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 Another Random Document on
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susceptible of a high polish, as inoxidizable as gold, and with that
character of penetrability which permits fastening with nails and
shaping by tools, with even greater exactness than you work with
wood.
“Our cities are built with uniformity. Their growth is invariably from
the center outward. Their location is not a matter of chance, as
yours generally is. No site is chosen without the thorough
examination and approval of a sanitary commission, whose
knowledge and sincerity we respect. Their foundation is made by the
laying out of a large circular enclosure for the location of all public
buildings, among which, in the center and more magnificent than all
in its imposing loftiness and artistic finish, is our temple of worship.
From this center radiate a set of wide and uniform thoroughfares,
and these are crossed at regular intervals by circular ones, which
begin at the center and are repeated to the circumference as a
series of concentric rings.”
The man from Mars became silent for a moment, and I observed
that for the first time his face was clouded a little. He had spoken of
a temple of worship, and it had started in my mind a wish to hear
something of the society and morals of his people, and how they
compared with us; so I said to him: “I am grateful to you for your
kindness in describing some of the material surroundings of your
people, but I would like very much to know something of your inner
lives, of your thoughts and beliefs, and how they affect your social
condition.”
“My brother,” said he, “you wish me to make a comparison between
our society and yours. I can scarcely do so without the risk of giving
you pain. With our greater advancement, we look back upon you as
travelers over the same rough paths. Your journey is even a more
difficult one than ours. In your present state, you appear to us as a
world of discord, confusion, and strife. While we were long ago
resolved into a single, homogeneous people, you are still divided into
nations and countries, unridden yet of the barbarous pride of
combat. We have but one religion. Yours are many and antagonistic.
I shall briefly make for you the comparison you wish, hoping that it
may bring no sense of pain to you, for, to speak the truth, the
cruelty, the intense individual selfishness, and the strange
superstitions of the inhabitants of the Earth will pass away out of the
ages to come.”
 CHAPTER III.
“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.”
 CHAPTER IV.
At the dawn of, and during the first stages of their civilization, the
people of the Earth found themselves surrounded with natural forces
which, in their scant knowledge of the laws of the universe, were
ascribed to the arbitrary and willful caprices of a great hidden being.
They found a mysterious power above them, and everywhere an
overwhelming evidence of design. The unthinkable and unknown
character of the infinite and eternal was not then acknowledged;
and the failure of any to explain this unseen intelligence and power
incited their imaginations to do for them what the closest
investigation had failed to accomplish. As may have been expected,
they clothed their imaginary deity with the qualities, propensities,
and passions of themselves. Any violent convulsion of nature was
taken by them as a certain sign of his anger; while the normal state
of rest, and the undisturbed processes of animal and vegetable
development and growth were looked upon as concessions in their
special favor. From a belief in the supervision of the deity over every
single one of the innumerable processes of nature, they naturally
imbibed the idea that they each were objects of his personal
watchfulness and attention, and as a consequence, that all the
fortunes and vicissitudes of their lives were dependent upon his
moods. It may very well be supposed that with this conception of
the deity, the chief purpose of life would be to find favor with Him,
to discover his wishes, and to learn his commands; since, in
accordance with this simple and crude idea, every one’s success and
comfort in life depended upon his conciliation. With these views of
nature and the universe, they came in due time to observe that
within themselves were feelings and sentiments entirely apart from
the ordinary epicurean impulses which governed them. We may
imagine in those cruel times the warrior standing over his prostrate
victim with upraised club, stayed in the act of killing him by a
sentiment of pity, and enjoying afterward as a result of his
compassion a pleasure which was as strange and unaccountable to
him as his first sight of a comet. There was no apparent motive
whatever for his humane act. On the contrary, it had deprived him of
spoil, and reduced the honor of his victory. And so, all the
inclinations to virtue which brought no material and immediate
rewards were regarded as mysterious and inexplicable as the great
hidden power, and by a very natural sequence of reasoning, a part
of it.
As your civilization advanced, it was to be seen that the virtues, and
especially those which had a direct influence upon material welfare,
grew and enlarged. The path to honor was no longer exclusively
through carnage and victory, and the possession and cultivation of
certain virtues brought consideration and respect. It was at this
critical stage of your progress that there was inflicted upon you an
evil greater than any your people have known. You were not content
with viewing the deity as we do from afar, and with accepting the
impulses of virtue as a part of yourselves, instituted for the wise
purpose of a continuous self-development toward a better earthly
life; but instead, in your unreasonable yearning to communicate with
the supreme Author, you surrendered yourself to the wiles of the
seers, and became the willing dupes of their delusions.
