of this enterprise. In his dream of wealth he
has achieved the hope of his ambition, and he stops there.

Your passion of hoarding beyond a competency, without purpose except
the lust for hoarding, is the offshoot of that instinct in the
carnivorous brute, which impels him to refuse to his hungry fellows any
portion of his captured carcass, one-tenth of which he cannot consume.
This low and brute-born heritage of greed only fails of a better
suppression in your society, because you have neglected to entirely
remedy, by your political methods, the generally precarious way in
which your animal and intellectual wants are supplied. Suffering now
follows just as close to a miss in your struggles for sustenance, as it
did when your skin-clad hunters failed of their game.

Your passion to get and hold is intensified and brutalized in
its lack of regard for the consequences to others, by the large
number of artificial necessities only attainable in your society
by a considerable accumulation of money, the want of which implies
degradation, and a sacrifice of many things that have grown to be dear
to life. Every addition to the savings removes to a greater distance
that dreaded condition of your civilization, known as poverty. The
insatiable character of the hoarding is not unlike the motive of
overcaution in a wanderer, who, terrorized by the appearance of a
dreaded animal in his path, increases his distance by flight far beyond
all possible approach of the dangerous presence.

Your breathless pursuit of wealth, beyond all reasonable limit of
obtaining the objects of desire, is induced also by the remarkable
opportunities its possession affords to appropriate the earnings of
industry. The capacity of your wealth to absorb and control the fruits
of toil exists in a geometrical ratio of increase with the greater
wealth employed, and the taste of power once felt is seldom appeased,
but increases with every money addition. Under your favorable laws, it
may extend to the privilege of a single individual exacting the whole
surplus earnings of an army of busy workers.

Through centuries of legislation and usuage you have established
various processes, by which wealth is enabled to extract an undue
portion of the earnings of industry. Among these processes may be named
rates of interest on money graded to the necessities of borrowers,
rents gauged by the ability of tenants to pay, monopoly supplies with
prices fixed just below the point of compelled abstinence, variations
in the value of mediums of exchange, with other unsuppressed agencies
promoting frequent change of values for the opportunities of capital
and the distress of labor; stupendous aggregations of wealth reversing
the laws of economy by advancing the price of necessities on the
one hand and depressing the wages of labor on the other; and more
successful than all, a system of land proprietorship which permits
holders of the Earth’s surface, in addition to their privilege of
exacting a large portion of the profits of industry in rent, a further
right to pocket, in the form of appreciated values of their land,
an unearned share of the collective fruits of the industries which
surround them.

Our divergent views of existence are exemplified in the care we have
taken to provide for an evener division of the products of industry.
With us, property is the means, and not the end, beyond which there
are any number of attainments in life incomparably more desirable
and beneficial to society, and our legislation has been directed
chiefly to the care and cultivation of these. The great aim of our
government has been to provide for the well-being of persons, while it
may be said of yours that the most attention has been devoted to the
welfare of property; by which is meant its protection and increase,
regardless of the manner of its distribution, or the doubtful methods
of its extraction from the energies of labor. In the pursuit of this
policy you are only perpetuating, without much change, your primitive
conditions, when the strong arm gathered the most of the wealth.
Your early born instincts do not seem sufficiently evolutionized to
co-operate in any undertaking which denies opportunities of the strong
over the weak; and the unhappy consequence is a society so mercenary
that the general estimate among you is not from any quality which
indicates a nearness to the Deity, but principally from the cool
numerical calculations of property attachments.

The unity of our spiritual and temporal interests makes it necessary
that every government act shall be a religious one. The spirit of
kindness, and charity to all which is the only deserving part of your
religions, we have taken as the foundation of all our public acts, and
have made it the cornerstone of government itself. Our legislation,
if the mere assent to measures recommended can be called by that
name, considers first the welfare of persons comprising the whole,
subservient to which every possible interest must take its place. And
the welfare of persons, in our politico-religious point of view, is
dependent upon the proper and equitable rewards of industry; their
equal opportunities of acquiring knowledge; an encouragement of their
morality by a recognition of their virtues, making it the necessary
stepping-stone to their advancement; and the sweeping away of every
social form which establishes a sense of inferiority, destroys the
pride of self, and institutes that feeling of degradation which is the
most prolific source of evil in society.

It is easy to note your tendency in these directions. The barbaric
institution of force and its concomitant of fear, as agencies in the
management and control of men, is gradually being eliminated from
all your progressive governments, and the better methods of assent
and co-operation are getting in their salutary work of emancipation.
Knowledge is spreading itself among you--no longer a dessert
only upon a few favored tables, but a chief dish under the newly
acquired appetites of the many. The glamour of your wealth and the
impressiveness of your religion are losing their reverential respect,
with the focused light directed upon their doubtful origins. You
have inaugurated the beginning of a new faith, with better spiritual
foundations, not condemning the world and its society, but loving it,
following in the footsteps of the divine presence within its limits,
taking a hand in its affairs, and directing them towards the better
possibilities in view.

