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 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
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 University of California Berkeley 
 
THE 
 
 MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 HIS MORALS, 
 POLITICS AND RELIGION. 
 
 THOMAS BLOT. 
 
 SAN FRANCISCO: 
 
 BACON & COMPANY, PRINTERS. 
 
 1891. 
 
Copyright, 1891, by the Author. 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 MY habitation is upon the plateau of a mount- 
 ain in California. I entered this region and became 
 a settler by a fortuituous event. About thirty-five 
 years ago, I took a summer outing from a close ap- 
 plication to business- ia the metropolis, and came 
 here for a deer hunt. One of those beautiful animals 
 that I had wounded with my rifle led me further in- 
 to this wild and picturesque locality than I had in- 
 tended to go, and I thus arrived upon this spot, as 
 I believe, the first white man that ever sat 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 
 
4 Introductory. 
 
 viewed from infancy, without emotion, the rising 
 and setting of the sun from a horizon of chimneys 
 and steeples ; and when these exhibitions first pre- 
 sented themselves to me here in this crystal atmo- 
 sphere, 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 reali- 
 zation 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 en- 
 joy those beautiful *and curious processes of nature, 
 where the bursting germs, ascending gradually out 
 of the soil, change their shapes, multiply their or- 
 gans, and after a time crown themselves with bril- 
 liant and deliciously flavored flowers. In my new 
 observation and intimacy with plant growth, with 
 some previous knowledge of the science appertain- 
 ing 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 
 
Introductory. 5 
 
 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 commu- 
 nication with the world is mostly through books. 
 A weekly newspaper or two, and such other publi- 
 cations 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 stream in the center of my poses- 
 sion, 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 ani- 
 mals 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 
 
6 Introductory. 
 
 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 sel- 
 dom 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 be- 
 lieve, 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. Kvery tree and shrub with- 
 in my possession of a 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 mon- 
 archs 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 out- 
 line. 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 
 
Introductory. 7 
 
 hair grows thin and white, and my step is no longer 
 firm and elastic. I^ike 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. 
 I^ong 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 ani- 
 mals 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 amus- 
 ing 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 ac- 
 customed relish of wheat grains, which are stowed 
 away for them in my pockets. I have three pet deer, 
 quite tame and domesticated, whose intimate acquaint- 
 ance was brought about in a singular way. Sitting 
 
8 Introductory. 
 
 on my doorstep one bright afternoon, I had listened 
 for some time to the baying of hounds in the neigh- 
 boring mountains, when presently there came bound- 
 ing 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 chil- 
 dren. My acquaintance with other of the creatures 
 about, though not so intimate, is still of such a con- 
 fidential kind that they manifest no terror at my ap- 
 proach, 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 equa- 
 ble 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 
 
Introductory. 9 
 
 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 hill- 
 sides and mountain tops, observing, frequently, 
 groups of deer grazing tranquilly, and at times a fam- 
 ily of panthers gamboling on the green carpet of an 
 opening, or an eagle feeding her young upon the in- 
 accessible brink of a precipice ; and on rarer occas- 
 ions, 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 dis- 
 covered by it the limitable range of our senses, and 
 how far below as well as above us the infinite ex- 
 tends. I grope about in the darkness of my under- 
 standing between an atom and the outside limit of 
 the stars, every step toward either showing an in- 
 crease 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 med- 
 itation 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 in- 
 habited ? What beings are upon them ? How do 
 
TO Introductory. 
 
 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 arous- 
 es the activities of thought, it is, nevertheless, cer- 
 tain 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 adjoin- 
 ing my cabin, with an elevated exposure, and has 
 some extra contrivances for the convenience of ad- 
 justment, 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 multiplied sys- 
 tems. I can easily discover with it the most dis- 
 tant planet Neptune, and by their progressive dis- 
 placement, 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 clear- 
 ness. I have so frequently looked into the dismal 
 
1 2 The Man from Man. 
 
 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 
 m} r 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 Harth. My conclu- 
 sion 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 atmos- 
 pheric 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 areas 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 lit- 
 
The Man from Mars. 1 3 
 
 tie less thati 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, in- 
 stead 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 calcula- 
 tions and theories of the abler scientists. Apper- 
 taining 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 occur- 
 rences of about every two years are holidays of pleas- 
 ure and enjoyment to me, There are, however, rarer 
 
14 The Man from Mars, 
 
 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 any human being at pres- 
 ent alive. 
 
 It can well be imagined what a supremely inter- 
 esting event this was to me. Days before its cul- 
 mination did I watch its progress approaching nearer 
 and nearer the Earth. Bach succeeding night ex- 
 hibited 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 thous- 
 and miles an hour. This planet was now approach- 
 ing, 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 ab- 
 sorbed that all my ordinary physical wants were 
 
The Man from Mars. 1 5 
 
 * 
 
 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 premoni- 
 tion. It gave me 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 per- 
 sonal 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 moderate- 
 ly 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 rever- 
 
1 6 The Man from Mars. 
 
 ence. I had never known until now what assurance 
 there was in the natural sounds which nightly fell 
 upon my ears. In rny mountain home no feeling of 
 loneliness ever came over me before. I felt an es- 
 pecial longing now for the sound of a human voice, 
 for a companion upon whom I might discharge my- 
 self 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 tend- 
 ed 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 atmos- 
 phere. 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 crea- 
 ture 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 show- 
 ing its red light near the horizon like a rising sun 
 in miniature. At midnight it would reach its cul- 
 mination, 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 my- 
 self in my observatory and adjusted the telescope, I 
 
The Man from Mars. 17 
 
 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 lirnb. The hours seemed 
 minutes to me. My fatigue and illness were forgot- 
 ten. 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 sud- 
 denly 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 
 
 ^ 
 
 UHJ7SRSIT7' 
 
1 8 The Man from Mars. 
 
 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 cor- 
 ner. An easy chair stands beside a table in the center, 
 and under a window, proportionately large, front- 
 ing the south, is placed a cushioned lounge of some 
 pretensions 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 col- 
 losal carpet, with fantistic 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 con- 
 dition of unrest. As the moon rose higher, its fan- 
 ciful shadows upon the ground dissolved, and the 
 level plateau adjacent to my window was uniformly 
 covered with a clear, bright light. Booking again, 
 and quite sensibly impressed with the changed con- 
 
The Man from Mars. 19 
 
 dition 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 pres- 
 ence. 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 admira- 
 tion 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 ma- 
 jestic. 
 
 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, 110 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 won- 
 drous a sight, and then, with the air of one on un- 
 familiar ground, he made an inquiring survey of my 
 cabin, and then directed his careful footsteps toward 
 my doorway. 
 
ao The Man from Mars, 
 
 CHAPTER IL 
 
 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 ex- 
 plained as I proceed. I had now the first opportun- 
 ity 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 transpar- 
 ency indicative of perfect health. The hair of his 
 head and beard, both long and waving over his 
 shoulders and breast, was of a hue that can be best 
 described as the color of the 'ripe filbert, with the 
 fineness and luster of unwoven silk. His hands, al- 
 though scrupulously clean and finely shaped, bore the 
 unmistakable signs of manual toil ; and yet he had 
 
The Man Jrom Mars, 2 1 
 
 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 endear- 
 ment. 
 
 " My brother, " said he, "you have a beautiful 
 world. That moon of yours is magnificent." 
 
 To me this vras a happy beginning. Here was, 
 thought I, a man after my own heart, whose soul 
 was above the common things of life. I could com- 
 pare 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/' 
 
22 The Man from Mars. 
 
 * ' I either misunderstood you, or you are not se- 
 rious. It is impossible. " 
 
 " Ah, my brother," said he, " you are very little 
 advanced in a knowledge of the properties of intel- 
 ligence. I am here by a process as yet unknown to 
 you, and which may be best described in your lan- 
 guage 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 cur planet, compute 
 its distance, estimate the shape and extent of its or- 
 bit, and indulge in some vague conjectures apper- 
 taining to its condition, we have been making a 
 close and interesting study of your social affairs, 
 including, of course, your morals, politics and relig- 
 ion. 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 his- 
 tory than you know yourselves. At a period of yours 
 described by your writers as the stone age, we had 
 
The Man from Mars. 23 
 
 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 some- 
 thing of the planet upon which I reside. 
 
 1 ' It will interest you to know that about the 
 equatorial regions of Mars is found its highest civil- 
 ization 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, sup- 
 ports 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 vege- 
 table 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 sim- 
 ple and elementary, while ours have reduced them 
 all to one, the unit out of which all creation is 
 
24 TJie Man from Mars* 
 
 formed. From this you may infer that our discov- 
 ery of the compound nature of the metals enables us 
 to make them at pleasure. This was a most fortu- 
 nate 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 conse- 
 quently 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 ques- 
 tion. 
 