There is nothing more unhappy to tell of you than the consequences
of this grave error. Your assumed possession of the commands and
wishes of the Deity in the shape of a revelation, has proved more a
misfortune than a blessing to you. In the first place, it has lowered
your conception of the Deity below ours. It has turned your religion
into a contest. It has rendered possible the establishment of certain
ecclesiastical bodies among you, who, while assuming entire control
of the morals of your people, are beset in their internal parts with all
the vices which come from cruelty, cupidity, and love of power.
Besides, your formulated conditions of punishments and rewards
have degraded religion from a cultivation of virtue for itself, and the
immediate good it brings, to a selfish scramble, each one struggling
to shoulder his way into the midst of celestial delights.
It can be easily understood why your religion, with all its crudities
and superstitions, has taken so firm a hold upon your society. You
are constituted as we are, with the same inherent elements of
progress. The steady increase of your affinity for the virtues, and
those who practice them, is a marked quality of your career, and as
they all lead, in one way or another, towards that union of interests
which constitutes the perfect social state, you are thereby impelled
by a natural and providential desire to build them up. So that, as a
matter of fact, there being an inherent love of goodness ingrafted in
your very natures, your religious creeds have attracted you to them,
and held you in fetters, under the false theory that the good within
you is but a contribution from their exclusive and abundant sources
of supply.
It has been your misfortune to be held captive throughout your
progress by the shrewd designs of your seers and prophets, who
have not failed until recently to supply you with an occasional
change of supernatural pabulum, to meet the new wants of a
steadily advancing development.
When at a certain stage of your civilization, about two thousand
years ago, you had attained a point of intellectual culture among the
few, the fruits of which have been reflected upon you to this day, in
some of the grandest recorded achievements of human thought, and
while the masses were left to take their undirected way among the
empty superstitions which conceded nothing to the growing human
sympathy, a seer appeared among you, who served rather as a
suggestion than as an immediate success. After the lapse of
sufficient time from his death to allow full scope for romance, there
was built up out of his memory by your seers a picture of all the
virtues which had been growing within your hearts, so entirely
adapted to the new age that all the pent-up forces of human
sympathy within its scope and influence surrendered to it. But what
might have been a triumph and a boon to you in the new impetus to
a better and broader humanity, unfortunately held concealed within
itself the subtle machinery of your seers and prophets, and was
guarded by their evil eyes, so that with this tremendous lever to
move you in the direction of their purposes, instead of advancing
you, they have turned your civilization back upon itself more than a
thousand years. No historical fact is more capable of demonstration
than this. None has been more persistently and ingeniously denied,
and no natural sequence ever followed more directly a moving
cause. From a free and independent exercise of the intellectual
activities in the direction of science, art, philosophy, and all
knowledge pertaining to yourselves, the Earth upon which you dwell,
and the universe, so far as your vision extends, the whole current of
your thoughts was turned by the new doctrines toward a paradise,
compared with which all things of the Earth were trifles. When you
were brought by the fascination of these promises, and the
unflagging efforts an interested body of ecclesiastics, to a general
belief in these doctrines, you sank into an intellectual torpor, from
which you only emerged by a protest of your reason not yet wholly
suppressed.
You cannot fail to see the utterly dehumanizing tendency of the
influences which surrounded you for so many centuries. The
common aims and purposes of your lives were submerged by the
one engrossing wish to reach heaven; and while your imagination
was carried away by its picture, you were led, without hesitation, to
place your feet upon the neck of any earthly enterprise that seemed
to stand in its way.
From the beginning of your history you have accepted one object of
worship after another, each an ideal impersonation of the goodness
which was inseparately a part of yourselves, and which was given to
you for the wise purpose of making your society possible, and to
perfect it; just as the parental instinct was bestowed upon you to
protect your infants. All these subjects of adoration have perfectly
reflected your intellectual condition, and have been discarded, one
after another, as they outlived their uses; until you are just now
beginning to realize, that for all these many centuries you have been
virtually worshipping yourselves. Your present ideal will, in time,
share the fate of those which preceded it, and in the absence of a
prevailing superstition, your seers luckily cannot build up for you
another one. Your long period devoted to the pursuit of phantoms is
rapidly passing away, and your new age of rationalism is
approaching. You have no just conception of the evils it will remove,
and the glories it has in store for you.
