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 language as the city of Good Will. As it is the type of all others, you are already informed of a few of its general features. I will, however, give you some fuller description of our society and surroundings, in only the hasty and imperfect manner which this opportunity affords.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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