Ah, my brother, the coming of your Messiah was both more and less
than you have imagined. The era of new and better things in social
development is preceded by the gradual decay of old convictions, which
have served their time and are no longer useful, except in their place
within the catalogue of traditions to mark the progress of thought.

Society assumes its beliefs under an impulse of progression, as much
controlled by evolutionary laws as the organic substances of the Earth.
No one can teach the world. With a free exercise of its intellectual
faculty, it teaches itself. The power of an idea, among the moral
forces, is in its corresponding with a proper stage of development to
receive it. A solitary thought is useless, as a moral agent, without
its already existing half-formed figments scattered about in society.
Its power to move lies in the coalescence of its parts. Ideas and
beliefs have been adopted at different stages of your civilization,
and have served as great motors to progress, which, ages before, were
enunciated without impression. Society rids itself of its rudimentary
impressions and beliefs, in much the same manner that an animal, under
changing environments, sheds its old organs and develops new ones.
Every new belief affecting society is subservient to it, and is only
adopted slowly and by degrees. If it be a truth making its way, its
final installation is marked by an unquestioned acquiescence and an
undisturbed tranquility. If an error, agitation and unrest mark the
whole period of its accession.

The coming of your Messiah was more than you have supposed, because
grander and more imposing than its assumed supernaturalisms was
its enthronement of two central ideas. One was the adoption of the
sentiment of brotherhood as a means of adjusting the relations of men
with each other, and the other was the inauguration of spiritual hope
as a guide in the actions of life. Out of this beginning has come all
that is good in your social progress. The general acceptance of these
ideas, as agencies in your civilization, began its work by weakening
the old society, and it finally destroyed it by extinguishing the bands
of physical force which held it together. The cultivation of these
inspirational beliefs in their purity, as they were bestowed upon you
by the divine intelligence, would have soon brought to you the same
peace and good will that they have shed upon the inhabitants of Mars;
but you were not to be indulged so soon in this happy offering. The
few who had been dominating the many for ages, appropriating their
earnings, and even sacrificing their lives, in a lust for power and
wealth, were not to let escape them so fine an opportunity to hold the
simple-minded by a new agency, ten-fold more subjugating than the old
method of coercion by force. The religious superstition of the age, a
mere diversion for the untaught multitude, inert and unpromising, was
vitalized by the infusion of these new, humane and spiritual impulses;
and, with many added ingeniously contrived supernaturalisms, and an
attractive moral code, it was built up into a system and organized
into a society which has borne its heavy weight upon your progress,
and spread its dominion more successfully than the war-like legions
it supplanted. It has accomplished no good which is not entirely due
to the irresistible expansion of the truths it appropriated at its
inception out of nature’s evolutionary process of social development,
viz., the regard for one another, as a guide in all the actions of
life, and that hope eternal which spiritualizes and elevates our
existence.

The coming of your Messiah was less than you have believed, because
you have mistaken a personality, in which the genius of advanced and
salutary doctrines manifested itself, for a part and presence of the
Deity himself. As the promulgation of thoughts that were conceived
under the inspiration and pressure of a natural force in the process
of social development is less than the awful presence and verbal
communication of the Deity, so, in the same degree, was the coming of
your Messiah less.

But you will have a second coming, my brother, unperverted by the
craft of your seers, and uncontaminated with the superstitions of a
crude society like the first. It will be of you and a part of you,
raising you up to a higher esteem of yourselves, glorifying you as
the progenitors of all good, under a divine and irresistible law
of betterment. It will relieve you of the evil thoughts that have
condemned and degraded you. The new hope, like a newly discovered
strength, will push out in all directions, in the exercise of its
salutary work. Instead of discourse and exhortation to the lowly and
down trodden, with promises as impossible of denial as of verification,
it will lift them upon their feet by the strong hand of a better social
method. Like the first coming, its symbolic picture will be carved into
monuments, reproduced in all the departments of art, and cherished as
the chief reminder of your duties and obligations to the Deity. It will
be no symbol of anguish and sorrow, like the first, but in place of it
THE DIVINE FIGURE OF A STRONG MAN SUPPORTING AND ENCOURAGING A WEAK
ONE. Yes, my brother, you will have a s-e-c-o-n-d c-o-m--

       *       *       *       *       *

What is all this? I raise myself upon my couch The sun is an hour
up. Through my window I see an enquiring group, marvelling at my
tardiness. My cows linger for their milking, and utter their complaints
in a gentle lowing. My pet deer stand with their large wondering eyes
fixed upon me, and the appearance of my face at the pane has drawn
toward me my whole restless and scrabbling flock of poultry, impatient
for their morning feed. I look toward the easy chair and it is empty.
My celestial visitor has departed.




FOOTNOTE:

[A] Draper’s Intellectual Development of Europe.




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

  Archaic spelling which may have been in use at the time of
    publication has been retained.







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