The difference between your present and future religion can be
easily outlined. Your present religion, from a long course of
erroneous teaching, is intense, aggressive and hysterical. It feeds
and fattens itself upon the miseries of life, which it does not
undertake to remove, except in a meretricious way for effect. Your
religion of the future will be tranquil and voluntary, and its chief
mission will be to permanently reduce the evils and misfortunes of
life to a minimum. The impulses of your present religion are entirely
apart from the moral sense, a significant fact easily substantiated by
a glance over the every-day life of your people. Except in their
observance of religious forms, your devout are not distinguished
from your profane. The practical virtues are no greater among
believers than among unbelievers. Your coming religion will be
founded upon the moral sense, and will be inseparable from it. It will
support no doctrine of a ready and convenient atonement for bad
acts, as the present one does. It will teach you that there can be no
complete reparation of an evil deed except in its undoing, and that
such an act, once performed, spreads its dire consequences in
accordance with its enormity over a part or the whole career of the
doer. It will not undertake to unburden the conscience of a crime,
nor to give assurance of celestial bliss to the most heinous of
offenders, upon the trifling and fallacious compliance with religious
forms.
Your peculiar religious beliefs have so shaped and moulded your
character that we have observed, what you are not likely to see of
yourselves, certain traits or inclinations which are not promising as
factors in your ultimate regeneration. Your churches, with the
shrewd purpose of rendering their services invaluable, have given
you to believe that your natural tendencies are evil, and that the
unavoidable misfortunes and sorrows of your lives are but penalties
for your many misdeeds. The general acceptance of this belief has
lowered your pride, and given you, to some extent, that character of
dejection and submissiveness which is entirely subversive to the
attainment of any destiny to be reached by yourselves.
There is a quality of mind which we acknowledge as, above all
others, the one which has assisted us to our present very desirable
social condition, and that is the feeling to resist the perpetration of a
mean or bad act, on account of the sense of degradation it inflicts
upon the feelings of the doer. This motive of conscience, so plainly
the offspring of self-esteem, and growing out of a cultivation of the
mind alone, without any regard whatever to creed influences or
teachings, is totally ignored, either as a promoter of virtue or
preventive of vice, by all the religions that have existed upon your
planet. The reason for this is easily explained. Under the knowledge
that a cultivation of the mind and conscience, without creed
influence, was capable of doing for you a better service in the
advancement of your morals than your churches have performed, it
has been made a part of their doctrine to belittle and abuse your
purely intellectual faculties, under the unwarranted and
unreasonable imputation that the free exercise of your reason was
an assumption beyond your right. And all this, too, in face of the
overwhelming evidence about you, that the most corroding and
dangerous of your vices germinate and seed themselves only in
places where the mind lies in fallow.
There comes to us from our remote ages, through tradition and
history, an account of some superstitious beliefs, but it has been our
good fortune never to have had them built up into a system so
overbearing and harmful as yours has been. It cannot be said of us
that we ever denounced honest intellectual efforts in any direction,
or that we ever regarded the expression of opinions founded on the
dictates of reason as crimes, and your punishment of such, with all
its atrocious and heart-rending details, serves as a lesson for the
whole universe of worlds never to put trust in the smooth tongues
and insinuating ways of the seers, for the spirit of fairness and truth
is not in them. Your restrictions and punishments of the free
expression of thought, inaugurated by the corporate organization of
your present religion, and maintained with more or less rigor to the
present, has left its blighting effects upon your society by
encouraging some of the meanest of your vices. The assumption
that one of you shall not have the right to convey to another his
opposing convictions upon any religious question is so outrageously
unjust, that it never could have been carried out in any other way
than by the general belief that it was in accordance with the wishes
and purposes of the Almighty. Such a denial of the natural right of
mankind could only be enforced when a majority of the multitude
became converts to the doctrines which favored it. The leaders of
religious persecution, during the centuries of church control, were
merely carrying out the wishes of this majority. The spirit of
intolerance, once abroad, became the parent of those habits of
concealed thought, moral cowardice and hypocricy, which even to
the present, so rule among you, that sincerity in expressing religious
belief is not universal. In deference to the lingering opinion among a
large body of your people that a dissension from old modes of
religious thought is displeasing to the Almighty, and dangerous to
society, many of you are constantly led to veil their thoughts on
these questions, in dread of the social consequences which would
follow their frank avowal. Many of skeptical tendencies are thus
induced to hide their convictions in fear of disturbing their safe and
comfortable positions in society. By silently working the penalty of
withholding their political and social support, your great illogical
multitude backed by their vigilant church organizations still maintain
a terrorism over you. Consequently, your writers are guarded in their
lines, your public speakers in their language, your teachers in their
instruction, and your statesmen in their legislation, that each shall
not get beyond the soundings of orthodox religious belief, while with
the knowledge of your time, most of them are conscious in their
inner thoughts that they are trimming to avoid truth, in the full
knowledge, that to this day upon the earth, the surest human
preferment is only for those who support error in this direction.