 " 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 com- 
 
The Man from Mars. 25 
 
 modities. By the double decomposition of air and 
 water we generate a heat which, for economy and 
 easy regulation, is better than anything the uni- 
 verse affords. The clumsy, unclean and inconven- 
 ient use of wood and coal for fuel is with us a prac- 
 tice of the past." 
 
 " 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 ren- 
 der the navigation of the air entirely safe and suc- 
 cessful. They are the greater density of our atmos- 
 phere, 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 in- 
 ventors have long since surmounted the difficulties 
 of adverse wind currents, and these vessels, of both 
 public and private use, may be seen constantly mov- 
 ing 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 pur- 
 poses 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 
 
26 The Man from Mars. 
 
 may anticipate, from the small size of our rivers, 
 there are no extensive mountainous water sheds 
 upon our surface. Instead of your immense, deso- 
 late, 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 ani- 
 mal 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 en- 
 joyable, and what would be with you reckless, di- 
 version. 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 our most popular amusements. 
 This, to you, strange condition of density is produc- 
 tive 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 
 
The Man from Mars. 27 
 
 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 tran- 
 quilly and delightfully upon their backs, resting 
 upon the soft cushion of the waters until rescued, 
 as they are sure to be on the succeeding day, by 
 one of the numerous air ships constantly skimming 
 the surface. 
 
 * ' Our land is generally rolling, and there is a con- 
 stant water movement in the channels connecting 
 these small bodies of water, not in a uniform direc- 
 tion toward the sea, as with you, but in all direc- 
 tions, thus saving to us a power for mechanical pur- 
 poses than which nothing better can be conceived. 
 
 ' ' Our cities, as you may imagine, are not located 
 as 3^ours are ; but, since one place is as good as an- 
 other for a distributing point, the rule has been to 
 build them up where all conditions were 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 
 
28 The Man from Mars, 
 
 achieved something far ahead of you in the sanitary 
 and labor-saving appliances about us, especially in 
 our metropolitan districts. In the lirst place, we 
 use no woods 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 pur- 
 poses. We use, instead, a metallic alloy unknown 
 to you, which is susceptible of a high polish, as in- 
 oxidizable as gold, and with that character of pen- 
 etrability which permits fastening with nails and 
 shaping by tools, with even greater exactness than 
 you work with wood. 
 
 * * Our cities are all 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 cir- 
 cular enclosure for the location of all public build- 
 ings, among which, in the center and more magnif- 
 icent 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 circu- 
 
The Man from Mars. 29 
 
 lar 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 for your kindness in de- 
 scribing some of the material surroundings of your 
 people, but I would like very much to know some- 
 thing of your inner lives, of your thoughts and be- 
 liefs, 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 110 sense of pain to you, 
 for, to speak the truth, the cruelty, the intense in- 
 
30 The Man from Mars. 
 
 dividual selfishness, and the strange superstitions 
 of the inhabitants of the Earth will pass away out 
 of the ages to come. ' ' 
 
The Man from Mars. 31 
 
 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 our 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 lor 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 
 
32 The Man from Mars. 
 
 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 maintain- 
 ing millions of your people, trained for the sole pur- 
 pose 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 civili- 
 zation, 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 tbe physical 
 strength' of the contestants; and all international 
 settlements by this means are but temporary, when 
 the winning party has not coinciden tally a prevail- 
 ing 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 mis- 
 judgments of one century often are, and are ever like 
 to be, reviewed and resubmitted to the same san- 
 guinary and delusive arbitration in a succeeding one. 
 
The Man from Mars. 33 
 
 In these brutal encounters you stain your hands 
 and garments in the blood of your fellow men with- 
 out 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 scheme 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 relig- 
 ions 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 inter- 
 ests 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 
 2 
 
34 The Man from Mars. 
 
 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 de- 
 fense and attack, like the beasts of prey which still 
 linger on your borders. 
 
 4 ' Your society presents to us the spectacle of a 
 continuous skirmish among yourselves, your whole 
 mass struggling to mount the summit of their indi- 
 vidual 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 toward 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 ad- 
 vantages, one class is permitted, and even encour- 
 aged, to prey upon another one. One or more of 
 you will enter upon a scheme of personal gain with- 
 out 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 the 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 
 
The Man from Mars. 35 
 
 even that has not served to soften or remove the as- 
 perities 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. 
 
 1 ' 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 estab- 
 lishments, 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 
 
36 The Man from Mars. 
 
 uncared-for, because each family finds its pleasures 
 increased by the opportunity to bestow shelter. 
 Hvery dwelling is open to all, and no assuring sal- 
 utation 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 foun- 
 dation 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." 
 
The Man from Mars. 37 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 AT the dawn of, and during the first stages of 
 their civilization, the people of the Earth found them- 
 selves 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 overwhelm- 
 ing evidence of design. The unthinkable and un- 
 knowable 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 watch- 
 
38 Tht Man from Mars. 
 
 fulness and attention, and as a consequence, that all 
 the fortunes and vicissitudes of their lives were de- 
 pendent upon his moods. It may very well be sup- 
 posed 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 com- 
 mands ; 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 re- 
 duced the honor of his victory. And so, all the in- 
 clinations 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 
 
The Man from Mars, 39 
 
 direct influence upon material welfare, grew and 
 enlarged. The path to honor was no longer exclu- 
 sively through carnage and victory, and the posses- 
 sion and cultivation of certain virtues brought con- 
 sideration 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 unreason- 
 able yearning to communicate with the supreme 
 Author, you surrendered yourself to the wiles of 
 the seers, and became the willing dupes of their de- 
 lusions. 
 
 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 
 
4O The Man from Mars. 
 
 of power. Besides, your formulated conditions of 
 punishments and rewards have degraded religion 
 from a cultivation of virtue for itself, and the im- 
 mediate good it brings, to a selfish scramble, each 
 one struggling to shoulder his way into the most 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 pro- 
 gress. 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 at- 
 tracted 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 
 
The Man from Mars. 41 
 
 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 hu- 
 man thought, and while the masses were left to take 
 their undirected way among the empty superstitions 
 which conceded nothing to the growing human sym- 
 pathy, 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 en- 
 tirely adapted to the new age that all the pent-up 
 forces of human sympathy within its scope and influ- 
 ence 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 advanc- 
 ing you, they have turned your civilization back 
 upon itself more than a thousand years. No histor- 
 ical fact is more capable of demonstration than this. 
 
42 The Man from Mars. 
 
 None has been more persistently and ingeniously 
 denied, and no natural sequence ever followed more 
 directly a moving cause. From a free and independ- 
 ent exercise of the intellectual activities in the direc- 
 tion 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 prom- 
 ises, and the unflagging efforts of 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, with- 
 out 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 ac- 
 cepted one object of worship after another, each one 
 an ideal impersonation of the goodness which was 
 
The Man from Mars. 43 
 
 inseparably 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 in- 
 stinct was bestowed upon you to protect your infants. 
 All these subjects of adoration have perfectly reflect- 
 ed your intellectual condition, and have been discard- 
 ed, 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 ration- 
 alism 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 relig- 
 ion, from a long course of erroneous teaching, is in- 
 tense, aggressive and hysterical. It feeds and fattens 
 itself upon the miseries of life, which it does not un- 
 dertake 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 per- 
 manently reduce the evils and misfortunes of life to 
 a minimum. The impulses of your present religion 
 
44 The Man from Mars, 
 
 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 sup- 
 port 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 its undoing, and that such an act, 
 once performed, spreads its dire consequences in ac- 
 cordance with its enormity over a part or the whole 
 career of the doer. It will not undertake to un- 
 burden the conscience of a crime, nor to give assur- 
 ance of celestial bliss to the most heinous of offend- 
 ers, 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 inval- 
 uable, have given you to believe that your natural 
 tendencies are evil, and that the unavoidable mis- 
 fortunes and sorrows of your lives are but penalties 
 
Man from Mars. 45 
 
 for your many misdeeds. The general acceptance 
 of this belief has lowered your pride, and given you, 
 to some extent, that character of dejection arid sub- 
 missiveness which is entirely subversive to the at- 
 tainment of any destiny to be reached by yourselves. 
 There is a quality of mind which we acknowledge 
 as, aboye 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 in- 
 flicts 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 bet- 
 ter 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 overwhelm- 
 ing evidence about you, that the most corroding 
 
46 Tfa Man from Mars, 
 
 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 supersti- 
 tious beliefs, but it has been our good fortune never 
 to have had them built up into a system so overbear- 
 ing and harmful as yours have been. It cannot be 
 said of us that we ever denounced honest intellectual 
 efforts in any direction as a crime ; and your punish- 
 ment of such, with all its atrocious 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 truth is not in them. 
 
