The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Man from Mars, by William Simpson.

Any one advanced in life who has enjoyed opportunities of knowledge derived from association with men and books, and who has an inclination to reach the bottom of things by his own independent thought, is apt to arrive at conclusions regarding the world and society very different from those which had been early impressed upon him by his superiors and teachers. From a suspicion, at first reluctantly accepted, but finally confirmed beyond a doubt, he finds that he has been deceived in many things. The discovery arouses no indignation because he knows that his early instructors were in most cases the victims of misdirection themselves, and are therefore not to be held accountable for the promulgation of errors which they had mistaken for truths. His self-emancipation has so filled his mind with a better hope for the future of the world, and a higher opinion of his fellow men, that the delight and satisfaction of the discovery[Pg 6] overcomes every sentiment except pity for those who had been leading him astray, and if the feeling of condemnation or censure comes to his mind at all, it is only for those few who live and thrive upon those delusions having their origin in the past, and whose chief purpose in life is to keep them alive and to bolster them up among the multitude.

In the new light that has come to him, the world and society have been transformed to his view and understanding. He discovers goodness in many places where his teachers had denied its existence, and its definition has become so changed, under his broader vision, that humanity seems teeming with it everywhere, and is ruled by it, and those departments of it most affecting society he observes to be increasing, and that instead of like an exotic in uncongenial soil, hard to be retained by mankind, it is perpetuated and cherished by natural human impulses. He finds, also, that the sum of badness in the world has been greatly exaggerated by his teachers, and that those branches of it most interfering with the welfare of society are gradually being lessened, and are likely to work out their extinction by the penalties of public disapproval. These convictions make the world seem a[Pg 7] brighter and better dwelling place. They reveal to him the possibilities of its future, and tend to divert his higher aims from the obscure paths where tradition had been leading them, into more fruitful channels. The truth will have at last dawned upon him, bearing evidences in this age that none but the unenlightened can doubt, that superstition, during many of the centuries past, has belittled the world, and has discouraged humanity in improving it, under the mistaken assumption of the world’s small comparative importance in the great outcome; the circumstantial particulars, of which, it pretends to hold by divine revelation. Having rid himself of these beliefs by a process of reasoning, and the assistance of the available knowledge of his time, he arrives at the conclusion that the best work of humanity is not, altogether that taught by the creeds, and that its most divinely inspired motives are those which tend to increase the knowledge of worldly things, those which add to the sum of goodness in society by exhibiting its practical effect toward happiness, and those also which assist in the great end of equalizing the burdens and enjoyments of life among all.

Having these conclusions firmly established in his mind, and the undeserved reverence from early training removed,[Pg 8] he becomes especially fitted to examine these old beliefs, and to pass judgment upon them, without that taint of blind devotional fervor which the unremitted teaching of many centuries has rendered current in the world. He observes of these old beliefs, that during their supremacy, when their control of society was complete and unquestioned, the material progress of mankind was least, without any compensating condition to make up for the darkness, and dead mental activity that had fallen upon it; except that apparent hypnotic influence from the doctrines taught, which made men careless of their miseries, and indifferent to the things of the earth. He observes, further, of these old beliefs, that as modern knowledge reduces their hold of authority among men, the world improves as it never did before. Even charity, kindness, and good will to men, adopted, and long taught as an inseparable part of them, multiply more rapidly as their weight in the management of human affairs grow less. From these well attested facts he arrives at the conviction that those religious societies, founded upon, and which have for centuries labored to perpetuate these beliefs, either are not possessed with all the elements of human progress, or, that having many of such elements, they have others of[Pg 9] such neutralizing and retarding effect as to render the first futile for such a purpose. That the latter is the case, every year added to his experience of life removes the doubt, and explains to his understanding why the religious societies of the world have failed in any great degree to advance the material and intellectual condition of mankind.

With a moral code, every provision of which plainly indicates the method of a better social state, these religious societies have indissolubly associated in their teachings certain doctrinal beliefs, originating in a semi-barbarous age, and laden with its superstitions, with that fatal assumption of divine authority which demands their acceptance every where and for all time. Beliefs of such unbending rigidity, impossible adaption or amendment, and intolerance of dissent, on account of their pretended sacred character, that the world has been kept in a turmoil discussing them since their introduction, and the more salutary lessons of morality and spiritual hope have been outranked and submerged by these vain and profitless discussions. These beautiful and attractive lessons of love, kindness, and charity, exemplified and taught through a personality, whose gift of genius was to see,[Pg 10] above all other men, the needs of humanity, have attracted men and women into these religious societies as the hungry are attracted by stores of food. Once within their lines, and imbued with the doctrines there found, they see but little abroad in the outside world but the evil spirit of Sheol. To them, its shadow rests upon much of the business of life, and with increased obscurity, upon many of its pleasures. It even shows to them among those humanities which are without their direction and cue. It is only however among the many who openly deny their doctrines and authority that the evil spirit is seen by them in all its hideous and malevolent personality, and their especial mission is to give battle in that direction. Between he who doubts, no matter how respectfully, and these religious societies, are drawn their lines of kindness and charity, and with their sermons of love, and their protestations of good will to mankind fresh upon them, they are at any time, transformed, so far as their relations with a doubter are concerned, into a band of hostile and relentless savages, with inflictions of punishment, measured in degree by surrounding enlightenment, from the actual barbaric torture of the savage, to mere social ostracism and avoidance.

[Pg 11]If it were the sole purpose of all Christian organizations to bring into general practice the civilizing precepts of their founder, they would become the most powerful agents in the world to human advancement and the betterment of social conditions, but these precepts are made subordinate by them, and are neither valued or estimated beyond their jurisdiction. They count nothing as saving qualities without the acknowledgment of certain doctrines and methods accompanying them. Those beautiful sentiments of charity and kindness, always so precious to the hearts of men, and growing more so as the ages advance, were not adopted nor promulgated entirely for civilizing purposes, but mostly with the selfish view of capturing humanity to church interests. With a like purpose, knowing the mystic tendency of the masses, the supernaturalisms, made a part of these attractive precepts, were adopted and upheld; bringing into the world an endless multitude of barren illusions, provoking acrimonious contentions among men, to no good purpose whatever, and filling the pages of history with a description of scenes that are a torture even to the memory.

It is given only to those now living, and who have experienced the longest terms of life, to personally compare[Pg 12] the past with the present, so far as their limited sojourn in the world extends. They are living witnesses to the wonderful changes in society and its beliefs during the short period of two generations only. They have seen many of these ancient supernatural dreams in all their power of authority, and have watched them wilt, and finally disappear, under some silent influence, after argument and reason had exhausted themselves against them in vain. They have listened to those weekly expositions of infernal horrors, common at one time, in all the fear and trembling of childhood, and have later, witnessed the theories and beliefs which inspired them, with many others equally obnoxious to reason, relegated to silence and disuse, as antiquated and worn furniture, no longer serviceable, is consigned to the rubbish heap. Only two generations ago they have seen the literature of the churches in leather bound books occupying the best filled, and most easily reached shelves of the libraries, and now laying neglected among the dust of the cellars; not one retained for reference, and even their titles forgotten. They have seen, in their time, the clutches of superstition compelled to relax its hold upon the throats of many a worthy human enterprise. They have witnessed the triumph of[Pg 13] science in its many skirmishes with tradition, and have been interested lookers-on, while the famous battle of evolution raged. They have seen it from start to finish, and the amusing spectacle of its end, when theology, metaphorically speaking, dragged its bruised and trembling body out of the dust; and wiping the blood from its pale and troubled face, unblushingly declared, as it had in every like outcome before, that there had been no conflict.

With all this, and within their own era of two generations only, they have seen the world arise to such prodigies of advancement, such marvels of practical charity and such activities in the pursuit of knowledge, in so close and quick succession as to fill them with bewilderment and wonder, and they will recognize, at least such of them as reflect upon the matter, that after conflicts innumerable, and setbacks and suppressions, the scientific have prevailed over the theological methods, and are at work in all the glories of their triumph, and that the ancient modes of thought are at last masters of the civilized world after nearly two thousand years of battle. The thread of civilization has been taken up and spliced at its point of rupture sixteen centuries ago. All this activity in the building of roads, bridges and aqueducts, this tunnelling[Pg 14] of mountains and rivers, this straining to make available for the services of man all the elements of nature, this untiring search to increase the comforts and conveniences of life, this higher regard for pure secular learning, regardless of where it may lead, this diversion of art from the purposes of religious expression only, to an exhibition of nature in all her beautiful forms, this greater toleration of opinion, this coming back to the earth in short, after a long period of phantom chasing in the clouds, is neither more nor less than the revival of paganism. But paganism with its brutalities filtered out, and the best, and only civilizing parts of christianity, its hope of immortality, its lessons of virtue, its brotherhood and socialism retained, the superstitions of paganism buried forever, and those of christianity gradually dropping one by one into their graves.

He, who now at three score and ten, remembers when the sound of the flint and steel was a necessary prelude to the morning fire, when the open fire place with its crane and pot hooks was the only resource for warmth and cooking, when the largest city on the American continent was without sewers or water conduits, when a river steamer was a wonder upon which the curious gazed, and ocean[Pg 15] ones unheard of, when railroads were in an experimental stage, when the belief that ghosts flitted about the graveyards was unquestioned and undenied, when Satan was said to have stalked upon the earth in person, his presence seriously considered and accounted for by many of the churches, when witchcraft, only in the throes of death but not yet buried, had many adherents in animated defence, when the electrical experiments of Franklin were reckoned in some places as the trifling of an infidel with the spirit of evil, can best appreciate, by the comparison which reminiscence affords, of these wonderful changes in thought, and the significant accompaniment of increased mental activity in all things benefitting the race. The close relations exhibited in this comparatively brief period between the growth of rationalism, and that accelerated movement all along the line of science, learning, and everything tending to place humanity on a higher plain, is more than a mere coincidence. It is the operation of cause and effect, better understood and acknowledged upon a closer examination.

The bursting forth, as it were, during this century of the united energies of mankind in the direction of knowledge, is an expansion after the removal of a pressure that[Pg 16] has borne down upon them for ages. Those great things that men have accomplished lately, they were as capable of centuries ago, and it is not surprising that they had not until recently made greater advances, when we estimate the weight of opposing forces. There had been for centuries nothing more discouraging to the formation of scientific hopes and ambitions than the theological methods of thought, and the atmosphere which surrounded them. The more that atmosphere was saturated with the doctrines of the churches, the more repellent it was to any intellectual effort toward outside things, and especially one requiring such a monopoly of mental energy and attention as to interfere with the Christian ideas of constant and unremitting devotion. There was no cultivated field, during the thousand years of supreme church jurisdiction, where an independent scientific ambition could germinate. Within the church such an ambition was impossible. It was not only against the spirit, but the very letter of its teachings. Its foundation was laid by its victory over science, in its overcome of which, it proclaimed divine assistance and authority. It already possessed a knowledge of all things appertaining to the earth and the “firmament” above it which the Almighty[Pg 17] desired men to know. The earth was not round, it was the center of the universe. It stood still while the sun moved daily over its surface, getting back each morning into its place with the help of angels. The rainbow was a sign placed in the heavens for a purpose. Every known phenomenon of nature was accounted for by scriptural reference. The method of the creation of the world and the origin of man and of woman also, the church possessed in circumstantial detail. The moment true science began its work, and ran counter to any of this fund of knowledge, assumed to have been furnished by the Almighty, the trouble began. But the trouble was not altogether with the honest investigator. If his discovery tended to disprove what was known as scriptural truth, and inadvertently had been allowed to gain the public ear, every prelate in the church began contriving to refute it. A new opportunity for fame was opened to every ambitious theologian, and there immediately began in rebuttal a spinning of texts, and a style of metaphysical argument, from one end of the church to the other, which remain to this day as the most remarkable curiosities of sinuous reasoning and constrained thought on record. All questions of a scientific character had but[Pg 18] one method of settlement, were they authorized or denied by scripture? If denied as they usually were, the disturber was either burned at the stake or made to recant. Fame, that chief incentive to all high effort, offered none of its rewards beyond theological circles, and during the ten centuries of complete church supremacy, any advance in knowledge which did not stir the animosity of theologians gained less public attention and applause than the wearing of a hair shirt or a crown of thorns. During a thousand years the church had kept the world slumbering in the darkness of barbarism and superstition punishing with death those it could not convince. Any doubter of generally accepted beliefs, either in religion or science, who can support his position with plausable argument, is entitled at least to the consideration of being a thinker. The constant taking off of every such one, during a term counted by centuries, could have no other effect than to reduce the average of intellectual vigor in the whole. The husbandman, who removes from his acres of growing grain the tallest and heaviest stalks, and instead of saving them for seed, destroys them, insures, in time, the misfortune of dwarfed fields and diminished harvests. The church, since its complete victory over paganism in the[Pg 19] fourth century, had not produced with its supreme control over all learning a single noted man of science, or one promising to be such, whom it had not either suppressed or tortured to death, not a painter or poet who had not devoted his genius principally to superstition or sensuality, not a historian whose veracity is not doubted, and not a single towering man of letters. This, too, in a people, among whom mingled the descendants of the Greek masters of literature and philosophy. When, about four centuries ago, secular learning and free thought began their first open advances since pagan days, the church, finding in every such movement some disturbance of its traditions, and making no account of their benefit to mankind, brought all its powers to bear for their suppression. In laying to do so it pursued the same cruel policy it had adopted in former contests. These cruelties and intimidations were practiced at a time when within the church were openly perpetrated corruptions of the most glaring character; which together, loosened its hold upon the consciences of men, and made possible that revolt and division known as the Reformation, early in the sixteenth century. Coming nearer our own time, and having to[Pg 20] deal with theological conditions not yet entirely removed, a little more detail is necessary.

The quarter century before and the century following the Reformation was a remarkable era in the world’s history. It was noted throughout as a desperate and continuous struggle by men of science to dispel the darkness that had so long enveloped the Christian world. The art of printing, then recently discovered, and just coming into practical working effect, and the thoughts of men thereby communicated from one to the rest with a facility never before known, had the effect of arousing mental activities everywhere. From a load only partially removed men began exploring regions of science that had been interdicted, and a great movement in positive knowledge began. The most enlightened men of the time went over to the Reformation, and if within that body, they had found the shelter and encouragement they deserved, the sixteenth century and the one following it would have been the most brilliant period on record except our own, for scientific discoveries and the world’s advancement. Such a conclusion is justified by taking note of the wonderful men of genius who came into the world during that time, who, with all the restrictions and limitations[Pg 21] cast about them by the two churches, laid such new foundations in truth and learning, that nothing was to be done by subsequent workers in the same lines but build upon them. Buffon, who may justly be called the father of natural science, with powers of research and gifts of presenting results showing genius of a high order, by his simple statement of truths which are to-day truisms in science, was dragged forth by the leaders of the Reformation, and forced to recant publicly and to print his recantation. “I abandon everything in my book respecting the formation of the earth, and generally all which may be contrary to the narrative of Moses.” Linnaeus, the founder of a scientific system in botany, and the discoverer of sex in plants, was constantly hampered and constrained in his thoughts by the threats of the Reformation. A pretended miracle of turning water into blood appeared in his vicinity, and after looking into it carefully he reported that the reddening of the water was caused by dense masses of minute insects. When news of this explanation reached the ears of the Protestant bishop he denounced this scientific discovery as a “Satanic Abyss.” “When God allows such a miracle to take place,” said he, “Satan endeavors, and so does his ungodly and[Pg 22] worldly tools, to make it signify nothing.” Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy, and ranked among the foremost mathematicians of his day, yet, his constant dread of persecution from Protestantism led him steadily to veil his thoughts, and to suppress them when they threatened to interfere with theological beliefs. Leibnitz, the great thinker, who came so near to the discovery of evolution, Spinoza, and later Hume, Kepler, Kant, Newton and many others, which want of space prevents mention were likely to have done much more for science had not the theological atmosphere of the Christian churches been so unpropitious.

The true story of Galileo, the monumental shame of Christianity, cannot be told without implicating the younger with the older church. The Reformation looked on complaisantly and approvingly while this crime was being committed. It was in complete accordance with its beliefs and methods. The Copernican system, on account of the adoption of which, Galileo was persecuted was as strenuously and bitterly denounced by Protestants as Catholics. Luther says “People gave ear to an upstart astrologer, who strove to show that the earth revolved, and not the sun and moon. This fool wishes to revise[Pg 23] the whole system of astronomy, but sacred scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth.” The recantation of this venerable scientist, worn out with imprisonment and sorrow, and in fear of torture and death, is as follows: “I Galileo, being in my seventieth year, being a prisoner on my knees before your eminences, having before my eyes the Holy Gospel, which I touch with my hands, abjure, curse and detest the error and the heresy of the movement of the earth.” As the sphericity of the earth was suggested by Aristotle, and its movement had been a matter of earnest discussion by theologians for ages, we see fit to transcribe here the argument of one of them, made a long time ago it is true, but nevertheless a fair sample of the theological methods of thought. It is copied from a book written by one Scipio Chiaramonti, and dedicated to Cardinal Barberini. “Animals which move have limbs and muscles, the earth has no limbs and muscles, therefore it does not move. It is angels who make Saturn, Jupiter, the Sun, etc., turn round. If the earth revolves it must also have an angel in the center to set it in motion; but only devils live there; it would therefore be a devil who would impart motion to the earth.” All branches of the Protestant[Pg 24] church condemned the theory of the earth’s movement. Calvin asked, “Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?” Wesley also denounced the new theory, declaring it to “tend toward infidelity.” The grand men who were coming forward in their efforts to advance knowledge unavoidably encroached upon many of the “truths of scripture” and both churches were equally engaged in their efforts to suppress them, by argument if possible, but if not, by fire and stake. The Protestant church, which has always made a claim of especial enlightenment, vied with the other in its cruel and relentless warfare upon what is known among the churches as heresy, the proper definition of which is reason and common sense. We have said that the case of Galileo was the monumental shame of Christendom; the case of Servetus was a monumental crime, which Protestantism alone must answer for.

The persecution of Michael Servetus by John Calvin, one of the leaders of the Reformation, was one of the most unjust and inhuman exercises of religious authority that the world has seen. There were many features in this tragedy of burning at the stake, that were out of the common. The victim was a man of unblemished character,[Pg 25] of great learning, and a scientist, with a genius for investigation. He was a skilled practitioner of medicine, out of which profession he derived his income. He had made some advances in medical science, coming so near to a discovery of the circulation of the blood, that it is quite likely, but for his untimely death, he would have reached it instead of Harvey, many years afterward. His active mind had led him to devote much of his leisure to the study of theology, and, laboring among its problems, he strove to reconcile a number of orthodox beliefs and doctrines with the scientific knowledge of his time, not combating them or contriving at their destruction, but by changing the sense of words, to make them apparently accord with known elements of truth. He was an ardent supporter of the Reformation, and a friend and admirer of Calvin, and he began and maintained for some time, a correspondence with him, with the view of obtaining his advice and support. The proposed modification in the sense of scriptural texts, was not favorably received by Calvin, and the two were drawn into a controversy, which finally became acrimonious. The world, at present, partially recovered from its long period of hypnotized reason, is able to appreciate the small value of the questions[Pg 26] which engaged these two men, and which led one to strike the other down to death, and it is also able to judge how much Servetus was in advance of his adversary in their discussions.

Calvin maintained, that under instructions from God, through the Bible, an infant, dying without baptism, could not escape the tortures of Hell, a locality described by the same authority, as a place of horrors, of endless burning amid sulphurous fires, of never ending thirst, and of a “weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth” through all time to come. Servetus expressed his doubts of the justice of this infliction upon sinless infants, and attempted to show that it was not authorized by the Sacred Book. He also denied the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, as it was commonly received. He did not deny a kind of Trinity in the unity of God, but believing that it was merely formal, and not personal, mere distinctions in the divine essence, and that, as generally understood, it was a dream, and an invention of the Fathers of the Church. He also asserted, upon good authority, that there was a Christian doctrine before there was any adoption of the Hebrew legends; that these legends did not become a part of the church, until nearly a century after[Pg 27] the great moral teacher had met his cruel death. He also came as near as he dared, to expressing his belief, that the Son was merely a man, with the divine inspiration in a large degree. Such advanced ideas as these, asserted with the positiveness of conviction, and backed with unanswerable argument, were the cause of his undoing.

Calvin, at this time, was at the head of a church already powerful. He ruled it with an autocratic will, and upon all questions of doctrinal beliefs, he was the last court of appeal. He had long accepted the homage of his followers, as one selected by the Almighty for their spiritual guidance, and, with the common weakness of humanity, he became arbitrary and despotic in his management of church affairs. He was always ready to advise and direct, and in his first letters to Servetus, assumed some show of argument while denying his doctrines. Servetus answered him, not with that deference that his adversary usually received, but in all the spirit of earnest debate. Nothing more exasperating to Calvin could have occurred, and to cap the climax of affront, his adversary, a mere layman, published a book “Christianity Restored” setting forth his advanced views, and with a reckless temerity, sent the reformer a copy.[Pg 28] The controversy between them immediately degenerated into mutual recrimination and abuse. Calvin’s anger was raised to a white heat, when he saw the errors and blasphemies, as he regarded them, and which he had vainly sought to combat, confided to the printed page, and thrown broadcast upon the world. Besides the alleged heretical matter of the book, he found himself taken to task, declared to be in error, and his most cherished doctrines controverted. But he discovered withal some matter in the book which pleased him. His enemy had committed himself in abusing the Papacy: evidence sufficient to convict him at once of blasphemy in the Roman Catholic city of Vienne in France where Servetus then resided, and he proceeded at once to put the cruel scheme of his death into execution. By information to the authorities at Vienne through dictated letters, he succeeded in having Servetus thrown into prison there, from whence he escaped, and became an outcast for months. The malignant and inhuman manner in which this Christian leader followed his innocent victim, could scarcely have occurred upon any other question but a religious one, and his murderous intent, from the first, is shown by a letter from Calvin to a friend in which he[Pg 29] says, “Servetus wrote to me lately, and besides his letter sent me a great volume of his ravings, telling me, with audacious arrogance, that I should find there things stupendous and unheard of until now.” He offers to come thither if I approve; but I will not pledge my faith to him; for, did he come, if I have any authority here, “I should never suffer him to go away alive.” And he proved himself, in this instance, true to his word.

The Roman Catholic authorities of Vienne, discovering after a while the connivance of Calvin, in putting the execution of his enemy on them, contrived, it is said, to make his escape easy. They had no mind to have this work thrust upon them. They probably felt that the reformers should take care of their own heretics. Servetus, after his escape, wandered about from place to place, all the time his life in imminent danger, and finally brought up in Geneva, the home of Calvin, disguising himself, and hiding in the outskirts. What induced him to take such desperate chances is not positively known. His intention is supposed to have been to go to Naples, and to be gone from Geneva on the first favorable opportunity. Weary of confinement, and always piously inclined, he ventured imprudently to show himself,[Pg 30] at the evening service of a neighboring church, and being there recognized, intimation of his presence was conveyed to Calvin, who, without loss of a moment, demanded his immediate arrest, making his arraignment himself, and industriously working until the end, as chief prosecutor and witness. The barbaric cruelty during imprisonment to this famous man, in an eminently Christian community, and by a Christian leader is shown by the following letter from his prison cell. “Most noble Lords, it is now three weeks since I petitioned for an audience, and I have to inform you that nothing has been done, and I am in a more filthy plight than ever. In addition, I suffer terribly from the cold, and from colic and my rupture, which causes me miseries. It is very cruel that I am neither allowed to speak, nor not have my most pressing wants supplied; for the love of God sirs, in pity give orders in my behalf.” And here is another one: “My most honored Lords, I humbly entreat of you to put an end to these great delays, or to exonerate me of the criminal charge. You must see that Calvin is at his wits ends, and knows not what more to say, but for his pleasure, would have me rot here in prison. The lice eat me up alive, my breeches are in rags, and I have no change, no doublet,[Pg 31] and but a single shirt in tatters.” Thirty-eight articles of impeachment were drawn up by Calvin, and after a protracted trial, wherein he acted as chief interrogator, this unhappy victim was sentenced to be burnt at the stake. Servetus, during his whole examination, showed himself to be a brave, conscientious, religious man. His answers to each one of the articles was able, consistent, and would have been considered in this day unanswerable, and what is more his views have since been adopted by the most advanced of the Christian sects. The following is a description of his execution recorded at that time.

“When he came in sight of the fatal pile, the wretched Servetus prostrated himself on the ground and for a while was absorbed in prayer. Rising and advancing a few steps he found himself in the hands of the executioner, by whom he was made to sit on a block, his feet just reaching the ground. His body was then bound to the stake behind him by several turns of an iron chain, whilst his neck was secured in like manner by the coil of a hempen rope. His two books—the one in manuscript sent to Calvin in confidence six or eight years before for his stricture, and a copy of the one lately printed at[Pg 32] Vienne—were fastened to his waist, and his head was encircled in mockery with a chaplet of straw and green twigs bestrewed with brimstone. The deadly torch was then applied to the fagots and flashed in his face; and the brimstone catching, and the flames rising, wrung from the victim such a cry of anguish as struck terror into the surrounding crowd. After this he was bravely silent; but the wood being purposely green, although the people aided the executioner in heaping the fagots upon him, a long half hour elapsed before he ceased to show signs of life and suffering. Immediately before giving up the ghost, with a last expiring effort he cried aloud, ‘Jesus, thou Son of the eternal God, have compassion upon me!’ All was then hushed, save hissing and crackling of the green wood, and by and by there remained no more of what had been Michael Servetus, but a charred and blackened trunk, and a handful of ashes.” So died in advance of his age, this victim of religious fanaticism and personal hate, a fitting triumph of the theological over the scientific methods of thought, the result among many thousands like it of the adoption of the Jewish legends by Christianity, and in this case, brought about by a Christian leader, the founder of a creed, in which to this[Pg 33] day, enough of his spirit remains to make it the greatest enemy of free thought and liberal opinion, among all the creeds of Protestantism. Of this disgraceful tragedy was it the spirit of the Master which led the inhuman crowd to vie with each other in piling on the fagots, or was it the malign influence of a vindictive and cruel Hebrew God?