The most lamentable instances to be found among you of this
evasion are your chief institutions of learning. Of all places these
should be the first to lead in truth, as they are best provided in all
the equipments to find it; yet under the prevailing terrorism their
predicament is embarrassing and pitiful. While holding class
instructions in evolution, geology, astronomy and kindred sciences,
they hesitate to openly deny those scriptural fallacies to which their
knowledge is opposed, and the farcical spectacle is daily enacted
among many of them of a ceremonious reverence for these fallacies,
and at all times an artful evasion of any denial of their truth, every
one of which it is their especial business to disprove in the course of
instruction.
I hope you will not infer from what I have said that the people of
Mars have not great reverence and veneration for the Deity. Indeed,
it is the universal belief amongst us, that the animus which is within
us to do good to ourselves, and to make pleasant the ways of life
among each other, is but the prompting of that divine presence
which is leading us aright in the direction of the still better things to
come. As we see in all living things a constant development upward
toward a state of perfection, and having, of all creatures else, that
within us most susceptible and easy of advancement in the universal
march, we simply take our place in the line. What we have
accomplished in that direction in our government, society, and
morals, gives us new heart to further efforts, and if our methods
may be of any service to you, I will give you some further account of
them.
 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 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.
 CHAPTER VI.
Our veneration for the Deity, which is truer and more sincere than
yours, arises from a widely different conception. Looking back upon
the ages, and what they have brought to us, we perceive that each
new development in matter brings an increase of those qualities
which give us pleasure to behold. Beginning with the most
unattractive shapes, this process of change in organization and
symmetry, by an unalterable law of the Creator, bring to us out of
the ugliness of the past the beautiful of the present. Since,
therefore, we see Him constantly at work, transforming the ugly into
the beautiful, we believe He is pleased with the colors, shapes, and
qualities of things which delight our own cultivated senses. Acting
then on this conviction, we surround ourselves with the beautiful in
nature and art.
The change, in the form of matter, is not more instructive than the
steady modification of intelligence, which, from its primitive
ignorance, superstition, and brutality, has gradually been raised step
by step to its present higher grade of thought and action. We
recognize here a fact most important and significant to us. While the
divine energy is steadily at work, converting lower forms of matter
into higher ones, we are given no part in the proceeding. It goes on
without our assistance, and we have no power to diminish or
accelerate its steady onward course. It is widely different with
intelligence. That is given into our hands, with all its grand
possibilities. In that, we have evidence of the divine confidence to
promote its advancement in view of the blessings it holds in store.
Taking this view, we have for centuries cultivated the mind in all
directions of knowledge and feeling, as the chief part of our religion.
The motion of the spheres is not more certainly the work of this
great being, than are these progressive changes in mind and matter.
We believe vice and ugliness to be convertible terms, the latter a
quality due to imperfectly developed matter, and the first a property
of intelligence in the same imperfect state; just as beauty and virtue
describe together, or separately, the same advanced evolution.
But while working in harmony with the Deity, and assisting in his
purposes, we have constantly in view, as an incentive to action, the
consummation or goal to which all these changes tend. We believe
the outcome to be a spiritual life with all things knowable, and a
state of perfection and happiness beyond our present conception.
Happiness, then, being a religious aspiration, we promote it in all
ways to the innocent and reasonable inclinations of our present
state.
Our religion is consequently more jubilant than solemn. We have no
torments in store in it, nor long drawn agonies and mortifications of
the flesh. Its only business with death is to smooth its pillow, and to
reduce its attendant sorrows to the minimum. To the misfortunes of
the present our religion extends its hand of sympathy and material
help. To what purpose should it introduce and dwell upon the
miseries and sorrows of the past? We let the dead ages rest. We can
find nothing in their ashes to compare with the living. The present is
better than the past, as the future will be better in exact measure
with the new truths discovered, and the old fallacies cast aside. You
rake among the emanations of an early and imperfect development
for monitors and guides, and do honor to them for the mysteries
they invoke. You place the withered hand of the mummy into the
warm palm of the living, and your ceremony of introduction is a
prayer that the living body may never depart from the dead form.
