■3 I'i 
 
 MORALS 
 POLITICS AND 
 v\ REUGION 
 
 
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 in 2010 with funding from 
 Duke University Libraries 
 
 http://www.arcliive.org/details/manfrommarsliismoOOsimp 
 
...THE... 
 
 Man From Mars 
 
 HIS MORALS, POLITICS 
 AND RELIGION 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM SIMPSON 
 
 THIRD EDITION 
 
 Revised and Enlarged by an Extended Preface and a 
 Chapter on Woman Suffrage 
 
 Press of 
 
 E. D. Beattie, 207 Sacramento St. 
 
 San Francisco 
 
Copyright, 1900. by the Author. 
 

 TO THE MEMORY 
 OF 
 
 JAMES LICK 
 
 who, by his munitkent bequests to 
 
 SCIENCE, INDUSTRY, CHARITY AND EDUCATION 
 
 has indicated in the manner of their 
 disposal, that humanity, wisdom, and enlightenment, arising 
 out of the convictions of modern thought, which holds these, 
 his beneficiaries to be the noblest and divinest pursuits of 
 mankind, and the only possible agencies in the betterment of 
 society. 
 
 This Book is reverently inscribed 
 
 BY THE AUTHOR. 
 
PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION 
 
 TO THIRD E 
 
 Any one advanced in life who has enjoyed opportuni- 
 ties 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 sus- 
 picion, 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 dis- 
 
6 rREFACE. 
 
 covery overcomes every sentiment except pity for those 
 who had been leading him astraj', 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 delu- 
 sions having their origin in the past, and whose chief pur- 
 pose 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 understand- 
 ing. He discovers goodness in many places w^here his 
 teachers had denied its existence, and its definition has 
 become so changed, under his broader \4sion, that 
 humanity seems teeming with it everywhere, and is ruled 
 by it, and those departments of it most affecting societ}'' 
 he observes to be iticreasing, and that instead of like an 
 exotic in uncongenial soil, hard to be retained by man- 
 kind, 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 con\'ictions make the world seem a 
 
PREFACE. 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 belit- 
 tled the world, and has discouraged humanit}^ in improving 
 it, under the mistaken assumption of the world's small 
 comparative importance in the great outcome; the circum- 
 stantial particulars, of which, it pretends to hold by divine 
 revelation. Ha\'ing rid himself of these beliefs by a pro- 
 cess 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 worldl}' 
 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 firml}' established in his mind, 
 and the undeserved reverence from early training removed, 
 
8 PREFACE. 
 
 he becomes especially fitted to examine these old beliefs, 
 and to pass judgment upon them, without that taint of 
 blind de-v'otional 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 unques- 
 tioned, the material progress of mankind was least, with- 
 out any compensating condition to make up for the dark- 
 ness, 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 obsen-es, fur- 
 ther, of these old beliefs, that as modem 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 afiairs grow less. From these 
 well attested facts he arrives at the conviction that those 
 religious societies, founded upon, and which have for cen- 
 turies 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 
 
PREFACE. q 
 
 such neutralizing and retarding eflfect 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 man- 
 kind. 
 
 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 tur- 
 moil discussing them since their introduction, and the 
 more salutory lessons of morality and spiritual hope have 
 been outranked and submerged by these vain and profit- 
 less discussions. These beautiful and attractixe lessons of 
 love, kindness, and charity, exemplified and taught 
 through a personalit}-, whose gift of genius was to see, 
 
lO PREFACE. 
 
 above all other men, the needs of humanitj', have attracted 
 men and women into these religious societies as the hun- 
 gry are attracted b}^ 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 e\il spirit 
 of Shoel. 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 bj' 
 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. 
 
PREFACI3. J J 
 
 If it were the sole purpose of all Christian organiza- 
 tions 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 bet- 
 terment 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 senti- 
 ments 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 super- 
 naturalisms, made a part of these attractive precepts, were 
 adopted and upheld; bringing into the world an endless 
 multitude of barren illusions, provoking acrimonious con- 
 tentions 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 com- 
 
12 PREFACE. 
 
 pare 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 beUefs during 
 the short period of two generations onl)'. They have 
 seen many of these ancient supernatural dreams in all 
 their power of authorit}", and have watched them wilt, and 
 finally disappear, under some silent influence, after argu- 
 ment and reason had exhausted themselves against them 
 in vain. They have Ustened to those weekly expositions 
 of infernal horrors, common at one time, in all the fear 
 and trembhng of childhood, and have later, witnessed the 
 theories and beliefs which inspired them, with many others 
 equally obnoxious to reason, relegated to silence and dis- 
 use, as antiquated and worn furniture, no longer servic- 
 able, is consigned to the rubbish heap. Only two genera- 
 tions ago they have seen the literatiu'e 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 worthj- 
 human enterprise. They have witnessed the triumph of 
 
PREFACE. 1 3 
 
 science in its many skirmishes with tradition, and have 
 been interested lookers-on, while the famous battle of evo- 
 lution raged. They have seen it from start to finish, and 
 the amusing spectacle of its end, when theology, meta- 
 phorically speaking, dragged its bruised and trembUng 
 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 genera- 
 tions only, they have seen the world arise to such pro- 
 digies of advancement, such marvels of practical charit}'- 
 and such activities in the pursuit of knowledge, in so 
 close and quick succession as to fill them with bewilder- 
 ment 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 civil- 
 ized 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 builduig of roads, bridges and aqueducts, this tun- 
 
14 PREFACE. 
 
 nelling 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 drop- 
 ping 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 resourse for warmth and cook- 
 ing, 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 
 
PREFACE. 15 
 
 ones unheard of, when railroads were in an experimental 
 stage, when the belief that ghosts flitted about the grave- 
 yards 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 comparitively 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 knowl- 
 edge, is an expansion after the removal of a pressure that 
 
1 6 PREFACE. 
 
 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 grater advances, when we esti- 
 mate the weight of opposing forces. There had been for 
 centuries nothing more discouraging to the formation of 
 scientific hopes and ambitions than the theological meth- 
 ods of thought, and the atmosphere which surronded 
 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 especi- 
 ally one requiring such a monopoly of mental energy and 
 attention as to interfere with the Christian ideas of con- 
 stant and unremitting devotion. There was no cultivated 
 field, during the thousand years of supreme church juris- 
 diction, 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 pro- 
 claimed divine assistance and authority. It already pos- 
 sessed a knowledge of all things appertaining to the earth 
 and the "firmament" above it which the Almighty 
 
PREFACE. 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 pos- 
 sessed 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 
 Almight}^ 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 metaphys- 
 ical argument, from one end of the church to the other, 
 which remain to this day as the most remarkable curiosi- 
 ties of sinuous reasoning and constrained thought on 
 record. All questions of a scientific character had but 
 
I8 PREFACE. 
 
 one method of settlement, were they authorized or denied 
 b}' scripture ? If denied as they usually were, the dis- 
 turber 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 theo- 
 logians 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 slumber- 
 ing in the darkness of barbarism and superstition punish- 
 ing 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 mis- 
 fortune of dwarfed fields and diminished harvests. The 
 church, since its complete \'ictory over paganism in the 
 
PREFACE. 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 sensual- 
 ity, not a historian whose veracity is not doubted, and 
 not a single towering man of letters. This, too, in a peo- 
 ple, among whom mingled the decendants 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 accotmt of their benefit to man- 
 kind, brought all its powers to bear for their suppression. 
 In trying to do so it pursued the same cruel policy it had 
 adopted in former contests. These cruelties and intimi- 
 dations 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 
 di\dsion known as the Reformation, early in the sixteenth 
 century. Coming nearer our own time, and having to 
 
20 PREFACE. 
 
 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 his- 
 tory. It was noted throughout as a desperate and con- 
 tinuous 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 deser\'ed, 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 won- 
 derful men of genius who came into the world during 
 that time, who, with all the restrictions and limitations 
 
PRBPACE. 21 
 
 cast about them by the two churches, laid such new foun- 
 dations in truth and learning, that nothing was to be done 
 by subsequent workers in the same lines but build upon 
 them. BufFon, who may justlj'- 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 Reforma- 
 tion, and forced to recant publicly and to print his recant- 
 ation. "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 discov- 
 erer of sex in plants, was constantly hampered and con- 
 strained in his thoughts by the threats of the Reforma- 
 tion. A pretended miracle of turning water into blood 
 appeared in his vicinitj^, 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 allov/s such a miracle to take place," said 
 he, "Satan endeavors, and so does his ungodly and 
 
22 PREFACE. 
 
 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 discov- 
 ery 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 unpropituous. 
 