 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 among 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, 
 
The Man from Mars. 47 
 
 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. 
 
48 The Man from Mars. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 people of Mars are impressed with the belief 
 that the governments of the Karth 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 pro- 
 gress, 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 labor 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 unfortu- 
 nately 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 much beyond these, and this difference 
 of view affords a marked instance of our develop- 
 ment 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 con- 
 
The Man from Mars. 49 
 
 sciousness, 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 separa- 
 tion 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 happi- 
 ness 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 au- 
 thority ; 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 cogni- 
 zance 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 
 
50 The Man from Mars. 
 
 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 those irresponsible bodies which you call 
 monopolies, yet you bestow the whole keeping and 
 guidance of your morals upon societies and organi- 
 zations of your fellow men, who are even less respon- 
 sible to authority than tney. 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 expe- 
 rience. Goodness therefore, as we understand it, is 
 the only path to honor, and the necessary high 
 
The Man from Mars. 5 1 
 
 character of all holders of public trust reflects a 
 distinction greater than 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 educa- 
 tion of our people to be an indispensible and neces- 
 sary 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 ele- 
 mentary branches of learning, you have provided 
 but little else than a convenience to them in the 
 business afiairs 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 
 
52 The Man from Mars. 
 
 you will see at once how learning has become the 
 chief part of our religion. You are slow to acknowl- 
 edge 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 ec- 
 clesiastics. 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 har- 
 mony with it, but on a separation of the two, they 
 become enemies by a well known social law ; your 
 churches with their awowed purpose of improving 
 your morals, and your secular schools, while in the 
 performance of their duties, occupying the same com- 
 peting 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 obliter- 
 
The Man from Mars. 53 
 
 ated 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 prin- 
 ciple 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 
 
54 The Man from Mars, 
 
 Deity. A triumph of science with us is a triumph of 
 religion, and while we go on strengthening our- 
 selves, and taking new heart at each step in the direc- 
 tion 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 diffi- 
 cult 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 
 
The Man from Mars. 55 
 
 doctrines, they could only bestow upon you at the 
 last scene of all a torturing doubt. We have pro- 
 moted 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 sepa- 
 rating 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 per- 
 formed by you, we regard as worse than supersti- 
 tion. 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 
 
56 The Man from Mars. 
 
 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 fal- 
 lacy of prayer, because, as an institution of your 
 churches, under their theory of atonement, it fur- 
 nishes 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 infin- 
 ite 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 beneficent act, of the 
 power to discover and to enjoy his beautiful meth- 
 
The Man from Mars. 57 
 
 ods 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 Karth 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 hom- 
 age, whose degree of prostration marks, with a sing- 
 ular exactness, your career all along, from the savage 
 ruler to the cultivated monarch ? 
 
 Outside of the fact that your continuous mendican- 
 cy 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 
 
5 8 The Man from Mars. 
 
 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 con- 
 venience and use, yet in the progress of these con- 
 cessions 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 con- 
 clusively the evidence of divine presence and help 
 as material and intellectual progress, it will be diffi- 
 cult 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. 
 
The Man from Man, 59 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 OUR veneration for the Deity, which is truer and 
 more sincere than yours, arises from a widely differ- 
 ent 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, brings 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 cul- 
 tivated 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 intelli- 
 gence, which, from its primitive ignorance, supersti- 
 tion, and brutality, has been gradually 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 
 
60 The Man from Mars. 
 
 steadily at work, converting lower forms of matter 
 into higher ones, we are given no part in the pro- 
 ceeding. It goes on without our assistance, and 
 we have no power to diminish or accelerate its steady 
 onward course. It is widely different with intelli- 
 gence. That is given into our hands, with all its 
 grand possibilities. In that, we have evidence of 
 the divine confidence to promote its advance in view 
 of the blessings it holds in store. Taking this view, 
 we have for centuries cultivated the mind in all di- 
 rections 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 devel- 
 oped matter, and the first a property of intelligence 
 in the same imperfect state ; just as beauty and vir- 
 tue describe together, or separately, the same ad- 
 vanced 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 
 
The Man from Mars. 61 
 
 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 ex- 
 tends 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 em- 
 anations 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 de- 
 cay. 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 
 
6 a The Man from Mars. 
 
 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 ad- 
 vancement as trifling. To some, your science ap- 
 pears 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 dan- 
 ger 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 dif- 
 fusion 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 be- 
 yond a doubt that the chemical forces and affinities 
 are nothing else but low, restricted, and insensible 
 
The Man from Mars. 63 
 
 forms of intelligent action. The fact is best shown 
 by the building up of organic bodies in their multi- 
 plication of cells. Eacn 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 intelli- 
 gences, 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 mathe- 
 matical 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 exact- 
 itude 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 cos- 
 
 TTf WT5 
 
64 The Man from Mars. 
 
 mos 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 propor- 
 tions 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 ; thajt you are the 
 harvest and fruition of the innumerable lower intelli- 
 gences, which were sown broadcast in the beginning 
 to do their potent work. 
 
 In pursuing these matters, your scientists will ar- 
 rive at a number of important truths, entirely in op- 
 position to some of your present apparently estab- 
 lished 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 con- 
 stricted views in that direction has produced a sense 
 of helplessness in the attempt to fathom these infi- 
 nite spaces. But ages of contemplation will serve 
 to broaden your views, as well as to expand your 
 
The Man from Mars. 65 
 
 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. 
 
66 The Man from Mars. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE confidential relations between our govern- 
 ment and people have given it a parental character. 
 It has consequently been the study of our legisla- 
 tion for ages past to assuage, as far as possible, those 
 natural evils which creep in as the result of unre- 
 stricted 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 civiliza- 
 tion, just as we began ours, by the crystallization 
 of society into two classes. Those who at first, by 
 thrift, acquisitiveness, or strong arms, became pos- 
 sessed 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 bene- 
 fit 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 pre- 
 vent the largest possible amount of happiness to all. 
 But before many ages we discovered that the in- 
 
The Man from Mars. 67 
 
 terests of the property class and the labor class were 
 not equally equipped to maintain a fair and equi- 
 table 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 govern- 
 ment, 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 be- 
 ginning of your history the privilege of wealth to 
 hold labor in subjection, and to use it as an instru- 
 ment 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 enact- 
 ment 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 
 
68 The Man from Mars. 
 
 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 reck- 
 oned 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-opera- 
 tive interests, so long as they offer no proposals of 
 relief to it in the unjust burthen it bears of the hard- 
 ships 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 mis- 
 taken 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 vicissi- 
 tude of such adverse changes of condition, there 
 can te no steady progress of the whole, but little 
 encouragement to thrift ; a lack of ambition must 
 prevail in all the higher purposes of life, and a gen- 
 eral surrender to improvidence and the vices which 
 follow. For that class which has created your 
 wealth, and is constantly renewing it, and which 
 
The Man from Mars. 69 
 
 constitutes so large a portion of your whole popula- 
 tion, you can show nothing of legislative effort in 
 its favor except indirectly, through some of the pur- 
 poses 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 condi- 
 tions which would have been removed or corrected 
 long ago, under a more humane and unselfish ad- 
 ministration of your affairs, and if your governments 
 had not been exclusively in the hands of the smaller 
 class mentioned. We know of nothing more heart- 
 less and cruel of the governing classes of the earth, 
 than their careless submission of its wage-earners to 
 the unrestricted influence of competition for em- 
 ployment, 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 
 
70 The Man from Mars. 
 
 class is entirely due the creation and constant re- 
 newal of all the wealth on our planet. Because, also, 
 that capital has natural advantages overlabor, which 
 are first, its choice of time and place for investment ; 
 second, its capacity to wait for opportunities with- 
 out 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 re- 
 lations and tendencies, and have proceeded to rem- 
 edy 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 own- 
 ership 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 
 
The Man from Mars. 7 1 
 
 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 en- 
 ables 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 landholding classes. 
 
 Almost every influence now at work in the pro- 
 gress 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 cheap- 
 ening from day to day, partly due to increased skill, 
 and the appliance of machinery in their manufac- 
 ture, 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 ele- 
 ment of CQvSt 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 owneiship of land was acquired 
 
7 2 The Man from Mars. 
 
 and held by force, and it may be safely asserted that 
 no title at present exists in any of your older coun- 
 tries that is not founded on violent conquest, and 
 that has not been maintained by an organized and 
 armed authority, whose existence depends upon re- 
 taining the system of ownership in vogue. It is 
 plain to see that when the demand of j ustice 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 pres- 
 ent system will not be quietly endured. 
 