Every conflict between science and theology since the days of Copernicus has resulted in an unequivocal victory for the former. Both churches resisted the truth of the rotundity and movement of the earth as though their existence depended upon it. They fought each question as it arose in the same spirit. The Mosaic account of the creation, the age of the world, the deluge, the length of man’s sojourn upon the earth, are questions as effectively settled adversely to the “truths of scripture” as the one for which Galileo suffered. And yet Christianity lives, and will continue to live and flourish, solely on account of the inherent and increasing affinity of the human heart as civilization advances for the precepts and example of its founder. If Christianity were destined to fall by the undermining of its legends it would fall now with the recent destruction of one upon which its existence appeared to depend, which has, more than any[Pg 34] other, shaped its course and laid the foundation of its rituals. The doctrine of evolution now established as a truth is the most serious and apparently destructive one that theology ever met. The fact that man has ARISEN from a condition of brutality, instead of FALLEN from a state of perfection is, to ecclesiasticism, a raking blow from stem to stern, compared with all previous battles with science as the shot of a modern thirty-two pounder with old fashioned ordinance. The legend of the fall of man, compared with all others, is the vilest. It was brought from Assyria, by the Hebrews, who obtained it during their captivity, from a barbarous people, among whom it was current for ages, and was thus inserted in our Sacred Book, proofs of which have recently been found in deciphering the Ninevite records. A suspicion is not entirely without warrant that it may have been adopted with a purpose of creating miseries and sorrows in the multitude for the profitable occupation of a divinely authorized few in the business of consoling them, and right well has it fulfilled its mission. It has changed the facial expression of Christendom. It has deepened the furrows of sorrow upon old age, and fixed lines of care upon the features of youth. It has brought[Pg 35] the undeserved dejection of criminality, and the downcast of shame, where of right belongs the reflection of hopefulness and the light of expectancy. It has incalculably multiplied the sorrows of life, and created for each death a nightmare of imaginary horrors. This legend is the foundation and inspiration of most of the evil and cruelty that Christianity has inflicted on human kind. Fabulous itself, it has been the parent of unrealities, witchcraft and magic for instance, from which millions of innocent victims have been sacrificed to torture and death. It has transformed reasonable enjoyments of life into crimes by the invention of a word, which with the latitude given its definition, has kept in trembling uncertainty the innocent and harmless. To the parent it has bestowed the agony of dread for the fate of departed offspring, guileless infants, as well as the matured. This legend of the fall of man has established in the paths of life its drag net Sin, a word of such unlimited theological definition, that any one of average rectitude, by some trifling inadvertance of thought or action, is likely to bring upon himself the condemnation of a frowning God; so that, the worthy as well as the unworthy, may not escape the services of theological assistance and intercession.[Pg 36] But for the doubt that exists, and has probably always existed, except among the ignorant and sluggish minded, of the truth of this puerile invention, it would have reduced humanity long ago to a state of universal hopelessness and despair.

The theologians have but little left now but the miracles to defend, and although it must be conceded by them that the miracle of Joshua has fallen, others whose fallacy cannot be so well demonstrated by science, are held to with the tenacity of desperation, and in utter disregard of reason and common sense. Fortunately, in the interest of truth, we are given an opportunity to study the evolution of miracles, in a case so modern that every statement in proof of their fallacy can be substantiated by the current literature of the time. Saint Francis Xavier was an earnest, sincere and truthful Jesuit, whose religious services were performed in the middle of the sixteenth century. He gave up a promising career as professor in a Paris academy, and in his enthusiasm and devotion to Christianity, went as missionary to the Far East. Among the various tribes of lower India, and afterward in Japan he wrought untiringly, toiling through village after village collecting the natives by means of a hand bell.[Pg 37] After twelve years of such efforts seeking new converts for religion, he sacrificed his life on the desert island of San Chan. During his career as missionary he wrote great numbers of letters, which were preserved, and have since been published, and these, with the letters of his contemporaries, exhibit clearly all the features of his life. No account of a miracle wrought by him appears either in his own letters or any contemporary document. More than that, his brother missionaries, who were in constant and loyal fellowship with him, make no illusions to them in their communications with each other, or with their brethren in Europe. This silence regarding his miracles was clearly not due to any unbelief in them, because these good missionary fathers were free to record the slightest occurrence which they thought evidence of Divine favor. One of them sends a report that an illuminated cross had been recently seen in the heavens; another that devils had been cast out of the natives by the use of holy water; others send reports that lepers had been healed by baptism, and that the blind and dumb had been restored by the rites of the church; but to Xavier no miracles are imputed by his associates during his life, or during several years after his death. On the contrary we find his own statements[Pg 38] as to his personal limitations and the difficulties arising from them fully confirmed by his brother workers. It is interesting for example, in view of the claim afterwards made, that the Saint was divinely endowed for his mission with the “gift of tongues” to note in these letters confirmation of Xavier’s own statement utterly disproving the existence of any such Divine gift, and detailing the difficulties which he encountered from his want of knowing various languages, and the hard labor he underwent in learning the elements of the Japanese tongue. With all this evidence, and much more available if necessary, to prove that Xavier never performed a miracle the church began building them up for him, unmindful of the fact that he lived in an age of literature, books and printed correspondence, and not in those remote times when it held supreme control of all learning and communication by letters; accordingly, the first of the Xavier miracles began to appear about ten years after his death. They multiplied from time to time beginning, it is reasonable to suppose, about the gossiping hearth and eagerly confirmed by the cloister, until they began to be mentioned in church literature. The first of which, a letter twenty years after his death by a Jesuit father entitled “On[Pg 39] religious affairs in the Indies” says nothing of Xavier’s miracles. The next, a publication called “History of India” thirty-six years after his death by another Jesuit father dwells lightly on the alleged miracles. The next, sixty years later, a “Life of Xavier” shows an increase of his miracles, and representing him as casting out devils, curing the sick, stilling the tempest, raising the dead, and performing miracles of all sorts. Since Xavier was made a Saint many other lives of him appeared, one of them one hundred and sixty years after his death, the best so far written and now esteemed a classic, in which the old miracles were enormously multiplied. According to his first biographer he saves one person from drowning by a miracle, in this one he saves, during his life time, three. In the first he raises three persons from the dead, in this one fourteen. In the first there is one miraculous supply of water, in this one three, and so on, until this date when the Xavier miracles are counted by hundreds. This case of the evolution of miracles is largely copied from a recent publication of President White of Cornell University. It is not only highly instructive as indicating the process by which these deceptions are evolved, but also tends to the pleasant and welcome conviction that many[Pg 40] of the earnest and self-sacrificing workers in the field of Christianity, to whom miracles are imputed were guiltless of them. But more than all it shows the way to a reasoning mind by which, through the present and coming rationalism, a pure and worshipful personality shall retain his hold upon the affections of men.

Those men of science and independent thought who went over to the Reformation, expecting encouragement and protection under it, were doomed to be disappointed. It was not a movement caused by the pressure of enlightenment. At that period, both Germany and England were far below Italy in their conditions of knowledge and learning. It was a rebellion caused by the oppression of evils, and a desire for change in the management of church matters only. Every one of the superstitions of the old church were transferred to the new one. The same, in fact a stricter literal adherence to the words of scripture in managing the affairs of life, and in deciding questions of science, were maintained, the same incessant watchfulness toward those men of learning who were threatening the “truths of scripture” in their scientific labors, and the same cruelties invoked for their suppression, and the extinction of heresy. No more intellectual freedom was permitted,[Pg 41] except upon minor doctrinal points of beliefs, and upon these there began those controversies which soon broke up the movement into factions or creeds. The intention of the new church was to do away with those rituals and ceremonies, which had been adopted from paganism as a compromise in the second and third centuries, and to bring their church back as far as possible, to that simplicity which characterized the first teachings of Christianity. But the leaders of the Reformation never attempted nor had they any desire to bring back that entire freedom of thought and expression which existed in the early days. No one with immunity would be allowed to deny the doctrine of the Holy Trinity or the truth of Immaculate Conception, as the old Greek philosophers were wont to do. Such vital questions it was torture and death to adversely consider, Servetus being an early victim to such temerity. There were questions enough however within the limits of safe discussion, to set agoing those unending controversies which distinguished Protestantism to this day. The newly acquired privilege of discussing sacred affairs among laymen as well as others, were indulged in to such an extent that debate between the sects, in defense of their several interpretations of scriptural texts, monopolized[Pg 42] in society its hours of intercourse and conversation. When their leaders were indulging in such discussion as the dialogue between Eve and the Serpent; whether the Serpent stood erect on his tail, or in its natural coil when it was addressing Eve; fixing the hour of this remarkable event; accounting for the manner in which Noah fed the animals in the ark; how fishes appeared before Adam to be named by him, and such troublesome problems, laymen were mostly engaged in the examination of those doctrinal points which were dividing the movement into sects. Questions that had been settled centuries before by authority in the old church were dragged forth to renewed discussion. Luther was describing his frequent interviews with the devil in his bed room. Demons and witches were poisoning the air, and bringing calamity and misfortune, against which there was but one safeguard and remedy, reading texts of scripture and prayer. But however the sects might differ in their understanding of the sacred language, upon a number of things they were all agreed; every text of scripture was to be taken literally; heresy could not be too severely punished; a curtailment of the pleasures of life increased the chances of heaven; the world was a “sink of iniquity” destined for[Pg 43] early destruction, and presided over by a God who never smiles, and troubled by a devil who never sleeps, the latter with millions of offspring, man pursuing demons, inflicting insanity, sickness and many other of the misfortunes of life.

In these beliefs the two churches were in entire accord and must equally answer for the miseries and cruelties they have inflicted upon humanity in enforcing them. Theories and doctrines so persistently advanced and upheld by both churches, and which have proved so disastrous to humanity do not properly belong, and should have no place in Christianity. They are not only without the authority of the Master, but are mostly in opposition to his teaching and example. The most harmful of them owe their origin to the fables and myths introduced into the sacred book second-hand from Egyptian and Oriental sources, centuries before the Christian era, and it is not surprising that legends due to the faculty of romance in the minds of some barbarous Assyrians or Pharos, far back in the cradles of humanity, when introduced as foundations for rules of life, and as explanations of the mysterious processes of nature along the whole line of human advancement should have been constantly rejected[Pg 44] and denied by the reasoning portion of mankind, and it is scarcely conceivable that now, within a few months of the twentieth century, they should be upheld by both churches as inspirations of the Deity. Not so surprising either when we consider that for seventeen centuries, the undeveloped minds of youth in all Christendom, have been moulded into the acceptance of beliefs, which, had they been presented without that gradual absorption in which reason takes no part would have been long ago rejected on account of their improbability. In no place is this better understood than among the churches, and as a consequence, they have been in perpetual contention with each other for the early education of youth.

The most inspiring and hopeful spectacle in all humanity is an assemblage, wrapt in the devotional exercises of Christianity, listening attentively to the eloquent ministrations of an earnest leader, who pleads the cause of virtue and charity as it is exhibited in the written life and character of the Model Man. The great central story never wearies in interest, and never grows old; a willing sacrifice and suffering for the benefit of mankind. Such never failing kindness, such lessons of brotherhood, such love for men, such tenderness for children, such consideration[Pg 45] beyond his time for women, and with such a pathetic and suffering end as to capture their emotional natures for all time. And above all bringing the tidings of a hope, that comes to men, as a boat of rescue comes to a storm-tossed ship slowly sinking into the depths; so cherished in Christian households as to become a worshiped member of them, to be defended as one of them, upheld if need be by force of arms and sacrifice of life. And the lesson of it all, and the hopefulness and inspiration of it all is, that wherever mankind dwells, be it in castles or cottages, amid the crowds of cities, or among quiet country fields, there are laurels everywhere among them all for him who will sacrifice himself that others may gain; esteem and veneration among them all for him, whose life is pure, and whose ways are ways of kindness and charity. Vice can never reign supreme but for a time amid such inherent affinity for goodness implanted in every human heart, and as the days of general consent and unobstructed knowledge enlighten and control the affairs of men, more and more certain, as time rolls on, will come protests and rebellions against the temporary triumph of evil.

Of that entrancing story which has captured civilization,[Pg 46] and has come to be a part of it, what is there in the Master that deserves such barbaric surroundings; such inconsequential details of obscure and barbarous lives; such vindictive retaliations and brutal conflicts, sacrilegiously involving the Deity as a promoter of them; wild fictions of early ages, inventions of the infancy of man, conflicting accounts of historical events, fragmentary parts by different persons at different periods; explanations in many branches of science, now known to be mistaken and absurd, and containing texts, that either openly sanction or have been twisted into service of the most stupendous outrages that humanity has suffered.

“Considering the asserted origin of these records—indirectly from God himself—we might justly expect that they would bear to be tried by any standard that man can apply, and vindicate their truth and excellence in the ordeal of human criticism. We ought therefore to look for universality, completeness, perfection. We might expect that they would present us with just views of the nature and position of this world in which we live, and that, whether dealing with the spiritual or material, they would put to shame the most celebrated productions of human genius, as the magnificent mechanism of the[Pg 47] heavens, and the beautiful forms of the earth are superior to the vain contrivances of man. We might expect that they would propound with authority, and definitely settle those all important problems, which have exercised the mental powers of the ablest men of Asia and Europe for so many centuries, and which are at the foundation of all faith and all philosophy; that they should distinctly tell us, in unmistakable language, what is God, what is the world, what is the soul, and whether man has any criterion of truth; that they should explain to us how evil can exist in a world, the Maker of which is omnipotent, and altogether good; that they should reveal to us in what the affairs of men are fixed by destiny, in what by free will; that they should teach us whence we came, what is the object of our continuing here, what is to become of us hereafter. And since a written word claiming a divine origin must necessarily accredit itself, even to those most reluctant to receive it, its internal evidences becoming stronger and not weaker, with the strictness of the examination to which they are submitted, it ought to deal with those things that may be demonstrated by the increasing knowledge and genius of many anticipating therein his conclusions. Such a work noble as may be its origin,[Pg 48] must not refuse, but court the test of natural philosophy, regarding it not as an antagonist but as its best support. As years pass on and human science becomes more exact and more comprehensive, its conclusions must be found in unison therewith. When occasion arises they should furnish us at least the foreshadowings of the great truths discovered by astronomy and geology, not offering for them the wild fictions of earlier ages. They should tell us how suns and worlds are distributed in infinite space, and how, in their succession they come forth in limitless time. They should say how far the dominion of God is carried out by law, and what is the point at which it is his pleasure to resort to his own arbitrary will. How grand would have been the description of the magnificent universe written by the omnipotent hand! Of man they should set forth his relations to other living beings, his place among them, his privileges and responsibilities. They should not leave him to grope his way through the vestiges of Greek philosophy, and to miss the truth at last, but they should teach him wherein true knowledge consists, anticipating the physical science, physical power, and physical well being of our own times, nay, even unfolding for our benefit things that we are still ignorant[Pg 49] of. The discussion of subjects, so many and so high, is not outside the scope of a work of such pretensions. Its manner of dealing with them is the only criterion it can offer of its authority to succeeding times.”[A]

How unlike this is our asserted Sacred Book, with its fables, its myths and legends, its deadly texts that have scourged mankind. By its pretension of divine authority, carrying forward into our civilization superstitions, that otherwise would have melted away under the light of knowledge; putting a limit to learning, obstructing it, and denouncing it, in many of its branches; paralyzing thought, and substituting in its stead a blind faith, instituted and cultivated by ecclesiasticism, to bring men under its control; holding up as an example of divine favor, the low moral standard of barbaric times; recounting murders, incests, adulteries and obscenities, that would have banished the book long since from the regions of refinement and civilization, but for its assumed origin, and which serve, by their easy and undenied access to young minds, as a stimulation to destructive pruriency; sanctioning human slavery, and encouraging bloodshed by battle; setting an example of extortionate tithes for the[Pg 50] support of ecclesiasticism; uttering the most heart-rending curses, as coming directly from the Almighty, for failure to comply with his assumed commands, and which have been made the example, authorizing the horrible cruelties inflicted upon mankind by the churches, literary models as they are of those anathemas, interdicts, and excommunications, by which the older church terrorized humanity for fifteen hundred years. “I will also do this unto you, I will even appoint over you terror, consumption, and the burning ague, that shall consume the eyes, and cause sorrow of heart, and ye shall sow your seed in vain; for your enemies shall eat it.” “I will also send wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your children, and destroy your cattle, and make you few in number, and your highways shall be desolate.” “For they went and served other gods, and worshiped them, gods whom they knew not, and whom he had not given unto them; and the anger of the Lord was kindled against this land to bring upon it all the curses that are written in this book.” “Do not I hate them O Lord that hate thee, yea I hate them with a perfect hate.” “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” “A man, also or a woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to[Pg 51] death.” “And ye shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword.” Solely on the authority of such deadly texts as these, and the book is full of them, the world has been overspread in blood. It was these that gave Spain a pretended sanction of the Lord to exterminate fifteen millions of people in Mexico and Peru, with a better and higher civilization than itself, and to rob them of their wealth and possessions. It was these, and such as these, that authorized and instigated the Inquisition, which from 1481 to 1808, put to torture and horrible death by burning, 340,000 human beings. It was these that induced the massacre of St. Bartholomew with its 30,000 victims of fire and sword; the English persecutions under Bloody Mary, in which three hundred fellow-creatures perished; the almost total annihilation of the Albigenesis in the south of France. This war was carried on with more ferocious cruelty than any ever recorded in history; the fanatical fury of the soldiers was stimulated by the exhortations of the clergy. At the storming of Baziers, when it was proposed to spare the Catholics, a monk exclaimed, “Kill all, God will recognize his own,” and the atrocious precept was but too well observed. The war terminated by the complete devastation[Pg 52] of the country, and the almost complete extermination of its inhabitants. Following along in the bloody path of these barbaric scriptural commands, we have to record the witch burnings of Europe and America, during the term of Christian supremacy, calculated in the hundreds of thousands; the Crusades, and purely religious wars since the time of Constantine, whose victims are beyond computation; and all this to no other purpose or end, but that the world should be forced into the belief of, what is known to be, the theological system of a low social development; this the terrible cost to humanity, for the adoption and systematic retention by the churches, of the ancient Jewish beliefs and modes of thought; this the infliction, that ecclesiasticism might prevail, using the sermon on the mount to capture the consciences of men, and scourging them with the mandates, curses and punishments of a Hebrew divinity, to bring them into line for its purposes. In taking these Jewish annals to its heart, making them a part of itself, as objects of example and worship, has not Christianity retarded the advance of mankind? Has it not, by them, obstructed knowledge, prevented a greater expansion of human sympathy, and prolonged the betterment of social conditions?

[Pg 53]In these days of enlightenment and higher thought, the vestiges are everywhere seen of our fifteen centuries of misdirection. Almost every Christian life bears the impress of these cruel Hebrew traditions. The commander of a battleship in the war with Spain, after his slaughter of numbers of the enemy, assembles his men to give “thanks to the Lord,” and the next moment cautions them not to cheer because “the poor fellows are dying,” illustrates, that mingling of Jewish superstition with the teaching and example of the Master, to be observed everywhere in our present civilization. The inherent religious impulses of mankind—natural religion—some of which, finding no more congenial quarters, is attracted to the churches, regard war with feelings of greater repulsion than does orthodox theology, indoctrinated in the belief of its divine sanction, and consequently, the success of the American arms, so plainly due to natural causes, was celebrated by the churches in the usual ancient Hebraic method by “thanks to the Lord.” The supreme intolerance of Christianity which has wrought such havoc with mankind, is plainly due to the suggestions of Hebrew scripture, and it is only the natural religion within the churches, and that large portion outside of[Pg 54] them, which is forcing Christianity into a purer worship, and destroying its superstitions. It demands for all things, holy as well as unholy, the right of critical examination, and it sees but little else in our Sacred Book worth preserving, outside the sermon on the mount, and its extensions. It is this natural religion of conscience, encouraging and encouraged by science and reason, which has wrested the control of civilization from ecclesiasticism. Its intellectual strength prevails at last over the intellectual strength of theology; but the unthinking of the multitude are many, and the battle commencing four centuries ago still lingers, theology backed by its weak numbers, its old weapons destroyed, and science by its strong men with searchlights.

But the searchlights of science can not disturb the heart of Christianity. Its doctrine of atonement, destroyed by the established truth of evolution; its account of the creation and the deluge, proved to be fables; its miracles discredited, and many of them demonstrated by science to be untrue, it still holds within itself, an element which is in harmony with the aspirations of mankind for the coming betterment on earth and hereafter. All these things that it has lost are but perverted[Pg 55] offrisings from its body, not a part of the body itself. “Love one another. Do unto others as you would that others shall do unto you,” are the golden words that have established it in the world as a living moving power. Of these its soul and life are composed, and these no arrow of science can reach. Its dogmas aside, every human being within the precincts of civilization is born a Christian, and but for its early perversion at the hands of a crafty priesthood, its intolerant and cruel career from forced and unworthy association, all men, learned as well as unlearned, would be working in its ranks.

It came into the world and entered society, making its way from below upward. Like all movements coming out of the lower levels, it was socialistic. Its originator, for he cannot be called its leader, was the first person who had ever appeared in the world as the instigator of a great reform movement benefitting the whole of mankind without some apparent or suspected motive, in denial of his absolute unselfishness, and the movement in its early stages, partaking and wholly composed of his inspiration, was a pure unselfish socialism. Its members were bound together by the closest brotherhood, loving and caring for each other by divine command; declared equal by a[Pg 56] mandate of Heaven, in an age when three-fourths of mankind were outcasts, uncared, neglected, and abused by a cruel oligarchy, slaves and dependents, among whom it was a misfortune and misery to have been born, and having a religion so purposeless and unpromising as to afford nothing but a momentary spectacular display. To these people the new religion was as congenial and welcome as the warm sunshine and verdure of summer after a long sojourn in the Arctic. Its doctrines touched society where it had most need of their humane precepts and uprising. For nearly a century no system of dogmas, no doctrine of atonement, no extensive church authority had been determined, and the whole stress of religious teaching was directed toward the worship of a moral ideal, and the cultivation of moral qualities. Its numbers, which had been looked upon until then, by the higher and governing class with either contemptuous silence, or occasional argumentative opposition, were become so increased that their political weight gave promise of a new field for the exercise of authority and power, and from thence on began that addition of intellectual forces which have so completely changed its character.

Every change instituted by its new leaders was with[Pg 57] the sole purpose of increasing its numbers and of augmenting its political weight. They began by making a compromise with paganism in adopting some of its rituals, pandering to the imaginations of the uncultivated multitude by spectacular display, inventing a system of church government with an executive head, adopting the Jewish annals for its organic laws and modes of thought, cultivating a belief in miracles and increasing them on every opportune occasion, until with the one end in view of overcoming the world as Cæsar did with his legions, more bloody than Cæsar, taking into their hands a movement full of humanity, instituted by men in the lower walks of life to soften their hard lines and give them new hopes, and to increase their sympathies and feelings of brotherhood, it became, and in many parts of the world remains to this day, under its attached dispensation of ecclesiastical dogma and control, a handmaid of kings and emperors in oppression, an upholder of deadly superstition, an intimidator of free thought and free learning, an unconcerned looker-on upon the miseries of life beyond its proselyting interest, careless of the whole world and its affairs, except so far as it can profit by its theory of exclusive salvation, and the mouth piece in cant phrases,[Pg 58] which have long since lost their force and meaning, of a lingering barbarism.

And yet the world was never so much in need of a pure Christianity. An expanded benevolence cherished and assisted as much by skepticism as the churches is one of the characteristics of modern society. Although the physically strong do not prey upon the physically weak as pitylessly as in the olden time, the financially strong are preying upon the financially weak with as little conscience, and the intellectually strong are preying upon the intellectually weak with as much cunning, as they were in barbaric times. Civilization has increased the two last mentioned evils. The straggling masses under a load of grinding wealth, in their better knowledge are no longer appeased by the promises of an adulterated and composite Christianity, whose chief business for centuries has been to set before them an awaiting paradise, in recompense for their earthly wrongs; but now, the multitude impressed with a knowledge belonging to these times, is proof against these allurements. The toiling millions who make easy places for the few, and increase their wealth, and who have carried out to a successful end the brilliant material advancement which surrounds us, is the world[Pg 59] proper, all the rest are merely dependants. Into this world and down among these quarters from whence it came Christianity must prepare itself to re-enter, and of this the shadow is already to be seen. It must discard its dogmas and superstitions, which it has even now consigned to partial obscurity and silence, and in place of them, take on the things of the world. It must go among the money changers of the temples, and into the halls and by-ways of legislation, giving battle everywhere with evil; for it is through these that the world is given or denied its betterment, and it must set science on its right hand, recognizing it as an attribute of the Deity. Christianity with this companion, its pure ideal recovered from its ecclesiastical mists, setting out on its new journey through the world, blazing the way for truth instead of suppressing it, conforming itself in all ways to the natural religion of mankind, would become to humanity what the sun is to the earth, comforting the souls of men by its hopes, enlarging their charities by its precepts, and warming into life many a germ of virtue and goodness, which else, would never have blossomed, to shed its moral fragrance on the earth.