The untenable and unsupportable premises upon which your
religions are based will lead to their decay. Nothing of them will
remain to you but their spirituality. Shorn of their superstitions, and
guided by the intellect, the spiritual part of them will be retained by
you as a jewel repolished and in a new setting.
The orthodox among you are suspicious of the inroads of science,
unaware of the fact that in due time it will fix upon your belief the
conviction of a future spiritual existence without the shadow of a
doubt. When you will have arrived at that point, your ways of
morality and progress will be so much increased, that you will regard
your previous advancement as trifling. To some, your science
appears to lend encouragement to materialistic beliefs. This is only
your half knowledge. For some time to come your discoveries will
tend in that direction of thought, but all this will be superseded with
a firm conviction of the existence of the Deity, and your steady
approach to Him. The period of danger to you will arrive when you
will have made the discovery, as we have centuries ago, of what
may be described in your language as the universal diffusion of
intelligence amongst all matter, inorganic as well as organic.
It may be a startling proposition to announce to you that the quality
which gives you the power of abstract thought is possessed in a
lower degree by, for instance, the stones which lie beneath your
feet; yet such is the case, for we have demonstrated beyond a doubt
that the chemical forces and affinities are nothing else but low,
restricted, and insensible forms of intelligent action. The fact is best
shown by the building up of organic bodies in their multiplication of
cells. Each cell arranges itself in place, and makes way to its
successor, under an inherited impulse of action from which it is
unable to depart. What are known among you as natural forces, are
merely forms of unconscious and restricted intelligences, which have
only the power to act in limited directions. They both build up matter
and tear it down for us. They shape the crystal with mathematical
uniformity, and mark out the form of the plant with unerring
precision. The character of the agency bears no proportion to the
magnitude of its work. These low, unconscious forms of intelligence,
which inspire the plant cell to build up its fanciful elevations, and the
infinitesimal atom to seek after and embrace its affinity, are precisely
the same as that which directs the sea of worlds upon their swift
and unvarying paths. And yet with all their exactitude and infinity of
scope, they are as much below that independent, self-conscious
intelligence which guides our thoughts and actions, as the
protoplasm is beneath the most highly organized and perfect form.
Your theology has degraded you with the belief that you are
mendicants, enjoying the favors of life as mere concessions from an
all-powerful and exacting master; and that your position in the
cosmos bears a close relation to the insignificance of your material
bodies, and your feeble power in the stupendous energies which
surround you. Your science will elevate you with the knowledge that
you are peers in the great universe, and that your stature has no
comparative measure for its proportions in the height and breadth of
your material world. It will teach you that by slow degrees, and
through millions of ages, you have become that elimination of the
spiritual out of the vast number of divided intelligences which have
built up and governed your natural world; that you are the harvest
and the fruition of the innumerable lower intelligences, which were
sown broadcast in the beginning to do their potent work.
In pursuing these matters, your scientists will arrive at a number of
important truths, entirely in opposition to some of your present
apparently established theories. In your speculations touching the
future state, there is a tendency which I cannot designate by any
other name in your language than narrowness. You have come so
recently to realize the immense sizes and distances of the heavenly
bodies, that their comparison with your former constricted views in
that direction has produced a sense of helplessness in the attempt to
fathom these infinite spaces. But ages of contemplation will serve to
broaden your views, as well as to expand your hopes. Encompassing
or beside this broad universe we have evidence of a spiritual region,
like the firm land bordering upon your own great ocean, which great
body of water to the lower animal life within it is just as limitless and
profound as the great cosmos is to yourselves.
You have but recently discovered a process of nature, by whose slow
changes, animal life has been altered, and its species modified and
improved. You know that the atmosphere, which encircled your
Earth at the beginning, was not of a composition to support its
present highly organized respiring life, and that consequently, behind
the ages the only living and moving things upon your planet were
the scant air-consuming creatures, who inhabited the water. Among
the dark and cavernous depths of your oceans, and the slimy ooze
of your rivers and lakes, were located the cradles, where nature
began moulding the present graceful living and moving forms which
now roam over your solid surface. The Creator’s delicate laboratory,
for the beginning of animal life, was placed among the equable
temperatures, and soft walls of water below the variable and
desiccating atmosphere, which everywhere surmounted it.
Yourselves, as well as all other living and breathing creatures, had
your foundations of life laid in the waters of the earth, a fact, of
whose significant reminder is, that nature has continuously provided
for the protective presence of water in your embryo womb growth.
