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 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 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.
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 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 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 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 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 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.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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.