 In your own more favored region of the Barth 
 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 unoc- 
 cupied agricultural surface, from which any of your 
 citizens are permitted at small cost to select a por- 
 tion with a title in perpetuity, destroys for the time 
 being the monopolizing character of private owner- 
 ship ; 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. 
 
The Man from Mars. 73 
 
 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 ef- 
 fected this in two ways : first by withdrawing from 
 the surplus population of densely inhabited districts 
 abroad, and second by supplying from its rich agri- 
 cultural 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 land- 
 less many and the land-holding few which your peo- 
 ple will surely witness in time. We manage these 
 things very differently on Mars. 
 
74 The Man from Mars. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 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 ben- 
 efit 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 in- 
 come 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 improve- 
 ments, 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, 
 
The Man from Mars. 75 
 
 a fair value is returned to him for all the fixed prop- 
 erty which is the product of his labor. It is pro- 
 vided that there shall be no competition in the occu- 
 pancy, 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 un- 
 just 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 land- 
 ed 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 
 
76 The Man from Mars. 
 
 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 pro- 
 gress, 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 enjoya- 
 ble. 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 combina- 
 tions 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 imagin- 
 ation is scarcely able to conceive the magnificence 
 of our temples of worship, and the charming per- 
 spectives of our streets and highways. Yet even 
 
The Man from Mars. 77 
 
 our industrious attention to all this pleasing effect 
 for the eye is held to be a matter of secondary im- 
 portance, when compared with the health-giving 
 measures and regulations which prevail. 
 
 From the ground rents alone of every munici- 
 pality, 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 or 
 friends. We place no dead bodies in the earth as 
 you do, considering such a practice not only bar- 
 barous, 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 dis- 
 covery 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 with due solemnity not a vestige of 
 the dead is left to be preserved, except their mem- 
 ories. 
 
 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 com- 
 binations of individual enterprise are to be found 
 
78 The Man from Mars. 
 
 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 
 small 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 revolu- 
 tion of the fly wheel adds to the value of these pos- 
 sessions, until in a short time there is no limit to 
 the price or rent of them, but the ability of in- 
 dustry 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 ele- 
 ments of prosperity. Capital comes to it abundantly 
 from abroad, induced by the opportunities of profit- 
 
The Man from Mars. 79 
 
 able investment, and labor is equally attracted by 
 high pay. Population increases, together with all 
 the enterprises of industry, and your land, con- 
 veniently divided into small lots, changes hands 
 from one purchaser to another, each realizing a sat- 
 isfactory 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. 
 I^abor enjoys an era of remarkable prosperity out- 
 side 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 gen- 
 eral contentment and thrift indicate that all material 
 interests are equally equipped and uniformly suc- 
 cessful 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 con- 
 
8o The Man from Mars. 
 
 tain 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 unfor- 
 tunately the inevitable outcome is not so promising 
 to it. The evil effects of your private ownership 
 become more and more apparent as your city ad- 
 vances, and when, under the promptings of human 
 greed and selfishness, your landlords have fairly com- 
 menced 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 posses- 
 sions. 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 therefor, which takes from the profits 
 of labor and capital an amount equal to the tenth part 
 of all their savings. Because the privilege of becom- 
 
The Man from Mars. 81 
 
 ing a land owner is equal to all, and is the hope of 
 most of you, you have permitted the transform- 
 ation of this gift of nature-land into a monopoly, 
 the most arbitrary and consuming that can be con- 
 ceived. 
 
 This gift of nature, however, is not the only one 
 diverted from its equitable distribution, and per- 
 mitted to become the material of unrighteous exac- 
 tion. The process of the water, heat, and light sup- 
 ply, so manifestly among the duties of your gov- 
 ernment to institute and superintend, is given, like 
 your land, to the management and control of pri- 
 vate individuals ; thus converting these indispensa- 
 ble 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 popula- 
 tion 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. Changes now become apparent in social life. 
 
82 The Man Jrom Mars. 
 
 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. I^abor 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 ten- 
 dency to make up for its reduced income, every 
 other one of its living expenses is greatly increased. 
 Allowing it its proper place with matrimonial ambi- 
 tions 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 inacessible without the charges of an 
 intercepting medium. The heat, and light-giving 
 materials of the ec.rth, 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 it- 
 self to all these burdens, and is quiet under them, 
 because it can readily reimburse itself by transfer- 
 ring all expenses and costs to prices. There is no 
 such escape for labor, which not only pays these 
 
The Alan from Mars. 83 
 
 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 rea- 
 son. 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 for- 
 ward 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 con- 
 dition 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 prac- 
 tice is not general. So that from the disabling vicis- 
 situdes 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 abun- 
 dant stores of food and raiment surrounding him, 
 suffers for enough of them to supply his moderate 
 wants. Poverty, which before had been only ex- 
 ceptional and sporadic, assumes now the propor- 
 tions of a numerous class among you, and out of 
 which, by a lack of the opportunities of knowledge, 
 
84 The Man from Mars. 
 
 crime as naturally appears as weeds in a neglected 
 husbandry. 
 
 Another and significant change now becomes ap- 
 parent 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 in- 
 creased 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 contriv- 
 ances peculiar to your planet, wherein the natural 
 effect of competition is entirely reversed, and where 
 the universal law of supply and demand is com- 
 
The Man from Mars. 85 
 
 pletely 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 ac- 
 cumulations become now a numerous and influential 
 class. While your society at one end has been sink- 
 ing into poverty, it blossoms 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 owner- 
 ship 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 re- 
 ceding 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 
 
86 The Man from Mars. 
 
 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 
 maybe observed. While the city's capital, prop- 
 erly so called, is about three hundred millions of dol- 
 lars, 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 de- 
 mands 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 per- 
 sons in every hundred of your workers owned a 
 portion of j^our 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 Man from Mars. 87 
 
 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 dissi- 
 pated in luxury, expended in new possessions, or 
 invested in some of the many monopoly undertak- 
 ings 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 cultiva- 
 tion 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 wher- 
 ever 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 refine- 
 ment of others, are entirely due to difference in op- 
 portunities of development, and between these two 
 
88 The Man from Mars. 
 
 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 vouch- 
 safed the opportunities for knowledge ? 
 
 The forces at work within your society have now, 
 we will say, brought up your population and gen- 
 eral 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. Im- 
 pelled by the necessities of life and a brave emula- 
 tion, all your industries will be found in the high- 
 est 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 pro- 
 vision 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 hu- 
 man 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 
 
The Man from Mars. 89 
 
 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 de- 
 vised. 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 broth- 
 ers, 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 arrange- 
 ment of the divine will. 
 
90 The Man from Mars. 
 
 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 civiliza- 
 tion 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 diligence is a saving and 
 w r holesome 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 pro- 
 gress 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 
 
The Man from Mars. 9 1 
 
 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 in- 
 terests of those who, by a struggle for the necessi- 
 ties of life, are obliged to toil. Some very remarka- 
 ble 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 occupa- 
 tion 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 cap- 
 tains 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. 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. Conse- 
 
92 The Man from Mars 
 
 quently our youth, encouraged by their parents and 
 teachers, become emulous of the qualities of physi- 
 cal endurance attached to labor, and serve their 
 terms among the toilers with a will that nothing 
 but a high ambition could create This greater re- 
 spect 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 earn- 
 ings. Chiefly in furtherance of this, we have or- 
 dained 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, scarce- 
 ly 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 leis- 
 ure, without the depression of muscular fatigue. 
 
The Man from Mars. 93 
 
 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 inexor- 
 able fate. No competency rewards his unremitting 
 toil, though with the skill of his hands he is build- 
 ing 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 in- 
 stead of compulsion, as the best way to gain inde- 
 pendence. Having no road to wealth, except 
 through the sterling qualities of industry and pru- 
 dence, 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 beneficent results in the life of every 
 individual. 
 
 Since, from the cradle to the grave, all are sur- 
 rounded 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 
 
94 The Man from Mars 
 
 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 sanc- 
 tion 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 3^ou is that in which the attainment of 
 wealth shall furnish personal gratification, the ac- 
 complishment of which, in most cases, is through a 
 line of public and private wrongs. The better con- 
 ditions of life with us are acquired in the fertiliza- 
 tion of innumerable schemes for the common wel- 
 fare. 
 
 You are not to make the mistake of 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 un- 
 envied 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 peo- 
 ple 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 oppor- 
 tunities of knowledge and cultivation. As a result, 
 
The Man from Mars. 95 
 
 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 de- 
 velopment is, that we utterly refuse the perform- 
 ance of any act which is an injury, even in a remote 
 degree, to our fellows ; while in the intense selfish- 
 ness of your present state, you are constantly sacri- 
 ficing 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 or- 
 dained in all possible ways that the journey there- 
 after shall be fair and equal to all. 
 