 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 Copernician 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 
 
PREFACE. 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 mj' 
 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 
 
24 PREPACK. 
 
 church condemned the theorj^ of the earth's movement, 
 Calvin asked, ' ' Who will venture to place the authorit)^ 
 of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit ? ' ' Wesley 
 also denounced the new theor>', declaring it to "tend 
 toward infidelity." The grand men who were coming 
 forward in their efforts to advance knovv'ledge unavoid- 
 ably encroached upon many of the * ' truths of scripture ' ' 
 and both churches were equally engaged in their efforts 
 to suppress them, bj^ argument if possible, but if not, by 
 fire and stake. The Protestant chturch, 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 Servitus 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 char- 
 
PREFACE. 25 
 
 acter, 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 ques- 
 
26 PREFACE. 
 
 tious 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 an}' adop- 
 tion of the Hebrew legends ; that these legends did not 
 become a part of the church, until nearly a century after 
 
PREFACE. 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 coniiction, 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 man- 
 agement 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 defer- 
 ence 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 adversar>% a mere layman, published a book 
 "Christianity Restored" setting forth his advanced views, 
 and with a reckless temerity, sent the reformer a copy. 
 
28 PREFACE. 
 
 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 doc- 
 trines 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 Ser\'etus 
 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 suc- 
 ceeded 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 
 
PREFACE. 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 stu- 
 pendous 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 AEIVE." 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. Ser- 
 vetus, 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, dis- 
 guising himself, and hiding in the outskirts. What 
 induced him to take such desperate chances is not posi- 
 tively known. His intention is supposed to have been to 
 go to Naples, and to be gone from Geneva on the first favor- 
 able opportunity. Weary of confinement, and always 
 piousl}' inclined, he ventured imprudently to show himself. 
 
30 PREFACE. 
 
 at the evening sen^ice 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 I^ords, 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 terri- 
 bly 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 
 mj' behalf. ' ' And here is another one : ' ' M}' most 
 honored I^ords, 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 doub- 
 
PREFACE. -J 
 
 let, 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 interro- 
 gator, 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 Hke 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 
 
32 PREFACE. 
 
 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 sufi^ering. Immediately before giving up the 
 ghost, with a last expiring eflbrt 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 
 
PREFACE. 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 effec- 
 tively 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 ex- 
 ample 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 exis- 
 tence appeared to depend, which has, more than any 
 
34 PREFACE. 
 
 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 fal,len 
 from a state of perfection is, to ecclesiasticism, a raking 
 blow from stem to stern, compared with all previous bat- 
 tles 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 sus- 
 picion is not entirely without warrant that it ma)^ have 
 been adopted with a purpose of creating miseries and 
 sorrows in the multitude for the profitable occupation of 
 a divinel}'' authorized few in the buisness 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 
 
PRKFACS. 35 
 
 the undeserved dejection of criminality, and the downcast 
 of shame, where of right belongs the reflection of hope- 
 fulness 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 ser\dces of theological assistance and interces- 
 
36 PREFACE. 
 
 sion. But for the doubt that exists, and has probably 
 always existed, except among the ignorant and sluggish 
 minded, of the truth of this peurile 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 can- 
 not 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 ser- 
 vices were performed in the middle of the sixteenth cen- 
 tury. 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 \dllage after 
 village collecting the natives by means of a hand bell. 
 
PREFACE. 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 cleary 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 witk 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 
 occurance 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 state- 
 
38 PREFACE. 
 
 ments 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 after- 
 wards 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 disprov- 
 ing 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 under- 
 went 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 commu- 
 nication by letters ; accordingly, the first of the Xavier 
 miracles began to appear about ten years after his death. 
 They multiplied from time to time begining, it is reason- 
 able to suppose, about the gossiping hearth and eagerly 
 confirmed by the cloister, until they began to be men- 
 tioned in church literature. The first of which, a letter 
 twenty years after his death by a Jesuit father entitled ' ' On 
 
^ 
 
 <<_ 
 
 religious affairs in the Indies" says nothing of Xavier's 
 miracles. The next, a publication called "History of 
 India" thirty-six years after his death by another Jesuit 
 father dwells lightly on the alleged miracles. The next, 
 sixty years later, a " I^ife of Xavier" shows an increase 
 of his miracles, and representing him as casting out 
 devHs, 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 Ufe 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 
 
40 PREFACE. 
 
 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 reas- 
 oning 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 enlighten- 
 ment. 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 e\'ils, 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, 
 
PREFACE. 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 and earl}^ 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, monop- 
 
42 PREPACK. 
 
 olized 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 doc- 
 trinal 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. lyUther was describing his frequent 
 interviews with the de\-il 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 liter- 
 ally ; 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 
 
PREFACE. 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 mis- 
 fortunes of life. 
 
 In these beliefs the two churchs 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 dis- 
 astrous to humanity do not properly belong, and should 
 have no place in Christianity. They are not only without 
 the aiithority 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 cradels 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 
 
44 PREFACE. 
 
 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 j'outh. 
 
 The most inspiring and hopeful spectacle in all human- 
 ity is an assemblage, wrapt in the devotional exercises of 
 Christianity, listening attentivelj^ to the eloquent minis- 
 trations 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 consider- 
 
PREFACE. 45 
 
 ation beyoud 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 wor- 
 shiped 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 inspira- 
 tion of it all is, that wherever mankind dwells, be it in 
 castles or cottages, amid the crow^ds 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 kind- 
 ness 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 enHghten and control the 
 affairs of men, more and more certain, as time rolls on, 
 will come protests and rebelUons against the temporary 
 triumph of evil. 
 
 Of that entrancing story which has captured civiliza- 
 
46 PREFACE. 
 
 tion, 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, sacreligi- 
 ously involving the Diety as a promoter of them ; wild 
 fictions of early ages, inventions of the infancy of man, 
 conflicting accounts of historical events, fragmentary 
 parts by difierent persons at different periods ; explana- 
 tions in many branches of science, now known to be mis- 
 taken 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 \dews 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 
 
PREFACE. 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 criter- 
 ion 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 exami- 
 nation 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, 
 
48 PREFACE. 
 
 must not refuse, but court the test of natural philosophy, 
 regardmg 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 pleas- 
 ure 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 ves- 
 tiges of Greek philosophy, and to miss the truth at last, 
 but they should teach him wherein true knowledge con- 
 sists, 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 
 
PREFACK. 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 deaUng with them is the only criterion it can 
 offer of its authority to succeeding times." * 
 
 How unHke 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 ; paralizing 
 thought, and substituting in its stead a blind faith, insti- 
 tuted 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 mur- 
 ders, incests, adulteries and obscenities, that would have 
 banished the book long since from the regions of refine- 
 ment 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 ; sanc- 
 tioning human slavery', and encouraging bloodshed by 
 battle ; setting an example of extortionate tithes for the 
 
 * Draper's InteUectual Deve'opemeut of Europe. 
 
50 PREFACE. 
 
 support of ecclesiasticism ; uttering the most heartrending 
 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 excom- 
 munications, b)^ which the older church terrorized human- 
 it}^ 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 lyord was kindled against this land 
 to bring upon it all the curses that are written in this 
 book." "Do not I hate them O I^ord that hate thee, j^ea 
 I hate them with a perfect hate. " " Thou shalt not suf- 
 fer 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 
 
PREFACE. 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 
 lyord 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. Bartholo- 
 mew with its 30,000 victims of fire and sword ; the Eng- 
 lish persecutions under Bloody Mary, in which three 
 hundred fellow-creatures perished ; the almost total anni- 
 hilation of the Albigenesis in the south of France. This 
 war was carried on with more ferocious cruelt}' than any 
 ever recorded in history ; the fanatical fury of the soldiers 
 was stimulated by the exortations of the clergy. At the 
 storming of Baziers, when it was proposed to spare the 
 Catholics, a monk exclaimed, "Kill all, God will recog- 
 nize his own," and the atrocious precept was but too well 
 observed. The war terminated by the complete devasta- 
 
52 PREFACE. 
 
 tion of the country, and the almost complete extermina- 
 tion of its inhabitants. Follo^^'ing along in the bloody 
 path of these barbaric scriptural commands, we have to 
 record the witch burnings of Europe and America, dur- 
 ing the term of Christian supremacy, calculated in the 
 hundreds of thousands ; the Crusades, and purely religi- 
 ous 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 kno\vn to be, the theological system of a low 
 social development ; this the terrible cost to humanit}', 
 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 pun- 
 ishments 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 worsnip, 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? 
 