[Pg 60]The foregoing was written to indicate that line of thought, whose convictions are briefly expressed, here and there, through the pages of this little book, now offered to the public in its third edition. It is always safer and pleasanter to deal with received theology in the spirit of reverence, usually found in literature; thus offending no one, and meeting the approval of a worthy and influential class; but, there are other reasons why an adverse criticism of theological methods and beliefs, are not so often publicly exploited as their importance to society deserves. In the first place experience has shown that errors of religious belief, fixed upon the mind in infancy and youth, are seldom removed by discussion. We are not yet arrived at that stage, when the love of truth so predominates in the minds of men, that they will sacrifice every prejudice, and reject all opposing influence to obtain it. Christianity has imposed an elaborate system of prejudices on every young mind within its jurisdiction and they have become entwined with all the most hallowed associations of childhood, appealing so strongly to the affections, that any expressed denial of their exact truth excites, in most cases, a feeling of resentment, and often stirs to petty persecution. A[Pg 61] large majority of the human race accept their opinions from authority, and all authority heretofore has encouraged beliefs, which appear so inseparably connected with the moral well being of society, and which hold in continued supremacy, institutions and modes of thought whose subversion it is alleged would be in many ways dangerous. Yet, the fact remains that it is mostly through its inroads upon these old beliefs that the world has arrived at its present stage of progress, and the opinion of orthodox theologians that they should be retained in their entirety, or of others that they should be abolished, cuts no figure; because, whether for good or evil in the opinions of men, Providence has ordained, that those only which represent the truth shall live, and knowing this of a certainty, it becomes of the greatest interest to discover what society is likely to lose or gain by that modification of religious beliefs, wherein only the truth shall remain. If we cannot foretell this future condition with certainty, it is largely foreshadowed by past and present experience. What the world has lost in the modification of religious beliefs, would be hard to find, what it has gained would take volumes to recount. In the most important of all human interests, liberty of person,[Pg 62] liberty of conscience, and liberty of speech, there has been, as yet, no adequate acknowledgement by mankind of the great services of the silent and avowed skepticism which brought about the consummation of these blessings. The writings of Moses, the recorded wisdom of Solomon, the encyclicals of popes, and the sermons of bishops and priests, both Protestant and Catholic, in their rising up of the lowly, in their encouragement of brotherhood, and in that exact and even justice to all men, so far as their practical services to humanity in these directions can be measured, sink into an empty insignificance, when compared with those organic declarations and laws, upon which this great republic was founded, and which were the outcome and product of a then recent enlightenment, due to the combined efforts of European skeptical writers, who by their genius of sarcasm and incisive argument, were disturbing the old theological modes of thought, and awaking the world to wide strides in rationalism. That these new American rules of political equality, beacons of liberty for men to follow and admire, obtained their inspiration and incentive from those new lights in literature, which, at that time, were stirring the world of thought, there can be no question. In these[Pg 63] famous American documents, were embodied the practical carrying out of principles, enunciated, and suggested by the European writers, and the most active of the men engaged in the noble work of forming the new government, are known to have been disciples of these leaders of anti-theologic thought. Our Declaration of Independence and Federal Constitution, stand, to-day, grand achievements of modern scientific thought, and conspicuous triumphs of rationalism, over old methods, foreshadowing in these, its great works, a better wisdom to govern the affairs of men, than all the ages guided by Hebrew tradition. Yet, in these documents will be seen an overflowing of natural religion, and the spirit of the Master. “Do unto others as ye would that others shall do unto you.”

If we have for more than fifteen centuries, yielded ourselves to doctrines, conveyed to us through all the highways of life, so assiduously, that neither infancy, youth, manhood or old age, have escaped their tireless importunities for acceptance; doctrines, which consign seven-eighths of humanity to eternal torture for no faults to most of them but a lack of opportunity, which under Providence has been denied, it is not unreasonable to conclude, with this experience of the mutability of human[Pg 64] understanding, that there are other beliefs fastened on our minds by ages of custom and mistaken thought, equally untenable, which may be as justly placed in our catalogue of errors. Where then shall we look for truth? Authority, as we have seen, is not an infallible guide. We shall never know how much the industrious promulgation of error is due to the selfish love of corporate power, how much to a pure benevolence. Neither are the brightest minds safe monitors in all things of thought. Aristotle defended slavery, Hobbes persecution, Johnson witchcraft, and Gladstone religious superstition; but, for all that, we shall never arrive at the extremity of despair; for a cultivation of the mind, the deductive use of positive knowledge, and the untrammeled exercise of reason, lead to truth, as directly, as the line of gravity points to the center of the earth, and only by these will its reign be established in the world.

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

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

Until this moment I had not approached a realization of the magnificence and prodigious wonders which the heavens afford to our observation. It was here also that I began for the first time to enjoy those beautiful and curious processes of nature, where the bursting germs, ascending gradually out of the soil, change their shapes, multiply their organs, and after a time crown themselves with brilliant and deliciously flavored flowers. In my new observation and intimacy with plant growth, with some previous knowledge of the science appertaining to it, and with a newly discovered delight in marking the changes[Pg 67] of position and the characters of the heavenly bodies by the greedy acquirement of all the information within my reach, I have come to forego, without regrets, the social pleasures of life.

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

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

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

Outside of this watered region, my homestead is interspersed with openings, where the rich loam only awaits the labor of cultivation to produce a wealth of grain or fruit. Every tree and shrub within my possession of[Pg 69] half a mile square, by long familiarity, seems to have become a part of myself. We are living and ageing together. I have watched in them the development of infancy, the slow and gradual approach to youth, and the turning point from maturity to old age. Among these old monarchs of the woods is here and there one tipped with the signs of superannuated decay. About their feet lay many of their withered, sapless limbs. They have lost their symmetry, and stand in scraggy outline. I see from year to year their gradual giving up of life, while beside them a new generation arises. There is a fellow feeling between us. My hair grows thin and white and my step is no longer firm and elastic. Like them my share of life is growing to a close, and yet I am an infant in years compared to many of them. I bow to them with a sentiment of reverence. They are my old men. The younger ones are my children—mine! What a grand thing it is to have these in my possession,—to hold in my own right such a choice piece of this blossoming earth, where all the mysterious forces are at work day and night for me alone!

I have come also to have an abiding interest in the creatures who by nature are inhabitants of this place.[Pg 70] Long ago have I laid aside my gun as an instrument of destruction, and it rests now on its pegs above my pillow only as a defense. By slow degrees I have gained a confidence with the native birds and animals which surround me, so that it is wonderful how many of them welcome me and enjoy my presence. There swarm to my poultry fold at feeding time myriads of quail and other birds, who with an amusing assurance, run about my feet and dispute for the crumbs that I scatter. The gray squirrels may be often seen scampering down from their hiding places in the trees to meet me, in expectation of their accustomed relish of wheat grains, which are stowed away for them in my pockets. I have three pet deer, quite tame and domesticated, whose intimate acquaintance was brought about in a singular way. Sitting on my doorstep one bright afternoon, I had listened for some time to the baying of hounds in the neighboring mountains, when presently there came bounding toward me, in terror, a trembling doe, and with her beaming eyes fixed upon me, seeming to invoke my pity, she literally threw herself into my arms. Taking in the situation at a glance, I tried to force her into my door before the dogs arrived. Too late for that, I could only arm myself with[Pg 71] a stick from my woodpile, when the whole yelping pack were upon us. It was a hard fight, and only after many bites and scratches from the disappointed hounds did I beat them off. I kept her in a secure outhouse for a few days, where two beautiful fawns were born to her; and ever since the mother and offspring have been my favorite pets, following me about like children. My acquaintance with other of the creatures about, though not so intimate, is still of such a confidential kind that they manifest no terror at my approach, and I am thus enabled to realize, by this free exhibition of them, how teeming with animal life is the earth in its most favored parts.

In my earlier years I have felt the cold blasts and torrid heats of other climes. I now rest myself in the happy satisfaction that I have found in this equable temperature and agreeable surroundings a place where one may look upon life as a blessing. I have acquired enough knowledge of some of the sciences to make an instrument or two of service to me, and I take especial interest in my telescope of three inches aperture, in the use of which I spend many an hour which otherwise might hang heavily on my hands. I have also a good microscope and field glass. Through the latter I bring to view the distant[Pg 72] hillsides and mountain tops, observing, frequently, groups of deer grazing tranquilly, and at times a family of panthers gamboling on the green carpet of an opening, or an eagle feeding her young upon the inaccessible brink of a precipice; and on rarer occasions, a bear complacently munching acorns under some prolific old oak a mile away. My microscope has revealed to me a world of wonders. I have discovered by it the limitable range of our senses, and how far below as well as above us the infinite extends. I grope about in the darkness of my understanding between an atom and the outside limit of the stars, every step toward either showing an increase of distance. These things I pursue, not with the spirit and application of a student, but rather for the entertainment which they furnish and the meditation they invoke. I have learned all that is known of the motions and eccentricities of heavenly bodies within my telescopic vision, and I never look upon them without rapture. What are all other shows to this? How many of these countless worlds are inhabited? What beings are upon them? How do they compare with us? Has it been given to them to comprehend eternity? Is knowledge with them intuitive or acquired? Thus do I lose myself in these[Pg 73] bewildering fancies.

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

My telescope is mounted in an apartment adjoining my cabin, with an elevated exposure, and has some extra contrivances for the convenience of adjustment, designed and constructed by myself. The instrument can be raised and lowered at pleasure, and is protected by a movable dome, which is easily laid aside by means of a couple of pullies. It is a good one, and for its size has remarkable power. I have been enabled to reach with it double stars of the sixth magnitude, frequently observing even Orion, with its beautiful double and multiple systems. I can easily discover with it the most distant planet Neptune, and by their progressive displacement, I have seen and recognized with it most of the asteroids. I can get with it a fine view of Jupiter, that magnificent planet fourteen[Pg 75] hundred times larger than our Earth, and have observed the black spots upon its surface, and the transit of its moons. The grand spectacle of Saturn and its rings is brought to my observation with remarkable clearness. I have so frequently looked into the dismal caverns and upon the towering mountains of our satellite, the Moon, that its marks and bounds are as familiar to me as the neighboring hills. But life is short, and amid all this illimitable sea of worlds, I have fixed my attention upon but one, for that special study which my few remaining years will permit. The heavenly body which most engages my attention is, excepting our satellite, the nearest one to us, our neighboring planet Mars.

I believe that body to be inhabited by beings in many respects like those of the earth. My conclusion is adduced from many known facts concerning it. Mars has an atmosphere like ours. Its density does not differ materially from the Earth. The heat it derives from the sun, possibly modified by atmospheric conditions, is quite likely the same as ours. It has zones of varying temperature, and seasons of summer and winter like the Earth. Its days are about the same length as ours. The ice and snow of its polar regions are plainly perceptible, and vary[Pg 76] in arrears exactly in accordance with its changing positions and distances from the sun. From which we may infer, without a doubt, that its atmosphere contains moisture of the same chemical composition as ours, and is condensed into rain and snow as with us.

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

My knowledge of astronomy not being profound, it has been the greatest pleasure and gratification to me to verify, by my own observations, the calculations and theories of the abler scientists. Appertaining to Mars, it is perhaps needless to say that there is a diversity of opinion among astronomers touching its physical conditions. The unusual red color of its reflected light, its bright and dark spots, and the variation which is observed in the forms overspreading its disc, are differently accounted for. It is among such questions as these, then, that my imagination[Pg 77] and ingenuity are free to exercise themselves, and the desire to settle some of these disputed points to my own satisfaction increases the eagerness of my observation.

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

It can well be imagined what a supremely interesting event this was to me. Days before its culmination did I watch its progress approaching nearer and nearer to the Earth. Each succeeding night exhibited to me its slowly magnifying proportions, and the greater distinctness of objects on its surface. Here was a world of beings, no doubt, with aims and enterprises like ours, rolling headlong through the heavens with a known velocity of fifty-four thousand miles an hour. This planet was now[Pg 78] approaching, hourly, its greatest possible proximity to the Earth. That I should lose no time in devouring, as I may say, this unusual spectacle, I had provided my telescope with a kind of clockwork contrivance, by which it exactly kept pace with Mars on its westward course. During these few days, I had forgotten everything else in my eagerness to feast my eyes on this rare show. The nights had been favorable to observation; and each evening after turning my instrument on the rapidly approaching planet, my interest became so transfixed and absorbed that all my ordinary physical wants were suppressed. I had lost in these few days of mental excitement all inclination for food and sleep. No one could be freer from superstition than I, yet my mind was uneasy under an unaccountable premonition. It gave some anxiety to think that on the very night of culmination, when my interest would be at its height, a change of weather might cut off the scene. But aside from this, in my somewhat feverish condition, I could not restrain a sense of some impending and momentous event in my personal affairs. Some strange influence seemed to be disturbing the usual tranquil and placid condition of my mind. I aroused myself from this, however, and became thoroughly myself[Pg 79] when the sun went down on the evening of my hope, and left an atmosphere that was as perfect as I could wish for. The sky was calm and clear, with just enough moisture in the air to increase its transparency. The ordinary evening sounds appeared stilled. Neither nighthawk nor owl seemed abroad, and the usual rustling of leaves and swaying of tree-tops was suppressed by a calm that struck me as strange. The day had been moderately warm, and the sun-distilled odors of the firs and pines, condensed by the coolness of twilight, were filling the air with an agreeable perfume, as though Nature was burning incense in the celebration of some ancient rite, during which every living and breathing thing about seemed bowed in silent reverence. I had never known until now what assurance there was in the natural sounds which nightly fell upon my ears. In my mountain home no feeling of loneliness ever came over me before. I felt an especial longing now for the sound of a human voice, for a companion upon whom I might discharge myself of the suggestions and beliefs appertaining to the subject of my investigation and study. My mind was filled with conclusions touching the physical condition of Mars, which each new observation tended to corroborate. I had my theory to give of[Pg 80] its rose-colored light. I had seen the clouds moving upon its surface, its polar snows, and its very atmosphere. I had no doubt whatever, now, that it was inhabited, and the anticipation of soon seeing it in its most favorable opposition with the Earth, was accompanied with a yearning that some human creature might share with me the rare spectacle.

As the twilight faded, I looked with my naked eyes toward the east, and my other world was showing its red light near the horizon like a rising sun in miniature. At midnight it would reach its culmination, when viewing it through the least possible thickness of our atmosphere in its vertical position, I would see it as no human being could see it again for over half a century. The oppressive silence and tranquility remained unbroken, and as I seated myself in my observatory and adjusted the telescope, I felt myself not quite in my accustomed vigor of health. The temperature had perceptibly raised, when it had usually fallen as the night advanced. The air was sultry. A sensation of qualmishness came over me. It came to my mind now that I had abused myself by a long neglect of sleep and regular meals. But no sooner had I brought my instrument to a focus than I was myself[Pg 81] again. Our beautiful neighbor was mounting the heavens, reflecting the sun’s light in a delicate crimson tint, and in size of outline beyond my expectation. I could plainly mark its rotation upon its axis by noting the slow movements of spots upon its disc, and their sudden disappearance over its limb. The hours seemed minutes to me. My fatigue and illness were forgotten. In my rapture of enjoyment the lingering wish increased that some fellow creature might share it with me. My telescope, in tracing the planet’s course had very nearly obtained a vertical position, when I was astonished to see the distant world suddenly disappear, and begin to vibrate back and forth over the aperture of my instrument. A moment’s reflection explained the matter. The Earth had shaken. So trifling, however, was the disturbance about me that it had not been felt. But I had lost my focus, and Mars was already on its backward journey. My grand holiday was over.

I immediately lowered the telescope and replaced its protecting dome. Gathering the few hasty notes I had prepared during my observation, for future reference and elaboration, I made my way to an apartment of my cabin which serves me for a library and bed chamber. A number[Pg 82] of shelves filled with books occupy one of its sides. My bed rests in a corner. An easy chair stands besides a table in the center, and under a window, proportionately large, fronting the south, is placed a cushioned lounge of some pretentions to comfort and luxury. I threw myself upon this, after laying away my papers, and the lower panes of my window being on a level with my head, I looked out into the night.

The moon in its last quarter was just peeping over a near mountain. Its light, partly obstructed by a network of tree-tops, was throwing figures of light and shade over the adjacent opening, so that the ground appeared to have spread upon it a colossal carpet, with fantastic decorations of ebony and silver. The air had grown a trifle cooler. A gentle breeze was stirring out of the West, and the silence, that had recently fallen so mysteriously upon me, was being followed now by a normal condition of unrest. As the moon rose higher, its fanciful shadows upon the ground dissolved, and the level plateau adjacent to my window was uniformly covered with a clear, bright light. Looking again, and quite sensibly impressed with the changed condition of things about me, I descried the figure of a man, not far from my[Pg 83] window; and, strange to say, I was neither alarmed nor startled at his presence. His face, of which I saw but little more than its profile, was turned upward looking at the moon, and its expression was unmistakably one of admiration and wonder. His long, and apparently well-cared-for hair and beard, reflected a golden sheen under the light above. His arms were folded, and his shape and attitude impressed me as being majestic.

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

This strange figure entered my cabin, and without introduction or sign of salutation seated himself in my easy chair as though he were a member of my household, an apparent rudeness which will be explained as I proceed. I had now the first opportunity to get a good survey of my visitor. He was a person of surpassing loveliness. His face was of that spiritual kind which is seldom seen off the canvas of some of our art masters, and it reflected a kindness of heart that is never realized except by the purest religious fancy. His form was so high and elaborate in its development, that I have only seen an approach to it in the best models. His singular attractiveness I can only compare to that affinity which comes of pure sexual love, captivating the beholder with a presence which drives away all thought but it. His complexion had that ruddy clearness and transparency indicative of perfect health. The hair of his head and beard,—both long and waving over shoulders and breast,—was of a hue that can be best described as the color of[Pg 85] the ripe filbert, with the fineness and lustre of unwoven silk. His hands, although scrupulously clean and finely shaped, bore the unmistakable signs of manual toil; and yet he had the superior air and manner of one whose mission it was to instruct. As he sat before me I felt like a child in the presence of a loved and loving parent. My impression of him was entirely correct, since his first word of utterance to me was a term of endearment.

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

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

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.”

“Ah, my brother,” said he, “you are very little advanced in a knowledge of the properties of intelligence. I am here by a process as yet unknown to you, and which may be best described in your language as reflection. I am here by reflection. That is to say, my natural body is at my home, on the planet, which you call Mars. Its spiritual counterpart is here. You have already an inkling of this strange faculty of transferring intelligence, in some of the phenomena on which is founded your spiritualistic creed. We, of the planet Mars, have been in the enjoyment of this discovery for centuries; and while you of the Earth are only able by your appliances of science to measure the size of our planet, compute its distance, estimate the shape and extent of its orbit, and indulge in some vague conjectures appertaining to its condition, we have been making a[Pg 87] close and interesting study of your social affairs, including, of course, your morals, politics and religion. You have only measured us as a planet. We have measured you as a people, and at least one of us, as you perceive, has mastered your language. Besides, our development is over ten thousand years ahead of yours. We can tell you more of your history than you know yourselves. At a period of yours described by your writers as the stone age, we had converted electricity into a motor and illuminating agent. I know your thoughts. You are surprised at what I have said, and wish me to tell you something of the planet upon which I reside.

“It will interest you to know that about the equatorial regions of Mars is found its highest civilization and densest settlement. Your torrid zone, and the corresponding section of our planet, are widely different. In ours, the climate is delightfully and evenly temperate. The extent of our surface, as you know, is very much less than yours, but the uniform quality of our land for cultivation, and the smaller water surface, compared with yours, supports a population whose numbers would astonish you. You may as well discharge your mind of the many conjectures which ascribe to each planet a quality[Pg 88] of matter and intelligence peculiar to itself. The whole universe is a unit, as your spectroscope, and the bodies from space that fall from time to time upon your surface, must have suggested to you. Variable states of density and temperature modify the forms and organs of animal and vegetable life, but matter is everywhere the same.

“Your chemists have just arrived at that point of knowledge where ours were forty centuries ago. Yours recognize over sixty forms of matter as simple and elementary, while ours have reduced them all to one,—the unit out of which all creation is formed. From this you may infer that our discovery of the compound nature of the metals enables us to make them at pleasure. This was a most fortunate and timely knowledge for us, since they are distributed very sparsely on our planet. It will no doubt be a strange thing to tell you, that we make gold at a less cost than iron, and that consequently it is the cheapest metal in use. You are about to ask me whether we make diamonds. We have made them for centuries. Our factories turn them out in masses for the ornamental parts of buildings, for which they are remarkably adapted on account of their brilliancy and indestructibility.”[Pg 89]

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

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

“But chemistry has done for us an immeasurably greater service. It has enabled us to provide for ourselves a food supply by the process of synthesis, which, in the extremity of crop shortage or failure, we can[Pg 90] resort to as a means of averting famine. You are aware, in your present stage of chemical knowledge, that all food products are composed of four simple ingredients, Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen and Nitrogen, found in abundant supply in the atmosphere and its natural mixture. These, with two or three earthy matters from the soil, are the constituents of all food. We forestall the slow assimilation of these by the organs of animals and plants, and by our chemical skill are enabled to combine them in proper proportion to form the proximate elements of all varieties of food, wanting in nothing but the taste and flavor of the natural supply, and on that account, only used when compelled by necessity.

“Our advance in synthetic chemistry has enabled us to imitate nature’s products in many of their organic forms. Besides those nitrogen compounds which we manufacture as life sustainers, we produce many substances which are equivalent to those you obtain exclusively from animal and vegetable life. We obtain in this way substitutes for leather, horn, ivory, and also fats and oils, albumen, gluten, starch, etc., etc.; most of these better and in more convenient forms for industrial and culinary uses than nature furnishes them. Our textile[Pg 91] fabrics are entirely derived from vegetable growth, and we give them a quality of slow or quick conduction of heat to accord with their purposes of summer or winter wear.

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

“It is a part of our religion to believe that every living creature is related, though distantly, to ourselves, and to those of them especially which are brought into our[Pg 92] service, we owe not only an obligation of kindness, but the care of attention in sickness and old age. We have accordingly established places of retirement for them. The kind relations existing for ages between us and all animal kind has modified their conduct to us in a way that would be striking to you, and would lead you to believe that they possess more intelligence than you have given them credit for. They come to us in their troubles, and submit in the most human way to medical treatment in their hospitals. You would be interested to note the friendly familiarity existing between us and our birds, who in brilliancy of plumage and song are far ahead of yours. They abound in our city parks, and one has only to open the window and whistle and they will come flying into the apartment, engaging themselves in a concert of song, perched about on the furniture, as a happy privilege. On any other occasion when one comes silent and alone we know what it portends, and it is tenderly carried to the bird hospital.”

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

“We have neither,” answered my visitor, “nor do we require them, for reasons easily explained. There are[Pg 93] two conditions of our planet which render the navigation of the air entirely safe and successful. They are the greater density of our atmosphere, and the diminished force of gravity compared with yours. Our air ships, as you would call them, are easily made to sustain and move large cargoes, by vacuum chambers and electric motors. Our inventors have long since surmounted the difficulties of adverse wind currents, and these vessels, of both public and private use, may be seen constantly moving about in all directions, and at all altitudes, with but few serious accidents.

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

“The relative density between water and an animal[Pg 94] body being such on our planet as to render the possibility of drowning by accident impossible, the fear and horror existing with you of involuntary immersion in the depths is entirely unknown. Our numerous lakes are therefore scenes of the most enjoyable, and what would be with you, reckless diversion. The upsetting of a boat with its load of excursionists, no matter where, results in merely a harmless frolic. The human body there sinks in the water only a little above its middle, and we have contrived, by web-like fastenings to the hands and feet, a means of propulsion so rapid as to nearly equal our speediest locomotion on the land. During our long summers, when the temperature of the water is agreeable, lake journeys, especially by the young, are among the most popular amusements. This, to you, strange condition of density is productive of a state of affairs partaking of the humorous, although leading to much domestic perplexity and annoyance. Our children take to the water in the summer season as naturally as your water fowl, and the loss of offspring upon the lakes, at that tender age which precludes their knowledge of the return direction, is the source of an immense amount of parental disturbance and worry. The straying of children upon the waters is[Pg 95] attended, however, with but little danger; since, if by any possibility they remain undiscovered during the night, they can, owing to the buoyancy of their bodies, sleep tranquilly and delightfully upon their backs, resting upon the cushions of the waters until rescued, as they are sure to be on the succeeding day, by one of the numerous airships constantly skimming the surface.

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

“Our cities, as you may imagine, are not located as yours are; but, since one place is as good as another for a distributing point, the rule has been to build them up where conditions are favorable, chiefly considered of which have been the health, comfort, and pleasure of their inhabitants. It would be doing us injustice to believe that, with our long period of development and progress, we have not achieved something far ahead of you in the sanitary and labor-saving appliances about us, especially in our metropolitan districts. In the first place, we use no[Pg 96] wood whatever in the construction of our buildings, having discovered long ago a tendency during its slow decay to absorb and retain the germs of disease and uncleanliness. Neither is its durability satisfactory; and its ready inflammability and lack of strength render it unfitted for our purposes. We use, instead, a metallic alloy unknown to you, which is susceptible of a high polish, as inoxidizable as gold, and with that character of penetrability which permits fastening with nails and shaping by tools, with even greater exactness than you work with wood.

“Our cities are built with uniformity. Their growth is invariably from the center outward. Their location is not a matter of chance, as yours generally is. No site is chosen without the thorough examination and approval of a sanitary commission, whose knowledge and sincerity we respect. Their foundation is made by the laying out of a large circular enclosure for the location of all public buildings, among which, in the center and more magnificent than all in its imposing loftiness and artistic finish, is our temple of worship. From this center radiate a set of wide and uniform thoroughfares, and these are crossed at regular intervals by circular ones, which begin at the[Pg 97] center and are repeated to the circumference as a series of concentric rings.”

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

“My brother,” said he, “you wish me to make a comparison between our society and yours. I can scarcely do so without the risk of giving you pain. With our greater advancement, we look back upon you as travelers over the same rough paths. Your journey is even a more difficult one than ours. In your present state, you appear to us as a world of discord, confusion, and strife. While we were long ago resolved into a single, homogeneous people, you are still divided into nations and countries, unridden yet of the barbarous pride of combat. We have but one religion. Yours are many and antagonistic.[Pg 98] I shall briefly make for you the comparison you wish, hoping that it may bring no sense of pain to you, for, to speak the truth, the cruelty, the intense individual selfishness, and the strange superstitions of the inhabitants of the Earth will pass away out of the ages to come.”