 It is not possible for you to thoroughly understand 
 or appreciate what I am about 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 
 
96 The Man from Mars. 
 
 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 phi- 
 losophy, as well as an every-day guide in the prac- 
 tical 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 ar- 
 rived at the many profound truths so deeply concern- 
 ing our lives. By it we have discovered how aston- 
 ishingly nature holds, concealed from common eyes, 
 so many of her processes, coquetting with us, as it 
 were, in witholding her greatest favors without pro- 
 longed 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 b) r cen- 
 turies of practice and improvement, and upon it 
 rests, in a great measure, the prosperity and happi- 
 ness 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 
 
The Man from Mars. 97 
 
 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 cur- 
 rency, and your speculation, which are your 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 sup- 
 ply, 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 read- 
 ily transplant itself from one department of produc- 
 tion 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 con- 
 stantly 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 
 
98 The Man from Mars. 
 
 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 availa- 
 ble 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 ener- 
 gies, and to direct them safely from any great re- 
 dundancy of supply. When engaged in the produc- 
 tion of food supplies, where nature becomes of neces- 
 sity 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 
 
The Man from Mars. 99 
 
 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. Kach of these is divided into 
 three grades, and the highest valued workman is he 
 who stands first in all. The first grade of 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 
 i 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 im- 
 portance 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 
 Jielplessly submitting themselves to the natural 
 
TOO The Man from Mars. 
 
 competition of dependent numbers, and to the ex- 
 acting 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 liv- 
 ing. Bach year, therefore, after the gathering of 
 our harvests, our statistical bureau makes its 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. Bach 
 one of these is divided into three grades, and who- 
 ever stands first in all of them is entitled, of course, 
 to the highest pay for his services. Usually, how- 
 ever, these high qualifications secure a reward be- 
 yond the scale. This system of rewarding labor 
 has a far-reaching effect in our political economy, 
 and is in complete uniformity with the general 
 tendency of our efforts to promote steady values. 
 The most important element of cost in all commodi- 
 ties offered for sale is labor, and that can never be 
 
The Man from Mars. 101 
 
 cheapened. We have not a single product of indus- 
 try in our list which represents in its labor cost, as 
 many of yours do, the underpaid, gaunt and hope- 
 less 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 extrem- 
 ity 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 suffi- 
 cient 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 Karth for their average of 
 ten hours' labor. Our industrial force has, there- 
 fore, a facility of expansion and contraction, without 
 distressful results, which yours does not possess. 
 No serious changes are wrought with us by a reduc- 
 tion 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 carefnl attentions to the interests of 
 labor, we have brought it into repute as one of the 
 
102 The Man from Mars. 
 
 most honorable as well as the most profitable pur- 
 suits 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 per- 
 form innumerabie enterprises, which on the Karth 
 are left to individuals and organizations of men, 
 its direct dealings with those who toil are more inti- 
 mate and extensive than yours. It is better ena- 
 bled 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 statemanship has been directed to this end of 
 supporting labor, and out of it, without question, 
 comes the general serenity and contentment which 
 prevail. 
 
The Man from Mars. 103 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 it is decided by our authorities that a new 
 city shall be built to meet the requirements of in- 
 creasing 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 fre- 
 quently the case, the proposed site is already occu- 
 pied by one or more tenants in rural pursuits, they 
 are scrupulously indemnified in all losses which re- 
 sult from their dispossession. 
 
 I wish to impress upon you here, that a tenant, un- 
 der 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 gov- 
 ernment 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 
 
IO4 The Man from Mars. 
 
 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, ex- 
 cept 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 sub- 
 mitted and approved, just as your proposals for a 
 single edifice. All its parts must conform with each 
 other; the choice of its location chiefly depending 
 upon drainage and water supply, it possesses these 
 advantages in the highest perfection. Kvery 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 elec- 
 tric 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, 
 
The Man from Mars. 105 
 
 which supervises also the material employed, and 
 the safety and durability of the work. Any disrepu- 
 table or depraved quarter is of course impossible un- 
 der 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 peo- 
 ple 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 quar- 
 ters 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 compuljed in your way as 
 millions of money for the institution of various works 
 designed for the health and comfort of the new pop- 
 ulation, and people are arriving in thousands from 
 all quarters to do the work. Kvery 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 
 
io6 The Man from Mars. 
 
 from their human chattels. All choose to work, be- 
 cause 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 bless- 
 ings 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 doc- 
 trine 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 pen- 
 alties of ill health. The muscular body in all condi- 
 tions 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 
 
The Man from Mars, 107 
 
 house fronts, relieved on the street corners by ele- 
 vated towers, reach out sufficiently far into the grad- 
 ually 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 em- 
 bellished in the highest style of gardening and land- 
 scape 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 ex- 
 pansion. 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 popu- 
 lation are, as you may except, unlike yours. The 
 general air of serenity and contentment, the uni- 
 form politeness, and the absence of degradation, 
 with its frequent unpleasant and disgraceful epi- 
 sodes, mark the difference between your city popu- 
 lation and ours. 
 
 It concerns us most, however, to make a compari- 
 son 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, 
 
io8 The Man from Mars. 
 
 maturity. It contains, now, like your city of ad- 
 vanced growth, about three hundred thousand inhab- 
 itants. Its land rentals have been subjected to con- 
 stant 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 dis- 
 tricts, where wealth and capital are most heavily 
 engaged, it has been materially advanced, a corres- 
 ponding 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 owner- 
 ship, 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 ac- 
 cess 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 every- 
 
The Man from Mars. 109 
 
 thing consumed by the enhanced cost of its distribu- 
 tion. 
 
 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 ex- 
 ceptions, all are engaged in the business of produc- 
 tion. By this increased productiveness every con- 
 sumer 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 work- 
 men having abundant leisure for intellectual de- 
 velopment, 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 abun- 
 dant with us that its proportion to labor makes labor 
 remunerative. 
 
 We have now assumed for the piirpose of compari- 
 son that the two cities, one of Mars and one of the 
 Earth, have each three hundred thousand inhabi- 
 tants ; and that, allowing for women and children 
 not engaged in productive industry, one hundred 
 thousand of each city is actively engaged in indus- 
 trial pursuits. As the general prosperity of eaoh 
 
 
1 1 o The Man from Mars. 
 
 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 oppor- 
 tunities 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 inhabi- 
 tants, and the combined profits of its capital. The 
 latter, however, being entirely derived from con- 
 sumers, 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 prof- 
 its 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 often 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 
 
The Man from Mars. 1 1 1 
 
 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 thou- 
 sand engaged in the business of directly creating 
 wealth are doomed, under your cruel system, to 
 sweat and toil from sun to sun without accumula- 
 tions. You accept this condition of things as inev- 
 itable, 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. 
 
 I/ooking upon your civilization, we find in its 
 modern aspects a wonderful increase in all the ap- 
 pliances and conditions which accumulate wealth. 
 
ii2 The Man from Mars. 
 
 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 ac- 
 cession 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 sup- 
 plies of the Earth have been made to flow in a 
 steady stream toward the districts of their consump- 
 tion. 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 con- 
 siderably 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 un- 
 due advantages, to increase its store out of all pro- 
 portion to a fair division of the wealth produced. 
 But the greater and cheaper food supply, and the 
 
The Man from Mars. 113 
 
 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 mer- 
 cantile pursuits, has at the same time offered to all 
 your monopolists of land the opportunity to extort, 
 under the pressure of competition, the whole sur- 
 plus 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 
 
114 The Man from Mars. 
 
 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 yet 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 owner- 
 ship 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, there- 
 fore, 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 de- 
 rived from a given amount of labor, and except in 
 a few favorite situations there is as yet no monop- 
 
The Man from Mars. 115 
 
 oly value in your cultivated lands. To this, more 
 than anything else, is due the comparative cheap- 
 ness of your food, and the steady and unrestricted 
 increase of your population. In time, however, for 
 reasons too 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 mani- 
 festation of the evils of your private ownership sys- 
 tem 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 natu- 
 ral laws of trade by unfair combinations, known 
 among you as trusts and syndicates, wherein the 
 common welfare is made a sacrifice to their deter- 
 mined and unscrupulous love of gain. 
 
 You have perhaps not fully considered how it has 
 come to pass that your wealth is so generally with- 
 out 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 pro- 
 duce a fortitude of restraint which denies every dis- 
 
n6 The Man from Mars. 
 
 pensable want and pleasure. It 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 abstemi- 
 ousness 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 their virtues in unrelieved 
 dependence. Your successful moneyed class, com- 
 ing in time to that place of power which their 
 wealth procures for them, shape and direct your 
 legislation ; which, as you might expect, instead of 
 being devoted, as it should be, chiefly to the sup- 
 port of measures to equalize and ameliorate the con- 
 ditions of all classes, works the machinery of gov- 
 ernment for their own selfish ends, making easy 
 and comfortable paths for those schemes which mul- 
 tiply their wealth. 
 