PRBPACE. 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 com- 
 mander 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 cau- 
 tions 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 ob- 
 served everywhere in our present civilization. The inher- 
 ent 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 re- 
 pulsion 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 Ivord. ' ' 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 
 
54 PREFACE. 
 
 them, which is forcing Christianity into a purer worship, 
 and destroying its superstitons. 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 pre- 
 ser\dng, outside the sermon on the mount, and its exten- 
 sions. It is this natural religion of conscience, encourag- 
 ing and encouraged by science and reason, which has 
 wrested the control of civilization from ecclesiasticism. Its 
 intellectusl strength prevails at last over the intellect- 
 ual strength of theolog)^ ; but the unthinking of the 
 multitude are many, and the battle commencing four cen- 
 turies 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, de- 
 stroyed 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 here- 
 after. All these things that it has lost are but perverted 
 
PREFACE. 55 
 
 offrisings from its body, not a part of the body itself 
 * * I^ove 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 Chris- 
 tian, and but for its early perversion at the hands of a 
 crafty priesthood, its intolerent 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. lyike 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 with- 
 out some apparent or suspected motive, in denial of his abso- 
 lute unselfishness, and the movement in its early stages, 
 partaking and wholly composed of his inspiration, was a 
 pure unselfish socialism. Its members were bound to- 
 gether by the closest brotherhood, loving and caring for 
 each other by divine command ; declared equal by a 
 
56 PREFACE. 
 
 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 wel- 
 come 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 argumentive opposition, were become so in- 
 creased 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 
 
PREFACE. 57 
 
 the sole purpose of increasing its numbers and of argu- 
 menting its political weight. They began by making a 
 compromise with paganism in adopting some of its ritu- 
 als, pandering to the imaginations of the uncultivated 
 multitude by spectacular display, inventing a sj^stem 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 Caesar did with his legions, 
 more bloody than Csesar, taking into their hands a move- 
 ment 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 super- 
 stition, 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, 
 
58 PREFACE. 
 
 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 phys- 
 ically 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 consci- 
 ence, and the intellectually strong are preying upon the 
 intellectuall}'' weak with as much cunning, as they were 
 in barbaric times. Civilization has increased the two last 
 mentioned evils. The strugghng 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 
 
PREFACE. 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 con- 
 signed 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 Diety. 
 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 
 b}' 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 
 fragrrance on the earth. 
 
6o PREFACE. 
 
 The foregoing was written to indicate that Hne 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 reverance, 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 
 
PREFACE. 6 1 
 
 large majority of the human race accept their opinions 
 from authority, and all authority heretofore has encour- 
 aged beliefs, which appear so inseparably connected with 
 the moral well being of society, and which hold in con- 
 tinued 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 opin- 
 ion of orthodox theologians that they should be retained 
 in their entirety, or of others that they should be abol- 
 ished, 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 know- 
 ing 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 per- 
 
62 PREPACK. 
 
 son, liberty of conscience, and libertj' of speech, there 
 has been, as yet, no adequate acknowledgement by man- 
 kind of the great services of the silent and avowed skep- 
 ticism which brought about the consumation 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 brother- 
 hood, and in that exact and even justice to all men, so 
 far as their practical services to humanitj'- in these direc- 
 tions 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 enlighten- 
 ment, 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 ration- 
 alism. That these new American rules of political equal- 
 ity, 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 
 
PREFACE. 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 diciples of these leaders of anti-theo- 
 logic thought. Our Declaration of Independence and 
 Federal Constitution, stand, to-day, grand achievements 
 of modern scientific thought, and conspicious 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, yeilded our- 
 selves to doctrines, conveyed to us through all the high- 
 ways of life, so assiduously, that neither infancy, youth, 
 manhood or old age, have escaped their tireless impor- 
 tunities 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 con- 
 clude, with this experience of the mutability of human 
 
64 PREFACE. 
 
 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 cata- 
 logue 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 promul- 
 gation of error is due to the selfish love of corporate 
 power, how much to a pure benevolence. Neither are 
 the brightest minds safe monitors in all things of thought. 
 Aristotle defended slavery, Hobbes persecution, Johnson 
 witchcraft, and Gladstone religious superstition ; but, for 
 all that, we shall never arrive at the extremity of despair ; 
 for a cultivation of the mind, the deductive use of positive 
 knowledge, and the untrammeled exercise of reason, lead 
 to truth, as directly, as the line of gravity points to the 
 center of the earth, and only by these will its reign be 
 established in the world. 
 
 W. S. 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 My habitation is upon the plateau of a mountain in 
 California. I entered this region and became a settler by 
 a fortuituous 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 sat foot upon it. 
 Reaching here late in the afternoon, I found myself too 
 far out of my path to return by daylight, and so, building 
 a fire, I spent my first night alone in this weird place. It 
 was the first time in my life that I had slept where some 
 human creature was not within the sound of my voice, 
 and from that night I date a change of sentiment, 
 thought, and feeling, which has altered my career, and 
 made me, what I have chosen to be, a recluse. 
 
66 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 I had been living in the world about thirty years amid 
 the artifical 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 exhib- 
 itions 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 suddenlj^ 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 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 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. 
 
68 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 There is a trout steam iu 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 foilage above a confused melody of birds, 
 who, I have reason to believe, assemble there for enter- 
 ment and gossip. 
 
 Outside of this watered region, my homestead is inter- 
 spersed with openmgs, 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 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 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 symmetery, 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 iriy step is no longer firm and elastic. Like them mj^ 
 share of life is growing to a close, and j^et 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 m)^ 
 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. 
 
70 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 lyOng 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 con- 
 fidence 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 dis- 
 pute 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 acquaint- 
 ance 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 moun- 
 tains, 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 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 7 1 
 
 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 favor- 
 ite pets, following me about like children. My acquaint- 
 ance 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 tor- 
 rid 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 nia.y look 
 upon life as a blessing. I have acquired enough knowl- 
 edge of some of the sciences to make an instrument or two 
 of service to me, and I take especial interest in my tele- 
 scope 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 
 
72 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 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 entertain- 
 ment which they furnish and the meditation they invoke. 
 I have learned all that is known of the motions and eccen- 
 tricities 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 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 73 
 
 bevaldering 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 
 whicTi arouses the activities of thought, it is, neverthe- 
 less, certain that I have not been submitted to a combina- 
 tion of those influences which render and error plausible. 
 The opinions and thoughts of the world come to me, and 
 I pass them in review with a full sense of the fallibility 
 of individual opinion, as well as an abiding faith in the 
 steady approach of that collective truth, which, sooner or 
 later, will overspread the world. 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 My telescope is mounted in an apartment adjoining my 
 cabin, with an elevated exposure, and has some extra 
 contrivances for the convenience of adjustment, designed 
 and constructed by myself. The instrument can be raised 
 and lowered at pleasure, and is protected by a movable 
 dome, which is easily laid aside by means of a couple of 
 pulHes. 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 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 en- 
 gages my attention is, excepting our satelite, 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 ma- 
 terially 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 temper- 
 ature, 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 
 
76 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 in arrears exactly in accordance with its changing posi- 
 tions and distances from the sun. From which we may- 
 infer, without a doubt, that its atmosphere contains moist- 
 ure of the same chemical composition as ours, and is con- 
 densed 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 un- 
 usual 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 
 
the; man from mars. 77 
 
 and ingenuity are free to exercise themselves, and the de- 
 sire to settle some of these disputed points to my own sat- 
 isfaction 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 head- 
 long through the heavens with a known velocity of fifty- 
 four thousand miles an hour. This planet was now 
 
78 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 v/ith iNIars on its westward course. 
 Dtiring these few days, I had forgotten everything else in 
 my eagerness to feast my ej-es on this rare show. The 
 nights had been favorable to observation; and each eve- 
 ning after turning my instrument on the rapidly approach- 
 ing planet, my interest became so transfixed and absorbed 
 that all mj' ordinary phj'sical wants were suppressed. 
 I had lost in these few days of mental excitement all inclin- 
 ation for foed 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 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 enongh 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, v/ere filling the air with an agree- 
 able 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 touch- 
 ing the physical condition of Mars, which each new obser- 
 vation tended to corroborate. I had my theory to give of 
 
8o THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 yearn- 
 ing 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 oppres- 
 sive silence and tranquility remained unbroken, and as I 
 seated myself in my observatory and adjusted the tele- 
 scope, I felt myself not quite in my accustomed vigor of 
 health. The temperature had perceptiblj' raised, when it 
 had usuall}'' 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 
 
THS MAN FROM MARS. 8 1 
 
 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 instru- 
 ment. A moment's reflection explained the matter. The 
 Earth had shaken. So trifling, however, was the dis- 
 turbance 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 num- 
 
82 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 ber 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, proportion- 
 ately 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 net- 
 work 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 collosal 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 myster- 
 iously upon me, was being followed now by a normal 
 condition of unrest. As the moon rose higher, its fanci- 
 ful 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 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 statute, 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. 
 