“Comparing your society with ours,” began my celestial visitor, “is like describing the difference between your present intellectual condition, and the state you were in during your cave-dwelling period. In review of your progress, we recognize two chief agencies at work which have regenerated us, viz.: the steady growth of human sympathy, and the fading out of old superstitions. In our advanced development, with the first of these, we have achieved a state of things in our society quite likely beyond your hopes. For instance, that feeling of regard and affinity for each other which is seldom found among you, except in the midst of family ties, we hold one for another among all. If I were to select from among you a domestic circle, the most refined and correct, its disturbance and anxiety from the sorrows and misfortunes of one of its members would scarcely represent the feeling in a body of our people for the misfortunes of any. We are shocked at your cruel indifference to the feelings of one another. When we see one of you sinking by the[Pg 100] wayside, by means of one of the evils which you naturally inherit; or overwhelmed, perhaps, with the penalties of a misadventure, and looked upon by his fellows regardless of his smitten condition, we can find no parallel to it among ourselves, except in the traditions that have come to us out of our remote ages.

“Your national antagonisms, your cruel wars, and the immense sums wasted by you in maintaining millions of your people, trained for the sole purpose of slaughtering their fellows, we regard as the one most disgraceful relic of your former supremely barbarous state. While, by the process of social development, all your most cruel brutalisms have disappeared within the range of your higher civilization, the remaining one, of sending masses of your people into deadly combat for the settlement of political and religious questions, is retained for reasons which are not wholly in concurrence with our sense of right. In the first place, no element of justice enters into the arbitration of a question, whose settlement rests entirely upon the physical strength of the contestants; and all international settlements by this means are but temporary, when the winning party has not coincidentally a prevailing sense of justice in its favor. All your wars and battles,[Pg 101] without a result on the side of equity and truth, have been fought in vain. Your bloody misjudgments of one century often are, and are ever like to be, reviewed and resubmitted to the same sanguinary and delusive arbitration in a succeeding one. In these brutal encounters you stain your hands and garments in the blood of your fellow men without remorse, because the wild instincts of your nature have never been suppressed in that particular direction. Those of you in authority, both civil and religious, have this to answer for. For the sake of a concurrence in the selfish schemes of your rulers, they have instituted a series of glittering rewards for the most skillful of their wholesale murderers and you have in that way been educated to honor most, those who could deal the heaviest blows.

“We cannot take a survey of the motives which have instituted nearly all these sanguinary and dreadful encounters among you, without a sense of horror. Your civilization has witnessed only a single one of these terrible conflicts, wherein a purely humane question was involved. Your religions have not only been used to sanction this dire carnage, but have even themselves been participants in the slaughter of millions of your people.[Pg 102] You are not yet freed from the savagery of your remote fathers, who, ages ago, entered those fierce contests between tribe and tribe, with strong personal interests in the outcome. The loss or gain of a battle meant to them either a share of spoils or probable torture and death. Yet you have kept alive this inclination to collective combat, when individual loss or gain seldom cuts any figure in the incentive which impels you to battle. And even beyond these physical encounters, your struggles of life appear, from our point of view, to be divided between defense and attack, like the beasts of prey which still linger on your borders.

“Your society presents to us the spectacle of a continuous skirmish among yourselves, your whole mass struggling to mount the summit of their individual hopes and ambitions, wounding and bruising each other with cruel unconcern. Our experience has taught us that this unhappy social condition is entirely due to the crude and imperfect stage of your development. Each of your new epochs brings some approach towards a better terrestrial life; but you have not fairly considered nor endeavored to surmount the chief obstacle to your progress in that direction. You have not yet learned to deal justly with[Pg 103] one another. By your system of unequal advantages, one class is permitted, and even encouraged, to prey upon another one. One or more of you will enter upon a scheme of personal gain without the slightest concern for its effect upon others. You have permitted, from time to time, the passage of laws having a direct and unmistakable tendency to throw your wealth into the hands of a few, and as a consequence, to increase the hardships of the many. Your generation exults over all preceding ones in its progress in science and knowledge; but even that has not served to soften or remove the asperities of your lives, for the reason that most of the available material of this new advance has been prostituted to serve the interests of the few.

“The growth of your social betterment rests almost entirely upon the total of your disciplined thought, yet by your methods, correct thinking is the rarest thing among you. Your social field, instead of being evenly stirred and seeded, is cultivated in spots and patches. Even your knowledge has been converted into a weapon of tyranny and oppression, and it is oftener pursued in the love of self than for the benefit of kind. Out of the helplessness of your neglected and unfavored masses, come the greater[Pg 104] number of your individual accumulations of wealth.

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

“The love of our kind forms the corner stone of our single religion, just as the like is made the foundation upon which your many creeds are built. But while your religious teachings have brought no great fruits, ours[Pg 105] have yielded a harvest of glorious consequences. If it will interest you, I shall tell you why.”

At the dawn of, and during the first stages of their civilization, the people of the Earth found themselves surrounded with natural forces which, in their scant knowledge of the laws of the universe, were ascribed to the arbitrary and willful caprices of a great hidden being. They found a mysterious power above them, and everywhere an overwhelming evidence of design. The unthinkable and unknown character of the infinite and eternal was not then acknowledged; and the failure of any to explain this unseen intelligence and power incited their imaginations to do for them what the closest investigation had failed to accomplish. As may have been expected, they clothed their imaginary deity with the qualities, propensities, and passions of themselves. Any violent convulsion of nature was taken by them as a certain sign of his anger; while the normal state of rest, and the undisturbed processes of animal and vegetable development and growth were looked upon as concessions in their special favor. From a belief in the supervision[Pg 107] of the deity over every single one of the innumerable processes of nature, they naturally imbibed the idea that they each were objects of his personal watchfulness and attention, and as a consequence, that all the fortunes and vicissitudes of their lives were dependent upon his moods. It may very well be supposed that with this conception of the deity, the chief purpose of life would be to find favor with Him, to discover his wishes, and to learn his commands; since, in accordance with this simple and crude idea, every one’s success and comfort in life depended upon his conciliation. With these views of nature and the universe, they came in due time to observe that within themselves were feelings and sentiments entirely apart from the ordinary epicurean impulses which governed them. We may imagine in those cruel times the warrior standing over his prostrate victim with upraised club, stayed in the act of killing him by a sentiment of pity, and enjoying afterward as a result of his compassion a pleasure which was as strange and unaccountable to him as his first sight of a comet. There was no apparent motive whatever for his humane act. On the contrary, it had deprived him of spoil, and reduced the honor of his victory. And so, all the inclinations to[Pg 108] virtue which brought no material and immediate rewards were regarded as mysterious and inexplicable as the great hidden power, and by a very natural sequence of reasoning, a part of it.

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

There is nothing more unhappy to tell of you than the consequences of this grave error. Your assumed possession of the commands and wishes of the Deity in the[Pg 109] shape of a revelation, has proved more a misfortune than a blessing to you. In the first place, it has lowered your conception of the Deity below ours. It has turned your religion into a contest. It has rendered possible the establishment of certain ecclesiastical bodies among you, who, while assuming entire control of the morals of your people, are beset in their internal parts with all the vices which come from cruelty, cupidity, and love of power. Besides, your formulated conditions of punishments and rewards have degraded religion from a cultivation of virtue for itself, and the immediate good it brings, to a selfish scramble, each one struggling to shoulder his way into the midst of celestial delights.

It can be easily understood why your religion, with all its crudities and superstitions, has taken so firm a hold upon your society. You are constituted as we are, with the same inherent elements of progress. The steady increase of your affinity for the virtues, and those who practice them, is a marked quality of your career, and as they all lead, in one way or another, towards that union of interests which constitutes the perfect social state, you are thereby impelled by a natural and providential desire to build them up. So that, as a matter of fact, there[Pg 110] being an inherent love of goodness ingrafted in your very natures, your religious creeds have attracted you to them, and held you in fetters, under the false theory that the good within you is but a contribution from their exclusive and abundant sources of supply.

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

When at a certain stage of your civilization, about two thousand years ago, you had attained a point of intellectual culture among the few, the fruits of which have been reflected upon you to this day, in some of the grandest recorded achievements of human thought, and while the masses were left to take their undirected way among the empty superstitions which conceded nothing to the growing human sympathy, a seer appeared among you, who served rather as a suggestion than as an immediate success. After the lapse of sufficient time from his death to allow full scope for romance, there was built up out of his memory by your seers a picture of all the virtues[Pg 111] which had been growing within your hearts, so entirely adapted to the new age that all the pent-up forces of human sympathy within its scope and influence surrendered to it. But what might have been a triumph and a boon to you in the new impetus to a better and broader humanity, unfortunately held concealed within itself the subtle machinery of your seers and prophets, and was guarded by their evil eyes, so that with this tremendous lever to move you in the direction of their purposes, instead of advancing you, they have turned your civilization back upon itself more than a thousand years. No historical fact is more capable of demonstration than this. None has been more persistently and ingeniously denied, and no natural sequence ever followed more directly a moving cause. From a free and independent exercise of the intellectual activities in the direction of science, art, philosophy, and all knowledge pertaining to yourselves, the Earth upon which you dwell, and the universe, so far as your vision extends, the whole current of your thoughts was turned by the new doctrines toward a paradise, compared with which all things of the Earth were trifles. When you were brought by the fascination of these promises, and the unflagging efforts an interested[Pg 112] body of ecclesiastics, to a general belief in these doctrines, you sank into an intellectual torpor, from which you only emerged by a protest of your reason not yet wholly suppressed.

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

From the beginning of your history you have accepted one object of worship after another, each an ideal impersonation of the goodness which was inseparately a part of yourselves, and which was given to you for the wise purpose of making your society possible, and to perfect it; just as the parental instinct was bestowed upon you to protect your infants. All these subjects of adoration have perfectly reflected your intellectual condition, and have been discarded, one after another, as they outlived their uses; until you are just now beginning to realize, that for all these many centuries you have been virtually[Pg 113] worshipping yourselves. Your present ideal will, in time, share the fate of those which preceded it, and in the absence of a prevailing superstition, your seers luckily cannot build up for you another one. Your long period devoted to the pursuit of phantoms is rapidly passing away, and your new age of rationalism is approaching. You have no just conception of the evils it will remove, and the glories it has in store for you.

The difference between your present and future religion can be easily outlined. Your present religion, from a long course of erroneous teaching, is intense, aggressive and hysterical. It feeds and fattens itself upon the miseries of life, which it does not undertake to remove, except in a meretricious way for effect. Your religion of the future will be tranquil and voluntary, and its chief mission will be to permanently reduce the evils and misfortunes of life to a minimum. The impulses of your present religion are entirely apart from the moral sense, a significant fact easily substantiated by a glance over the every-day life of your people. Except in their observance of religious forms, your devout are not distinguished from your profane. The practical virtues are no greater among believers than among unbelievers. Your coming[Pg 114] religion will be founded upon the moral sense, and will be inseparable from it. It will support no doctrine of a ready and convenient atonement for bad acts, as the present one does. It will teach you that there can be no complete reparation of an evil deed except in its undoing, and that such an act, once performed, spreads its dire consequences in accordance with its enormity over a part or the whole career of the doer. It will not undertake to unburden the conscience of a crime, nor to give assurance of celestial bliss to the most heinous of offenders, upon the trifling and fallacious compliance with religious forms.

Your peculiar religious beliefs have so shaped and moulded your character that we have observed, what you are not likely to see of yourselves, certain traits or inclinations which are not promising as factors in your ultimate regeneration. Your churches, with the shrewd purpose of rendering their services invaluable, have given you to believe that your natural tendencies are evil, and that the unavoidable misfortunes and sorrows of your lives are but penalties for your many misdeeds. The general acceptance of this belief has lowered your pride, and given you, to some extent, that character of dejection and submissiveness which is entirely subversive to the attainment[Pg 115] of any destiny to be reached by yourselves.

There is a quality of mind which we acknowledge as, above all others, the one which has assisted us to our present very desirable social condition, and that is the feeling to resist the perpetration of a mean or bad act, on account of the sense of degradation it inflicts upon the feelings of the doer. This motive of conscience, so plainly the offspring of self-esteem, and growing out of a cultivation of the mind alone, without any regard whatever to creed influences or teachings, is totally ignored, either as a promoter of virtue or preventive of vice, by all the religions that have existed upon your planet. The reason for this is easily explained. Under the knowledge that a cultivation of the mind and conscience, without creed influence, was capable of doing for you a better service in the advancement of your morals than your churches have performed, it has been made a part of their doctrine to belittle and abuse your purely intellectual faculties, under the unwarranted and unreasonable imputation that the free exercise of your reason was an assumption beyond your right. And all this, too, in face of the overwhelming evidence about you, that the most corroding and dangerous of your vices germinate and[Pg 116] seed themselves only in places where the mind lies in fallow.

There comes to us from our remote ages, through tradition and history, an account of some superstitious beliefs, but it has been our good fortune never to have had them built up into a system so overbearing and harmful as yours has been. It cannot be said of us that we ever denounced honest intellectual efforts in any direction, or that we ever regarded the expression of opinions founded on the dictates of reason as crimes, and your punishment of such, with all its atrocious and heart-rending details, serves as a lesson for the whole universe of worlds never to put trust in the smooth tongues and insinuating ways of the seers, for the spirit of fairness and truth is not in them. Your restrictions and punishments of the free expression of thought, inaugurated by the corporate organization of your present religion, and maintained with more or less rigor to the present, has left its blighting effects upon your society by encouraging some of the meanest of your vices. The assumption that one of you shall not have the right to convey to another his opposing convictions upon any religious question is so outrageously unjust, that it never could have been carried[Pg 117] out in any other way than by the general belief that it was in accordance with the wishes and purposes of the Almighty. Such a denial of the natural right of mankind could only be enforced when a majority of the multitude became converts to the doctrines which favored it. The leaders of religious persecution, during the centuries of church control, were merely carrying out the wishes of this majority. The spirit of intolerance, once abroad, became the parent of those habits of concealed thought, moral cowardice and hypocricy, which even to the present, so rule among you, that sincerity in expressing religious belief is not universal. In deference to the lingering opinion among a large body of your people that a dissension from old modes of religious thought is displeasing to the Almighty, and dangerous to society, many of you are constantly led to veil their thoughts on these questions, in dread of the social consequences which would follow their frank avowal. Many of skeptical tendencies are thus induced to hide their convictions in fear of disturbing their safe and comfortable positions in society. By silently working the penalty of withholding their political and social support, your great illogical multitude backed by their vigilant church organizations[Pg 118] still maintain a terrorism over you. Consequently, your writers are guarded in their lines, your public speakers in their language, your teachers in their instruction, and your statesmen in their legislation, that each shall not get beyond the soundings of orthodox religious belief, while with the knowledge of your time, most of them are conscious in their inner thoughts that they are trimming to avoid truth, in the full knowledge, that to this day upon the earth, the surest human preferment is only for those who support error in this direction.

The most lamentable instances to be found among you of this evasion are your chief institutions of learning. Of all places these should be the first to lead in truth, as they are best provided in all the equipments to find it; yet under the prevailing terrorism their predicament is embarrassing and pitiful. While holding class instructions in evolution, geology, astronomy and kindred sciences, they hesitate to openly deny those scriptural fallacies to which their knowledge is opposed, and the farcical spectacle is daily enacted among many of them of a ceremonious reverence for these fallacies, and at all times an artful evasion of any denial of their truth, every one of which it is their especial business to disprove in the course of[Pg 119] instruction.

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

The people of Mars are impressed with the belief that the governments of the Earth have made no great advance in the benefits and usefulness of their legislation during the last two thousand years. We recognize amongst you, only as movements of progress, some provision, particularly in your own country, for the free education of the people, a few sanitary attentions, and a slight awakening to the interests of your laboring class, as about all worth mentioning. It is true that your governments, after originating themselves with only the simplest duties, have come in time, as your civilization advanced, to take on increased and complicated services. But in the multiplication of their duties, there is unfortunately little to be seen but an extension, in various directions, of their first purposes; which may be briefly stated as a defence of assault from without, and a protection of person and property within. We have come to regard the obligations of government as something beyond these, and this difference of view affords a marked instance of[Pg 121] our development and advance.

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

Your efforts for the suppression of vice and crime, since the first stages of your history, are futile to a degree that[Pg 122] must be appalling to you, and the cause of your failure is due to conditions plainly apparent to us. These conditions are that your governments, for all these centuries, have taken no official cognizance of virtue, and have failed to see that there existed in their patronage of good deeds that tangible reward which would place all ambition for honor and prominence among them on uncompromising terms with evil. You have only attempted to suppress crime by punishment, while the powerful stimulus to virtue which your governments afford of precept and example have been neglected. Although, in your undeveloped state of greed and selfishness, you find it unsafe to trust your material interests in the hands of irresponsible bodies which you call monopolies, yet you bestow the whole keeping and guidance of your morals upon societies and organizations of you fellow men, who are even less responsible to authority than they. Under this state of things, how can you expect anything better than your present chaotic state of religion, and the loose, unguided, unrewarded, and wholly spontaneous morality of your people.

Our government, in the furtherance of its religious duties, has for centuries made a special recognition of the[Pg 123] virtues, and particularly those which bestow good upon others, and it is only by the practice of such that public honors are achieved. One of the happiest consequences of this has been, to elevate only the most exemplary of our people to the head of public affairs, and from this comes a confidence and regard between our representatives and people, which you can scarcely appreciate after your experience. Goodness therefore, as we understand it, is the only path to honor, and the necessary high character of all holders of public trust reflects a distinction greater that those of any other positions in life. This in turn, as you may readily perceive, induces a spirit of emulation to reach such elevated places, beyond all considerations of emolument.

As a part of our moral system, we hold the education of our people to be an indispensable and necessary adjunct. In that we go a great deal further than what appear to us your narrow and mercenary views. In a representative government like your own, you have been constrained to adopt a system of free education, for the purpose of securing the safety and permanence of your institutions; and with no other motive even, it is surprising that you will be divided in opinion touching the extent[Pg 124] to which learning may be profitably imparted for this end alone; because, to us it seems that when you have conveyed to your youth no more than the elementary branches of learning, you have provided but little else than a convenience to them in the business affairs of life. It is only when the higher branches are acquired that the government receives an equivalent for its outlay, in the well-disciplined and safe citizen returned to it.

We have, however, motives beyond all this in the education of our masses, and chief among them is the purpose to furnish knowledge to the minds of all, out of which good may be naturally evolved; and thus you will see at once how learning has become the chief part of our religion. You are slow to acknowledge the great value of your purely secular education as a moral agent, because of its disturbance recently with your cherished traditions; but this reason, great as it is, is supplemented with another one, which fully accounts for the earnest opposition of your ecclesiastics. So long as the learning of your schools was mixed up with creed influence and teachings, it was virtually a part of the church, and in harmony with it, but on a separation of the two, they became enemies by a well known social law; your churches with their avowed[Pg 125] purpose of improving your morals, and your secular schools, while in the performance of their duties, occupying the same competing field.

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

We have leaders and heroes as you have, but not one who has not gained his honors by some act in furtherance[Pg 126] of the material, intellectual, or moral progress of his race. The memories of your greatest men are more honored by us than by yourselves. Men go down to their graves yearly among you whose achievements are the admiration and talk of our whole people. He of you who discovered the theory of planetary motion, he who found the law of gravitation, and he also who ascertained the principle of evolution in organic life, are scarcely known upon the Earth, except among the cultivated few; while the whole world of Mars is impressed with the services they have bestowed, and discuss the great and everlasting effects of their work.

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

Our religious devotion is essentially buoyant, even joyous.[Pg 127] The sorrows of life which are not the direct and indirect results of indiscretions, and violations of natural laws, we regard as an inheritance and not a punishment, and we endeavor in all conceivable ways to lighten them and make them easier to bear. For those in sickness among us, the hand of love and sympathy is never absent; and among the firm and undisturbed convictions of philosophic thought, death is only a regret and never a terror. Your creeds administer to the final end in all ways to a point of agony; they have ingeniously devised a theory of horrors for it, out of which has been made to come their chief sustenance and support. The path of life which they declare as the only one leading into the promised eternity of bliss, is the tortuous and difficult footway winding like a maze among the shadows of their churches.

Although attentively guided throughout in this prescribed journey of life by your ecclesiastical teachers, and your entrance and exit made difficult without their help, yet, by the very nature of their doctrines, they could only bestow upon you at the last scene of all a torturing doubt. We have promoted the serenity of death by removing as far as possible its sorrow. With us, the individual in his last moments is not overcome with any[Pg 128] sympathetic dread of that approaching suffering for the wants of life among dependents, which so often couples the agony of separation with an overwhelming sense of despair, as your society is constituted. The end comes placidly to us, in the belief that as we came from the Deity, so in the last we go back to Him; that the life beyond must be a higher life, because the moral sense grows constantly within us; and that the region ahead of us must be a free, open, and hospitable one, with no agonizing barriers separating families and friends, because, in the growth of our tenderness and attachment to each other, we can safely predict the evolution of a better and happier state.

Prayer, in the sense that it is understood and performed by you, we regard as mere superstition. It is an outcome of your lowest stages of mental evolution. It is the spirit of that willing self-abasement and fear, which prostrates the savage before his idol, soliciting aid in his works of carnage, or immunity from some violated law of nature, or safety from some convulsion of the air, land or sea. Carried forward into your civilization, it has become no less unreasonable. For thousands of years you have been daily calling on the Deity for favors, not one of[Pg 129] which has been granted, except seemingly by a coincidence. The most conclusive tests have failed to convince the devout among you of the fallacy of prayer, because, as an institution of your churches, under their theory of atonement, it furnishes a ready escape to the conscience; and for the reason also that it affords to the imagination, in its striking and novel situations of converse with the author of worlds, a semblance of that pleasure which the lowly feel for concessions from the great.

It is quite in keeping with your conceptions of the Deity that you should grovel and debase yourselves before Him. The whole tenor of your religious thought has been made to take on this color of self-degradation, which, while serving to throw you more completely into the hands of your theological superiors, is not warranted by any possible relations with the being you address. You represent upon the Earth, as we do on our planet, the very highest form of life. We both are the triumphant outcome of a process established by the great Author infinite ages ago. On us only, among all beings, has He bestowed the wonderful attributes of thought and reason, which make us a part of Himself. We are the only inheritors, by his own beneficial act, of the power to[Pg 130] discover and enjoy his beautiful methods of work, and those magical transformations of mind and matter which convert, out of the dead ashes of the past, the blooming present, with its assuring hope of a fruition to come.

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

Outside of the fact that your continuous mendicancy has accomplished nothing for you, you have an abundance of negative evidence to hint that your incessant supplication, instead of bringing to you favors from the[Pg 131] Deity, has shadowed upon you in an unmistakable manner the signs of his displeasure. For as he has raised you gradually out of the lower forms, and enlarged your capacities, until in the last he has taken you into his confidence so far as to teach you the methods of his work, and to deliver up to you the hitherto pent-up forces for your convenience and use, yet in the progress of these concessions it is to be noted as a significant fact, that your prayers have served rather to obstruct than to promote them. Indeed, as there is nothing so conclusively the evidence of divine presence and help as material and intellectual progress, it will be difficult to show, in the record of terrestrial things, that the supremacy of prayer has not invariably been followed by a temporary withdrawal of this divine assistance and support.

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

The change, in the form of matter, is not more instructive than the steady modification of intelligence, which, from its primitive ignorance, superstition, and brutality, has gradually been raised step by step to its present higher[Pg 133] grade of thought and action. We recognize here a fact most important and significant to us. While the divine energy is steadily at work, converting lower forms of matter into higher ones, we are given no part in the proceeding. It goes on without our assistance, and we have no power to diminish or accelerate its steady onward course. It is widely different with intelligence. That is given into our hands, with all its grand possibilities. In that, we have evidence of the divine confidence to promote its advancement in view of the blessings it holds in store. Taking this view, we have for centuries cultivated the mind in all directions of knowledge and feeling, as the chief part of our religion. The motion of the spheres is not more certainly the work of this great being, than are these progressive changes in mind and matter.

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

But while working in harmony with the Deity, and assisting in his purposes, we have constantly in view, as an incentive to action, the consummation or goal to which[Pg 134] all these changes tend. We believe the outcome to be a spiritual life with all things knowable, and a state of perfection and happiness beyond our present conception. Happiness, then, being a religious aspiration, we promote it in all ways to the innocent and reasonable inclinations of our present state.

Our religion is consequently more jubilant than solemn. We have no torments in store in it, nor long drawn agonies and mortifications of the flesh. Its only business with death is to smooth its pillow, and to reduce its attendant sorrows to the minimum. To the misfortunes of the present our religion extends its hand of sympathy and material help. To what purpose should it introduce and dwell upon the miseries and sorrows of the past? We let the dead ages rest. We can find nothing in their ashes to compare with the living. The present is better than the past, as the future will be better in exact measure with the new truths discovered, and the old fallacies cast aside. You rake among the emanations of an early and imperfect development for monitors and guides, and do honor to them for the mysteries they invoke. You place the withered hand of the mummy into the warm palm of the living, and your ceremony of introduction[Pg 135] is a prayer that the living body may never depart from the dead form.

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

The orthodox among you are suspicious of the inroads of science, unaware of the fact that in due time it will fix upon your belief the conviction of a future spiritual existence without the shadow of a doubt. When you will have arrived at that point, your ways of morality and progress will be so much increased, that you will regard your previous advancement as trifling. To some, your science appears to lend encouragement to materialistic beliefs. This is only your half knowledge. For some time to come your discoveries will tend in that direction of thought, but all this will be superseded with a firm conviction of the existence of the Deity, and your steady approach to Him. The period of danger to you will arrive when you will have made the discovery, as we have centuries ago, of what may be described in your[Pg 136] language as the universal diffusion of intelligence amongst all matter, inorganic as well as organic.