 While the wish to accumulate is acknowledged 
 to be the fountain head of all material progress, 
 its accomplishment, under your system, is mostly 
 the reward of those qualities of the mind which 
 
The Man from Mars. 117 
 
 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 con- 
 sidered as worthy of being enlarged by precept. 
 
n8 The Man from Mars. 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 OTJR more advanced civilization and truer democ- 
 racy 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 au- 
 thorities 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, insur- 
 ance against individual loss by fire or flood, free 
 burial to the dead, and a system of education be- 
 stowing upon every individual the higher branches 
 of study. 
 
 Besides this immense service, the government 
 provides religious edifices, buildings for public en- 
 tertainment, and pleasure grounds. And all this, 
 you will bear in mind, at a less cost to our popula- 
 tion than your landlords exact of you for ground rent 
 
The Man from Mars. 119 
 
 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 ex- 
 penses not provided by our government, and out of 
 which come all the profit and accumulations of capi- 
 tal, 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 considera- 
 tion. 
 
 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 priv- 
 ilege to appropriate those bounties of nature which 
 are found ready for use, we have restricted its opera- 
 tions to a mere partnership with labor, where it justly 
 belongs. In our endeavors to sustain labor, and to 
 equalize its opportunities with capital, we have gone 
 much further than this. We hold that all public ne- 
 cessities of general demand, in the supplying of which 
 large expenditures are required in fixed capital, and 
 
I2O The Man from Mars. 
 
 which are not strictly in the line of production, 
 should be provided for by the government. We re- 
 move 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 railroads and telegraph lines are promi- 
 nent examples, obstruct the natural tendency of 
 competition, and capital and wealth are thereby per- 
 mitted advantages over labor which they should not 
 of right have. 
 
 The unlimited privilege of capital in these direc- 
 tions 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 founda- 
 tion in fact. The growing political weight, especial- 
 ly in your representative governments, of all mo- 
 nopoly combinations, by reason of their wealth and 
 large individual patronage, presents to you the 
 choice of either a government ruled by outside in- 
 fluences, which cannot be held responsible for the 
 evils it inadvertently inflicts by the irresistible pres- 
 sure from without, or a government entirely and 
 
The Man from Mars. 121 
 
 absolutely liable, and to beheld to a strict accounta- 
 bility for all encroachments upon the common wel- 
 fare 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 ad- 
 vanced government upon your Earth has ever under- 
 taken 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 pri- 
 vate 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 ex- 
 punged for their flagrant injustice, exhibit some of 
 the most striking examples of mental obliquity in 
 your annals. No government of the Karth, how- 
 ever, 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. 
 
122 The Man from Mars. 
 
 What seems at a superficial glance to be in your 
 own country such a measure, in what may be gener- 
 ally termed your land policy, with its homestead 
 provisions, becomes upon a closer examination de- 
 lusive. Hvery one of your laws for the pretended 
 purpose of bestowing your territory upon labor bears 
 the covert design of a connivance to further the op- 
 portunities 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 op- 
 portunities afforded in the early stages of your city's 
 growth. 
 
 The fact appears that, in your present devel- 
 opment, the general sense of individual acquisitive- 
 ness 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 Karth. No 
 representative government can exist long without a 
 
The Man from Mars. 123 
 
 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 in- 
 creased. It is a striking illustration of the irrest- 
 ible 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 fellowmen held, in the ag- 
 gregate 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 posses- 
 sion 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 pro- 
 claimed the equality of all men, while fostering a 
 political method which must in time enslave or pau- 
 perize the majority. 
 
 There can be no doubt but that the unlimited priv- 
 
1 24 The Man from Mars. 
 
 ileges of capital in these directions have greatly ac- 
 celerated your material progress. The speedy utili- 
 zation of the immense resources of your own repub- 
 lic has hidden and disguised the evil it was grad- 
 ually 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 ap- 
 parent 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 
 Karth. These furnishing the bone and sinew for 
 still more rapid development, your progress has be- 
 come 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 
 
The Man from Mars. 125 
 
 hands, your poor do not grow sensibly poorer dur- 
 ing this unequal distribution. Your enormous re- 
 sources 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 well rewarded industries have 
 induced, your labor unconsciously submits to the 
 extraction of an unfair portion of the wealth it pro- 
 duces 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 are 
 encouraged to fresh demands upon the industries 
 on this account. Although your poor do not yet 
 grow sensibly poorer, your rich are getting im- 
 measurably 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 Karth 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 
 
126 The Man from Mars. 
 
 thus far been led into the business of its cultivation r 
 because from the abundance and easy acquirement 
 of land it must come, in so doing, in such direct com- 
 petition 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 econ- 
 omy 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 sur- 
 plus, 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 part- 
 nership with the fertile earth. Its depression will re- 
 duce 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 promis- 
 ing investments for capital extant. There will be 
 a rise in the price of food staples, and rent for the- 
 
The Man from Mars. 127 
 
 first time in your history will enter into them as an 
 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 sup- 
 ply completely under the control of your wealthy 
 and capital class. Your small holders now occu- 
 pying 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 num- 
 ber of such tracts thrown into one of sufficient profit 
 to engage their means. 
 
 The labor saving contrivances which your inge- 
 nuity 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 ser- 
 vices of labor, by its cheaper supplies to it in articles 
 of manufacture, no such open and unrestricted com- 
 petition 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 
 
128 The Man from Mars. 
 
 its use for cultivation has only been exceptional, 
 and it can never become general so 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 opera- 
 tion 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 appear- 
 ance of fairness not at variance with your popular 
 aspirations of equality, and the evil will not be gen- 
 erally 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 sin- 
 cerely considered or acted upon by any of the gov- 
 ernments of the earth. You have taken it for 
 granted that a serving and dependent class, compos- 
 ing four-fifths of your numbers, must always assist 
 to make up the sum of your population, and no leg- 
 islative measure can be found in your records which 
 sustains this large body of your people against the 
 encroachments with which wealth and capital are con- 
 tinually permitted to invade their interests. liberty 
 itself is of but little value, when life becomes a for- 
 feiture of all the ways and means to improve it. 
 There is, in fact, no liberty in the correct sense, 
 
The Man from Man. 129 
 
 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 Mamnon. The divine im- 
 pulse for better things is among you, but instead of 
 laying out its work in the practical affairs 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 ambi- 
 
130 The Man from Mars. 
 
 tions to build out of the materials in sight ; but to 
 what purpose except an unworthy one ? The pres- 
 ent is ours. Our field is among the living things 
 which surround us. The most of life to us is its 
 possibilities of happiness. 
 
The Man from Mars. 131 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 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 mate- 
 rial progress. An assumption among your thinkers 
 that; ony 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 ac- 
 tion, 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 , how- 
 ever, 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 con- 
 nected 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 con- 
 stitution. Where the penalty of a straightened 
 :financial condition is the forfeiture of everything 
 
132 The Man from Mars. 
 
 which makes life desirable, even a denial of the op- 
 portunities of association with the better class, and a 
 surrender of offspring to the degradation and con- 
 tempt which comes of limited knowledge, it may 
 reasonably be expected that the struggle for wealth 
 would be keen. Kqually as an incentive also are the 
 innumerable avenues of gain, which are everywhere 
 open for the investment of capital, and the remark- 
 able 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 a 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 inev- 
 itable, 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 dread- 
 ed by 3^ou 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. Dur- 
 
The Man from Mars. 133 
 
 ing 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 mer- 
 cenary 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 it- 
 self, 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 attain- 
 ment in any large volume increased, society will 
 not be given so intensely to its individual accumu- 
 lation. 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 indus- 
 tries, and there will be enough for capital to do with- 
 in these limits to moderately enlarge itself ; while 
 yet within this narrowed field, limited wealth will 
 
134 The Man from Mars. 
 
 be able to provide itself with income enough to sus- 
 tain and reward habits of prudential saving. Al- 
 though 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 deserv- 
 ing 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 necessi- 
 ties 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 occa- 
 sional 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 stim- 
 ulates 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 cor- 
 responding degree depress labor. You must bear in 
 mind, however, that the stationary state, as exem- 
 
The Man from Mars. 135 
 
 plified 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 pos- 
 session of a larger amount of the products of labor 
 to bring about that condition of life known as a com- 
 petency than it does with you. But by a well de- 
 termined 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 estab- 
 lishment depressing at his will and pleasure the pay 
 of perhaps a whole community of working people. 
 When an establishment is required for the manu- 
 facture of some product in demand, our workmen 
 undertake it as a business belonging wholly to them- 
 selves, and there is never any lack of means among 
 them to do it. 
 