In your germal life, the universe seemed to you nothing but a vast
and unlimited expanse of water. The submerged earth upon which
you lay and rested, with its murky surroundings, and the expanse of
sunless liquid clouds above you, was the only world and universe
you knew. By what authority of reason or science then do you
conclude, that the stage of evolution, which brought you out into the
glorious sunshine and free air, and adapted you with the form and
comprehension you possess, is the end? From the cold, sluggish,
and unconscious, to the warm, alert, and intellectual, is no greater a
step of progress, than the coming one, which will make clear to your
understanding the mysteries of life and nature, so unknowable and
unthinkable in your present immaturity. Out of your next stage of
spiritual supremacy, you will look back upon the present, with all its
conditions, so condemned by the contrast of better things attained,
that it will be but little more to you than is now the repulsive
uncanny, and incommunicable habitat of your beginning.
 CHAPTER VII.
The confidential relations between our government and people have
given it a parental character. It has consequently been the study of
our legislation for ages past to assuage, as far as possible, those
natural evils which creep in as the result of unrestricted social forces.
Regarding the whole mass of our inhabitants as a family, the
government could never feel that its duty was faithfully performed,
while a number of its people were, relating to the ordinary
enjoyments of life, in a state of suppression from any removable
cause. You began your civilization, just as we began ours, by the
crystallization of society into two classes. Those who at first, by
thrift, acquisitiveness, or strong arms, became possessed of
sufficient property to escape the necessity of daily toil for the
sustenance of life; and those who, by the absence of these qualities
or from other causes, were obliged from day to day to exercise their
muscular and nervous energies for the benefit of those who found it
profitable to use and pay for them. This condition of society is a
natural and just one, and there is nothing whatever in it to prevent
the largest possible amount of happiness to all. But before many
ages we discovered that the interests of the property class and the
labor class were not equally equipped to maintain a fair and
equitable relation with each other. We found that the interests of
labor in the many bore no comparison in its political weight with the
great power of wealth in the few; and foreseeing that subjugation in
time, of one by the other, which your experience has shown, we
made wide provision against it.
We acknowledge as the foundation of all material progress that the
honest accumulation of wealth should be the privilege of all; and
that the rights of property should be protected, and the enjoyment
of it secured to everyone. Yet with these principles firmly and
successfully carried out in our government, we have for many
centuries, considered it necessary to support and sustain the
interests of the labor class by special legislative attention. You have
pursued a directly opposite course. From the beginning of your
history the privilege of wealth to hold labor in subjection, and to use
it as an instrument of accumulation, with about the same regard for
its well being as the horse in the collar or the ox under its yoke, has
prevailed, without the enactment of any sincere and effective law to
assist and sustain it in its unequal contest. On the contrary, your
statute books are filled with oppressive laws against the labor class;
and while in your most civilized districts these unjust enactments are
nearly obsolete, there yet remains an average over your planet of
such legal and social suppressions of the class whose strong arm
supports you, as to be reckoned by us as the most unhappy and
discreditable feature of your social state.
It matters not how your economists may examine and discuss the
relations of labor with its co-operative interests, so long as they offer
no proposals of relief to it in the unjust burthen it bears of the
hardships of life. Your common view that labor must be unavoidably
submitted to the law of supply and demand, and that, consequently,
eighty per cent of your people are to be helplessly left to take their
chances of distress and suffering at each unfavorable turn of the
labor market, is peculiar to the planet upon which you live, and is
one of the most mistaken and unwise conclusions among you. This
heartless notion of yours is plainly the inheritance of your early cruel
ages. With such a state of things you can never have a very high
state of civilization. With so many of you constantly under the
vicissitude of such adverse changes of condition, there can be no
steady progress of the whole, and but little encouragement to thrift;
a lack of ambition must prevail in all the higher purposes of life, and
a general surrender to improvidence and the vices which follow. For
that class which has created your wealth, and is constantly renewing
it, and which constitutes so large a portion of your whole population,
you can show nothing of legislative effort in its favor except
indirectly, through some of the purposes to smooth the way and
increase the profits of capital. The opportunities of your
comparatively small capitalistic class to use for its purposes, in an
entirely heartless way, the larger body of wealth producers, have
been made easy by natural conditions which would have been
removed or corrected long ago, under a more humane and unselfish
administration of your affairs, and if your governments had not been
exclusively in the hands of the smaller class mentioned. We know of
nothing more heartless and cruel of the governing classes of the
Earth, than their careless submission of its wage-earners to the
unrestricted influence of competition for employment, under the
compromising condition of a necessity for bread.