It may be a startling proposition to announce to you that the quality which gives you the power of abstract thought is possessed in a lower degree by, for instance, the stones which lie beneath your feet; yet such is the case, for we have demonstrated beyond a doubt that the chemical forces and affinities are nothing else but low, restricted, and insensible forms of intelligent action. The fact is best shown by the building up of organic bodies in their multiplication of cells. Each cell arranges itself in place, and makes way to its successor, under an inherited impulse of action from which it is unable to depart. What are known among you as natural forces, are merely forms of unconscious and restricted intelligences, which have only the power to act in limited directions. They both build up matter and tear it down for us. They shape the crystal with mathematical uniformity, and mark out the form of the plant with unerring precision. The character of the agency bears no proportion to the magnitude of its work. These low, unconscious forms of intelligence, which inspire the plant cell to build up its fanciful elevations, and the infinitesimal atom to seek after[Pg 137] and embrace its affinity, are precisely the same as that which directs the sea of worlds upon their swift and unvarying paths. And yet with all their exactitude and infinity of scope, they are as much below that independent, self-conscious intelligence which guides our thoughts and actions, as the protoplasm is beneath the most highly organized and perfect form.

Your theology has degraded you with the belief that you are mendicants, enjoying the favors of life as mere concessions from an all-powerful and exacting master; and that your position in the cosmos bears a close relation to the insignificance of your material bodies, and your feeble power in the stupendous energies which surround you. Your science will elevate you with the knowledge that you are peers in the great universe, and that your stature has no comparative measure for its proportions in the height and breadth of your material world. It will teach you that by slow degrees, and through millions of ages, you have become that elimination of the spiritual out of the vast number of divided intelligences which have built up and governed your natural world; that you are the harvest and the fruition of the innumerable lower[Pg 138] intelligences, which were sown broadcast in the beginning to do their potent work.

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

You have but recently discovered a process of nature, by whose slow changes, animal life has been altered, and its species modified and improved. You know that the atmosphere, which encircled your Earth at the beginning,[Pg 139] was not of a composition to support its present highly organized respiring life, and that consequently, behind the ages the only living and moving things upon your planet were the scant air-consuming creatures, who inhabited the water. Among the dark and cavernous depths of your oceans, and the slimy ooze of your rivers and lakes, were located the cradles, where nature began moulding the present graceful living and moving forms which now roam over your solid surface. The Creator’s delicate laboratory, for the beginning of animal life, was placed among the equable temperatures, and soft walls of water below the variable and desiccating atmosphere, which everywhere surmounted it. Yourselves, as well as all other living and breathing creatures, had your foundations of life laid in the waters of the earth, a fact, of whose significant reminder is, that nature has continuously provided for the protective presence of water in your embryo womb growth.

In your germal life, the universe seemed to you nothing but a vast and unlimited expanse of water. The submerged earth upon which you lay and rested, with its murky surroundings, and the expanse of sunless liquid clouds above you, was the only world and universe you[Pg 140] knew. By what authority of reason or science then do you conclude, that the stage of evolution, which brought you out into the glorious sunshine and free air, and adapted you with the form and comprehension you possess, is the end? From the cold, sluggish, and unconscious, to the warm, alert, and intellectual, is no greater a step of progress, than the coming one, which will make clear to your understanding the mysteries of life and nature, so unknowable and unthinkable in your present immaturity. Out of your next stage of spiritual supremacy, you will look back upon the present, with all its conditions, so condemned by the contrast of better things attained, that it will be but little more to you than is now the repulsive uncanny, and incommunicable habitat of your beginning.

The confidential relations between our government and people have given it a parental character. It has consequently been the study of our legislation for ages past to assuage, as far as possible, those natural evils which creep in as the result of unrestricted social forces. Regarding the whole mass of our inhabitants as a family, the government could never feel that its duty was faithfully performed, while a number of its people were, relating to the ordinary enjoyments of life, in a state of suppression from any removable cause. You began your civilization, just as we began ours, by the crystallization of society into two classes. Those who at first, by thrift, acquisitiveness, or strong arms, became possessed of sufficient property to escape the necessity of daily toil for the sustenance of life; and those who, by the absence of these qualities or from other causes, were obliged from day to day to exercise their muscular and nervous energies for the benefit of those who found it profitable to use and pay for them. This condition of society is a natural and just[Pg 142] one, and there is nothing whatever in it to prevent the largest possible amount of happiness to all. But before many ages we discovered that the interests of the property class and the labor class were not equally equipped to maintain a fair and equitable relation with each other. We found that the interests of labor in the many bore no comparison in its political weight with the great power of wealth in the few; and foreseeing that subjugation in time, of one by the other, which your experience has shown, we made wide provision against it.

We acknowledge as the foundation of all material progress that the honest accumulation of wealth should be the privilege of all; and that the rights of property should be protected, and the enjoyment of it secured to everyone. Yet with these principles firmly and successfully carried out in our government, we have for many centuries, considered it necessary to support and sustain the interests of the labor class by special legislative attention. You have pursued a directly opposite course. From the beginning of your history the privilege of wealth to hold labor in subjection, and to use it as an instrument of accumulation, with about the same regard for its well being as the horse in the collar or the ox[Pg 143] under its yoke, has prevailed, without the enactment of any sincere and effective law to assist and sustain it in its unequal contest. On the contrary, your statute books are filled with oppressive laws against the labor class; and while in your most civilized districts these unjust enactments are nearly obsolete, there yet remains an average over your planet of such legal and social suppressions of the class whose strong arm supports you, as to be reckoned by us as the most unhappy and discreditable feature of your social state.

It matters not how your economists may examine and discuss the relations of labor with its co-operative interests, so long as they offer no proposals of relief to it in the unjust burthen it bears of the hardships of life. Your common view that labor must be unavoidably submitted to the law of supply and demand, and that, consequently, eighty per cent of your people are to be helplessly left to take their chances of distress and suffering at each unfavorable turn of the labor market, is peculiar to the planet upon which you live, and is one of the most mistaken and unwise conclusions among you. This heartless notion of yours is plainly the inheritance of your early cruel ages. With such a state of things you can[Pg 144] never have a very high state of civilization. With so many of you constantly under the vicissitude of such adverse changes of condition, there can be no steady progress of the whole, and but little encouragement to thrift; a lack of ambition must prevail in all the higher purposes of life, and a general surrender to improvidence and the vices which follow. For that class which has created your wealth, and is constantly renewing it, and which constitutes so large a portion of your whole population, you can show nothing of legislative effort in its favor except indirectly, through some of the purposes to smooth the way and increase the profits of capital. The opportunities of your comparatively small capitalistic class to use for its purposes, in an entirely heartless way, the larger body of wealth producers, have been made easy by natural conditions which would have been removed or corrected long ago, under a more humane and unselfish administration of your affairs, and if your governments had not been exclusively in the hands of the smaller class mentioned. We know of nothing more heartless and cruel of the governing classes of the Earth, than their careless submission of its wage-earners to the unrestricted influence of competition for employment,[Pg 145] under the compromising condition of a necessity for bread.

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

We have long since considered these unequal relations and tendencies, and have proceeded to remedy them.[Pg 146] Our legislation in behalf of the labor classes is the happiest and most satisfactory of any that we have. Without it our present civilization would be impossible. Before describing our methods, let me direct your attention to the immediate and indirect causes which bear down upon the labor classes of your planet.

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

Almost every influence now at work in the progress of[Pg 147] your society tends to throw money into the hands of your land holders, not fairly earned by themselves. While the products of labor are cheapening from day to day, partly due to increased skill, and the appliance of machinery in their manufacture, and partly, also, by the competition of labor, owing to increase of population, yet even by these very operations the value of landed property goes up.

You already estimate rent as a considerable element of cost in the production of your food materials, and you are gradually approaching a period, when by the growth of population the cost of food will be very much increased by rent charges. You have all along submitted to this monopoly of land from causes plainly apparent. In the early days of your history all private ownership of land was acquired and held by force, and it may be safely asserted that no title at present exists in any of your older countries that is not founded on violent conquest, and that has not been maintained by an organized and armed authority, whose existence depends upon retaining the system of ownership in vogue. It is plain to see that when the demand of justice to all shall be the basis of political action, and especially when the cost of your[Pg 148] food supply shall become greatly increased by the charges of rent, your present system will not be quietly endured.

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

Your own country in the newness of its human possession, by the lavish distribution of its territory into private hands, has alleviated the burdens of labor elsewhere, as well as within itself. It has effected this in two ways: first by withdrawing from the surplus population of densely inhabited districts abroad, and second by supplying[Pg 149] from its rich agricultural lands a cheaper food supply to the older countries of the Earth than they were able to furnish from their own soils. But the most unreasonable among you cannot fail to perceive the speedy limit to these operations in the interests of labor, which after all must be considered as merely effecting a truce between that conflict of the laboring and landless many and the land-holding few which your people will surely witness in time. We manage these things very differently on Mars.

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

Our agricultural districts are divided into small farms, even in size, with graded rents in accordance with the richness of their soils, and other conditions. Sub-letting is not allowed, and a chief purpose in making these allotments is, that the family residing upon each farm will be able to perform all the labor required. This is in accordance with a principle which our government carries out in all possible ways, to bring labor and capital into partnership. The cultivator of the soil goes on with his[Pg 151] improvements, in the assurance that they are as secure to him as though his title were perpetual; for in the event of a change of tenancy, which is exceedingly rare, a fair value is returned to him for all the fixed property which is the product of his labor. It is provided that there shall be no competition in the occupancy, and as the rent is but a nominal sum, he feels no insecurity in his possession. Agricultural rents are graded annually, and are payable shortly after harvest. They may be either higher or lower than those of the preceding year, depending entirely on profits.

Landlordism, as it exists with you, is unknown amongst us. The rapacity which under your unjust system is admitted to an ownership in which no competition can possibly exist, and at the same time is permitted to avail itself of that unlimited competition which the pressure of public necessity induces, has neither foothold nor abiding place upon our planet. Under our system, you will perceive that any increase of the profits of land is met by the tenant with an increase of rent, and all those natural causes which advance the value of landed property add to the government income, and in that way are shared by all. Our government derives its sole support from rent,[Pg 152] and no other tax or exaction is known. With a percentage of the profits from the use of the land, which is never burdensome to the tenant, it has been enabled, and has found it to its interest, to carry out agricultural and municipal improvements and enterprises which individual ownership would never undertake. It has drained our marshes, and reclaimed our desert lands in the most efficient manner, without the necessity of creating, as with you, an exacting monopoly, which would claim of industry its lion’s share of profits from the work.

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

As I have already hinted to you, a cultivation of the beautiful in art and nature is a part of our religion, and we indulge in the gratification of esthetic inclinations as[Pg 153] one of the greatest charms of life. Our government erects no buildings except public ones, and in their construction and fittings is manifested that universal love of the grand and beautiful which everywhere prevails. Your imagination is scarcely able to conceive the magnificence of our temples of worship, and the charming perspectives of our streets and highways. Yet even our industrious attention to all this pleasing effect for the eye is held to be a matter of secondary importance, when compared with the health-giving measures and regulations which prevail.

From the ground rents alone of every municipality, free and abundant water, light and heat are supplied to every inhabitant; and from the same source of income a complete insurance is furnished against individual loss from accidents, and all our dead are disposed of without cost to relatives and friends. We place no dead bodies in the earth as you do, considering such a practice not only barbarous, but dangerous to the health of the living. On the contrary, we extinguish them in a manner which you cannot follow from a lack of the required advance in chemical science. Ever since our discovery of the elementary unit we have had the power to reduce all[Pg 154] matter into its original state, and it serves us well, that with our chemical appliances and due solemnity not a vestige of the dead is left to be preserved, except their memories.

For the purpose of exhibiting to you the marked difference of effect on labor and industry between private and government ownership of land, let us trace the institution and progress of one of your cities in comparison with one of ours. These combinations of individual enterprise are to be found upon your planet in all stages of growth, and may be most conveniently observed by you in this vicinity in their earlier periods of development. They are instituted mostly with you in a fortuitous way, a few individual interests forming the nucleus around which capital and labor are attracted, under the outlook of increased population and trade, to supply and create the various products of industry demanded. The whole land surface of your new city, including its prospective limits, is immediately appropriated at a trifling cost, by a single one or a smaller number of owners, under laws conveniently designed for their purposes. From this time forward the most extraordinary exactions from industry begin. Every stroke of the hammer and[Pg 155] revolution of the fly wheel adds to the value of these possessions, until in a short time there is no limit to the price or rent of them, but the ability of industry to stand the tax.

During the earlier stage of your city’s growth, conditions exist which disappear later. Labor is specially favored. The demand for it is as great as the supply, if not greater, and its savings enable it to get a share, by small investments, in the steady advance of land values. Your new city, supposing it to be a metropolis, is invested with all the elements of prosperity. Capital comes to it abundantly from abroad, induced by the opportunities of profitable investment, and labor is equally attracted by high pay. Population increases, together with all the enterprises of industry, and your land, conveniently divided into small lots, changes hands from one purchaser to another, each realizing a satisfactory and handsome profit. The monopolizing influences of land ownership are not generally felt, because of the large and unoccupied area of surface, and the facility to all in the acquirement of titles. Labor enjoys an era of remarkable prosperity outside as well as within the limits of your city. Your government has donated to it millions of[Pg 156] acres of fertile agricultural lands, whose surface, for the most part, requires no great outlay of capital to fit it for the uses of husbandry; and altogether, the general contentment and thrift indicate that all material interests are equally equipped and uniformly successful in the struggle of life. Labor goes cheerfully to its daily toil, and returns to its abundant board with a hope and ambition it has seldom known before. All human purposes appear in a flourishing state, except, it may incidentally be observed, that your religion at this period droops, without its usual attention and support.

You are now, we shall suppose, at the end of the second decade in the history of your city, and many changes are observable, due to the progress of your society and civilization. Your metropolis may contain now about one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants. The market value of its land surface, about three miles square, has increased, from the government price at which it was purchased by the single or half dozen purchasers, from about seven thousand to three hundred and fifty millions of dollars, and the whole value of the products of industry upon it may be reasonably estimated at a like sum. With the privileges and partnership[Pg 157] which labor has enjoyed in this great increase of values, it is so far quiet and satisfied; but unfortunately the inevitable outcome is not so promising to it. The evil effects of your private ownership become more and more apparent as your city advances, and when, under the promptings of human greed and selfishness, your landlords have fairly commenced their raid upon the industries of the city. They now exact from you a tax in the form of land rent alone which consumes yearly the twentieth part of all the products of industry upon their possessions. This enormous tax is exacted without the return of any service whatever except the privilege of a dwelling place.

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

This gift of nature, however, is not the only one diverted from its equitable distribution, and permitted to[Pg 158] become the material of unrighteous exaction. The process of the water, heat, and light supply, so manifestly among the duties of your government to institute and superintend, is given, like your land, to the management and control of private individuals; thus converting these indispensable elements of life and comfort into money getters for wealth, and subtracting to an unnecessary degree from the profits of industry and the savings of labor.

We shall now suppose that your city has arrived at the termination of its fourth decade. Its population has increased two-fold, and its land value has quadrupled; but it is noticeable that your products of industry have not kept pace in their value with this enormous appreciation, and your ground rents alone now consume every ten years the whole cost of all buildings and their contents. In other words, every vestige of the accumulated labor of your city goes into the pockets of its landlords every ten years. Change now becomes apparent in social life. Competition has now reduced the wages of labor, and it has very nearly lost its ability to share in some of the minor operations of capital. The struggles of increasing numbers, precisely the same influence[Pg 159] which has depressed wages, have advanced land. Labor has lost much of its old buoyancy and hopefulness. While raiment and food, the products of its own industry, have fallen in price, with a tendency to make up for its reduced income, every other one of its living expenses is greatly increased. Allowing it its proper place with matrimonial ambitions and hopes, the remarkable proportion of one fourth of its hard-earned wages is demanded of it in land rent alone, for a dwelling spot in the midst of a region which nothing else but its own energies have produced from a wilderness. Every single one of the bounties of nature, except the air and sunshine, are inaccessible without the charges of an intercepting medium. The heat, and light-giving materials of the earth, together with water, the most useful and abundant of all, are served out to it burdened with all the costs and profits levied by an organized and irresponsible few.

The capital engaged in your industries adjusts itself to all these burdens, and is quiet under them, because it can readily reimburse itself by transferring all expenses and costs to prices. There is no such escape for labor, which not only pays these monopoly exactions directly, but as a consumer is obliged by an indirect method to foot a large[Pg 160] share of these bills for capital. Capital remains contented under these extraordinary demands for another reason. All monopoly enterprises, and especially that one of land, furnish the safest and most profitable reservoirs of investment for its surplus earnings, and when it does not already participate it looks forward to a partnership in their profits.

You can readily understand, then, why the toilers of your city, at this period of its history, should show signs of sinking back into that dependent condition which characterizes them elsewhere upon your planet. A few among them, with great fortitude of restraint and large acquisitiveness, manage to lay by some of their earnings, but the margin between income and expense is so narrow that such a practice is not general. So that from the disabling vicissitudes of life, and a carelessness of habit induced by lack of ambition, comes that distressful state of existence, unknown on our planet, but common enough on yours, where a human being, with abundant stores of food and raiment surrounding him, suffers for enough of them to supply his moderate wants. Poverty, which before had been only exceptional and sporadic, assumes now the proportions of a numerous class among you, and[Pg 161] out of which, by a lack of the opportunities of knowledge, crime as naturally appears as weeds in a neglected husbandry.

Another and significant change now becomes apparent in your social state. During the first stages of your city’s existence, there had been no money invested except as capital. Every dollar laid out in that way had been shared by labor. Any increase in the volume of capital brings a corresponding prosperity to those who toil; but the accumulations from the profits of capital have not generally been added to it, and in many cases the capital itself has been led away into the many profitable monopoly enterprises which abound. These now flourish as they never did before. Increase of population and trade has stimulated the various industries to increased supplies, but the prices of all commodities instead of being raised are lowered. The free and open competition within the precincts of capital and labor has effected this; not greatly to the detriment of either, because the producer in one department of industry is a consumer in many of the others, and capital has increased its volume of business to make up for smaller profits. But you have within the borders of your city those money-making contrivances[Pg 162] peculiar to your planet, wherein the natural effect of competition is entirely reversed, and where the universal law of supply and demand is completely abrogated. The worst and most disastrous of these is your system of land ownership.

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

We shall say now that your city contains a half million of inhabitants. Its surface is not extended in proportion with its increase in population, the cost of space inducing[Pg 163] a greater crowding of houses and people. Your labor products, and the land upon which they rest, have been so constantly receding from each other in values, that now, with all the forced economy of space, your piles of goods, merchandise, and houses, if sold at their market value, would not furnish more than a quarter enough of money to purchase the ground beneath them. This enormous increase in the value of your city land is mostly the result of the opportunities its owners enjoy to prey upon the industries, and at this stage the following very remarkable conditions may be observed: While the city’s capital, properly so called, is about three hundred millions of dollars, and the number of its workers in industrial pursuits about one hundred thousand, the aggregate earnings of both labor and capital combined have one quarter of the whole swept away by the demands of your landlords, estimating ground rent alone. And this enormous exaction, remember, is imposed without rendering any service in return. None of your economists will deny that this large drain does not come directly from the industries of your people, and its exhausting effects are daily seen in the gradually hardening lines in the lives of those who toil. In an early period, twenty persons in[Pg 164] every hundred of your workers owned a portion of your city’s surface. Now only four per cent are land owners, and within a few decades not more than five in a thousand will dwell or pursue their avocations without the virtual consent of some superintending ground owner, upon whose mercy in abstaining from ejectment or extortion they will remain in constant uncertainty.

The ownership of your city lots will now have gone almost exclusively into the hands of your leisure class; and the vast sums of money drawn monthly for rent, instead of being, as formerly, partly returned as capital, to assist labor in the various industrial enterprises is now either dissipated in luxury, expended in new possessions, or invested in some of the many monopoly undertakings of the day. The effects of this unjust burden are daily apparent. It reduces the possible savings of labor and the accumulations of industry to such a minimum that success in these is the exception rather than the rule. It is mostly because of this monopoly of land that life among your masses is a continuous and uninterrupted struggle; and to this more than all else is due that unequal distribution of wealth which affords only the few that cultivation and knowledge which elevates them,[Pg 165] and that dooms the many to an unceasing wear of nerve and muscle to sustain themselves.

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

The forces at work within your society have now, we we will say, brought up your population and general conditions to the standard of those which may be found in the older portions of the Earth. Your poverty is more intense and widespread, with its corresponding increase in crime, while your wealth has become more munificent and ostentatious. Impelled by the necessities of life and a brave emulation, all your industries will be found in the highest strain of action. The accumulated products of labor and its multiplied activity have given to you a semblance[Pg 166] of prosperity and success. But while in the course of your progress you have created new necessities and wants, you have made no just provision by which they could be, as near as possible, equally shared; and as a consequence the apparent as well as the silent and concealed miseries of human life were never greater.

There is to be observed now a marked increase in the spread and influence of your religion. As the hope of success in life becomes lessened, and as the heartaches and distresses increase by your uneven struggles, the suffering and disappointed masses turn naturally to another existence for what has been denied them in this; and it can be said of all your religious theories, that their contrivances to make you suffer uncomplainingly the outrages of authority are the best that could have been devised. The few among you enjoying the bounties of life, surrounded by that want and privation whose voices they cannot escape, and whose strong arms they cannot fail to observe, turn instinctively to your religious doctrines with a sense of safety and protection. The few favored ones, looking over the vast multitude of their less fortunate brothers, are conscious that the superabundance they enjoy has been doubtfully acquired, and they are quick to[Pg 167] embrace that convenient justification, which ascribes the greater ills and burdens of the many to a preconceived and unalterable arrangement of the divine will.

Before bringing into comparison one of our cities it will be necessary to explain to you some of the processes which have rendered our present civilization possible. You already have a hint, from what I have said, of the very striking difference between the society of Mars and that of the Earth, in their handling of labor interests. While with your careless and indifferent treatment, labor remains degraded, we have raised it to a point of honor. We have arrived at our methods of its treatment by that philosophical induction which has interpreted to us the many reliable and unerring decrees of the divine will. Nature, upon whom we depend for all we know of the supreme wishes, has furnished indubitable signs that physical diligence is a saving and wholesome quality, inseparable from intelligence, in its extended sense as we know it, upon which the very existence of all material things rests. But even the activities of nature are not more indispensable to the firmness of the Earth, than individual mental and physical energy is to the well-being and progress of[Pg 169] your society. Since one of these energies is as useful as the other in the economy of the world, we can conceive no reason why you should allow one of them to dominate the other; nor how you can justify yourselves in bestowing upon one all the honors and emoluments, while to the other you pursue a course denying opportunities, and in all ways bringing upon it an inferior social scale.

We met these natural tendencies ages ago, by a determination to equalize, as far as possible, the burdens of life among all classes, and to this end we have chiefly directed our efforts to sustain the interests of those who, by a struggle for the necessities of life, are obliged to toil. Some very remarkable results have followed. We have achieved that degree of justice where the skillful artisan, by virtue of his manual cunning alone, can acquire a certain elevation in our society, and whose occupation is not subordinated by any other on our planet. We have a very numerous class amongst us, known by the best interpretation of your language as officers of industry, who secure truer and more lasting honor than your military heroes. Our admiration of them arises from the fact that they assist to build up and restore the waste of those industrial products which sustain our lives. The official[Pg 170] grades among these compare somewhat with your military system. Their insignia of office is permanently worn on their dress, and to achieve distinction in this line is the hope of all, since without having worn the badge of office in some of these grades, social or political distinction is difficult. By methods, long ago in vogue, we have united our intellectual and manual training so that there should be no social separation between them. But while equal distinction awaits the skillful pursuit of either path, the highest honors are achieved by those who excel in both. Consequently our youth, encouraged by their parents and teachers, become emulous of the qualities of physical endurance attached to labor, and serve their terms among the toilers with a will that nothing but a high ambition could create. This greater respect and consideration for physical industry than yours would have been impossible, were it not that we have avoided the various causes which either suppress or degrade it. In the first place, we have decreed that it shall receive a fair share of its earnings. Chiefly in furtherance of this, we have ordained that no individual holder of land shall rob it by taking to himself that appreciation in values which its diligence produces. To this end also we have provided that wealth and capital[Pg 171] shall not bear down upon it in the various monopoly exactions common with you. But a measure of justice, scarcely less effectual than these to elevate and sustain labor, is our governmental system of fixing its rates of wages.

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

[Pg 172]With us the pursuit of manual labor is attended with better conditions. By securing to industry its rightful rewards, it has been adopted by choice instead of compulsion, as the best way to gain independence. Having no road to wealth, except through the sterling qualities of industry and prudence, industry and probity are the indispensable qualities which lead to the upper stratum of our society. Thus, you will perceive, the natural laws of progression and development are encouraged to work out their beneficial results in the life of every individual.

Since, from the cradle to the grave, all are surrounded with the living rewards of goodness, we have no need of sermons. We know no gilded vice. It bears no fruits with us but destruction. You preach against it and reward it in the same breath. You denounce it in empty words, and at the next moment honor it with a bow. You sanction the wholesale injury which your system inflicts upon each one, hoping in the scramble to pocket the losses of others. The most desirable condition of life with you is that in which the attainment of wealth shall furnish personal gratification, the accomplishment of which, in most cases, is through a line of public and private wrongs. The better conditions of life with us are[Pg 173] acquired in the fertilization of innumerable schemes for the common welfare.

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

A marked indication of our advanced social development is, that we utterly refuse the performance of any act which is an injury, even in a remote degree, to our fellows; while in the intense selfishness of your present state, you[Pg 174] are constantly sacrificing each other’s interests. With sentiments like these prevailing, it is easy for you to understand why we have no class among us perpetually under less favored conditions than another class, and why, acting under the great lesson of nature which has sent us all into life upon an equality, we have ordained in all possible ways that the journey thereafter shall be fair and equal to all.