84 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 This strange figure entered my cabin, and without 
 introduction or sign of salutation seated himself in my 
 easy chair as though he were a member of my household, 
 an apparent rudeness which will be explained as I 
 proceed. I had now the first opportunity to get a good 
 survey of my visitor. He was a person of surpassing 
 loveliness. His face was of that spiritual kind which is 
 seldom seen off the canvass 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 ot his head and 
 beard, — both long and waving over shoulders and breast, 
 — was of a hue that can be best described as the color of 
 
the; man from mars. 85 
 
 the ripe filbert, with the fineness and lustre of unwoven 
 silk. His hands, although scrupulously clean and finel}- 
 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. M}^ 
 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 cer- 
 tainly 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 ver>' little importance among heavenly bodies. 
 Speaking of magnificent planets, what do you think of 
 Mars?" 
 
86 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 ' ' Mars stdts me, ' ' said my visitor. 
 
 Thinking my question too general, I inquired : ' ' Do 
 you think Mars inhabited ? ' ' 
 
 "I am a good proof that it is," said he. "I left that 
 planet — ^let me see — by your time, about one hour ago." 
 
 "I either misunderstood you, or you are not serious. 
 It is impossible. ' ' 
 
 "Ah, my brother," said he, "you are very little 
 advanced in a knowledge of the properities of intelligence. 
 I am here by a process as yet unknown to you, and 
 which may be best described in your language as rejflec- 
 tion. 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 transfering 
 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 87 
 
 close and interesting study of your social affairs, includ- 
 ing, 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 illum- 
 inating agent. I know your thoughts. You are sur- 
 prised at what I have said, and wish me to tell you some- 
 thing 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 corres- 
 ponding section of our planet, are widely different. In 
 ours, the cUmate 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 culti- 
 vation, 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 qual- 
 
88 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 ity of matter and intelligence peculiar to itself. The 
 whole universe is a unit, as 3'our spectroscope, and the 
 bodies from space that fall from time to time upon 5-our 
 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 remark- 
 ably adapted on account of their brilliancy and indestruct- 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 89 
 
 ibility." 
 
 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 com- 
 position 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 our- 
 selves a food supply by the process of synthesis, which, 
 in the extremety of crop shortage or failure, we can 
 
go THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 assimula- 
 tion 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 sytithetic 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 sub- 
 stances which are equivalent to those you obtain exclu- 
 sively 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 
 
THK MAN FROM MARS. 9 1 
 
 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 demoral- 
 izing 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 them- 
 selves to their nourishment. 
 
 " It is a part of our religion to believe that every living 
 cieature is related, though distantly, to ourselves, and to 
 those of them especially which are brought into our 
 
92 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 sendee, 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 wa)^ 
 that would be striking to you, and would lead you to 
 believe that they possess more intelHgence 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 appartment, engaging themselves in a concert of 
 song, perched about on the furniture, as a happy privi- 
 lege. On any other occassion 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 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 
 5^ou 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, deso- 
 late, and storm-beaten seas, we have a series of lakes, 
 everywhere varying in size, but none of them larger than 
 seventy-five of your miles long, and forty broad. 
 
 "The relative density between water and an animal 
 
94 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 loco- 
 motion 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 producti^'e of a state of affairs partaking of the humor- 
 ous, 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 
 worr3\ The straying of children upon the waters is 
 
the; man from mars. 95 
 
 attended, however, with but Httle danger ; since, if by 
 an}^ possibility they remain undiscovered during the 
 night, they can, owing to the buoyancy of their bodies, 
 sleep tranquilly and deHghtfully 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 rolUng, 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 
 
96 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 3'ours 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 magnifi- 
 cent 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 97 
 
 center and are repeated to the circumferance 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. 
 
98 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 selfish- 
 ness, and the strange superstitions of the inhabitants of 
 the Earth will pass away out of the ages to come. ' ' 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 99 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 "Comparing your society with ours," began my 
 celestial visitor, " is like describing the difference between 
 your present intellectual condition, and the state you 
 were in during your cave-dwelling period. In review of 
 your progress, we recognize two chief agencies at work 
 which have regenerated us, viz : the steady growth of 
 human sympathy, and the fading out of old superstitions. 
 In our advanced development, with the first of these, we 
 have achieved a state of things in our society quite likely 
 beyond your hopes. For instance, that feeling of regard 
 and afl&nity 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 distur- 
 bance 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 feeUngs of 
 one another. When we see one of you sinking by the 
 
lOO THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 3^our 
 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 arbi- 
 tration of a question, whose settlement rests entirely upon 
 the physical strength of the contestants ; and all intena- 
 tional settlements by this means are but temporary, when 
 the winning party has not coincidentally a prevailing 
 sense ot justice in its favor. All your wars and battles, 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. lOI 
 
 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 arbitra- 
 tion 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. 
 
I02 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 aUve 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 lof prey which still 
 linger on your borders. 
 
 ' ' Your society presents to us the spectacle of a contin- 
 uous skirmish among yourselves, your whole mass strug- 
 gling 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. IO3 
 
 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 v^rithout the slightest concern for 
 its effect upon others. You have permitted, from time to 
 time, the passage of laws having a direct atid unmistak- 
 able tendency to throw your wealth into the hands of a 
 few, and as a consequence, to increase the hards"hips 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 
 
I04 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 fellov^r beings in our 
 society, brings its punishment in the general condemna- 
 tion 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 eleemosy- 
 nary establishments, because they are not needed. There 
 can be no suflfering 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. Bach 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. IO5 
 
 have yielded a harvest of glorious consequences. If it 
 will interest you, I shall tell you why." 
 
I06 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 At the dawn of, and during the first stages of their 
 civilization, the people of the Earth found themselves 
 surrounded with natural forces which, in their scant 
 knowledge of the laws of the universe, were ascribed to 
 the arbitrar>' and willful caprices of a great hidden being. 
 They found a mysterious power above them, and every- 
 where 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 inves- 
 tigation 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 supers- isi on 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. I07 
 
 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 purp0!=e of life would be to find 
 favor with Him, to discover bis 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 imptdses 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 senti- 
 ment of pity, and enjoying afterward as a result of his 
 compassion a pleasure which was as strange and unac- 
 countable 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 
 
I08 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 virtue which brought no material and immediate rewards 
 were regarded as mysterious and inexplicitable 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 communi- 
 cate 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 posses- 
 sion of the commands and wishes of the Deity in the 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. IO9 
 
 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 rehgion, 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 
 
no the; man from mars. 
 
 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 exclu- 
 sive and abundant sources of supply. 
 
 It has been your misfortune to be held captive through- 
 out 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 develop- 
 ment. 
 
 When at a certain stage of your civilization, about two 
 thousand years ago, you had attained a point of intellect- 
 ual 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 grow- 
 ing 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. Ill 
 
 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 surren- 
 dered 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 civiliza- 
 tion back upon itself more than a thousand years. No 
 historical fact is more capable of demonstation 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 para- 
 dise, 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 
 
1 1 2 THB MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 body of ecclesiastics, to a general oelief 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 imper- 
 sonation 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. II3 
 
 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 rapily 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 misfor- 
 tunes 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 
 ever>'day life of your people. Except in their observance 
 of religious forms, your devout are not distinguished 
 from your profane. The practical \irtues are no greater 
 among believers than among unbelievers. Your coming 
 
114 THK MAN FROIJ MARS. 
 
 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 beUefs have so shaped and 
 moulded your character that we have obser^'^ed, what you 
 are not likely to see of yourselves, certain traits or inclin- 
 ations 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 accep- 
 tance of this belief has lowered your pride, and given 
 3'ou, to some extent, that character of dejection and 
 submissiveness which is entirely subversive to the attain- 
 
the; man from mars. 115 
 
 ment of any destiny to be reached by yourselves. 
 
