CHAPTER III.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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