It is not possible for you to thoroughly understand or appreciate what I am to lay before you, in a description of our society in municipal life, without a further knowledge of some of our methods. One of the most important of these, is the perfection which we have brought to our science of statistics, and the indispensable service it is made to perform in our political economy. This branch of science is pursued by us as the most serviceable and practical of all. We learn from it in a positive way many truths which your economists fail to reach, and we have discovered by it many errors which have existed as the result of sophistical reasoning. We use it as a rule and square to measure the speculations of philosophy, as well as an every-day guide in the practical affairs of life. Its better value for us lies in the fact that our conclusions[Pg 175] from it are adduced out of the records of centuries. It is to social science what analysis is to chemistry. It is only by a systematic and orderly record of the occurrences of nature, and the changes and events of society, that we have arrived at the many profound truths so deeply concerning our lives. By it we have discovered how astonishingly nature holds, concealed from common eyes, so many of her processes, coquetting with us, as it were, in withholding her greatest favors without prolonged and incessant interrogation. But although our store of scientific knowledge has been increased by these statistical labors, we hold them of no less importance in managing the practical affairs of life.

Our bureau of statistics is without question the most valuable department of our government. It has been brought to its perfected condition by centuries of practice and improvement, and upon it rests, in a great measure, the prosperity and happiness of our people. By it, mainly, we are enabled to save our population from the distresses of over-production, and the chance occurrences of uneven labor demand. Your experience has shown you that in times of depression the causes were plainly apparent. We have merely arranged to anticipate these causes, to[Pg 176] sound the general alarm, and to forestall them. Outside of the defects of your currency, and your speculation, which are most prolific sources of industrial disaster, comes that blind over-production, entirely undirected by any reliable or authoritative knowledge of the existing capacity to consume. You are having at times a large amount of misdirected labor in the form of products slow of sale; and for the time being a supply, so much in excess of demand, does not return a full equivalent for the labor invested. These frequent errors of production depress wages, and are altogether more calamitous to labor than to capital; because labor is variously skilled, and cannot readily transplant itself from one department of production to another, and is obliged, under the conditions, either to accept reduced wages or to remain idle. Capital does not suffer as labor does in these constantly occurring over-supplies. On the other hand, it finds its opportunity, either by waiting from a low to a high market for its returns, or by changing its field of investment. In these frequent partial or complete suspensions in the production of over-supplied commodities, labor is therefore the chief sufferer.

We have nearly a complete remedy for this in our[Pg 177] system of statistics. Our planet in all its habitable parts is divided into districts, in each of which is kept an accurate and systematic record of all available labor, as well as an account of its different classes, with the separate capacity of each for production. In connection therewith is also kept an account of all products turned out. The information furnished in this way determines the surplus or deficiency of all commodities produced.

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

[Pg 178]You are not to expect me to go into detail in these matters; but as it may seem impracticable to you, how any arbitrary rate of wages may be made to rule fairly among so many different people, I will give you some account of our system of grading labor, by which this difficulty is overcome. We have formed out of the three qualities of SKILL, STRENGTH and ACTIVITY a basis upon which to reckon the value of all individual labor. Each of these is divided into three grades, and the highest valued workman is he who stands first in all. The first grade in skill is considered equal to both the first and second grades of strength and activity in estimating wages; and there is no first grade of skill allowed, except in those industrial operations requiring much manual training.

The workman begins his career usually in the lowest grades of each, although at times strength and activity are raised one grade at the beginning. The wages of all labor are uniformly established by the government, in accordance with the standing of the individual and the certificate he holds, according him his status under this method of estimating his ability. From middle life to old age changes usually occur in his grade, and his[Pg 179] apportionment of wages is consequently modified; but so long as he retains his skill it goes far to keep up the allotment of fair wages against the loss of strength and activity.

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

Outside of the handicraft of the workmen, we have established a scale for estimating a just rate of pay for all employees in professional and business pursuits. This[Pg 180] arrangement is based upon the qualities of TALENT, INTELLIGENCE and CAPABILITY. Each one of these is divided into three grades, and whoever stands first in all of them is entitled, of course, to the highest pay for his services. Usually, however, these high qualifications secure a reward beyond the scale. This system of rewarding labor has a far-reaching effect in our political economy, and is a complete uniformity with the general tendency of our efforts to promote steady values. The most important element of cost in all commodities offered for sale is labor, and that can never be cheapened. We have not a single product of industry in our list which represents in its labor cost, as many of yours do, the underpain, gaunt and hopeless toil of some fellow creature struggling for the scanty means to live.

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

A considerate custom has fixed our period of daily labor at six hours; one-half of which, under the equitable[Pg 181] adjustment of our wage rates, affords sufficient pay, under ordinary circumstances, to furnish a liberal enjoyment of life. Under our system three hours of work each day affords a share of wealth somewhat in excess of the share usually obtained by the workmen of the Earth for their average of ten hours’ labor. Our industrial force has, therefore, a facility of expansion and contraction, without distressful results, which yours does not possess. No serious changes are wrought with us by a reduction of working force to half time, and consequent half pay; while more or less pinching and misery are sure to follow such an occurrence with you.

From these careful attentions to the interests of labor, we have brought it into repute as one of the most honorable as well as the most profitable pursuits of life. I have endeavored to show you some of the ways by which this grand purpose has been attained. I must not, however, omit to remind you, that as our government takes upon itself to perform innumerable enterprises, which on the Earth are left to individuals and organizations of men, its direct dealings with those who toil are more intimate and extensive than yours. It is better enabled thereby to carry into operation those methods which distinguish our[Pg 182] system. The greater part of the energies of our government and the wisdom of our statesmanship have been directed to this end of supporting labor, and out of it, without question, comes the general serenity and contentment which prevail.

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

I wish to impress upon you here, that a tenant, under our government, has even greater security of possession than your land owners. The prevailing sense of justice, and a widespread interest, have established the right of a renter to hold and enjoy, against all competition, his allotment during his life. He has also the right, under our custom, to convey its possession by will; and it is more generally the case on our planet than on yours, that a piece of land is held for generations in the same family.[Pg 184] Our government exercises some rights of interference, to the end that the size of a farm shall conform, as near as possible, to such dimensions as to employ no great excess of labor over that capable of being supplied by the family of the occupant. In a general way, the tenant enjoys the same rights of ownership which are held by your individual holders in fee, except that he cannot convey title, and does not take to himself any emolument arising from increased value. His rent is simply an equivalent to your tax, with the very important difference, that its amount depends entirely on the season’s productiveness, and is never a burden.

Once decided upon, the proposed city becomes the subject of universal interest. Its plans are submitted and approved, just as your proposals for a single edifice. All its parts must conform with each other; the choice of its location chiefly depends upon drainage and water supply, and it possesses these advantages in the highest perfection. Every house must be erected in conformity with rules. Work is commenced by the erection of public buildings in the center, and the laying of drain, water, heat and electric conduits through its newly surveyed streets. People come to it, as they come to your new cities, for the[Pg 185] purpose of gain in trade and industry, and locate themselves as they choose under a fixed and uniform land rental. They erect edifices as you do, varying them as they like in their internal structure, but strictly conforming in their outer elevations to the style adopted by our architectural commission, which supervises also the material employed, and the safety and durability of the work. Any disreputable or depraved quarter is of course impossible under this plan; nor could such an encouragement and propagation of crime exist in one of our cities, as they do in yours, even had we the class of tenants to people them. It must be charged among the evils of your landlordism, that it not only promotes vice through its tendency to impoverish your masses, but is ready at all times to multiply it, by affording quarters for convenient association.

The spectacle of our city in course of construction is very different from yours. The government has set aside, what may be computed in your way as millions of money for the institution of various works designed for the health and comfort of the new population, and people are arriving in thousands from all quarters to do the work. Every one of them is impressed with that feeling and[Pg 186] interest which can only arise from ownership, and there is not a single one of them who is not performing some of the work. No one of them has a hope for honor and wealth by getting a monopoly of the land. No rich man comes with his accumulations to get a perpetual lien upon the industries that are just now springing up, and to hold for himself and his descendants the privilege of exacting daily for all time a larger share of the earnings of labor than your slaveholders derive from their human chattels. All choose to work, because it is both honorable and profitable to do so, and also because it is a duty, the conscious fulfillment of which is attended with a feeling of happiness.

The systematic and regular use of the voluntary muscles, without excessive fatigue, has not only an important influence on health, but assists as well to develop perfect and well rounded brains, out of which can only come those evenly balanced minds which create, out of the power of intelligence, the blessings of human progress; whence only come those level headed men, who are distinguished among yourselves as being never wholly the product of learning. It is an axiom with us, that he who does not produce has no right to consume, and this doctrine[Pg 187] has been so carried out in our society that physical inertia, no matter how much attended with wealth, is exceedingly rare. As a consequence, affluence with us is not beset with the terrible penalties of ill health. The muscular body in all conditions of life is made to act with the brain and nerves.

We shall suppose, now, our city has reached a period of its growth equal in time to your decade. Its grand temple is not quite completed. Its streets stretch away in the distance, none of them narrower than a hundred of your feet, and some of them more than twice as wide, to accommodate the airships and the larger warehouses. The lines of uniform house fronts, relieved on the street corners by elevated towers, reach out sufficiently far into the gradually changing suburbs to give a hint of the long and beautiful perspectives that are to come. From the center outwards there are reserved, at intervals of about a half mile, spaces corresponding with the area of two blocks, which make a circular belt around the whole. These are cultivated and embellished in the highest style of gardening and landscape art. Here are located our public baths, statues, monuments, conservatories, and arenas for athletic sports. These pleasure grounds, so[Pg 188] convenient and accessible, diversify our city life with a taste and flavor of the country. Our city grows in a solid expansion. There are no straggling suburbs, like yours. Blocks are erected together, and always in continuation of the appropriated space adjoining them. The intercourse and demeanor of our population are, as you may expect, unlike yours. The general air of serenity and contentment, the uniform politeness, and the absence of degradation, with its frequent unpleasant and disgraceful episodes, mark the difference between your city population and ours.

It concerns us most, however, to make a comparison of our wealth producing agencies, and the channels of their distribution, and for this purpose we shall take our metropolis as it stands in its maturity. It contains, now, like your city of advanced growth, about three hundred thousand inhabitants. Its land rentals have been subjected to constant modification, and are in some places very much higher than they were at first. In certain localities, where trade has concentrated, the public fund has been increased by a considerable advance of rent to store keepers, but there is no exorbitant demand of rent for such favored places as there is with you. The purpose[Pg 189] of rent with us being only to meet the expenses of government, its total is limited; and consequently, while in the mercantile and trade districts, where wealth and capital are most heavily engaged, it has been materially advanced, a corresponding reduction has taken place in the residence portions. The direct and immediate effect, therefore, of an appreciation of land value, is to reduce living expenses among the masses by curtailing their rents. In the absence of any monopoly of private ownership, there is no case, even in the most concentrated places, where rent forms anywhere near so large a proportion of business expense as with you. By your land ownership methods, landlords have an access to both pockets of the tenant. Out of one they take to the limit of their greed whatever sum they choose for the privilege of business quarters, or a dwelling place, and from the other a tithe on everything consumed by the enhanced cost of its distribution.

As our material wants and needs are very much like yours, it is not hard to make a comparative estimate of the savings of industry. We produce more wealth than you in a given time, even with our shorter daily periods of work, because, with few exceptions, all are engaged in[Pg 190] the business of production. By this increased productiveness every consumer is richer. He is able by a smaller amount of labor to procure a greater amount of the objects of desire. Our production is more perfect than yours, by the use of more perfect machinery. Our division of labor is more complete than yours. Our workmen having abundant leisure for intellectual development, all the practical advantages of knowledge and science are immediately brought into effect. By avoiding your great waste of capital by excessive government expenditures, it is constantly so abundant with us that its proportion to labor makes labor remunerative.

We have now assumed for the purpose of comparison that the two cities, one of Mars and one of the Earth, have each three hundred thousand inhabitants; and that, allowing for women and children not engaged in productive industry, one hundred thousand of each city is actively engaged in industrial pursuits. As the general prosperity of each city depends upon the earnings of this one hundred thousand, and the accumulations in capital and wealth upon the amount saved by these productive classes, let us make a relative estimate of the opportunities each possess in individual savings. Having no common[Pg 191] medium of exchange upon which to base our estimate, let us take the value of a day’s labor for that purpose. The income of a city is derived from two sources, the aggregate wages of its inhabitants, and the combined profits of its capital. The latter, however, being entirely derived from consumers, is largely contributed to by the inhabitants themselves. And for the reason that all imported products, as well as those exported, bear the profits of capital in their rates of sale, we may safely say that an amount very nearly equal to the whole profits of capital of a city is paid by the consumers within its limits as capital profits. The chief source of your city’s yearly income then is about thirty-one million days’ labor. Out of this you must pay for expenses, under your system, two million days’ labor for government taxes, fifteen million days’ labor for ground rent, two million days’ labor for water, two million days’ labor for insurance, and with the balance of ten million days’ labor you must pay the cost of food, raiment, fuel, the portion of rent estimated in buildings, together with the various incidentals of furniture and house lights. You will observe that all these expenses except the first are largely loaded with the profits of capital, so that with the income and expense as[Pg 192] set forth you may be in a progressive condition, as that term is defined by you. That is to say, your capital may increase, and your wealth may be very greatly augmented. The enormous proportion of your earnings carried away by rent, although drawn very largely from your business districts, is contributed equally by the whole in the increased cost of all products consumed. Of your one hundred thousand producers, it is safe to say that twenty thousand of them have capital investments. Among these is divided the whole of the surplus of the city’s earnings. The eighty thousand engaged in the business of directly creating wealth are doomed, under your cruel system, to sweat and toil from sun to sun without accumulations. You accept this condition of things as inevitable, and your economists contend that the real or natural remuneration of labor is the bare means of subsistence. We have seen the unrighteous origin of this prodigious fund, which absorbs one third of the earnings of labor at least: let us examine its perpetual effects upon the interests of those who toil.

Looking upon your civilization, we find in its modern aspects a wonderful increase in all the appliances and conditions which accumulate wealth. Among these may be[Pg 193] specified a better and more economical division of labor, the discoveries of science, labor saving inventions, and altogether as a result, greatly increased productiveness.

Added to these contributions of knowledge and science in the interest of the working class, you have, during the last century, experienced the most remarkable acquisition in favor of labor that was ever known upon your planet. I allude to the accession of new and fertile lands, over which the boundaries of civilization have been extended, and out of which, by the new methods and contrivances both of husbandry and transportation, the food supplies of the Earth have been made to flow in a steady stream toward the districts of their consumption. These immense advantages could not fail to have, in some degree, a beneficent effect upon your labor class. Inasmuch as your workmen of to-day are enabled to obtain more of the comforts of life than formerly, real wages may be said to have considerably advanced. Their share, however, of the wealth produced is as small a portion as formerly. By the modern necessities which custom has rendered difficult to avoid, they have become larger consumers, which in itself has enabled your capital, with its undue advantages, to increase its store out of all[Pg 194] proportion to a fair division of the wealth produced. But the greater and cheaper food supply, and the abundant capital of your recent times, while serving to neutralize the depressing effect of increase of population in the labor ranks, and to institute a condition of general prosperity in trade and mercantile pursuits, has at the same time offered to all your monopolists of land the opportunity to extort, under the pressure of competition, the whole surplus of the earnings of your workmen. Precisely the same happy conditions which have brought a modicum of prosperity to them have created a richer field for your monopolists, and especially for those of them who by their ownership of city land can exact from the extended demands of business, and a rapidly multiplying population, an unfair portion of the wealth produced. The unlimited privilege of appropriating to themselves the utmost share of the profits of industry, gives a speculative value to the holdings of your landlords, and serves in turn to furnish them the excuse of a parallel in their charges for rent to the current rate of interest on money. If industry can be forced to make over to them a third of its earnings now, the possibilities of the future shadow golden dreams, which promise no less to them than the[Pg 195] power of your imaginary Midas—dreams which encourage an easier wealth-making than was possessed by your olden barons, who by force of arms were enabled to hold,—what your modern law and custom equally allows,—the privilege of sapping the industry of millions of busy hands of all else but a bare sustenance and a shelter from the elements.

That rent does not to any great extent enter into the cost of your agricultural products, is due to the abundance of new land coming constantly under cultivation, and to that equalizing of situations which your railroads promote. An increase in the demand for food, and the promise of an advance in its price, brings under cultivation lands of lesser fertility or those more remote from your markets. The monopoly power of agricultural land ownership is thereby effectually destroyed. So long as these favorable conditions exist, the cost of your food staples will be governed by the value alone of the labor employed. The profits of capital, therefore, take no part in them until they leave the hands of the producer. There is no value in your cultivated lands of the lesser fertility, except in the opportunity they afford for labor to exchange its services for money. This class of land[Pg 196] fixes the price of and cheapens the food of the Earth. The value of all lands from these upwards in degrees of fertility is estimated by the amount of produce derived from a given amount of labor, and except in a few favorite situations there is as yet no monopoly value in your cultivated lands. To this, more than anything else, is due the comparative cheapness of your food, and the steady and unrestricted increase of your population. In time, however, for reasons to obvious to require mention, rent must enter into the original element of cost among your food staples, just as it now so largely takes a part in the cost of their distribution. The fullest manifestation of the evils of your private ownership system will then take place. The signs of what may occur at that rapidly approaching critical period are to be seen in the completely merciless character of your wealth holders, who, in the face of a divine intelligence, which has so charitably provided an even abundance to all, attempt to subvert the natural laws of trade by unfair combinations, known among you as trusts and syndicates, wherein the common welfare is made a sacrifice to their determined and unscrupulous love of gain.

You have perhaps not fully considered how it has come[Pg 197] to pass that your wealth is so generally without the best feelings and impulses of humanity. The desire to accumulate which pervades all classes can accomplish nothing in the ranks of labor, except for those who possess it in an inordinate degree. The anxiety for gain must be so intense as to overwhelm the wish for gratifications within reach, and to produce a fortitude of restraint which denies every dispensable want and pleasure. Is is only the few who have this power of abstinence that can escape a life of drudgery. The ranks of capital and wealth are largely recruited from this body of abstainers. Under the depressing effects of your monopolistic condition, ordinary prudence and moderate abstemiousness are not, as a rule, capable of laying the foundation of wealth. You have, consequently, by a natural process of selection, the ranks of your moneyed classes filled up, for the most part, by the most aggressively mercenary and acquisitive of your race; while the better part of humanity, where the self-sacrificing and generous impulses most prevail, must pay the penalty of its virtues in unrelieved dependence. Your successful moneyed class, coming in time to that place of power which its wealth procures for it, shapes and directs your legislation; which, as you might[Pg 198] expect, instead of being devoted, as it should be, chiefly to the support of measures to equalize and ameliorate the conditions of all classes, works the machinery for government for its own selfish ends, making easy and comfortable paths for those schemes which multiply its wealth.

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

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

Besides this immense service, the government provides religious edifices, buildings for public entertainment, and[Pg 200] pleasure grounds. And all this, you will bear in mind, at a less cost to our population than your landlords exact of you for ground rent alone. Adding to this four million days’ labor for rent, paid to private owners of buildings, and we have left nineteen million days’ labor for living expenses not provided by our government, and out of which come all the profit and accumulations of capital, except those derived from rents of buildings. You will see thereby, that with all the monopoly privileges that have fastened themselves upon your system done away with, capital has yet a full scope to exercise its legitimate functions in the fields of production and distribution, apart from which it has no rights and is entitled to no legislative consideration.

It is only by expunging the demands and profits of capital that the government is enabled to furnish all these services mentioned at so small a cost. We hold it to be a principle of justice, that the natural elements should not be permitted to form the basis of corporate management or monopoly control, and therefore instead of allowing capital the fullest privilege to appropriate those bounties of nature which are found ready for use, we have restricted its operations to a mere partnership with labor,[Pg 201] where it justly belongs. In our endeavors to sustain labor, and equalize its opportunities with capital, we have gone much further than this. We hold that all public necessities of general demand, in the supplying of which large expenditures are required in fixed capital, and which are not strictly in the line of production, should be provided for by the government. We remove the burdens of labor, by relieving it of those large capital enterprises which subsist on it, and which fail to share with it a reasonable portion of earnings. The large sums of money and the special privileges required in these operations of supply, of which your railroad, telephone and telegraph lines are prominent examples, obstruct the natural tendency of competition, and capital and wealth are thereby permitted advantages over labor which they should not of right have.

The unlimited privilege of capital in these directions has been defended on the ground that it greatly accelerates your material progress; that in private hands these enterprises can be more economically managed; and that the centralization of power in a government would be dangerously increased by the proprietorship of such large undertakings. All of these allegations except the[Pg 202] first are without foundation in fact. The growing political weight, especially in your representative governments, of all monopoly combinations, by reason of their wealth and large individual patronage, presents to you the choice of either a government ruled by outside influences, which cannot be held responsible for the evils it inadvertently inflicts by the irresistible pressure from without, or a government entirely and absolutely liable, and to be held to a strict accountability for all encroachments upon the common welfare while handling these services of supply. In the latter case your remedy is an easy one; and may be readily applied; while in the former, nothing short of a political convulsion will serve you. No advanced government upon your Earth has ever undertaken a public service of any magnitude for a long term, which has not been systematized and improved by all the available knowledge and science of its time. The difference between a public and a private supply of a common demand is, that to one is added the costs and profits of capital; while the other, shorn of these oftentimes excessive exactions, is furnished at the cheapest rate possible.

Any policy of your governments, no matter how unwisely adopted, becomes in time a fixture which is[Pg 203] difficult to remove. The abuses which it may be known to produce are tolerated long after its evil is understood. Yet, there is scarcely one of these which has not had its active defenders. The able defense of measures which have long since been expunged for their flagrant injustice, exhibit some of the most striking examples of mental obliquity in your annals. No government of the Earth, however, in its long legislative career, was ever known to favor the laboring and landless over the interests of those holding endowments of the Earth’s surface. What seems at a superficial glance to be in your own country such a measure, in what may be generally termed your land policy, with its homestead provisions, becomes upon a closer examination delusive. Every one of your laws for the pretended purpose of bestowing your territory upon labor bears the covert design or connivance to further the opportunities of capital. From the inauguration of your system, capital and wealth have been gradually absorbing your lands, and the partnership of labor in them is as transitory and accidental as the opportunities afforded in the early stages of your city’s growth.

The fact appears that, in your present development, the general sense of individual acquisitiveness among your[Pg 204] governing classes is too great to deal fairly with the whole body of your people under such seductive opportunities for self-gain. You cannot prevent, under your present system of private ownership, the lands now held by your people from drifting into a comparatively few hands. This process, although going on for years, gradually accelerates, and will rapidly become apparent when the last of your public territory shall have passed out of the hands of your government. The owners of your lands always have, and will continue to govern the countries of the Earth. No representative government can exist long without a system which prevents the monopoly of its territory by wealth.

No other idea appears to have been held by the founders of your nation, but that your land was a chattel, to be disposed of for money, and as much a subject of barter and speculation as merchandise, and like it, liable to that depression in value which a superabundant supply produces. Its unequalled advantages as a subject for speculation became more and more apparent as your population increased. It is a striking illustration of the irresistible influence of the mercenary impulse on your planet, that those who were prominent in establishing[Pg 205] so many advances toward equalizing the conditions and privileges of their fellow-men held, in the aggregate among themselves, the title and possession of which they stood ready to defend, an area of the Earth’s surface equal to about eight million of your acres, one hundred thousand acres being in possession of him who became the first presiding officer of your republic. I do not refer to these facts in a spirit of censure to those men, so enlightened and liberty loving beyond their times; but only to show that singular limit of vision which sincerely proclaimed the equality of all men, which fostering a political method which must in time enslave or pauperize the majority.

There can be no doubt but that the unlimited privileges of capital in these directions have greatly accelerated your material progress. The speedy utilization of the immense resources of your own republic has hidden and disguised the evil it was gradually producing. The new fields of labor opened by the many monopoly enterprises have satisfied and quieted it; and the open invitation, for the time being, of a partnership with capital in the occupancy of the soil for purposes of cultivation, leaves no apparent ground of complaint among the masses who toil.[Pg 206] Thus have your demands for labor been so much greater than the supply, that large accessions have been drawn from the older countries of the Earth. These furnishing the bone and sinew for still more rapid development, your progress has become the wonder of the age. You will perceive, however, that the general prosperity among all classes of your society, and the absence of any great public grievance, is just that condition which render the incursions of capital and wealth easy, so that during all your enormous accumulations by the hands of your workers, out of which they have little to show of gain besides their living expenses, the most stupendous moneyed fortunes of history have fallen into the hands of the few. Unlike the older countries of the Earth, where the increasing poverty of the masses is a natural and unavoidable sequence of the large accumulations of wealth in few hands, your poor do not grow sensibly poorer during this unequal distribution. Your enormous resources hold up labor to a condition of comparative prosperity during all these inroads upon it. As a consequence, of the abundance which the bounties of nature have supplied to you, and the stimulated energies which your rewarded industries have induced, your labor unconsciously[Pg 207] submits to the extraction of an unfair portion of the wealth it produces without individual suffering. The better condition of your workmen compared with those of other lands should not disguise the fact, however, that capital and wealth get new assurance, and encouraged to fresh demands upon the industries on this account. Although your poor do not yet grow sensibly poorer, your rich are getting immeasurably richer. The better opportunities for labor have brought millions of workers from abroad, who in their rapid development of the country have so immensely appreciated land values that the bosom of the Earth has been converted into a chattel for speculation, and the chief business of wealth has been to pocket the increase which it has not earned.

You cannot fail to have observed, that to this period your money class has had but little to do with land in your agricultural districts, except to buy and sell it. Capital, other than that limited quantity which has been created on the land, has not thus far been led into the business of its cultivation, because from the abundance and easy acquirement of land it must come, in so doing, in such direct competition with labor as not to leave a satisfactory margin of profit. When, however, your public lands[Pg 208] shall have been all conveyed to private hands, at which time the price of land products will not be governed as now by the willingness of labor to make out of their production a mere exchange for fair wages, then, and not till then, will you find capital embarking to any great extent into the business of agriculture.

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

More than one easily recognized agency of your civilization[Pg 209] will tend to reduce the number of your small farms, and to throw the business of food supply completely under the control of your wealthy and capital class. Your small holders now occupying lands of the lower grades of fertility, and who with their limited means but little more than sustain themselves, will readily submit their titles to capitalists, who with the advantage of costly labor saving machines, will find the cultivation of a number of such tracts thrown into one of sufficient profit to engage their means.

