"Yes," answered one of them, with unexpected good-nature, "you are patriotic; any one might know that you have just come from the Earth."
And the elder added,—
"Let your compatriots alone. They will never be any more intelligent or less blind than they are now. They have been there eighty thousand years already, and you yourself acknowledge that they are not yet capable of thinking. It is really very absurd of you to look at the Earth with such sorrowful eyes. It is too foolish."
Dear reader, have you not, in your journey through the world, sometimes met men who were puffed up with imperturbable pride, and who thought themselves sincerely and unquestionably above all the rest of the world? When these proud personages find themselves face to face with anything superior, they are instantly hostile to it, they cannot endure it. Very well. In the preceding dithyramb (of which you have had but a very poor translation), I felt myself greatly superior to earthly humanity, since I felt pity for it, and invoked for it better days. But when these two inhabitants of Mars pitied me, and I thought I discovered in them a cold superiority to myself, I was for a moment like these foolish, proud people. My blood gave one bound, and, restraining myself by a remnant of French politeness, I opened my mouth to say,—
"After all, gentlemen, the inhabitants of the Earth are not as stupid as you appear to think, but are worth perhaps more than you."
Unfortunately they did not give me time to begin my sentence, inasmuch as they had understood it all while it was being formed by the vibration of the substance of the brain.
"Permit me to remark at once," said the younger, "that your planet is an absolute failure, in consequence of an occurrence which happened about ten million years ago. It was at the time of the primary period of the earthly genesis. There were plants already, and very fine plants too; the first animals were beginning to appear in the depths of the sea and along the shores,—mollusks that were headless, deaf, mute, and without sex. You know that respiration is all a tree requires for its entire nourishment, and that your most robust oaks, your most gigantic cedars, have never eaten anything, and that that has not prevented their growth. They are nourished solely by respiration. Misfortune, Fatality, had willed that a drop of water thicker than the surrounding medium should pass through one of the mollusks. Perhaps he liked it. That was the first digestive tube, which was to exert so baleful an effect on the entire animal kingdom, and later on mankind itself. The first murderer was the mollusk who ate. Here we do not eat, have never eaten, and never shall eat. Creation is developing itself gradually, peacefully, and nobly, as it began. Organisms are nourished; or, to express it differently, renew their molecules by a simple respiration, like your terrestrial trees, each leaf of which is a little stomach. In your precious country you can live a single day only on condition of killing. With you, the law of life is the law of death. Here, the idea of killing even a bird has never occurred to any one.
"You are all more or less butchers. Your hands are stained with blood, your stomachs are gorged with food. How can you expect to have wholesome, pure, elevated ideas,—I will even say (excuse my frankness) clean ideas,—with such coarse organisms? What souls could live in such bodies? Reflect a moment, and do not soothe yourself any more with blind illusions, too ideal for such a world."