In our philosophy we recognize only two honest ways of
accumulating wealth. One is the saving of wages, and the other the
profits of capital; and our legislation has been chiefly directed to
make the chances of wealth by these two methods as even as
possible. To perform this service effectually, our greatest efforts have
been directed toward the labor interest. We feel ourselves justified in
this, because the welfare of about seven-eighths of our people is
connected with this interest; because to the labor class is entirely
due the creation and constant renewal of all the wealth on our
planet. Because, also, that capital has natural advantages over labor,
which are first, its choice of time and place for investment; second,
its capacity to wait for opportunities without the risk of physical
suffering by its owners, and the leisure for thought and knowledge it
affords to those who control it. Also, that capital, holding the
position of a voluntary employer, naturally assumes the rights and
privileges of master, which labor, in its constrained and dependent
situation, is obliged to acknowledge.
We have long since considered these unequal relations and
tendencies, and have proceeded to remedy them. Our legislation in
behalf of the labor classes is the happiest and most satisfactory of
any that we have. Without it our present civilization would be
impossible. Before describing our methods, let me direct your
attention to the immediate and indirect causes which bear down
upon the labor classes of your planet.
Prominent among these is the promiscuous ownership of land. The
surrendering of the Earth’s surface to the control of individual
ownership is one of the most serious mistakes of your civilization. It
is not to be mentioned alone as the greatest objection to this, that
the planet upon which you were born is the natural inheritance of all
of you, from whose surface each and every one of you is destined to
derive a sustenance, and that a monopoly of it by the few is as plain
a violation of justice as it would be to hold the atmosphere in private
use by sections, were such a thing possible. But it is chiefly to be
taken into consideration, that your land policy enables the few to
dominate the many, suppresses one class and elevates another, and
insensibly transfers an undue portion of the earnings of labor into
the pockets of your land-holding classes.
Almost every influence now at work in the progress of your society
tends to throw money into the hands of your land holders, not fairly
earned by themselves. While the products of labor are cheapening
from day to day, partly due to increased skill, and the appliance of
machinery in their manufacture, and partly, also, by the competition
of labor, owing to increase of population, yet even by these very
operations the value of landed property goes up.
You already estimate rent as a considerable element of cost in the
production of your food materials, and you are gradually
approaching a period, when by the growth of population the cost of
food will be very much increased by rent charges. You have all along
submitted to this monopoly of land from causes plainly apparent. In
the early days of your history all private ownership of land was
acquired and held by force, and it may be safely asserted that no
title at present exists in any of your older countries that is not
founded on violent conquest, and that has not been maintained by
an organized and armed authority, whose existence depends upon
retaining the system of ownership in vogue. It is plain to see that
when the demand of justice to all shall be the basis of political
action, and especially when the cost of your food supply shall
become greatly increased by the charges of rent, your present
system will not be quietly endured.
In your own more favored region of the Earth may be found
temporary conditions which tend not only to tolerate your present
land ownership system, but to render it popular. Your large area of
unoccupied agricultural surface, from which any of your citizens are
permitted at small cost to select a portion with a title in perpetuity,
destroys for the time being the monopolizing character of private
ownership; and while these governmental acts of land distribution
are the most remarkable concessions to labor in human history, we
fail to discover anything in the practice but a temporary compromise
between the interests of capital and labor. As your society
progresses you must arrive at the time when your landless class will
be as effectually excluded from the privilege of ownership as they
are at present in the older countries of the world.
Your own country in the newness of its human possession, by the
lavish distribution of its territory into private hands, has alleviated
the burdens of labor elsewhere, as well as within itself. It has
effected this in two ways: first by withdrawing from the surplus
population of densely inhabited districts abroad, and second by
supplying from its rich agricultural lands a cheaper food supply to
the older countries of the Earth than they were able to furnish from
their own soils. But the most unreasonable among you cannot fail to
perceive the speedy limit to these operations in the interests of
labor, which after all must be considered as merely effecting a truce
between that conflict of the laboring and landless many and the
land-holding few which your people will surely witness in time. We
manage these things very differently on Mars.
 CHAPTER VIII.
The planet Mars is held to be the inheritance of those who are born
upon it. Admitting the self evident and uncontrovertible justice of
this view, our government ages ago assumed the ownership and
property control of it in trust for the equal benefit of all. It has
proceeded in accordance with this view to grant its uses for all the
purposes of industry and pleasure, in such a manner as to bestow
the income of its rent equally upon every living inhabitant. I can only
give you some outlines of our admirable manner of accomplishing
this purpose.