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

Machinery has never cheapened the supply of raw materials which come directly from the soil, because its[Pg 210] use for cultivation has only been exceptional, and it can never become general as long as land is held in small tracts. This very condition is the one which will engage the attention of investors in land for the profits of use, and at the first permanent advance in the price of your food staples the operation of turning small farms into large ones will begin.

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

I am sorry to say of you that the principle of equality, as we understand it, has never been sincerely considered or acted upon by any of the governments of the earth. You have taken it for granted that a serving and dependent class, composing four-fifths of your numbers, must always assist to make up the sum of your population, and no legislative measure can be found in your records which sustains this large body of your people against the encroachments with which wealth and capital are continually permitted to invade their interests.[Pg 211] Liberty itself is of but little value, when life becomes a forfeiture of all the ways and means to improve it. There is, in fact, no liberty in the correct sense, where all the moments of life must be bartered for the means to live.

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

The past is burnt out, with a residue of but little value except as a warning. The future is not ours, but of the universe with its hidden and irrevocable destiny. The[Pg 212] present belongs to us, and it is our creed to be happy in its possession. We could have sown fears as you have, and could have been as overwhelmed with their multiplied terrors. We could have invented a circumstantial paradise like yours, with its pathway of extinguished temporal hopes, and its discouragements of the noblest ambitions to build out of the materials in sight; but to what purpose except an unworthy one? The present is ours. Our field is among the living things which surround us. The most of life to us is its possibilities of happiness, and the opportunities it affords for the enjoyment of our religious impulses to serve the Deity in advancing ourselves and our society toward that state of perfection to which under the supreme intelligence all things are seen to tend.

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

We have found certain active qualities of mind, predominating everywhere in women, indispensable to a better progress in social advancement, and great things have been wrought to us by our present absolute equality of the sexes. The full value of women as factors in social progress is not known, nor even suspected by you, because you have never witnessed the experiment of a complete withdrawal of those restrictions which hold[Pg 214] them in subjection; yet, it is a fact that in what are truly the noblest advances in humanity, they are your superiors. They have left further behind them the brutalisms of the past, are deeper touched with your inhumanities, and will go further to banish them than your men.

Your estimate of the mental capacity of women is singularly erroneous. The cropping out occasionally of their intellectual achievements, and the marked increase of such with the multiplication of opportunities, must have hinted to you that their silence, and apparent inferiority in the higher mental efforts, were alone due to their long period of subordination, during which the usages of your society have discouraged any attempts to enter the field as competitors with men. In the full swing of opportunity and encouragement allowed them by us, they have raised themselves to a very high plane, especially in literature, poetry and art. We owe to them many of our masterpieces in these attainments, and their aptitude for study and investigation is shown in the even place they hold with us in science and the professions. Those feminine qualities of mind which are described by you as heart, sympathy, sentiment and emotion, and which are generally considered by you as out of place in affairs of[Pg 215] state, are the very ones of which you have the greatest need in legislation. It is principally through the feelings mentioned that divine impulses are expressed, and yet that part of yourselves where they most prevail are excluded from your councils.

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

From the nature of things your men are more easily overcome by evil political forces than your women would be. The latter, being more closely allied to the interests of the family, in its moral training, and less willing to sacrifice the benefit of example, are consequently less[Pg 216] corruptible than men. Women have a greater natural affinity for virtue than men, more unselfishness and a larger concern for the moral welfare of mankind, exhibited in their more earnest support of religion.

With the enfranchisement of women the humanities of life would enter more largely into your politics. You have proofs of this in the few local instances where they have been granted suffrage rights. The desirable family methods and sentiments, of which they are better exponents than men, have never failed to come to the surface as indications of their presence. They have invariably shown a greater inclination than men to consider the welfare of persons in legislation as against the welfare alone of property, which has to the present so monopolized and corrupted your politics. Your legislation in the hands of men alone has accomplished but little in alleviating the distresses of humanity. The cold and calculating hand of speculation, which invests only to call back its capital with high usury, has always held your law making as a ready instrument for its purposes, and without loftier views, your governments will continue to miss their opportunities for benefitting mankind. By the admission of women the higher sentiments would sooner[Pg 217] find a place. It would be the first step in bringing natural religion and politics together. The present irrational state of your spiritual beliefs retards the adoption of a moral code in your systems of government. With you, the State is led to care for nothing in the interest of morality, except a punishment of its infractions. It ignores, as no part of its duties, all incentives to goodness, and in dealing with crime the service of its prevention, in any other way than punishment, is not considered, principally because other departments of society have assumed for ages the public control and promotion of the virtues.

A wider range in the duties of government is opposed by many of you as objectionable paternalism. Such of you overlook the fact that there can be no paternalism in a republic. Such a system is co-operation pure and simple, and neither good nor evil can permanently exist without the consent of the whole. The nearer you get to complete co-operation, the more perfect your government becomes. The greatest vices of misgovernment among you are to be found in granting precedence of one interest over others, that interest in most cases being a capitalistic one, often antagonizing the welfare of many[Pg 218] individuals. Among your industrial class, less than one-tenth are employers, whose political weight has so overcome the majority as to have excluded any direct legislation in its behalf, and so far as these conditions exist, the principle of co-operation which should be the corner stone of your government has not been faithfully carried out. A greater, and in our view, a more glaring violation of this principle is your exclusion of women from the rights of representation in your government. You cannot deny that they have separate interests to care for. You will find upon examination of your assessment rolls that nearly one-fifth of all your real and personal estate is owned by them, and of the greater part of the balance they are interested by matrimonial partnerships with men. Their property ownerships alone entitle them to the rights of suffrage, in the denial of which you have no excuse whatever but the usage and custom of barbaric ages extended to the present, and the prejudice of a society grown familiar and blinded to its injustice. The struggles of labor for better recognition, and the agitation for woman suffrage are evolutionary movements in thought, and in your advanced government indicate the coming of a more perfect co-operation.

[Pg 219]The political subjection of women, and the subjection of labor helplessly to the law of supply and demand, without legislative assistance or attention, are at present your most prominent relics of barbarism. They are both endured because the parties to be benefitted have never yet enjoyed the privileges due them. Neither one or the other are consequently aroused to action in their own behalf, and when these rights are acquired by them it will be more owing to an enlightened public opinion than to any concerted action by themselves. It is well known that your slaves had little to do with the abolition of slavery, and it is therefore not a proper argument against the granting of these privileges that the persons to be benefitted are not all clamoring for them; or that, in the case of woman suffrage, a large majority of women are indifferent and a few opposed.

The subjection of women to men in all the political and business affairs of life have greatly modified the characters of both. You have confined the lives of your women to innumerable small details. Her aspirations and powers have been confined within this narrow scope. The absorption of their whole minds has been in a set of small ideas and occupations, from one to the other in[Pg 220] continuous exercise. In such a life profound thought and loftier emotions are not encouraged. They have but little incentive to the acquirement of general knowledge, for it can be of no practical use to them, and being early impressed with a sense of their dependence upon men, their lives are given up to all the small devices for obtaining power over them in the sensuous fields of personal adornment and display. Theirs, as well as other human minds, must be shallowed under such conditions; yet of the two sexes their duties are the most serious and responsible in shaping the destinies of mankind. Theirs is the chief part in the forming of minds, both by heredity and training, and with their limited opportunities for broadened thought you can look for nothing more in them than those narrow prejudices, which are in turn transmitted, and which are so manifest in all your society. This narrowness is one of your most unhappy traits; it is almost universal among you. Until quite recently you have only had a man here and there capable and willing to fairly examine a question which interferes with traditional beliefs and old modes of thought. You have formed no conception of how much this state of things is due to the limited mental horizon in which your women[Pg 221] have been confined. The intellects of your best men have not been multiplied and reproduced as they should have been, owing to the loss of their strength and fibre in the process of reproduction, through your average non-high thought producing female minds.

The extended barbaric relations which your women hold to men, though greatly modified by civilization, has carried with it enough of its primary feelings and motives to influence a large majority of your matrimonial engagements, where in truth, it may be said that the attraction is sensual to a degree not willingly acknowledged, and this being more and more the case as you descend in the social scale, you will find here your women going through life helplessly subject to the lingering brutalism which your customs and laws enforce. It is from the animalism of these low life marriages that a large sum of your miseries and crimes are produced. Your inferior men have but little respect for those subject to their power, and in many cases use a tyrannical authority over their defenseless wives in gratification of a mean instinct of humanity. It is the only opportunity perhaps that brutal husbands enjoy in their whole lives to command a grown person who is under an obligation by law, custom and[Pg 222] religion to obey. Such a dangerous subjection of one human being to another could only be excused by a certainty that the welfare of your society depended upon it, when in fact the condition is one of the obstacles to a better social state.

During your barbaric period, and for a long time thereafter, women made no protest against her subordinate position in society. It has been her place for ages to suffer more than her share of the pains and trials of human replenishment. She has been taught to believe that this was her only part in the world’s economy, and men have held her to it by all the force of ecclesiastical and secular bonds. In all your glorious modern achievements of science and general knowledge until lately she has not even been an invited spectator. While the world in front has been all astir in the movements of progress, she has only been permitted to listen and wonder at the applause through the rear windows of the nursery and kitchen; not knowing what it all meant and not educated to approve, or even to understand, its glorious import. Having never been accustomed to think on any great subject, she has held to her traditions after they have been discredited and denied by the knowledge of her[Pg 223] times, and imparting them to childhood in all their ancient mixture of error has assisted to keep alive those prejudices among you which have so seriously blocked your advancement. This is one of the penalties you have paid for your subjection of women. Those traditions to which she so defiantly clings she will never be persuaded to discard in her present dependent condition. It may be said to her honor that they are mistakenly pursued as the only great method within her reach to indulge her concern for human welfare. You must give her new duties, and arouse in her new ambitions, before you can expect her to take her proper place beside man in the march of progress. It is only within the last two or three generations that a glint of the outside enlightenment has penetrated her retired circle, and under its revelation she is already in some quarters demanding her rights. She is beginning to understand that procreation is not the chief purpose in life, but only one of its incidentals; that its processes from first to last are guided exclusively by animal instincts, among which men have compelled her to sacrifice the best parts of her life; that although nature has imposed upon her the larger share in these processes, and all their pains, it has also bestowed upon[Pg 224] her capabilities which are clearly designed for more exalted stations than mere breeders of men and gratifiers of their animal pleasures, so unduly stimulated on the earth as the unintellectual and chief attraction of the sexes. You have perhaps but little conception of how much that reckless sexual impulse to matrimony, unrestrained by your laws, and encouraged by your religion, has swollen your ranks of poverty, crime and imbecility. Your women in their dependence and subjection have but one source of power at their service, and they have used it for all it was worth. As a consequence, even to the present period of your civilization, qualities of mind cuts no figure against the voluptuous animalism of person in securing husbands than it did in barbaric times.

It is the rarest thing among you to find an intellectually mated husband and wife qualified by equal education and opportunities to be in perfect accord and sympathy in the pursuit of high purposes. Among your higher circles are to be found occasionally one of these congenial matings, the happiest conditions of matrimonial existence, where by good breeding and cultivation a man tacitly ignores his superiority under your unjust usages; but[Pg 225] although the wife may be in sympathy with the ambition and purposes of her husband in his intellectual labors she is seldom able to assist him owing to educational differences. With us the wife has more than encouragement to offer. Her mind becomes a part of her husband’s and increases his capabilities. Many of our highest achievements in brain work are the result of such collaboration of two minds working as one. The rare cases instanced among you are only to be found in your cultivated circles, below these, in all degrees to the bottom mental equality in women is oftener the source of contention than happiness, and you must expect to have this unhappy condition increased until you have granted them their rightful position in society. So long as their subjection to men was hopeless and they were taught by their theological superiors to obey their husbands, and by the same advisors, their separation denied or discouraged, they meekly submitted to abuse and suffering because without a hope of relief; but as it is becoming more and more apparent to you that the subjection of your women is one of the many ancient fallacies, the gradual reasoning of them out of existence is paving the way for woman’s liberty.

[Pg 226]Nature has designed that women shall only devote a portion of her life to maternity and its attendant duties. It has set her free of them at a time when her mind and body are fully capable of most of the avocations of life. Having fulfilled these great services to mankind, you have ordained by custom and usage that she shall remain thereafter a mere unconsidered supernumerary on the world’s stage. In your lower circles she becomes a helpless drudge in the interests of her children, and in the higher ones, either an unwelcome retainer in the household of a daughter, or a more or less constrained member in the family of a son; but in all of these her lot is a happy one when compared with her utter desolation in the world when her children have departed from her by immigration or death. You have given her no part in great affairs, and she has but little knowledge of or interest in them. They afford her no entertainment amid her loneliness, and by the narrow training of her faculties, diverted only by the minor things of life,—its personal episodes and gossiping incidents—she lives out her remaining purposeless career. This mere lack of mind expansion has been cited against her as a sex weakness, but it is safe to predict that if men had been subject to[Pg 227] such conditions, without her deep human sympathies and her religion, they would have fallen into complete mental imbecility, and if men for all the ages past had been confined as she had been to duties requiring no high attainments, the present balance of mind work could not be shown in their favor.

With us maternity is not allowed to absorb the whole of a woman’s life. While we accord to her, in consideration of its responsibilities and pains, an exemption from all the physically exhausting occupations, she is encouraged in all others to which her capabilities are adapted; accordingly with us she is an open competitor with men in many lines of business, some of which are entirely given over to her by general consent. By multiplying her opportunities in this way, she is not, as with you in most cases, helpless and dependent. She moves around among men as their equal, discussing matters of business and questions of public policy like one of them. She joins them in out door sports and athletics, in which she often excels, and these relations which the sexes hold to each other, so differing from yours, entirely changes their lines of attraction. In their closer association with us it becomes possible for men and women to thoroughly[Pg 228] understand each other. They do not move in two separate worlds as with you, artfully disguising their characters and feelings from each other, wearing a different manner as occasions require for deception. Men select matrimonial companions with us as they choose friends among themselves, sympathy of feeling and sincerity being primary motives of attraction. It is only the general untruthfulness of your society carried into matrimony which makes it in so many cases unhappy. You have so inculcated the arts of deception and falsehood into your lives that they have come at last to be openly pursued as legitimate methods of thrift. One could not find a better indication of the insincerity of your society than this metropolitan journal on your table. Here is a strong editorial commending truth, another a well written homily on honesty, and on the connecting pages, authorized by the same hands, hundreds of advertisements in all shades of deception to catch the unwary. With the gradual decadence of force as a means of preying upon one another, you have so cultivated falsehood to take its place that the life of each individual among you is kept constantly on the watch to protect his interests. Hypocrisy in religion, and deception in[Pg 229] matrimony, belong to those vices which at present disgrace your civilization, and of which your women must always suffer most so long as you keep them excluded from a free intercourse in the world’s affairs.

The difference in our treatment of women has very materially changed their points of attraction. While we can see no beauty in a woman without enlightenment, and can find no full companionship in her without her knowledge of our world and its affairs, these qualities are not so much considered by you. The idea of a fitness to live together, as equals in everything, is not entertained, by either the one or the other of you, in these serious life contracts. Your women submit their dependence as a virtue, and it is accepted, as well as their gentleness,—so often assumed,—as a flattering offer to men’s vanity of power. There is seldom a marriage among you without the hidden satisfaction of a man with his new entrance into authority. Any subsequent development of individuality or independence of character in the women, must result in discord. We meet each other, in such contracts, on the common ground of equality. There are no political or domestic rights which both do not equally enjoy; consequently, women are not[Pg 230] tempted into blandishments, and deceptions, for the conquests of men. Owing to their independence and helpfulness, the marriage proposal is never accepted as an extreme opportunity, leading them to take desperate chances, among conditions that are not promising to happiness. This, you have forced them to do, by closing all other doors against them.

You may suspect that the admission of women amongst us, in the affairs of business and government, has coarsened them, and given them a character of what is known among you as masculinity. That is not so. Their amiability of manner, instead of being lost, is conveyed and multiplied among our business methods. All men, among the civilized nations of the earth, are softened by female association. Outside your regions of degradation, this has been invariably the case, and you have proofs of it already in the instances among you where women have taken a hand in affairs outside the household. When, by superior intelligence and force of character, they have made their way to success and fame among the pursuits of men, they have carried with them, in every case, that soft femininity of which they are naturally endowed. Your often expressed fears of[Pg 231] hardening, or in some injuring them, by an admission to equal rights, is not entirely sincere. To keep on good terms with them, and to retain their approbation, you have been led to conceal from them many of your doubtful business and political methods, and you hesitate to admit them into these fields with you, not more from the dread of their contamination, than the exposure it would bring about of ways, which you have heretofore so carefully concealed. There is many a successful politician, or business man among you, who poses before his wife and lady friends as a hero of finance, or statesmanship, who could not do so, did they share with him a knowledge of the incidents and manipulations which brought about his success. Deference to women, and a regard for their esteem beyond that of men, is a human attribute apparent in your whole history. It has been the inspiration of your best poetry, and your most stirring romance. In your middle ages, under what is known among you as chivalry, it has led you to deeds of virtue in upholding the right, far beyond the prevailing oppression. How much the conduct of men is modified, and their evil tendencies checked, by a regard for the good opinion of women, every man can judge by examination[Pg 232] of himself. In how many dangerous moments has temptation been cast aside, by the fear of evil report to some fond wife, mother, sister, daughter, or lady friends, when, to sacrifice the good opinion of men alone, would have been no bar?

By our greater attention to the laws of health, and our governmental restriction of unhealthful marriages, which I will describe to you further on, we have developed a far greater average of physical perfection in women that exists with you. In connection with this there are other advantages which our women enjoy beyond yours, which greatly enhance their personal attractiveness and beauty. Their equal educational opportunities under our system, of which they are not slow to avail themselves, the hopefulness and lack of austerity in our religion, and the interest they are led to exhibit in great affairs, are so marked in their demeanor and physiognomy as to render them very different beings. As we estimate beauty, you have only a women here and there who compares with them. Among your mass of women, the facial expression of their long subjection, and its attendant conditions are strikingly observable to us. Features, no matter how perfectly lined, without the light of cultivation and[Pg 233] knowledge, and which are destined to become, in conjugal association, clouded with the cares of an overwrought maternity, and dejected by a threatening and superstitious religion, would have no charms to any member of our society. With us, their faces reflect the consciousness of absolute equality, and are illuminated with daily religious duties, which consist, in accordance with our belief, in making the ways of life pleasant, and its paths peaceful, and in assisting in all things toward the improvement of ourselves and society, in the process of which it is our religion to assist, and in the performance of which, they work with us as equals to attain.

You must have suspected before this that, so far as the rapid accumulation of wealth is concerned, our society was in that stationary condition so much dreaded by your economists as the end of all material progress. An assumption among your thinkers that any permanent diminishment of the production of wealth is the forerunner of disaster to society, is one of those mistakes easily accounted for by the surroundings of your present stage of development. Your experience teaches you that where the wealth producing energies are in the highest stage of action, your civilization shows all its other forces equally advancing; and where on the other hand, capital and wealth are restricted, there is a state of general stagnation. These opposite conditions, however, you will find to be, more than anything else, the result of difference in degrees of intelligence, knowledge, and consequently ambition. Your aims, even the higher ones, are so indissolubly connected with wealth as the means by which most of them are promoted, that your[Pg 235] incentives to acquire riches have become a part of your intellectual constitution. Where the penalty of a straightened financial condition is the forfeiture of everything which makes life desirable, even a denial of the opportunities of association with the better class, and a surrender of offspring to the degradation and contempt which comes of limited knowledge, it may reasonably be expected that the struggle for wealth would be keen. Equally as an incentive also are the innumerable avenues of gain, which are everywhere open for the investment of capital, and the remarkable profits which accrue to keep up the spirit of money-making adventure. You will certainly agree with me that this crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels in the attempt to get money is not the best possible form or type of society: more especially since you are not all fairly and evenly equipped in this struggle, the mass of your people reap no benefit from it, and its result is only to double up the incomes of the few.

Stagnation is not necessarily a condition of the stationary state, as many of your writers lead you to believe. It is merely a revolution in the aims of society, brought about by changes which are inevitable, and[Pg 236] which your civilization is sooner or later bound to reach. Every newly applied science and invention, and above all every acre of land brought under cultivation, render this period so much dreaded by you more remote; but you will come to it all the same. It will merely be a using up of all the resources of capital to RAPIDLY multiply itself. During your present progressive period, so far as that term is applicable to the speedy gathering in of wealth, your society presents to us an aspect of mercenary abandonment beyond anything we have ever experienced ourselves, and with a full knowledge of the end that will come we look forward with a high degree of interest to that time when you will arrive at the stationary condition.

As you approach that period where the diminished profits of capital will discourage the great activity and aggressiveness which now characterize it, some very great changes will gradually be brought about. Assuming that labor will continue to enlighten itself it will slowly change its relations with capital, so that in the end instead of being below, as it is now, it will be on top, as with us. Many of the ways by which wealth now multiplies itself will be shut off, and with its acquirement no longer indispensable to the honors of life, and the difficulties[Pg 237] of its attainment in any large volume increased, society will not be given so intensely to its individual accumulation. Your intellectual activities will be turned more in the direction of other motives. To repair waste and provide for the necessities of the living will be about all that is left to employ your industries, and there will be enough for capital to do within these limits to moderately enlarge itself; while yet within this narrowed field, limited wealth will be able to provide itself with income enough to sustain and reward habits of prudential saving. Although great wealth will be exceedingly difficult to obtain, a fair competency will be within the reach of all; since labor coming to the front, owing to the weakened powers of wealth, will assume its deserving place in the forces of economy and legislation, and will demand and receive a fairer share of the profits of industry.

After the advance of civilization and knowledge beyond a certain period, the ambitions and necessities of a people will furnish abundant incentives to keep society in a state of activity. The energies of life are stimulated, not so much by the large occasional rewards which come to a few, like prizes in a lottery, as the steady and certain remuneration of each day’s output of action to all. The[Pg 238] ability to obtain from industry a considerable margin beyond the daily expenses of life is sufficient to keep alive the mental and physical energies, and is certain to bring about that general state of hopefulness, which more than anything else promotes thrift and stimulates ambition.

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

Under our system, capital becoming diffused among the masses in comparatively small portions, and having no[Pg 239] such extraordinary uses, nor such high rates of interest as with you, it assumes its natural place as an adjunct to all the enterprises of labor. All our factories are consequently carried on by co-operation. No such a thing is known on our planet as the owner of a manufacturing establishment depressing at his will and pleasure the pay of perhaps a whole community of working people. When an establishment is required for the manufacture of some product in demand, our workmen undertake it as a business belonging wholly to themselves, and there is never any lack of means among them to do it.

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

In the condition of things with us, bestowing upon[Pg 240] labor all the emoluments of industry, it becomes the most advantageous pursuit of life. With wages at a uniform and fixed sum, from which there can be no deviation except to increase, the working man proceeds to lay by his surplus, until, in a reasonable time, it can be made to do service in adding to the fruits of his toil.

In our society there is no possibility, and no one has hopes of gaining money by chance. We hold it to be a demoralizing evil that wealth should be obtained without industry. The quality of mind which you honor under the name of shrewdness, and which seldom hesitates to profit by the losses and even the miseries of others, would find life a burden on account of the odium attached, in any community on our planet. The privilege to build up an individual fortune, by taking from the substance of the whole people in any unlimited degree which an unscrupulous ingenuity can devise, is one of the peculiarities of your civilization. To this general license, with its very small limitation, is to be ascribed most of your social miseries. The lessons presented to your youth at the very first glance at the affairs of life are calculated to impress them with the belief that success is not so much for the strong and considerate, as it is for the wary and cunning;[Pg 241] and that the business of creating wealth is of the slightest importance, when compared with the many successful arts and schemes for capturing it after its production. The example is witnessed everywhere among you of money-making without loss of honor or respect, by the method of drawing from others, by taking advantage of their necessities, excessive and unfair portions of their substance for some sort of service rendered. The consequence is that life with you is constantly renewed, on the one hand, by persons with more or less inherited capital, who are educated to believe that existence is a game, whose winning instances are the best guides to follow; and on the other by the great mass of hereditary toilers who submit themselves as victims under sheer force of necessity and usage. This state of your civilization brings into play many of your lower feelings, as indispensable instruments of success. When selfishness is the chief promoter of thrift, practical charity is only aroused by unusual provocation. The miseries of existence are unseen and unfelt by others than the sufferers themselves among you, just as your senses become oblivious to the presence of disturbing influences which you find it unprofitable to suppress. The necessity for each one looking out for himself[Pg 242] in your fierce battles of life makes him unmindful of others. Yet benevolence dwells within all your hearts as a divine attribute, which cannot be wholly destroyed, no matter how neglected its cultivation. Like the retarded germination of seed in a too deeply surmounting soil, it comes to the light among you here and there, under favorable conditions, with an increasing frequency which reveals your destiny as unerringly as the golden horizon presages the coming of the sun.

The difference in the degree by which each individual holds the common welfare in comparison with his own, marks the stage of progress towards perfection in society. You hold within yourselves, by a divine provision, the elements to this end. Your history is full of instances to prove that self-sacrifice is an act which inspires a greater commendation than any other. All your normal mental organizations are endowed with the propensity to benefit others, which only the conditions of your society circumscribe by a conflict of interest. What is now in your higher faculties, during your present development, a pleasure, will become a passion by further progress and cultivation, and, by a still more extended pursuit, a necessity to the tranquility and enjoyment of your lives.[Pg 243] Filial and parental love from mere instincts have grown among you to be the most gratifying of inclinations. Sexual affinity, from its origin of brutal desire, has been transformed, in your higher circles, to a pure and tender sentiment of disinterested regard. Not long ago your lunatics were chained to stakes like beasts. Your infected were left to die upon the roadsides. Your infirm were shut from sight, consumed with vermin among their rags. You house, clothe, and care for all these now with almost the solicitude that parents bestow upon children. If you should submit yourselves now for a time to the presence of these old inhumanities, and observe their disturbing effects upon the happiness of your lives, it would be a fair measurement of your progress toward the stationary state.