 There is a quaUty of mind which we aclinowledge as, 
 above all others, the one which has assisted us to our 
 present very desirable social condition, and that is the 
 feeHng to resist the perpetration of a mean or bad act, on 
 account of the sense of degradation it inflicts upon the 
 feeHngs of the doer. This motive of conscience, so 
 plainly the ofispring of self-esteem, and growing out of a 
 cultivation of the mind alone, without any regard what- 
 ever 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 impu- 
 tation 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 
 
Il6 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 seed themselves only in places where the mind lies in 
 fallow. 
 
 There comes to us from our remote ages, through 
 tradition and historj-, 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 harm- 
 ful 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-rend- 
 ing 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 punish- 
 ments of the free expression of thought, inaugurated by 
 the corporate organization of your present rehgion, 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. II7 
 
 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 deferance 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 constantl}^ 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 
 
Il8 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 j^our chief institutions of learning. Of 
 all places these should be the first to lead in truth, as they 
 are best pro\dded in all the equipments to find it ; yet 
 under the prevailing terrorism their predicament is 
 embarassing 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 farcial spectacle 
 is daily enacted among many of them of a ceremonious 
 reverance 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 
 
THS MAN FROM MARS. 11 9 
 
 instruction. 
 
 I hope you will not infer from what I have said that 
 the people of Mars have not great reverence and venera- 
 tion for the Deit}'. 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 perfec- 
 tion, 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 goverment, 
 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. 
 
I20 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 The people of Mars are impressed with the belief that 
 the governments of the Earth have made no great 
 advance in the benefits and usefulness of their legislation 
 during the last two thousand years. We recognize 
 amongst you, only as movements of progress, some 
 provision, particularly in your own country, for the free 
 education of the people, a few sanitary attentions, and a 
 slight awakening to the interests of your laboring class, 
 as about all worth mentioning. It is true that your 
 governments, after originating themselves with only the 
 simplest duties, have come in time, as your civilization 
 advanced, to take on increased and complicated services. 
 But in the multiplication of their duties, there is unfor- 
 tunately little to be seen but an extension, in various direc- 
 tions, 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 goverment as something beyond these, 
 and this difference of view affords a marked instance of 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 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 conscious- 
 ness, 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 sepp.ration 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 success- 
 fully 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 ration- 
 alistic 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 
 
122 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 must be appaliug to you, and the cause of your failure is 
 due to conditions plainly apparent to us. These condi- 
 tions 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 v^^hich would place all ambi- 
 tion for honor and prominence among them on uncom- 
 promising terms with evil. You have only attempted to 
 suppress crime by punishment, while the powerful stimu- 
 lus 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 
 
THK MAN FROM MARS. 1 23 
 
 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 afiairs, and from this 
 comes a confidence and regard between our representa- 
 tives 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 indispensible 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 surpris- 
 ing that you will be divided in opinion touching the extent 
 
124 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 1 25 
 
 purpose of improving your morals, and your secular 
 schools, while in the performance of their duties, occupy- 
 ing the same competing field. 
 
 You ma}'- 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 accord- 
 ance 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 com- 
 pletely 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 j^ou, and which is cul- 
 tivated 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 further- 
 
126 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 ance of the material, intellectual, or moral progress oi his 
 race. The memories of your greatest men are more 
 honored by us than by yourselves. Men go down to their 
 graves j^early among j^ou 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 ser- 
 vices they have bestowed, and discuss the great and ever- 
 lasting 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 strength- 
 ening 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 joy- 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 1 27 
 
 ous. 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. Fcr those in sickness 
 among us, the hand of love and sympathy is never absent ; 
 and among the firm and undisturbed convictions of phil- 
 osophic 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 prom- 
 ised eternity of bliss, is the tortuous and difl&cult footway 
 winding like a maze among the shadows of their churches. 
 Although attentively guided throughout in this pre- 
 scribed 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 
 
128 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 pros- 
 trates 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 
 
THK MAN FROM MARS. 1 29 
 
 which has been granted, except seemingly by a coinci- 
 dence. 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 trium- 
 phant 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 partpf Himself We are the only 
 inheritors, by his own beneficial act, of the power to 
 
130 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 discover and eujoy 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 abund- 
 ance of negative evidence to hint that j^our incessant 
 supplication, instead of bringing to you favors from the 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. I3I 
 
 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 conclu- 
 sively 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 suprem- 
 acy of prayer has not invariably been followed by a 
 temporary withdrawal of this divine assistance and 
 support. 
 
132 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Our veneration for the Deity, which is truer and more 
 sincere than yours, arises from a widely different concep- 
 tion, lyooking back upon the ages, and what they 
 have brought to us, we perceive that each new develop- 
 ment 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 beau- 
 tiful, 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 instruc- 
 tive 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 1 33 
 
 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 pro- 
 mote 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 imper- 
 fect 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 
 
134 THK MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 atten- 
 dant 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 meas- 
 ure 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 
 
THE MAN PROM MARS. 1 35 
 
 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 materialis- 
 tic 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 
 
136 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 language as the uuiversal 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 demonstated 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 inheri- 
 ted 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 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 indepen- 
 dent, self-conscious intelligence which guides our 
 thoughts and actions, as the protoplasm is beneath the 
 most highly organized and perfect fonn. 
 
 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 
 
138 THE MAN PROM MARS. 
 
 intelligences, which were sown broadcast in the begin- 
 ning 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 
 5'our 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. Encom- 
 passing or beside this broad universe we have evidence of 
 a spiritual region, like the firm land bordering upon 
 5'our 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. 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 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 dessicating atmosphere, 
 which everywhere surmounted it. Yourselves, as well as 
 all other living and breathing creatures, had your founda- 
 tions of life laid in the waters of the earth, a fact, of 
 whose significant reminder is, that nature has continu- 
 ously 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 
 
140 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 uncon- 
 scious, 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 yotu: next stage of spiritual suprem- 
 acy, 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 MAN FROM MARS. I4I 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 The confidential relations between our government and 
 people have given it a parental character. It has conse- 
 quently 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 faith- 
 fully 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 sufii- 
 cient 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 
 
142 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 prop- 
 erty 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 subj ugation 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 success- 
 fully carried out in our goverment, 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 
 
THK MAN FROM MARS. I43 
 
 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 suppres- 
 sions 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 
 
144 'TH^ ^^^^N FROM MARS. 
 
 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 pro- 
 gress 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 
 \dces 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. 
 
TH:e MAN FROM MARS. 1 45 
 
 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. 
 
146 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 Our legislation in behalf of the labor classes is the happi- 
 est 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 sec- 
 tions, 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 por- 
 tion of the earnings of labor into the pockets of your 
 landholding classes. 
 
 Almost every influence now at work in the progress of 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 1 47 
 
 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 machin- 
 ery in their manufacture, and partly, also, by the compe- 
 tition of labor, owing to increase of population, j^et 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 
 
148 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 food supply shall become greatly increased by the charges 
 of rent, your present S3''steni will not be quietly endured. 
 
 In your own more favored region of the Earth may be 
 found temporary conditions which tend not only to toler- 
 ate your present laud 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 posses- 
 sion, 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 supply- 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. I49 
 
 ing 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. 
 
I50 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 The planet Mars is held to be the inheritance of those 
 who are born upon it. Admitting the self evident and 
 uncontrovertible justice of this view, our government 
 ages ago assumed the ownership and property control of 
 it in trust for the equal benefit of all. It has proceeded 
 in accordance with this view to grant its uses for all the 
 purposes of industry and pleasure, in such a manner as to 
 bestow the income of its rent equally upon every living 
 inhabitant. I can only give you some outlines of our 
 admirable manner of accomplishing this purpose. 
 
 Our agricultural districts are divided into small farms, 
 even in size, with graded rents in accordance with the 
 richness of their soils, and other conditions. Sub-letting 
 is not allowed, and a chief purpose in making these allot- 
 ments is, that the family residing upon each farm will be 
 able to perform all the labor required. This is in accor- 
 dance with a principle which our government carries out 
 in all possible ways, to bring labor and capital into part- 
 nership. The cultivator of the soil goes on with bis 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 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 posses- 
 sion. 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. 
 
 I^andlordism, 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, 
 
152 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 and no other tax or exaction is known. With a percent- 
 age 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 muni- 
 cipal 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 construc- 
 tion, which have made our cities as complete and harmo- 
 nious as single works of art ; their symmetrical combina- 
 tions of lines and curves as consistently meeting each 
 other as in a separate architectural elevation. 
 