 The utterly helpless condition of your workmen, 
 
136 The Man from Mars. 
 
 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 be- 
 ing 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 up- 
 on 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 shrewd- 
 ness, 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 
 
The Man from Man. 137 
 
 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 de- 
 gree 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 les- 
 sons 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 cun- 
 ning ; 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 cap- 
 ital, 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 her- 
 editary toilers who submit themselves as victims un- 
 der sheer force of necessity and usage. This state 
 of your civilization brings into play many of your 
 
138 The Man from Mars, 
 
 lower feelings, as indispensable instruments of suc- 
 cess. When selfishness is the chief promoter of thrift, 
 practical charity is only aroused by unusual provo- 
 cation. The miseries of existence are unseen and 
 unfelt by others than the sufferers themselves among 
 you, just as your senses become oblivious to the pres- 
 ence of disturbing influences which you find it un- 
 profitable 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. L,ike the retarded germin- 
 ation 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 gold- 
 en horizon presages the coming of the sun. 
 
 The difference in the degree by which each indi- 
 vidual holds the common welfare in comparison with 
 his own, marks the stage of progress towards per- 
 fection 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 organiza- 
 tions are endowed with the propensity to benefit oth- 
 ers, which only the conditions of your society cir- 
 
The Man from Mars. 139 
 
 cumscribe by a conflict of interest. What is now in 
 your higher faculties, during your present develop- 
 ment, a pleasure, will become a passion by further 
 progress and cultivation, and, by a still more extend- 
 ed pursuit, a necessity to the tranquility and enjoy- 
 ment 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 dis- 
 interested 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 happi- 
 ness of your lives, it would be a fair measurement of 
 your progress toward the stationary state. 
 
 Supposing yourself to be one of an audience as- 
 sembled 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 dis- 
 satisfaction would spoil your enjoyment, no matter 
 upon what it might be founded. It might arise, for 
 
140 The Man from Mars. 
 
 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 as possible, every individual shall enjoy equal 
 privileges in society. Happiness is simply not pos- 
 sible without it. 
 
 Your moralists might argue that too close and in- 
 timate 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 to- 
 wards the stationary condition, unmistakable evi- 
 dence proves. Material as well as spiritual indica- 
 tions 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 
 
The Man from Mars. 141 
 
 advanced regions it has already worked out its re- 
 sources 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 fur- 
 ther advanced towards this stationary state. 
 
 One of the greatest obstacles opposing your ap- 
 proach 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 worth- 
 less, that any indulgence therein is useless to so- 
 ciety. 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 cen- 
 turies 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 pros- 
 perity, virtue, and even beauty are but synonyms 
 
 Of THK 
 
i4 2 The Man from Mars. 
 
 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 tradi- 
 tions. You will 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 ener- 
 gies and substance consumed in the work of enlarg- 
 ing 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 
 
The Man from Mars. 143 
 
 temptations to evil, the unrecognized virtue, and 
 the uneven opportunities for individual advance- 
 ment, 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 Barth is 
 merely a battle ground and field of conquest for the 
 perpetuation of their doctrines, all else upon it be- 
 ing blank vanities. They have kept you away from 
 the true business of your lives, and have mesmer- 
 ized you, alternately terrifying and delighting you 
 by unreal fancies ; now exhibiting to you a paradise 
 and at another time a nightmare. They have in- 
 volved you in a perpetual shadow, discouraging you 
 of all hopes of brightness until your celestial birth. 
 By exhibiting only your grosser parts, and threaten- 
 ing 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 estab- 
 lishing a happier and more perfect dwelling together. 
 
144 Mr Man from Man. 
 
 CHAPTER xiiH r 
 
 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 desig- 
 nating such places with names of quality, it would 
 be known in jour language as the city of Good 
 Witt. As it is the type of all others, you are already 
 informed of a few of its general features. I will, 
 however, give yon some further description of our 
 society and surroundings, in only the hasty and im- 
 perfect matttipr which thi 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 yon by those 
 delusions which destroys 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 hare designed an architecture not unlike that of 
 your ancient Greece. Our isolated exteriors, such 
 as villas and country residences, bear a dose ire- 
 semblance to some of your ancient styles. In our 
 cities we have been obliged to conform to the con- 
 dition of aerial navigation, which has greatly re- 
 
The Man from Mart. 145 
 
 stricted 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 ingen- 
 iously formed horizontal curtains can be darkened 
 at will. We believe this to be one of the most im- 
 portant 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 adaptation, these glass roofs have 
 become inseparably connected with our religious 
 lives. Our interest in the wonderful nightly exhi- 
 bitions which they permit is increased by the gen- 
 eral knowledge we have cultivated of the character 
 and motions of the heavenly bodies. As a conse- 
 quence, there are but few among us who cannot de- 
 scribe 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 
 
146 The Man from Mars. 
 
 between them. No other exhibition so feeds and 
 stimulates our religious impulses, as the grand dis- 
 play 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. 
 
 Bach 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 dwell- 
 ing or business purposes, and prevented those un- 
 sightly back yards which disfigure the cities of the 
 Karth 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 inte- 
 riors adorned with growing flowers 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 unre- 
 stricted and unselected numbers participating. Music 
 and dancing are delights with us beyond your ex- 
 perience. We enjoy the advantages of atmospheric 
 
The Man from Mars. 147 
 
 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 consequent- 
 ly more airy and graceful. In movements like danc- 
 ing 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 pleas- 
 ures of life, and for that guidance which has directed 
 us clear of the deadly superstitions of our neighbor- 
 ing 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 
 
148 The Man from Mars. 
 
 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 hon- 
 ors 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 differ- 
 ence in his favor, that for years to come, and perhaps 
 as long as he lives, his income is permanently in- 
 creased by an enhanced value to his labor. No com- 
 petition will ever, under our system, render value- 
 less this achievement of his. 
 
 Your degrees of learning are but empty honors 
 compared with this profitable distinction. You in- 
 sure no certain rewards for that acquirement of 
 knowledge which has won its parchment of approv- 
 al, 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. 
 
The Man from Mars. 149 
 
 with all his struggles ahead. Our workman, at each 
 step of his advancement, increases his income, under 
 the assurance and protection of our industrial meth- 
 ods, with the certainty and stability of a government 
 pension. 
 
 But while we have found it wise to honor and pro- 
 tect manual skill, the physical strength of our people 
 has for many ages been a subject of general atten- 
 tion. Among the productions of the supreme au- 
 thor which he is engaged in perfecting and beauti- 
 fying, the first in importance on your planet is sure- 
 ly 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 insep- 
 arable connection between mental and physical en- 
 ergy, and yet your cultivation of the body has en- 
 gaged but little attention. It seems to us one of the 
 most serious objections to your religious abstrac- 
 tions, 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 mus- 
 cular 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 exer- 
 
150 The Man from Mars. 
 
 cise, 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 reasona- 
 bly be expected to provide for yourselves some sub- 
 stitute 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 ena- 
 bled 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 specta- 
 cle 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 infirm- 
 ities which he had so sucessfully banished in his 
 brutes by parental selection. 
 
The Man from Mars. 151 
 
 The neglect of your opportunities in this direc- 
 tion 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 foun- 
 dation of a larger average of mental power and ac- 
 tivity, 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 dis- 
 eases. It is appaling to estimate the sum of human 
 misery perpetually transmitted congenitally in dis- 
 eased 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 pen- 
 alty of life ; when, in fact, it is perpetuated chiefly 
 by that over-powering individual selfishness which 
 makes no account of the general good while gratify- 
 ing sentiments of feeling, pleasure, or greed. 
 
 I have already drawn your observation to that 
 infallible test which marks the progress of social de- 
 velopment 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 
 
152 The Man from Mars. 
 
 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 pro- 
 tests of an infringement of personal liberty, because 
 we have arrived beyond that stage where law and 
 its enforcement are required. Official recommenda- 
 tion, supported by a united public opinion, withoiit 
 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 degrees supervise, those marital engagements 
 out of which our numbers are so constantly replen- 
 ished. 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 manage- 
 ment 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 
 
The Man from Mars. 153 
 
 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 dis- 
 covery 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. 
 
 This system establishes a public record of the 
 physical standing, either in lurking disease or de- 
 formity, of every individual ; and as it is made the 
 duty of our health department to declare its judg- 
 ment of approval in every marriage contract, we 
 have no transmitted diseases 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 civil- 
 ization. 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 de- 
 velopment, and in her processes of modification both 
 in forms and qualities of things, and with a knowl- 
 edge so acquired, you have cultivated a world of 
 animal and vegetable organisms to your better ser- 
 vice. We have done that, too ; but we have accom- 
 plished in that line something of incomparably more 
 
154 The Man from Mars. 
 
 importance to us, in advancing together by due cul- 
 tivation and care our animal as well as our intellect- 
 ual selves. 
 
