CHAPTER V.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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