 As I have already hinted to you, a cultivation of the 
 beautiful in art and nature is a part of our religion, and 
 we indulge in the gratification of esthetic inclinations as 
 
Tn:S MAN PROM MASS. 1 53 
 
 one of the greatest charms of life. Cur government 
 erects no buildings except public ones, and in their con- 
 struction and fittings is manifested that universal love of 
 the grand and beautiful which everywhere prevails. 
 Your imagination is scarcely able to conceive the magnifi- 
 cence of our temples of worship, and the charming 
 perspectives of our streets and highv/ays. 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 regula- 
 tions 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 contrarj^ 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 
 
154 '^'^'^ ^AN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 insti- 
 tution 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 develop- 
 ment. They are instituted mostly with you in a fortui- 
 tous 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 pros- 
 pective 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 
 
THK MAN FROM MARS. I55 
 
 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, condi- 
 tions 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 unoccu- 
 pied area of surface, and the facility to all in the acquire- 
 ment 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 
 
156 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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. lyabor goes cheerfully to its daily toil, 
 and returns to its abundant board with a hope and ambi- 
 tion 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 laud 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 
 
the; man from mars. 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 land- 
 lords have fairly commenced their raid upon the indus- 
 tries 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 
 therefor, which takes from the profits of labor and capital 
 an amount equal to the tenth part of all their savings. 
 Because the privilege of 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 
 
158 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 industy have 
 not kept pace in their value with this enormous apprecia- 
 tion, 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 accumu- 
 lated labor of your city goes into the pockets of its land- 
 lords 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 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 propor- 
 tion 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. Ever^^ single one of the 
 bounties of nature, except the air and sunshine, are inac- 
 cessible 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 
 
l6o THS MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 invest- 
 ment 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 
 5''0ur city, at this period of its historj'-, 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 dis- 
 abling 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 j'^ou, and 
 
THIS MAN FROM MARS. l6l 
 
 out of which, by a lack of the opportunities of knowl- 
 edge, 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 
 
t62 the man from mars. 
 
 peculiar to j^our 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 ta 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 out- 
 come of your land ownership system, as drouth and 
 famine arfe the outcome of a lack of moisture in the soil. 
 
 We shall say now that yotir city contains a half million 
 of inhabitants. Its surface is not extended in proportion 
 v/ith its increase in population, the cost of space inducing 
 
THK MAN FROM MARS. 1 63 
 
 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 ren- 
 dering any service in return. None of your economists 
 v.'ill 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 
 
1 64 THE MAN PROM MARS. 
 
 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 luxur>% 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 hfe 
 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, 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 1 65 
 
 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 sus- 
 tenance supply, it inclines to devote its leisure to a culti- 
 vation 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 
 v/hole, so long as by your methods a few only are vouch- 
 safed the opportunities for knowledge ? 
 
 The forces at work within your society have now, we 
 we will say, brought up your population and general con- 
 ditions 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 sem- 
 
1 66 THE MAN PROM MARS. 
 
 blance 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 con- 
 cealed 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 lessoned, 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 out- 
 rages 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 fortun- 
 ate brothers, are conscious that the superabundance they 
 enjoy has been doubtfully acquired, and they are quick to 
 
the; man from mars. 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. 
 
1 68 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Before bringing into comparison one of our cities it 
 will be necessary to explain to you some of the processes 
 which have rendered our present 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 physi- 
 cal diligence is a saving and wholesome quality, insepar- 
 able 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 indispensa- 
 ble to the firmness of the Earth, than individual mental 
 and physical energy is to the well-being and progress of 
 
THK MAN FROM MARS. 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 bestow- 
 ing 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 deter- 
 mination to equalize, as far as possible, the burdens of life 
 among all classes, and to this end we have chiefly directed 
 our effbrts 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 mili- 
 tary 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 
 
170 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 wealtb and capital 
 
THK MAN FROM MARS. I7I 
 
 shall not bear down upon it in the various monopoly- 
 exactions common with you. But a measure of justice, 
 scarcely less eflfectual 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 unre- 
 strained 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. 
 
172 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 com- 
 pulsion, 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. I73 
 
 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 unlet- 
 tered 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 develop- 
 ment is, that we utterlj' 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, j'ou 
 
174 'J^HE M(AN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 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 scien- 
 tific 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 overproduction, 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 
 
176 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 bj^ 
 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 suppl}-, 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 condi- 
 tions, 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 invest- 
 ment. 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 1 77 
 
 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 sepa- 
 rate 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 producion of food supplies, where nature becomes 
 of necessity a party to this great co-operative arrange- 
 ment, 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. 
 
178 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 
 diflSculty is overcome. We have formed out of the three 
 qualities of skii,l,, 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. I79 
 
 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 import- 
 ance 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 nec- 
 essary, 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 
 
I So THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 reward- 
 ing labor has a far-reaching efiect in our political economy, 
 and is a complete uniformity with the general tendancy of 
 our efforts to promote steady values. The most import- 
 ant element of cost in all commodities ofiered 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 exhaust- 
 ing 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 equit- 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. l8l 
 
 able adjustment of our wage rates, affords sufiicieut pay, 
 under ordinary circumstances, to furnish a liberal enjoy- 
 ment 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 contrac- 
 tion, 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 5''ou. 
 
 From these careful attentions to the interests of labor, 
 we have brought it into repute as one of the most honor- 
 able 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 
 carr}^ into operation those methods which distinguish our 
 
1 82 THB MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 system. The greater part of the energies of our govern- 
 ment and the wisdom of our statemanship have been 
 directed to this end of supporting labor, and out of it, 
 without question, comes the general serenity and content- 
 ment which prevail. 
 
THS MAN FROM MARS. 183 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 Whkn 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 engi- 
 neering 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 allot- 
 ment during his Hfe. 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. 
 
1 84 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 sub- 
 ject 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 cbme to your new cities, for the 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 1 85 
 
 purpose of gain in trade and industry, and locate them- 
 selves 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 conform- 
 ing 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 encourage- 
 ment 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 promots 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 
 
1 86 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 con- 
 scious fulfillment of which is attended with a feeling of 
 happiness. 
 
 The systematic and regular use of the voluntary mus- 
 cles, 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 dis- 
 tinguished among yourselves as being never wholly the 
 product of learning. It is an axiom with us, that he who 
 does not produce has no right to consume, and this doc- 
 
the; man from mars. 187 
 
 trine has been so carried out in our society that physical 
 inertia, no matter how much attended with wealth, is 
 exceedingly rare. As a consequence, affluence with us is 
 not beset with the terrible 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 
 coroners 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 
 
1 88 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 inter- 
 course 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 popula- 
 tion 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 sub- 
 jected 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 189 
 
 of rent with us being only to meet the expenses of gov- 
 ernment, 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 owner- 
 ship, there is no case, even in the most concentrated 
 places, where rent forms anywhere near so large a pro- 
 portion 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 
 5-ours, 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 
 
190 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 the business of production. By this increased produc- 
 tiveness 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 efifect. By 
 avoiding your great waste of capital by excessive gov- 
 ernment 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 produc- 
 tive 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 opportuni- 
 ties each possess in individual savings. Having no com- 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. IQI 
 
 mon 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 esti- 
 mated 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 
 
192 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 set forth you may be in a progressive condition, as that 
 term is defined by 3'ou. That is to say, your capital may 
 increase, and your wealth may be very greatly aug- 
 mented. 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 with- 
 out 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 sub- 
 sistence. 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. 
 
 lyooking upon your civilization, we find in its modern 
 aspects a wonderful increase in all the appliances and con- 
 ditions which accumulate wealth. Among these may be 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 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 acquisi- 
 tion 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. Inas- 
 much 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 diificult 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 
 
194 '^^^ ^^-^^^ FROM MARS. 
 
 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 pros- 
 perity in trade and mercantile pursuits, has at the same 
 time ofifered to all your monopolists of land the opportu- 
 nity to extort, under the pressure of competition, the 
 whole surplus of the earnings of your workmen. Pre- 
 cisely 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 specu- 
 lative 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 195 
 
 power of your imaginary Midas— dreams which encour- 
 age 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 equaUy 
 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 abun- 
 dance 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 cultiva- 
 tion 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 
 fertiUty, except in the opportunity they afford for labor 
 to exchange its services for money. This class of land 
 
196 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 favor- 
 ite situations there is as yet no monopoly value in your 
 cultivated lands. To this, more than anything else, is 
 due the comparativecheapnessof 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 complete- 
 ly merciless character of 5'our 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 unscru- 
 pulous love of gain. 
 