 You cannot fail to discover in this, one of the 
 effects of that striking divergence between our civ- 
 ilization and yours, due to widely different interpre- 
 tations 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 ac- 
 complishment 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, con- 
 demn 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, )'ou have devised 
 a theory which brings them into antagonism as di- 
 verse 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 im- 
 
The Man from Mars. 155 
 
 pulse and enthusiasm, and depending wholly upon 
 the lower faculty of self-gain, advances by slow de- 
 grees, 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 the struggling in- 
 fluence 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 by 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 tinencouraged 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 sal- 
 vation. 
 
 What but this unwarranted dissociation of spirit 
 
156 The Man from Mars. 
 
 and matter, of the body and soul, of your physi- 
 cal and intellectual parts, regarding one as the de- 
 grading yokemate of the other instead of its counter- 
 part 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 fac- 
 ulties? 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 moss- 
 grown 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 emanci- 
 pated 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, 
 
The Man from Mars. 157 
 
 your heroism of good deeds, and your spiritual 
 hopes, are conveyed to you in a germinal state with- 
 out any intercepting medium, with the first breath 
 of your bodies ; to be improved, enlarged and har- 
 vested for the purposes and uses of your 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 ef- 
 fort has attempted to enlarge. Your progress can- 
 not be otherwise than uncertain and slow, and your 
 governments will always be unstable in their found- 
 ations 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 advance- 
 ment. 
 
 Your fields are not wanting in your attentions. 
 You bring profit to yourselves by the thorough till- 
 age of your acres. You multiply by your manipu- 
 lation under nature's hints the life-supporting and 
 pleasure-giving properties of the fruits and flowers 
 of the Earth to the extremest blossoming and abund- 
 ance. And yet in such a state of fallow is your own 
 divine essence of reason and thought, that to this 
 day no superstition is too absurd, no sophistry too 
 
158 The Man from Mars. 
 
 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. 
 
The Man from Mars. 159 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 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, char- 
 ity, 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 
 
160 The Alan from Mars. 
 
 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 suffer- 
 ing. In the extremity of invalidism or other mis- 
 fortune, 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, en- 
 tirely 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 en- 
 terprises 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 enthusi- 
 asm 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 wor- 
 ship within our temples is not considered of conse- 
 
The Man from Mars, 161 
 
 quence to our spiritual welfare. These religious 
 centers, unlike yours, assume no power to condone or 
 compromise with evil. No burdened, unclean con- 
 science comes to them with the hope of absolution, 
 to return again laden with its misdeeds for another 
 purging. No wholesale peculator brkigs 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 cooperation in our efforts to cultivate our- 
 selves, 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 contin- 
 uous roof, may be either a single or a number of 
 dwellings, to accord with the incomes of its occu- 
 pants. 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 uni- 
 formly pleasant and comfortable. With us the sus- 
 picion of unseen misery is enough to disturb the 
 pleasures of life. Besides the unpleasant sugges- 
 
1 62 The Man from Mars. 
 
 tions of discomfort 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 plates, 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 pro- 
 portions, there is not wanting within those luxuries 
 of wealth urged by the prevailing tastes. The estab- 
 lishment becomes the pride and pleasure of its local- 
 ity. In conformity with all other of the city's blocks, 
 it has three lofty stories. The lower one on each of 
 its fagades 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 decorat- 
 ed in bas relief with architraves and cornices de- 
 signed 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 contain- 
 ing a powerful electric light, illuminating at night 
 the interior as well as the surrounding streets. As 
 our thoroughfares which radiate from the city's cen- 
 
The Man from Mars. 163 
 
 ter 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 teach- 
 ing to which your kindergartens bear some similar- 
 ity, 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 towards 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 unusual promise, 
 were being assisted in their pursuance of some 
 branch of science or art. 
 
 Outside of this department of instruction you 
 
164 The Man from Mars. 
 
 would find an extensive library, with its reading 
 room attachments ingeniously arranged for conven- 
 ience, 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 of 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 en- 
 
The Man from Mars. 165 
 
 tirely remedy, by your political methods, the gener- 
 ally precarious way in which your animal and intel- 
 lectual wants are supplied. Suffering now follows 
 just as close to a miss in your struggles for susten- 
 ance, 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 necessi- 
 ties only attainable in your society by a consider- 
 able accumulation of money, the want of which 
 implies degradation, and a sacrifice of many things 
 that have grown to be dear to life. Bvery 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 wan- 
 derer, who, terrorized by the appearance of a dread- 
 ed 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 in- 
 dustry. 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 
 
1 66 The Man from Mars. 
 
 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 earn- 
 ings of an army of busy workers. 
 
 Through centuries of legislation and usage you 
 have established various processes, by which wealth 
 is enabled to extract an undue portion of the earn- 
 ings of industry. Among these processes may be 
 named rates of interest on money graded to the ne- 
 cessities 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 fre- 
 quent change of values for the opportunities of cap- 
 ital and the distress of labor ; stupendous aggrega- 
 tions 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 propri- 
 etorship which permits holders of the Earth's sur- 
 face, in addition to their privilege of exacting R 
 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 col- 
 lective fruits of the industries which surround them. 
 
 Our divergent views of existence are exemplified 
 
The Man from Mars. 167 
 
 in the care we have taken to provide for an evener 
 division of the products of industry. With us, prop- 
 erty is the means, and not the end, beyond which 
 there are any number of attainments in life incom- 
 parably 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 gov- 
 ernment 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 prop- 
 erty ; 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 char- 
 ity to all which is the only deserving part of your 
 
1 68 The Man from Mars. 
 
 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 as- 
 sent to measures recommended can be called by that 
 name, considers first the welfare of persons com- 
 prising the whole, subservient to which every pos- 
 sible 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 neces- 
 sary stepping-stone to their advancement ; and the 
 sweeping away of every social form which estab- 
 lishes 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 direc- 
 tions. 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 bet- 
 ter methods of assent and co-operation are getting 
 in their salutary work of emancipation. Knowl- 
 edge 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 im- 
 
The Man from Mars. 169 
 
 pressiveness of your religion are losing their rever- 
 ential respect, with the focused light directed upon 
 their doubtful origins. You have inaugurated the 
 beginning of a new faith, with better spiritual found- 
 ations, not condemning the world and its society, 
 but loving it, following in the footsteps of the di- 
 vine presence within its limits, taking a hand in its 
 affairs, and directing them towards the better possi- 
 bilities 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 use- 
 ful, 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 corres- 
 ponding with a proper stage of development to re- 
 ceive it. A solitary thought is useless, as a moral 
 agent, without its already existing half-formed fig- 
 ments scattered about in society. Its power to move 
 lies in the coalescence of its parts. Ideas 'and be- 
 liefs have been adopted at different stages of your 
 
170 The Man from Mars. 
 
 civilization, and have served as great motors to pro- 
 gress, 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 enthrone- 
 ment of two central ideas. One was the adoption of 
 the sentiment of brotherhood as a means of adjust- 
 ing 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 begin- 
 ning has come all that is good in your social pro- 
 gress. 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 be- 
 stowed upon you by the divine intelligence, would 
 
The Man from Mars. 171 
 
 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 dom- 
 inating the many for ages, appropriating their earn- 
 ings, 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 super- 
 stition 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 con- 
 trived supernaturalisms, and an attractive moral 
 code, it was built up into a system and organized 
 into a society which has borne its heavy weight up- 
 on your progress, and spread its dominion more suc- 
 cessfully than the warlike legions it supplanted. It 
 has accomplished no good which is not entirely due 
 to the irresistible expansion of the truths it appro- 
 priated 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 person- 
 
172 The Man from Mars. 
 
 ality, 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 are 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 uncon- 
 taminated 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 con- 
 demned and degraded you. The new hope, like a 
 newly discovered strength, will push out in all di- 
 rections, in the exercise of its salutary work. In- 
 stead of discourse- and exhortation to the lowly and 
 down trodden, with promises as impossible of de- 
 nial as of verification, it will lift them upon their 
 feet by ths strong hand of a better social method. 
 L,ike the first coming, its symbolic picture will be 
 carved into monuments, reproduced in all the de- 
 partments of art, and cherished as the chief re- 
 minder of your duties and obligations to the Deity. 
 It will be no symbol of anguish and sorrow, like 
 
The Man from Mars. 173 
 
 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 scrambling flock 
 of poultry, impatient for their morning feed. I 
 look toward the easy chair and it is empty. My 
 celestial visitor has departed. 
 
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 THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
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