“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 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,
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. 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 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 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 have yielded a harvest of glorious consequences. If it
will interest you, I shall tell you why.”