 You have perhaps not fully considered how it has come 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 197 
 
 to pass that your wealth is so generally without the best 
 feelings and impulses of humanity. The desire to accu- 
 mulate which prevades 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 depen- 
 dence. 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 
 
1 98 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 govern- 
 ment for its own selfish ends, making easy and com- 
 fortable 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 accom- 
 plishment, 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. 
 
THB MAN FROM MARS. 199 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 Our more advanced civilization and truer democracy- 
 exhibit themselves nowhere more strikingly, than in the 
 way in which we have determined the equal division of 
 land interests. With our city of three hundred thousand 
 inhabitants, and its income during the same period of 
 time as yours of thirty-one million days' labor, there is 
 assessed by our authorities about the sum as ground rent 
 equivalent to eight million average days' pay of our 
 workmen. For this amount in hand, our government 
 furnishes to its tenants, without further cost, perfected 
 streets in constant repair, abundance of Vv'ater for house- 
 hold and other purposes, lights both in houses and streets, 
 heat by our system (to you undiscovered), perfect drain- 
 age 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 indi- 
 vidual the higher branches of study. 
 
 Besides this immense service, the government provides 
 religious edifices, buildings for public entertainment, and 
 
200 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 pleasure grounds. And all this, you will bear in mind, 
 at a less cost to our population than j'our 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 privi- 
 leges 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. 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 20I 
 
 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 pro- 
 vided 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 reas- 
 onable 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 ten- 
 dency 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 accel- 
 erates 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 
 
202 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 first are without foundation in fact. The growing polid- 
 cal 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 inadvertantly 
 inflicts by the irresistable 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 avail- 
 able knowledge and science of its time. The diSerence 
 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 exces- 
 sive 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 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 sens6 of individual acquisitiveness among your 
 
204 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 governing classes is too great to deal fairly with the 
 whole body of your people under such seductive oppor- 
 tunities 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 apparant 
 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 
 irrestible influence of the mercenary impulse on your 
 planet, that those who where prominent in establishing 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 205 
 
 SO many advances toward equalizing the conditions and 
 privileges of their fellowmen 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 graudally 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 occu- 
 pancy of the soil for purposes of cultivation, leaves no 
 apparent ground of complaint among the masses who toil. 
 
2o6 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 conse- 
 quence, of the abundance which the bounties of nature 
 have supplied to you, and the stimulated energies which 
 your rewarded industries have induced, your labor uncon- 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 207 
 
 sciously 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 
 
i208 tHK MAN FJROM MARS. 
 
 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 civili- 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 209 
 
 zation will tend to reduce the number of j^our 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 suflScient 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 necessitj' 
 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 
 
2IO THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 popula- 
 tion, 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. 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 211 
 
 lyiberty 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 senti- 
 ment of brotherhood, as we know it, has never intruded 
 itself into the spirit of your legislation. The spectacle 
 of four-fifths of your number toiling from sun to sun to 
 no purpose but that the balance may be enriched has 
 inspired no compassion, and evoked no measure of relief. 
 In the regions of your authority, where there should be 
 some touch of the fraternal instinct, nothing presides but 
 the selfish and mercenary genius of Mamnon. The 
 divine impulse for better things is among you, but instead 
 of laying out its work in the practical afifair of life, it has 
 been diverted into the channels of your busy but unfruit- 
 ful 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 
 
212 THE MAN FSOM MARS. 
 
 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 para- 
 dise 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 enjoy- 
 ment 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. 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 213 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 A notable condition of your society compared with ours 
 is the tardy advance of your women from that complete 
 subjection to men which existed in your primary state. 
 It is not surprising that in your present stage of progress 
 the males of your race should continue to usurp many of 
 the privileges which came to them as an inheritance from 
 a savage and brutal ancestry of comparatively recent 
 existence, and your gradual awakening to a sense of 
 justice in that direction is one of the many evidences that 
 you are moving along on the lines marked out for you by 
 the divine law of evolution in thought. 
 
 We have found certain active qualities of mind, pre- 
 dominating 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 
 
214 "^^S M-^N FROM MARS. 
 
 them in subjection ; yet, it is a fact that in what are truly 
 the noblest advances in humanitj^ 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 erronious. 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 inferi- 
 ority 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 femi- 
 nine 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 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 intefere 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 
 
2l6 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 corruptable 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 suflfrage rights. The desirable family 
 methods and sentiments, of which they are better expo- 
 nents 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 monopo- 
 lized and corrupted your politics. Your legislation in the 
 hands of men alone has accomplished but little in allevi- 
 ating the distresses of humanity. The cold and calcula- 
 ting 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 
 
the; man from mars. 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 incentitives to good- 
 ness, and in dealing with crime the service of its preven- 
 tion, 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 govern- 
 ment 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 
 
2l8 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 individuals. Among your industrial class, less than one- 
 tenth are employers, whose political weight has so over- 
 come the majority as to have excluded any direct legisla- 
 tion 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 can- 
 not 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 predjudice of a societj' 
 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 yovir advanced government indicate the coming of 
 a more perfect co-operation. 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 219 
 
 The political subjection of women, and the subjection 
 of labor helplessly to the law of supply and demand, with- 
 out 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 absorbtion of their whole minds has been in a set of 
 small ideas and occupations, from one to the other in 
 
220 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 obtain- 
 ing 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 predj udices, 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 tradi- 
 tional 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 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 engage- 
 ments, 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 tyranical authority over their 
 defenseless wives in gratification of a mean instinct of 
 humanity. It is the only oppontunity perhaps that brutal 
 husbands enjoy in their whole lives to command a grown 
 person who is under an obligation by law, custom and 
 
222 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 there- 
 after, 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 achieve- 
 ments 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 223 
 
 times, and imparting them to childhood in all their ancient 
 mixture of error has assisted to keep aljve those predju- 
 dices 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 genera- 
 tions 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 
 
224 "^^^ ^-^^ FROM MARS. 
 
 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 subjec- 
 tion 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 intellectu- 
 ally 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, 
 whereby good breeding and cultivation a man tactily 
 ignores his superiority under your unjust usages ; but 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 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 differ- 
 ences. With us the wife has more than encouragement 
 to offer. Her mind becomes a part of her husbands and 
 increases his capabiHties. Many of our highest achieve- 
 ments in brain work are the result of such colaboration 
 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 degress to the bottom mental equality 
 in women is oftener the source of contention than happi- 
 ness, 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 reUef ; 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. 
 
226 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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, 3'ou 
 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 help- 
 less drudge in the interests of her children, and in the 
 higher ones, either an unwelcome retainer in the house- 
 hold 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 bj^ 
 immigration or death. You have given her no part in 
 great aflfairs, and she has but little knowledge of or interest 
 in them. They afford her no entertainment amid her 
 loneHness, 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 
 
THE MAN PROM MARS. 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 consider- 
 ation of its responsibilities and pains, an exemption from 
 all the physically exhausting occupations, she is encour- 
 aged 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 
 
228 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 differ- 
 ent manner as occasions require for deception. Men 
 select matrimonial companions with us as they choose 
 friends among themselves, sympathy of feeling and 
 sincerety 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 false- 
 hood 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 adver- 
 tisements 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 false- 
 hood 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 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 enter- 
 tained, by either the one or the other of you, in these 
 serious life contracts. Your women submit their depen- 
 pence 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 
 
230 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 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 politi- 
 cian, or business man among you, who poses before his 
 wife and lady friends as a hero of finance, or stateman- 
 ship, who could not do so, did they share with him a 
 knowledge of the incidents and manipulations which 
 brought about his success. Deferance 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 oppres- 
 sion. 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 
 
232 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 hope- 
 fulness and lack of austerity in our religion, and the 
 interest they are led to exhibit in great afiairs, are so 
 marked in their demeanor and physiognomy as to render 
 them very diflferent 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 233 
 
 knowledge, and which are destined to become, in conju- 
 gal 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. 
 