Our agricultural districts are divided into small farms, even in size,
with graded rents in accordance with the richness of their soils, and
other conditions. Sub-letting is not allowed, and a chief purpose in
making these allotments is, that the family residing upon each farm
will be able to perform all the labor required. This is in accordance
with a principle which our government carries out in all possible
ways, to bring labor and capital into partnership. The cultivator of
the soil goes on with his improvements, in the assurance that they
are as secure to him as though his title were perpetual; for in the
event of a change of tenancy, which is exceedingly rare, a fair value
is returned to him for all the fixed property which is the product of
his labor. It is provided that there shall be no competition in the
occupancy, and as the rent is but a nominal sum, he feels no
insecurity in his possession. Agricultural rents are graded annually,
and are payable shortly after harvest. They may be either higher or
lower than those of the preceding year, depending entirely on
profits.
Landlordism, as it exists with you, is unknown amongst us. The
rapacity which under your unjust system is admitted to an ownership
in which no competition can possibly exist, and at the same time is
permitted to avail itself of that unlimited competition which the
pressure of public necessity induces, has neither foothold nor
abiding place upon our planet. Under our system, you will perceive
that any increase of the profits of land is met by the tenant with an
increase of rent, and all those natural causes which advance the
value of landed property add to the government income, and in that
way are shared by all. Our government derives its sole support from
rent, and no other tax or exaction is known. With a percentage of
the profits from the use of the land, which is never burdensome to
the tenant, it has been enabled, and has found it to its interest, to
carry out agricultural and municipal improvements and enterprises
which individual ownership would never undertake. It has drained
our marshes, and reclaimed our desert lands in the most efficient
manner, without the necessity of creating, as with you, an exacting
monopoly, which would claim of industry its lion’s share of profits
from the work.
The government interest in our municipal progress, by virtue of its
holdings, has led it to carry out in the most complete manner those
sanitary enterprises which render city life safe and enjoyable. With
its advantages of sole ownership of city land, it is enabled to enforce
certain uniform rules of taste in house and street construction, which
have made our cities as complete and harmonious as single works of
art; their symmetrical combinations of lines and curves as
consistently meeting each other as in a separate architectural
elevation.
As I have already hinted to you, a cultivation of the beautiful in art
and nature is a part of our religion, and we indulge in the
gratification of esthetic inclinations as one of the greatest charms of
life. Our government erects no buildings except public ones, and in
their construction and fittings is manifested that universal love of the
grand and beautiful which everywhere prevails. Your imagination is
scarcely able to conceive the magnificence of our temples of
worship, and the charming perspectives of our streets and highways.
Yet even our industrious attention to all this pleasing effect for the
eye is held to be a matter of secondary importance, when compared
with the health-giving measures and regulations which prevail.
From the ground rents alone of every municipality, free and
abundant water, light and heat are supplied to every inhabitant; and
from the same source of income a complete insurance is furnished
against individual loss from accidents, and all our dead are disposed
of without cost to relatives and friends. We place no dead bodies in
the earth as you do, considering such a practice not only barbarous,
but dangerous to the health of the living. On the contrary, we
extinguish them in a manner which you cannot follow from a lack of
the required advance in chemical science. Ever since our discovery of
the elementary unit we have had the power to reduce all matter into
its original state, and it serves us well, that with our chemical
appliances and due solemnity not a vestige of the dead is left to be
preserved, except their memories.
For the purpose of exhibiting to you the marked difference of effect
on labor and industry between private and government ownership of
land, let us trace the institution and progress of one of your cities in
comparison with one of ours. These combinations of individual
enterprise are to be found upon your planet in all stages of growth,
and may be most conveniently observed by you in this vicinity in
their earlier periods of development. They are instituted mostly with
you in a fortuitous way, a few individual interests forming the
nucleus around which capital and labor are attracted, under the
outlook of increased population and trade, to supply and create the
various products of industry demanded. The whole land surface of
your new city, including its prospective limits, is immediately
appropriated at a trifling cost, by a single one or a smaller number
of owners, under laws conveniently designed for their purposes.
From this time forward the most extraordinary exactions from
industry begin. Every stroke of the hammer and revolution of the fly
wheel adds to the value of these possessions, until in a short time
there is no limit to the price or rent of them, but the ability of
industry to stand the tax.
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