Supposing yourself to be one of an audience assembled for the purpose of obtaining pleasure from a performance on the stage, your delight would, in a large degree, depend upon the manifestations of approval surrounding you. Any expression of dissatisfaction would spoil your enjoyment, no matter upon what it might be founded. It might arise, for instance, from unfair opportunities of view, or from the usurped privilege of some to obstruct[Pg 244] the vision of others. Your inclinations, arising from no higher motive than self interest, would lead you to assist in bringing about that state of general satisfaction which is indispensable to your own comfort and happiness. This illustrates one of the motives which, in our stage of development, impels us to arrange that, so far possible, every individual shall enjoy equal privileges in society. Happiness is simply not possible without it.

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

That you are slowly and gradually moving towards the stationary condition, unmistakable evidence proves. Material as well as spiritual indications confirm this belief. You can easily observe that wealth in the hands of the few is losing its opportunities for rapid increase.[Pg 245] In your oldest advanced regions it has already worked out its resources to the extent of endeavoring to find abroad occasions for profitable use. But for the monopoly of land, which enables it to extract from industry an amount for its services out of all proportion with its value elsewhere, it would have been much further advanced towards the stationary state.

One of the greatest obstacles opposing your approach towards the perfect society is your propensity to theorize and speculate upon matters which it is not given you to know. We have a saying that he who gets his feet in the air is lost. We mean by that to convey the idea, that all speculation not founded on positive knowledge is so utterly worthless, that any indulgence therein is useless to society. The opinion is unchallenged among us, that the inhabitants of the Earth are too prone to get their feet in the air. And yet the very ease by which this misfortune is accomplished among you is a proof of your goodness. Your inclination to virtue is your weak side of approach, and all your inherent and intuitive charity, which might during all these centuries have been exercised upon yourselves, has been to a great extent wasted upon your schemes of salvation, in which you have no[Pg 246] assurance whatever but the wild promises of imagination. When you come fully to understand that happiness, true prosperity, virtue, and even beauty are but synonyms of truth, and that misery, crime, misfortune, and ugliness are but other names for falsehood, you will no longer have any dread or hesitation to search for that verity which destroys old beliefs, even though that search melts into air your most cherished traditions. You come to understand after a while that a truth can disseminate nothing but good; and that a falsehood, no matter how venerable with age, nor how respectable by adoption, can generate little else than evil. Your creeds have attracted you and plowed deep into your affections, because in them is gathered from yourselves the divine sentiments of goodness, out of which they are all robed in a pretended monopoly. Your virtues are brought into service within their narrow limits, and your energies and substance consumed in the work of enlarging their influence, while the more fruitful material for your charities lies neglected in the evils and miseries of your society.

The Earth is your dominion. Tread firmly upon it. Remember it has been put into your keeping, and that your people are entirely responsible for its social condition.[Pg 247] He who assists to improve that, serves the Deity better than he who spends his life in genuflections and prayers. When you look around among the wretched criminals among you, punished and unpunished, and the poverty-stricken, and the sad-eyed, neglected children; see the unsuppressed temptations to evil, the unrecognized virtue, and the uneven opportunities for individual advancement, you should bear in mind that all these are but evidences of the violation of the trust imposed in you by the divine intelligence. There is, perhaps, no spectacle upon the Earth that inspires more pity among the inhabitants of Mars, than the constant waste of your best parts in submitting yourselves to the impositions of your seers, who lead you away from your duties, under the theory that the Earth is merely a battle ground and field of conquest for the perpetuation of their doctrines, all else upon it being blank vanities. They have kept you away from the true business of your lives, and have mesmerized you, alternately terrifying and delighting you by unreal fancies; now exhibiting to you a paradise and at another time a nightmare. They have involved you in a perpetual shadow, discouraging you of all hopes of brightness until your celestial birth. By exhibiting only your[Pg 248] grosser parts, and threatening the vengeance of an austere and capricious god of their own imaginary creation, they both degrade you and belittle your conceptions of the Deity. You could bend your faces upward with a better sincerity, if, instead of following phantoms all these ages, with your feet in the air, you could show a truer interpretation of the divine purpose in establishing a happier and more perfect dwelling together.

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

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

It is to be noted, as a coincidence proving the unity of all intelligence within the universe, that we have designed an architecture not unlike that of your ancient Greece. Our isolated exteriors, such as villas and country residences, bear a close resemblance to some of your ancient[Pg 250] styles. In our cities we have been obliged to conform to the condition of aerial navigation, which has greatly restricted our elevated ornamentation, and forced upon us a system of curves instead of angles in our projections.

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

By a natural adaption, these glass roofs have become inseparably connected with our religious lives. Our interest in the wonderful nightly exhibitions which they permit is increased by the general knowledge we have cultivated of the character and motions of the heavenly[Pg 251] bodies. As a consequence, there are but few among us who cannot describe the paths and directions of the planets; and it is quite safe to say that a majority of our people can compute the periods of opposition and conjunction between them. No other exhibition so feeds and stimulates our religious impulses, as the grand display of divine power in the unceasing motions of the spheres. We bring the spectacle within our households, and dwell with it. It is the altar upon which we worship the great unseen.

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

[Pg 252]These extensive halls are a necessity to the social character of our people. You may imagine how an intercourse based on perfect equality, and with the paramount idea of obtaining pleasure by bestowing it, would have its enjoyments enlarged by the unrestricted and unselected numbers participating. Music and dancing are delights with us beyond your experience. We enjoy the advantages of atmospheric conditions and a degree of gravitating force which are peculiarly adapted to heighten these enjoyments. Our voice tones, seldom without cultivation, acquire an energy and brilliancy in our atmosphere unknown to you. A combination of trained voices with us is so vastly superior to instrumental music, that the latter is not known except as a novelty. Since the force of gravity is less with us our bodies are much lighter than yours, and our motions are consequently more airy and graceful. In movements like dancing there is less muscular energy expended, and a greater pleasure attained.

Under these vast transparent domes, looking out upon the universe of planets and stars, we dance, and sing our hymns of praise to the Deity, asking for nothing, but uniting our voices in the rhythms of poetry and music in[Pg 253] a thanksgiving for the pleasures of life, and for that guidance which has directed us clear of the deadly superstitions of our neighboring planet, and for that intelligence which has led us to find our true religious duties in exercising our better impulses within our own fields of action.

Over our business quarters these upper stories, less ornate and well ventilated, serve the purposes of factories and work shops, where the sun’s rays, not so intense as with you, owing to our greater distance from it, are let in to brighten the hours of those who toil. Among these locations of industry are conditions that would surprise you. There is the indispensable anteroom beside the entrance of each, where, enjoying the comfortable furniture, may be found a number of operatives waiting for the beginning of the three-hour shift. They are all on terms of easy familiarity, yet among them may be found the president of the grand council, who manages the affairs of the city, the lecturer who presides at the temple, and other prominent worthies mingled with the others who have achieved no honors beyond the work bench. The person who is most complimented among the number is the one who has just been granted an advance of one[Pg 254] grade in the skill of his calling. He has attained what would be an equivalent in your society to the honors of a collegiate degree, with the very material difference in his favor, that for years to come, and perhaps as long as he lives, his income is permanently increased by an enhanced value to his labor. No competition will ever, under our system, render valueless this achievement of his.

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

But while we have found it wise to honor and protect manual skill, the physical strength of our people has for many ages been a subject of general attention. Among the productions of the Supreme Author which he is engaged in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance[Pg 255] on your planet is surely man himself, as a being animal as well as mental. As an indolent, weak and passive body is usually associated with a mind of the same character, it is only by the cultivation of both together that society improves. You have evidences enough of the inseparable connection between mental and physical energy, and yet your cultivation of the body has engaged but little attention. It seems to us one of the most serious objections to your religious abstractions, that the spirit of all of them tends to deny or belittle the great service of healthy sinews and nerves in the progress of social improvement.

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

Civilization, at a certain degree of its progress, is expected to assume duties which until then, have been faithfully performed by nature alone. Like a good mother she has provided, in your primitive state, against[Pg 256] the degeneration of your bodies by the operation of her universal law, the survival of the fittest. In your social betterment you can reasonably be expected to provide for yourselves some substitute to maintain that standard of hardihood and strength which had formerly been kept up by your primitive struggles for existence.

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

The neglect of your opportunities in this direction is more surprising, when it is considered how greatly you are suffering from it; for although the achievement of a more general perfection of form and strength is invaluable[Pg 257] to you, as laying the foundation of a larger average of mental power and activity, yet this is not more important to your society than the easy and certain eradication by judicious matings of the most persistent and fatal of your diseases. It is appalling to estimate the sum of human misery perpetually transmitted congenitally in diseased tissues and functional defects.

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

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

[Pg 258]We are not embarrassed as you would be by protests of an infringement of personal liberty, because we have arrived beyond that stage where law and its enforcement are required. Official recommendation supported by a united public opinion, without any penalty for non-compliance except the general condemnation, is our only resort in directing the conduct of our people. Under such a system, any violation of individual rights is impossible. It is enough in our society to determine that a measure is for the common good, to secure its adoption without dissent.

Accordingly, it comes within the province of our Government Health Department to direct, and in some degree supervise, those marital engagements out of which our numbers are so constantly replenished. This important business is closely associated with measures designed in other ways to promote our health, and may be said to begin at the birth of every child. Each infant is carefully examined by medical experts, and registered. Every peculiarity or bodily defect is recorded, and rules of management furnished, as remedies, if found necessary. Every person, young or old, is required periodically to pass a like examination. The personal health[Pg 259] register is open to all, and the bodily condition of every inhabitant may be in that way ascertained. None fail to avail themselves of information so greatly concerning themselves. Incipient diseases are in a vast number of cases remedied by this discovery of their unsuspected presence, and the habits of life are often changed in time to head off some latent malady, which in its early stages, nothing but medical science could reveal.

The system establishes a public record of the physical standing, either in lurking disease or deformity, of every individual; and as it is made the duty of our health department to declare its judgment of approval in every marriage contract, we have no transmitted disease or deformities of body running through generations, and multiplying the miseries of life, as you have. We have long ago stamped out by this method three-fourths of the diseases which are nourished by the habits of civilization. By this means we have secured a race of men and women so physically perfect as to cause existence to be accepted as a grateful patrimony. You have interrogated nature in her laws of development, and in her processes of modification both in forms and qualities of things, and with a knowledge so acquired, you have cultivated a world of[Pg 260] animal and vegetable organisms to your better service. We have done that, too; but we have accomplished in that line something of incomparably more importance to us, in advancing together by due cultivation and care our animal as well as our intellectual selves.

You cannot fail to discover in this, one of the effects of that striking divergence between our civilization and yours, due to widely different interpretations of the divine will. We look upon our planet with all its appurtenances as a bequest which has been delivered into our keeping for that assistance in progression so plainly the best and most exalted business of our lives, and so unmistakably pleasing to the Supreme Author that every degree of its accomplishment is rewarded by signs of his favor. From our better demonstrated spiritual belief, we derive the inspiration to increase and bestow upon each other the best things of life; while you, under religious promptings from the same high source, condemn yourselves to abstinence and austerity. You so misconceive the true relations between spiritual and material forces, that instead of regarding each as the nursery and builder-up of the other, you have devised a theory which brings them into antagonism as diverse influences; the exercise[Pg 261] of material concerns, as you assume, tending to lead you away from the divinity.

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

Your doctrine of the absolute divorce of spiritual and material interests, by wasting your best parts in the service of the world-condemning deity of your imagination, and surrendering your temporal affairs to the sole exercise of your lower sentiments and feelings, has spread its dire effects, and may be traced in every phase of your society. Out of it comes that singular disregard for each other in all things except the spiritual, and that perverted estimate of goodness, which has consigned your science[Pg 262] and learning with their influences, together with your whole world of industry, to places where unassisted and unencouraged they must work out their own doubtfully admitted and tardy rewards; while your best enthusiasm and most active morality is led to waste among your many unreasoning schemes of salvation.

What but this unwarranted dissociation of spirit and matter, of the body and soul, of your physical and intellectual parts, regarding one as the degrading yokemate of the other instead of the counterpart and co-worker, has taken all the heart out of your lives, hidden from you the moral possibilities within your worldly reach, and reduced the only existence you are so far called upon to improve into a dead and useless hibernation of your divinest faculties? What more readily excuses and defends your indifference to the hard lines of human labor, and your toleration of a system which dooms most of you to perpetual dependence, than those mossgrown traditions which, from their selected quarters among the supernatural and unseen, are not disturbed or interested by your social wrongs, and which in truth find their best patronage and most profitable employment where most prevail the miseries of life? Just in the degree in which you are[Pg 263] already emancipated from these barren illusions, does your most humane work in social progress appear.

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

You turn over the surface of the Earth and gather its fruits, never doubting the superhuman forces in conjunction which reward your labor; and yet your intellectual tillage is left to take its chances among circumscribed opportunities which no combined effort has attempted to enlarge. Your progress cannot be otherwise than uncertain and your governments will always be unstable in their foundations under your system, which at its best furnishes scarcely one disciplined mind in a hundred, and[Pg 264] the acquirements of that one, too, resulting only from a spontaneous individual impulse, with, in most cases, no higher motives than self-gain and advancement.

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

We have, like you, wealth with its self-rewarding luxuries, but its character is very different. Its chosen pleasures and inclinations are unlike yours. Acquisitiveness has no such controlling motives as with you. The hope of social elevation, the anxiety to place the sufferings of poverty beyond reach, and the love of power, are not elements in our desire for gain. As an inducement to the accumulation of wealth, all these motives are supplanted by the one overweening passion for distinguishment which its possession affords, by contributing to the well-being and happiness of others. The even opportunities of life, and the entire absence of poverty as you have it, with its miseries, do away with the most fertile stimulus to individual greed among you; and the strong passion to hoard, which you call avarice, becomes with us, from the singleness of its motives, one of the noblest of our religious aspirations. Whatever luxuries wealth provides for itself are shared by all; and since the nature and form of our society precludes the necessity[Pg 266] of alms-giving, charity, as you understand it, is unknown. The general dissemination of self-pride and independence, as much the result of our religious beliefs as of our political and educational methods, secures us against those evils of indiscriminate charity which are found to paralyze industry everywhere upon the Earth, in its present stage of development.

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

Our rich contribute largely from their substance to the purposes of education, with a philanthropy that is greatly intensified by the religious enthusiasm gratified by the[Pg 267] act; but they do not build nor contribute to our temples of worship as yours do, since the attendance upon these is unsolicited and voluntary, and a mere pleasurable gratification of our spiritual hopes and aspirations. Unattended by saving forms and conditions, as with you, the worship within our temples is not considered of consequence to our spiritual welfare. These religious centers, unlike yours, assume no power to condone or compromise with evil. No burdened, unclean conscience comes to them with the hope of absolution, to return again laden with its misdeeds for another purging. No wholesale peculator brings a portion of his evil gains as an atonement for the inflicted miseries of his avaricious career. There is nothing whatever within our temples or surrounding them, but the peace and self conscious satisfaction of the divine co-operation in our efforts to cultivate ourselves, and the praise and glory of our own success forms the spirit of our worship.

Our society being without exclusiveness, and the ostentation of riches a thing unknown, there is no ambition to get beyond the general fare in dwellings. The whole city block, surmounted by its one continuous roof, may be either a single or a number of dwellings, to accord[Pg 268] with the incomes of its occupants. Under our land system the cost of rent is such a small item in the living expenses, that all are enabled to share alike in their housings, and to equally enjoy the benefit of our wholesome sanitary provisions. No one amongst us dwells in a hovel. We labor that the surroundings of all shall be uniformly pleasant and comfortable. With us the suspicion of unseen misery is enough to disturb the pleasures of life. Besides the unpleasant suggestions of discomfit which a rough and incommodious dwelling would arouse, it would be considered by us a painful violation of taste, and a sacrifice of the opportunities of art.

Consequently within the limits of our cities you will not find any external distinction among our dwelling places, to denote the financial standing of their occupants. But as a whole block becomes occasionally occupied by a single family, whose large fortune enables them to enjoy its magnificent proportions, there is not wanting within those luxuries of wealth urged by the prevailing tastes. The establishment becomes the pride and pleasure of its locality. In conformity with all other of the city’s blocks, it has three lofty stories. The lower one on each of its facades consists of a series of Corinthian columns[Pg 269] with highly wrought capitals, resting upon which, and forming the second story elevation, are a line of arches, supporting the flush outer walls of the story above. This story, which is abundantly lighted by its transparent roof, has its exterior surface decorated in bas relief with architraves and cornices designed in our elaborate styles. Every block has an arched and vestibuled main entrance at each of its four corners, over which there rises a tower containing a powerful electric light, illuminating at night the interior as well as the surrounding streets. As our thoroughfares which radiate from the city’s center are straight, and better adapted for business and the industries, they are devoted to these purposes. Consequently, on the circular or concentric streets are located most of our dwellings; the choicest of which, as to location, are those fronting the parks, which, as I have already given you to understand, circumscribe at intervals every neighborhood of the city. It is, then, in these convex or concave fronts, standing on opposite lines of the park belt, that the abodes of wealth are mostly to be found.

You would discover the whole of one of these buildings, except its middle story, devoted to the use of the public, and containing on its first floor a number of class rooms[Pg 270] assigned to a system of teaching to which your kindergartens bear some similarity, and a few others in which the scholars have advanced to a higher grade. The character of the instruction would be indicated by the appliances and implements of industry everywhere to be seen, the busy use of them at intervals by the classes, and the pride and emulation of the scholars, in their struggling efforts toward skill in their handling. In another room you would find a smaller class, the special proteges of the owner, composed of a few, who, by the early manifestations of an unusual promise, were being assisted in their pursuance of some branch of science or art.

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

The upper story is a public assembly chamber for occasions of rejoicing and pleasure, and is adorned with statuary, fountains, and blooming plants. This grand apartment[Pg 271] is so tempered in warmth by the cheap appliances of our municipality, that it becomes a winter garden during our long, inclement seasons, when the parks are sere and icy.

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

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

Your passion to get and hold is intensified and brutalized[Pg 272] in its lack of regard for the consequences to others, by the large number of artificial necessities only attainable in your society by a considerable accumulation of money, the want of which implies degradation, and a sacrifice of many things that have grown to be dear to life. Every addition to the savings removes to a greater distance that dreaded condition of your civilization, known as poverty. The insatiable character of the hoarding is not unlike the motive of overcaution in a wanderer, who, terrorized by the appearance of a dreaded animal in his path, increases his distance by flight far beyond all possible approach of the dangerous presence.

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

[Pg 273]Through centuries of legislation and usuage you have established various processes, by which wealth is enabled to extract an undue portion of the earnings of industry. Among these processes may be named rates of interest on money graded to the necessities of borrowers, rents gauged by the ability of tenants to pay, monopoly supplies with prices fixed just below the point of compelled abstinence, variations in the value of mediums of exchange, with other unsuppressed agencies promoting frequent change of values for the opportunities of capital and the distress of labor; stupendous aggregations of wealth reversing the laws of economy by advancing the price of necessities on the one hand and depressing the wages of labor on the other; and more successful than all, a system of land proprietorship which permits holders of the Earth’s surface, in addition to their privilege of exacting a large portion of the profits of industry in rent, a further right to pocket, in the form of appreciated values of their land, an unearned share of the collective fruits of the industries which surround them.

Our divergent views of existence are exemplified in the care we have taken to provide for an evener division of the products of industry. With us, property is the[Pg 274] means, and not the end, beyond which there are any number of attainments in life incomparably more desirable and beneficial to society, and our legislation has been directed chiefly to the care and cultivation of these. The great aim of our government has been to provide for the well-being of persons, while it may be said of yours that the most attention has been devoted to the welfare of property; by which is meant its protection and increase, regardless of the manner of its distribution, or the doubtful methods of its extraction from the energies of labor. In the pursuit of this policy you are only perpetuating, without much change, your primitive conditions, when the strong arm gathered the most of the wealth. Your early born instincts do not seem sufficiently evolutionized to co-operate in any undertaking which denies opportunities of the strong over the weak; and the unhappy consequence is a society so mercenary that the general estimate among you is not from any quality which indicates a nearness to the Deity, but principally from the cool numerical calculations of property attachments.

The unity of our spiritual and temporal interests makes it necessary that every government act shall be a religious one. The spirit of kindness, and charity to all[Pg 275] which is the only deserving part of your religions, we have taken as the foundation of all our public acts, and have made it the cornerstone of government itself. Our legislation, if the mere assent to measures recommended can be called by that name, considers first the welfare of persons comprising the whole, subservient to which every possible interest must take its place. And the welfare of persons, in our politico-religious point of view, is dependent upon the proper and equitable rewards of industry; their equal opportunities of acquiring knowledge; an encouragement of their morality by a recognition of their virtues, making it the necessary stepping-stone to their advancement; and the sweeping away of every social form which establishes a sense of inferiority, destroys the pride of self, and institutes that feeling of degradation which is the most prolific source of evil in society.

It is easy to note your tendency in these directions. The barbaric institution of force and its concomitant of fear, as agencies in the management and control of men, is gradually being eliminated from all your progressive governments, and the better methods of assent and co-operation are getting in their salutary work of emancipation. Knowledge is spreading itself among you—no longer a[Pg 276] dessert only upon a few favored tables, but a chief dish under the newly acquired appetites of the many. The glamour of your wealth and the impressiveness of your religion are losing their reverential respect, with the focused light directed upon their doubtful origins. You have inaugurated the beginning of a new faith, with better spiritual foundations, not condemning the world and its society, but loving it, following in the footsteps of the divine presence within its limits, taking a hand in its affairs, and directing them towards the better possibilities in view.

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

Society assumes its beliefs under an impulse of progression, as much controlled by evolutionary laws as the organic substances of the Earth. No one can teach the world. With a free exercise of its intellectual faculty, it teaches itself. The power of an idea, among the moral forces, is in its corresponding with a proper stage of[Pg 277] development to receive it. A solitary thought is useless, as a moral agent, without its already existing half-formed figments scattered about in society. Its power to move lies in the coalescence of its parts. Ideas and beliefs have been adopted at different stages of your civilization, and have served as great motors to progress, which, ages before, were enunciated without impression. Society rids itself of its rudimentary impressions and beliefs, in much the same manner that an animal, under changing environments, sheds its old organs and develops new ones. Every new belief affecting society is subservient to it, and is only adopted slowly and by degrees. If it be a truth making its way, its final installation is marked by an unquestioned acquiescence and an undisturbed tranquility. If an error, agitation and unrest mark the whole period of its accession.

The coming of your Messiah was more than you have supposed, because grander and more imposing than its assumed supernaturalisms was its enthronement of two central ideas. One was the adoption of the sentiment of brotherhood as a means of adjusting the relations of men with each other, and the other was the inauguration of spiritual hope as a guide in the actions of life. Out of[Pg 278] this beginning has come all that is good in your social progress. The general acceptance of these ideas, as agencies in your civilization, began its work by weakening the old society, and it finally destroyed it by extinguishing the bands of physical force which held it together. The cultivation of these inspirational beliefs in their purity, as they were bestowed upon you by the divine intelligence, would have soon brought to you the same peace and good will that they have shed upon the inhabitants of Mars; but you were not to be indulged so soon in this happy offering. The few who had been dominating the many for ages, appropriating their earnings, and even sacrificing their lives, in a lust for power and wealth, were not to let escape them so fine an opportunity to hold the simple-minded by a new agency, ten-fold more subjugating than the old method of coercion by force. The religious superstition of the age, a mere diversion for the untaught multitude, inert and unpromising, was vitalized by the infusion of these new, humane and spiritual impulses; and, with many added ingeniously contrived supernaturalisms, and an attractive moral code, it was built up into a system and organized into a society which has borne its heavy weight upon your progress,[Pg 279] and spread its dominion more successfully than the war-like legions it supplanted. It has accomplished no good which is not entirely due to the irresistible expansion of the truths it appropriated at its inception out of nature’s evolutionary process of social development, viz., the regard for one another, as a guide in all the actions of life, and that hope eternal which spiritualizes and elevates our existence.

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

But you will have a second coming, my brother, unperverted by the craft of your seers, and uncontaminated with the superstitions of a crude society like the first. It will be of you and a part of you, raising you up to a higher esteem of yourselves, glorifying you as the progenitors[Pg 280] of all good, under a divine and irresistible law of betterment. It will relieve you of the evil thoughts that have condemned and degraded you. The new hope, like a newly discovered strength, will push out in all directions, in the exercise of its salutary work. Instead of discourse and exhortation to the lowly and down trodden, with promises as impossible of denial as of verification, it will lift them upon their feet by the strong hand of a better social method. Like the first coming, its symbolic picture will be carved into monuments, reproduced in all the departments of art, and cherished as the chief reminder of your duties and obligations to the Deity. It will be no symbol of anguish and sorrow, like the first, but in place of it THE DIVINE FIGURE OF A STRONG MAN SUPPORTING AND ENCOURAGING A WEAK ONE. Yes, my brother, you will have a s-e-c-o-n-d c-o-m—

What is all this? I raise myself upon my couch The sun is an hour up. Through my window I see an[Pg 281] enquiring group, marvelling at my tardiness. My cows linger for their milking, and utter their complaints in a gentle lowing. My pet deer stand with their large wondering eyes fixed upon me, and the appearance of my face at the pane has drawn toward me my whole restless and scrabbling flock of poultry, impatient for their morning feed. I look toward the easy chair and it is empty. My celestial visitor has departed.

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Man from Mars: His Morals, Politics and Religion

...THE...
Man From Mars

PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION.

INTRODUCTORY.

CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER V.

CHAPTER VI.

CHAPTER VII.

CHAPTER VIII.

CHAPTER IX.

CHAPTER X.

CHAPTER XI.

CHAPTER XII.

CHAPTER XIII.

CHAPTER XIV.

CHAPTER XV.

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE