by James Cowan
CHAPTER VI
A REMARKABLE PEOPLE.
The conversation with our new friends was not all on one side, for wehad many questions to answer about the earth, the Martian mind showingas great a thirst for knowledge as ours. One of the first thingsThorwald said after we had settled down to a good talk was:
"But, Doctor, your little head is so full of thought that it seems to meyou ought not to have been surprised to find us so large here. You knewbefore you came that Mars is much smaller than the earth and, therefore,the attraction of gravitation being less, that everything can grow moreeasily. Things may as well be one size as another if only they are welladapted to each other, and we would never have known we were large orthat you were small had we not been brought together. In the sight ofHim who made both the earth and Mars, and fashioned one for you and theother for us, we are neither great nor small. In fact, size is neverabsolute but only relative."
"That is very clear to us now," said the doctor, "and I promise not tobe surprised again, even when I walk the streets of your cities and seeyou in your houses."
"Then, Doctor," said I, "if we had found inhabitants on the moon whatgreat folks they must have seemed to us."
This was an exceedingly foolish remark for me to make, for it resultedin the doctor's almost betraying his condition to our friends.
Of course Thorwald was interested in what I said, and eagerly inquired:
"So you found no inhabitants in the moon?"
"Just one," spoke up the doctor quickly.
"What! you found one and left him there?"
"It was a woman," said the doctor.
This talk had been so rapid that I had not had a chance to interfere,but I saw that I must stop it now for the doctor's sake. When I couldsee him alone I could tell him his memory was playing him a trick and hemust avoid that subject. So, before Thorwald could speak again, I said:
"Let me suggest, Thorwald, that we let the moon rest till we have heardmore of Mars, which I am sure is of greater importance. We have told youmany things in regard to our planet, and are willing to answer all thequestions you may please to ask from time to time, but now we would liketo listen a while."
"Yes," said the doctor, "we started on this expedition to add to ourscientific knowledge, and we seem in a fair way to accomplish ourpurpose; so that, if you will find a way to send us back to the earthsome time, I think our friends will admit that we have been successful.But first we want to learn all we can about this wonderful world. Howlong has your race existed? Our astronomers tell us Mars is too oldto be inhabited, and, considering some of my own recent experiences infinding my science unreliable, it rather consoles me to discover thatthey are mistaken."
"They are right," Thorwald answered, "in believing that Mars is veryold, and so our race is nearing its maturity. It is impossible tojudge accurately of the age of the planet itself, but we know it isexceedingly old from the evidences of changes that have taken place onits surface. Neither can we tell when our race was born, though we havelegends and traditions dating back fifty thousand years, and authentichistory for nearly half that time."
The doctor and myself now began to realize that we had indeed somethingto learn from these people, and I remarked:
"These figures astonish us, Thorwald, and you can hardly understand howinterested we are. But please continue. From what little I have seenI should think you are much farther advanced in everyway than theinhabitants of the earth."
"We believe," replied the Martian, "that our planet is much olderthan the earth, and if we are right in that it is but natural that ourcivilization should be older also. If the tendency of mind is towardperfection, if in your experience you have found that, in the main, menlook upward more than downward, what would you expect to find in a worldso beautiful as this and where life has existed so long? From what weknow of our own history and from what we have learned of the worldsaround us, we believe the life-bearing period of Mars has long sincepassed its middle point, and that both our planet and our race havepassed through convulsions and changes to which other worlds, perhapsthe earth, are now subjected."
This appeared so reasonable that I said to him:
"We must believe that Mars is an afternoon planet. And now we want tohear whatever you may choose to tell us about your civilization."
"That is a broad subject," replied Thorwald, "but it is something I liketo talk about. If I judge rightly of what you have already told me ofthe earth and its people, I think we were in just about your situationages ago and that we have merely matured. That is, the causes nowat work on the earth are having in us their legitimate effect. Theseprocesses are slow but sure. To the Infinite time is of no moreimportance in itself than is size.
"I know of no better topic to begin with," continued Thorwald, "than thematter of government. You wondered at the peculiar discipline on boardthis ship. It is but a type of what you will find on land. We haveno government in its strict sense, for there is no one that needsgoverning. We have organization for mutual help in many ways, but norulers nor legislators. The only government is that of the family. Herecharacter is formed so that when the children go forth into the world noone desires to wrong his neighbor. We know from our histories of allthe struggles our ancestors passed through before the days of universalpeace and brotherhood. Now we go and come as we please, with no fear ofharm. We are all one nation because all national boundaries havebeen obliterated, and we have a common language. There are no lawsof compulsion or restraint, for all do by instinct what is best forthemselves and their neighbors."
"Oh, happy Mars!" here broke in the usually prosaic doctor. "That soundslike a story. And yet what is it," he continued, addressing me, "butthe effect of perfect obedience to our golden rule? If men should reallylearn to do to others as they would have others do to them, what atransformation it would accomplish."
"So that is what you call the golden rule, is it?" asked Thorwald. "Andare you all trying to live by it?"
"Well," I replied, "that is what many of us profess to be doing, but Imust say we fall far, very far short of the mark. I do not know a singleinhabitant of the earth, with the possible exception of my companionhere, who fully obeys that command."
The doctor's smile was not lost on Thorwald, who replied:
"It was rather too bad of you to bring so far away from the earth theonly good man the planet contained; but I am glad to know the goldenrule, as you may well call it, has been given to men. We have hadthe same here, and, oh! if I could make you realize something of thestruggle our race has had in working it into life and practice, youwould gain some hope for the people of the earth. I mean, the result ofthis struggle would give you hope, for I am not ashamed to say thatwe are now living up to the full requirements of this law, and if youshould spend the remainder of your lives with us I am sure you would notfind my statement untrue. It is only by actually loving our neighborsas ourselves that we are able to live as we do. The law of love hasreplaced the law of force. It is well for you to understand this atthe beginning, for it is the secret of our wonderful success in all thehigher forms of civilization."
"It must have helped you greatly," said I, "in the matter of which youhave just been speaking, that of government."
"Yes, it has," he replied. "In our histories we have full accounts ofthe long course of events when we were divided into hundreds of nations,each with its own pride and ambition, and each striving to build upitself upon the misfortunes or the ruins of its neighbors. You canperhaps imagine what a mass of material we have for reading and study."
"We can," spoke up the student doctor, "and it fairly makes my mouthwater. But tell us briefly, Thorwald, how you ever passed from thosetroublous times to the blissful state in which we now find you."
"The transition was exceedingly slow; it seemed, in fact, impossiblethat such a change could ever be effected. But it began with theestablishment of universal peace, which was demanded by the growingspirit of brotherly love, and assisted by commercial reciprocity and aw
orld language. Gradually national boundaries were found to be only anannoyance, and in time--a long time, of course--we became one nationand finally no nation. For now no one exercises any authority over hisneighbors, since the need for all artificial distinctions has long sincepassed away."
"Then," said I, "you have no doubt lost all fear and anxiety over theconflicting interests of capital and labor."
"Yes," replied Thorwald, "for we have no such distinctions in society asrich and poor, workingmen and capitalists. We all work as we please,but there is so little to do that no one is burdened, and one cannot bericher than another because all the material bounties of nature and artare common to all, being as free as the air. I suppose, as this seems tobe strange talk to you, that you cannot realize what it is to belong toa society where everyone considers the interests of his neighbor as muchas his own. You will find when you reach that point that most of yourtroubles will be gone, as ours are."
"Our troubles!" said the doctor. "Many of our troubles, to be sure,arise from our passions and appetites--in other words, from ourselfishness--and these will no doubt disappear when we reach thatblessed state of which you have spoken, a condition prayed for anddimly expected by many of our race. But other troubles of ours come fromsickness and severe toil, from accidents, famines, and the convulsionsof nature. How, for example, can you have escaped the latter, unless,indeed, God has helped those who have so wisely helped themselves?"
"Your last thought is right," answered our friend. "Nature has certainlyassisted us. While the crust of the planet was thin we know the centralfires heaved and shook the ground and burst forth from the mountains,causing great destruction and keeping the world in fear. We do not knowhow thick the crust of the planet now is, but nothing has been felt ofthose inner convulsions for many ages. One of our feats of engineeringhas been to see how far we could penetrate into the surface of theglobe. A well of vast size has been dug, the temperature being carefullynoted and observations made of the many different substances passedthrough--water, coal, gas, oil, and all kinds of mineral deposits. Thework has progressed from one generation to another, and no one can tellwhen it will be called finished, as it is determined to dig toward thecenter of the planet as fast as our ever-increasing skill will permit."
"Did you find out how thick the crust is?" I asked.
"No," he answered, "we are not much nearer the solution of that questionthan before, but we have made valuable discoveries as to what the crustis composed of. The temperature has gradually, though slowly, increased,and we believe the time will come when the work will have to beabandoned on account of the heat. We have gone far enough to know thatwhen the fuel on the surface of our globe is all used up we shall onlyhave to tap the center to get all the heat we want."
"What a capital idea that will be," I interrupted, "to throw at some ofour pessimistic friends on the earth, Doctor."
"We see now, Thorwald," my companion said, "that your planet is too oldto give you any more trouble from earthquake and volcano, but how aboutother natural phenomena, the tempest and cyclone for example?"
"Well," replied Thorwald, "we have a theory that time, the great healer,has cured these evils also. Let me ask, Doctor, if the earth everreceives any accretions of matter from outside its own atmosphere?"
"Yes, we have the fall of meteorites, foreign substances which webelieve the earth encounters in its path around the sun."
"I supposed such must be the case," Thorwald continued. "And now, whenyou consider the great age of Mars, perhaps you will not be surprisedto learn that this new matter, coming to us from the outside, wassufficient to increase the weight of our globe and gradually decreasethe rate of speed at which we were traveling through space."
"I am surprised, though," said the doctor, "because the accumulation ofmeteorolites on the surface of the earth is so exceedingly slow thatit would take millions of years, at the present rate, to increase itsdiameter one inch."
"But perhaps they came much faster in past ages. Let me ask you, Doctor,if it is not a fact that the rate of revolution of Mars around the sunis slower than the earth's? I suppose you are far enough advanced inastronomical science to answer that."
"Yes," replied the doctor, "you are correct. I believe the earth speedsalong at nineteen miles a second, while Mars travels only sixteen milesin the same time."
"We know by our computations that our speed is much less than it oncewas, and our theory is that this has in some way hushed those terriblestorms and winds which we know were formerly so frequent."
Here the doctor thought he saw a chance to make a point, and spoke asfollows:
"If the meteorites come in quantities sufficient to have caused suchchanges, it seems to me their fall must be as great a menace to yourpeace as the evils they have cured. They do not strike the earth inlarge numbers, but still we have a record of a shower of meteoric stoneswhich devastated a whole village. I suppose all parts of your globeare by this time well populated, and how can you be entirely free fromtrouble when you are living in constant danger of the downfall of thesegreat masses of rock?"
"But we don't have meteorites now," replied Thorwald.
"Oh, you don't?"
"No, they ceased falling long ago. Mars is going slow enough for thepresent."
"Very kind of them, I am sure, to stop when you didn't need them anylonger," said the doctor; "and I suppose you have some plausible reasonto give for their disappearance."
"Yes, we believe that the interplanetary space was well filledwith these small bodies, circling around the sun, and when theirmultitudinous and eccentric orbits intercepted the orbits of theplanets, they came within the attraction of these larger masses. Marshas merely, in the course of time, cleared for itself a broad pathin its yearly journey and is now encountering no more stragglingfragments."
"There, Doctor," said I, "you are well answered. And now, Thorwald, tellus how you have escaped other evils, famine and fire for instance."
"Fire," continued our friend, "was one of the first foes subdued. Wequite early learned to make our habitations and everything about us offireproof materials, and, if I mistake not, you on the earth will notlong endure an enemy which can be so easily put down. You will find allmaterials can be so treated with chemicals as to be absolutely safe fromthe flames. We have fire only when and where we desire it.