234 THB MAN FRO:.I MARS. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 You must have suspected before this that, so far as the 
 rapid accumulation of wealth is concerned, our society 
 was in that stationary condition so much dreaded by 
 your economists as the end of all material progress. An 
 assumption among your thinkers that any permanent 
 diminishment of the production of wealth is the fore- 
 runner 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 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 every- 
 thing 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 
 
236 THE MAN PROM MARS. 
 
 which your civilization is sooner or later bound to reach. 
 Kvery 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 multi- 
 plies itself will be shut off, and with its acquirement no 
 longer indispensable to the honors of life, and the diffi- 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 237 
 
 culties 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 
 
238 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 deter- 
 mined 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 
 
The man from mars. 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 conse- 
 quently 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 busi- 
 ness 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 consider- 
 able 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 
 
240 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 unscrupu- 
 lous 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; 
 
THB MAN FROM MARS. 24I 
 
 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 win- 
 ning 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 provo- 
 cation. The miseries of existence are unseen and unfelt 
 by others than the suflferers themselves among you, just 
 as your senses become oblivious to the presence of dis- 
 turbing influences which you find it unprofitable to sup- 
 press. The necessity for each one looking out for himself 
 
242 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 j'-ou here and there, under favor- 
 able 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. 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 243 
 
 Filial and parental love from mere instincts have grown 
 among you to be the most gratifying of inclinations. 
 Sexual aflSnity, from its origin of brutal dersire, 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 infec- 
 ted 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 
 
244 'THE ^^"^ FROM MARS. 
 
 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. 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 245 
 
 In your oldest advanced regions it has already worked out 
 it 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 else- 
 where, 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 misfor- 
 tune is accomplished among you is a proof of your good- 
 ness. 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 exer- 
 cised upon yourselves, has been to a great extent wasted 
 upon your schemes of salvation, in which you have no 
 
246 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 under- 
 stand 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 aflfections, because in them is 
 gathered from yourselves the divine sentiments of good- 
 ness, 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. 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 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 con- 
 quest 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 perpet- 
 ual shadow, discouraging you of all hopes of brightness 
 until your celestial birth. By exhibiting only your 
 
248 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 grosser parts, and threatening the vengeance of an austere 
 and capricious god of their own imaginary creation, they 
 both degrade you and Delittle 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 inter- 
 pretation of the divine purpose in establishing a happier 
 and more perfect dwelling together. 
 
THB MAN FROM MARS. 249 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 I RESIDE within a city of Mars which, in point of 
 population and grandeur, is one of the first on our planet. 
 In accordance with our custom of designating such places 
 with names of quality, it would be known in your lan- 
 guage 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 descrip- 
 tion 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, uninter- 
 rupted 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 resi- 
 dences, bear a close resemblance to some of your ancient 
 
250 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 Styles. Ill 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 apart- 
 ments we bathe ourselves in the sun, and enjoy the con- 
 stant 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 25 1 
 
 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 con- 
 junction 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 busi- 
 ness 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 apart- 
 ments, 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 neighbor- 
 hood and open to all. 
 
252 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 These extensive halls are a necessity to the social 
 character of our people. You may imagine how an inter- 
 course based on perfect equality, and with the paramount 
 idea of obtaining pleasure by bestowing it, would have 
 its enjoyments enlarged by the unrestricted and unse- 
 lected numbers participating. Music and dancing are 
 deUghts 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 culti- 
 vation, acquire an energy and brilliancy in our atmos- 
 phere 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 253 
 
 a thanksgiving for the pleasures of life, and for that 
 guidance which has directed us clear of the deadly super- 
 stitions of our neighboring planet, and for that intelli- 
 gence 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 furni- 
 ture, 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 acheived no honors beyond the work bench. 
 The person who is most compUmented among the number 
 is the one who has just been« granted an» advance of one 
 
254 '^^B ^-^N FROM MARS. 
 
 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 indus- 
 trial 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 impor- 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 255 
 
 tauce 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 seri- 
 ous 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 
 
256 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 quahties 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 pro- 
 creation 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 
 
the; man from mars. 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 appaling 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 self- 
 ishness 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 indi- 
 vidual 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. 
 
258 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 We are not embarassed 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-com- 
 pliance 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 neces- 
 sary. Every person, young or old, is required periodi- 
 cally to pass a like examination. The personal health 
 
the; man prom mars. 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 modi- 
 fication both in forms and qualities of things, and with a 
 knowledge so acquired, you have cultivated a world of 
 
26o THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 animal and vegitable organisms to your better service. 
 We have done that, too ; but we have accompHshed 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 absti- 
 nence 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 
 
THE MAN PROM MARS. 26 1 
 
 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 imagina- 
 tion, 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 
 
262 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 intel- 
 lectual 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 facul- 
 ties? 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 supernatu- 
 ral and unseen, are not disturbed or interested by your 
 social wrongs, and which in truth find their best patron- 
 age and most profitable employment where most prevail 
 the miseries of life ? Just in the degree in which you are 
 
THE MAN PROM MARS. 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 v/hich 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 conjunc- 
 tion 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 uncer- 
 tain 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 
 
264 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 pre- 
 tended 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 pro- 
 gress 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. 
 
THK MAN FROM MARS. 265 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 "We have, like you, wealth with its self-rewarding lux- 
 uries, but itr character is very diflferent. Its chosen 
 pleasures and inclinations are unlike yours. Acquisitive- 
 ness has no such controlling motives as with you. The 
 hope of social elevation, the anxiety to place the suffer- 
 ings 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 distin- 
 guishment 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 
 
266 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 politi- 
 cal 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 require- 
 ments, 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 mem- 
 bers 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 j^our 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 
 
THK MAN PROM MARS. 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 pleasureable 
 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 conse- 
 quence 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 atone- 
 ment for the inflicted miseries of his avaricious career. 
 There is nothing whatever within our temples or sur- 
 rounding them, but the peace and self conscious satifac- 
 tion 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 osten- 
 tation of richess 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 
 
268 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 with the incomes of its occupants. Under our land system 
 the cost of rent is such a small item in the living expen- 
 ses, that all are enabled to share alike in their housings, 
 and to equally enjoy the benefit of our wholesome sani- 
 tary 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 loftj'- stories. The lower one on each 
 of its facades consists of a series of Corinthian columns 
 
THE MAN PROM MARS. 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 indus- 
 tries, 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 
 j'ou to understand, circumscribe at intervals every neigh- 
 borhood 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 w^ould 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 
 
270 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 assigned to a system of teaching to which your kinder- 
 gartens 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 attach- 
 ments 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 mem- 
 ber of our society. 
 
 The upper story is a public assembly chamber for occa- 
 sions of rejoicing and pleasure, and is adorned with stat- 
 uary, fountains, and blooming plants. This grand apart- 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 27 1 
 
 ment 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 sup- 
 port 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, with- 
 out 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 brutal- 
 
272 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 ized 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 degredation, 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 reason- 
 able 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 addi- 
 tion. 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. 
 
TH:e MAN PROM MARS. 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 sup- 
 plies 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 opportunites 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 Karth'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 
 
274 "^^^ '^^'^ FROM MARS. 
 
 means, and not the end, be5'ond which there are any 
 number of attainments in life incomparably more desire- 
 able 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 doubt- 
 ful 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 opportu- 
 nities 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 indi- 
 cates 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 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 depen- 
 dent upon the proper and equitable rewards of industry ; 
 their equal opportunities of acquiring knowledge ; an 
 encouragement of their morality by a recognition of their 
 \drtues, 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-op- 
 eration are getting in their salutary work of emancipation. 
 Knowledge is spreading itself among you — no longer a 
 
276 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 
 focussed light directed upon their doubtful origins. You 
 have inaugurated the beginning of a new faith, with 
 better spiritual foundations, not comdemning 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 progres- 
 sion, 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 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 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 animial, under changing envi- 
 ronments, 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 
 
278 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 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 weaken- 
 ing the old society, and it finally destroyed it by extin- 
 guishing 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 earn- 
 ings, and even sacrificing their lives, in a lust for power 
 and wealth, were not to let escape them so fine an oppor- 
 tunity 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 unprom- 
 ising, 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, 
 
THE MAN FROM MARS. 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 him- 
 self. As the promulgation of thoughts that were con- 
 ceived 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 uncontamin- 
 ated 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 progen- 
 
280 THE MAN FROM MARS. 
 
 itors of all good, under a divine and irresistible law of better- 
 ment. 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. I^ike the first coming, its symbolic 
 picture will be carved into monuments, reproduced in all 
 the departments of art, and cherished as the chief remin- 
 der 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. YcS, 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 
 
THK MAN FROM MARS. 28 1 
 
 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 scramblinu flock of poultry, impatient for their morn- 
 ing feed. I look toward the easy chair and it is empty. 
 My celestial visitor has departed.