“The government is a despotism, the king having about the same authority as the emperor of Russia, although he has a council of state whose advice he listens to, and then does as he pleases. Since the subjugation of the five legged race this king is the supreme ruler of the whole planet. In some districts the people have made considerable advances in civilization, confining themselves to the use of two legs, and walking sidewise instead of rolling edgewise. But the king does not want all his subjects to adopt these innovations, for he is very proud of his soldiers and thinks them more efficient on six legs then two. Besides, for certain kinds of labor, especially drawing wagons and carriages, the old way is the best.”
“Why don’t they use horses,” I inquired, “or haven’t they any?”
“There are no such animals on Mars, nor in fact any other sort of animals except radiates. There are many genera of these, mostly living in the water and all small, except the dominant race, which I call the Martians.
“But there are great differences in the conditions of life amongst the people of this race, some being fairly civilized while others are only beasts of burden, and still others take the place of dumb machines. They are specially adapted to act as wheels for light carriages. The axles of the carriage are terminated at each end with a six pronged fork, the prongs arranged in a circle or cylinder so that when a man is to play the role of wheel, he is impaled on this fork one prong of it fitting snugly between each pair of his legs. A vehicle of this kind is specially adapted for soft roads as the broad disc like feet prevent sinking.
“The king has a phaeton mounted on twelve foot specimens of these lively wheels, in which he dashes around at a thirty or forty mile gait when the fancy strikes him. He also has a royal barge propelled by the same sort of wheels, the legs acting as paddles.
“The king is imitated in his fads by the nobility and gentry as far as they are able, and so one may quite often see these live wheel phaetons, and live-paddle boats moving about.
“On the public roads, vehicles are used having wheels such as you use, and drawn by these creatures, yoked together in pairs by the pronged shafts or axles like those I just described. From 5 to 10 pairs may sometimes be seen tugging at one of these heavy freight wagons. They are tremendously strong and their strength counts for vastly more on the planet Mars than it would on the earth, because Mars being so much smaller everything weighs very much less. I have seen some of those big fellows after rolling a few hundred yards with great speed give a leap from the ground and fly whirling through the air for two hundred feet before they lit.”
“They are a wonderful race,” said I, “but it seems difficult to connect intelligence with a tribe of star fishes or to imagine they could ever become highly developed. You know those we have on earth are very low in the scale of existence.”
“Intelligence,” said the Professor, “does not depend on the form. Any form on which it is possible for the forces of the environment such as light heat contact etc., to make an impression, already has intelligence; the ability to be impressed is intelligence. If any organism can be impressed, then if you give it time enough it can be impressed indefinitely, because each impression differentiates it and adds to its sensitiveness, that is, its ability to be further impressed. The reason why inferior races so generally remain inferior is the jealousy and hostility of the superior. The dominant race is always hostile to any other race that shows any intelligence, and proceeds to kill it off for fear it will become a rival. It is thus that the race of man has no rivals that compare with him in intelligence, no “connecting links” between him and the monkeys. He was jealous of them and exterminated them.
“On the planet Mars there were never any forms of animal superior to the stars so they have received all the development. Their differentiation would have advanced further if the planet itself had not been so backward. It has a great deal more water on it in proportion to its size than the earth. It is destitute of high mountains, and very much of its surface is but little raised above the level of the sea. A great deal of it is marshy. It is only in recent geologic times that it has become well suited to life on land. When it became so, the star fishes crawled out, and by degrees became accustomed to that mode of life as well as their aquatic mode. If there had been any land animals there to attack them when they first ventured to leave the water, of course they would have been prevented from ever rising. But there were no enemies and they gradually developed lungs by which they were enabled to live continuously out of water. At first they crawled about like spiders with all their feet on the ground at once, but after awhile they learned to raise themselves up on edge and finally to roll from one foot to another, and so gradually adopted a new and wonderfully advanced mode of locomotion.