"When you speak of famines you touch a more difficult subject, but here,too, time and skill have wrought wonderful changes. In our histories weread of the time when the weather was chiefly noted for its fickleness,and when some parts of our globe were mere desert wastes, where rainwas unknown and no life could exist. And in the inhabited portions onesection would often be deluged with too much rain while another wouldhave none, both conditions leading to a failure in agriculture and muchconsequent suffering. A long time was spent in gathering statistics,which finally proved that if the rainfall were distributed there wouldbe just about enough to water sufficiently the whole surface of theglobe. Nature provided rain enough, but it did not always fall where andwhen it was most needed. It seemed to be left with us to find a remedyfor this apparent evil. When I say 'us' in this way I mean our race as awhole, for most of these changes took place many ages ago.
"Our philosophers had seen so many difficulties removed and improvementsmade in things supposed to be fixed that they began, once upon a time,to assert that rain and snow and the weather in general ought tobe subject to our will. They said that in the advanced state ofcivilization toward which we were progressing it would seem to bean anomalous thing that we should continue to be subjected to theannoyances of so changeable a tyrant as the weather. We seemed destinedto gain control of so many of the forces of nature that our futuremastery in this department looked to them reasonable. For a long timethese views appeared fanciful to the many, but this did not deter a fewenthusiasts from study and experiment. As knowledge and skill increasedwe began, little by little, to gain control of the elements; but do notimagine it was anything less than a slow and laborious wor
k.
"First, as we learned something of the laws which control theprecipitation of the moisture suspended in the atmosphere, we discovereda way to produce rain by mechanical means. As this discovery wasgradually developed we found we had really solved the problem. For, asthere was only a certain amount of moisture taken up into the air, thequantity of rain could not be increased nor diminished, and so when wemade it rain in one place it was always at the expense of the rainfallsomewhere else.
"Since those early days vast improvement has been made, until now theselaws, once so mysterious and so perplexing, are obedient to our service.The whole face of our planet has been reclaimed, and drouth and famineon the one hand and floods on the other are entirely unknown. Eachsection of country is given rain or snow or sunshine just as it needsit, and there is no uncertainty in the matter."
When Thorwald had reached this point my curiosity prompted me to ask himto tell us in a few words how they could make it rain when they pleased,and he answered that he would be glad to give us details of all thesematters if we insisted on it, but he thought it would be better for himto present a general view of the state of their society, leaving it forus to see with our own eyes how things were done, after we had reachedour destination.
I readily acquiesced, with an apology for my interruption, and Thorwaldresumed:
"The doctor spoke of accidents, sickness, and severe toil as among thesources of your troubles. With us, at the present day, all naturallaws are so well understood and so faithfully obeyed that there are noaccidents. Machinery and appliances of all kinds are perfect; nothing isleft to chance, but everything is governed by law. And as we follow thatlaw in every instance nothing can ever happen, in the old sense of thatword. To take a homely example, you have of course learned that it isnot well to put your hand into the fire, and so, though you use a gooddeal of fire you keep your hands out of it. You know what the law is,and you do not tempt it. By our long experience we have learned theoperation of all laws, and in every position in life we simply avoidputting our hand into the fire. To be sure, we have been assisted inthis by superior skill and by our general steadiness and ripeness ofcharacter. If I read history aright accidents were caused by ignoranceor neglect of law, and I am sure the people of the earth, when theybegin to realize fully how unnecessary they are, will soon outgrow them.
"As for sickness, you cannot understand how strange the word sounds tome. Just think for a moment how useless, how out of place, such athing as sickness is. Like the subject just spoken of, it comes fromdisobedience to law, and although I know we were a long time in riddingourselves of it, it seems to me now that it must be one of the easiestof your troubles to remove. With us the science of medicine became soperfect that it accomplished a great deal of the reform, but more wasdone by each individual acquiring full knowledge of himself and actingup to that knowledge. In learning to love our neighbors we did notforget to foster a proper love for ourselves. In fact, our creedteaches that self-love is one of our most important duties. When one isinstructed to love his neighbor as himself it is presupposed that hisaffection for himself is of that high quality that will always leadhim to do the very best he can for every part of his being. So, as ourdevelopment continued, we came in time to love ourselves too well todespise or abuse or neglect the bodies we lived in. We studied howbest to nurture and care for those bodies, and when that lesson wasthoroughly learned we found that sickness and pain were gone, and withthem, also, all fear of death. For now we die when our days are fullyended. The span of our life has been doubled since we began to knowand care for ourselves, and, at the close, death is anticipated andrecognized as a friend."
