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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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.