Nor do we take sides in this horrible calamity. Why call one madman a fool and jolly the other madman by telling him that he is right? We, on this side of the rocking pond, do not care a rap whether the Brits, the Two-Tons, or any other nation attains to world-supremacy, provided that, this supremacy reached, they shall not assume an overbearing attitude or dictate to us how we are to conduct our business. We Am-Eurekans do not aspire at supremacy. Our institutions are founded on equality; and, indeed, equality and supremacy cannot easily be made to harmonize. All we aspire to attain is what a clean-minded and healthful development of our resources and intelligence may bring us in the natural course of events. All we advise other nations is to be wise enough not maliciously to interfere with this development.
Did the Two-Tons believe the Brits were maliciously interfering with their natural growth? Then they should have gone straight for the Brits, without starting a campaign against the Fringe or the Rush-Nots, and without a destructive passage through a small country that never had been accused of malicious interference. Were the Brits under the impression that their natural development was maliciously interfered with by the Two-Tons? Then they should have settled their quarrel openly and directly with the Two-Tons, without waiting deep-low-matically for a “noble” excuse that they all along expected to be furnished them. We Am-Eurekans believe in a fair fight when a fight cannot be avoided; stripped and without gloves if need be; but no hitting below the belt.
When the war broke out, we in Am-Eureka noticed that the actual hostilities had been started by the Two-Tons. We noticed that, instead of limiting their activities to assailing the nation they were about to attack, they forced their way through other countries, one of these being the land of the Bell-Giants, against the Bell-Giants’ clearly expressed desire to the contrary. The Bell-Giants were defending naught but their right to keep aloof from the mad struggle; and when, owing to the narrow limits of their territory and resources, they were defeated, their fields devastated and their towns destroyed, we naturally sympathized with the Bell-Giants in their pitiable plight. There are Two-Tons who migrated to my adopted country but who are still in close sympathy with the Two-Tonian nationality-mania, and who saw in this attitude on our part the evidence of ill-will against Two-Tonia. Yet before these grim events no sign of any such ill-will or hatred had ever been detected. Nor will it be possible to detect any after the struggle for supremacy shall have come to an end. We in Am-Eureka love justice, and justice necessarily involves a deep-seated consideration for the rights of others, and a systematic avoidance of any passionate violence, especially of violence in the wrong direction. But the Two-Tons may be at ease. Our sympathies are not with the backward Rush-Nots or with the deep-low-matic Brits, either. Were they to indulge in unjust acts, we would detest these acts as definitely in them as in any other Martians. Only, while we may disapprove of an act of injustice in any nation, that does not mean that we bear malice toward the nation as such, nor that we fail to appreciate whatever virtue or wisdom that nation may possess.
After thus having described the attitude of his own country, the Martian philosopher declared that this was in reality not the main purpose of his reflections. What he wished to emphasize was, he said, that the whole deplorable conflict could have been avoided if only the Martian nations had taken measures to cure, at least in part, the nationality-mania that at any time is likely blindly to arouse their destructive passions. To you, he said, at the distance at which you see our planet, all of our globe must make the impression of an insane asylum, where nationality-mania and nationalized megalomania are the two mental aberrations most prominently prevalent. But in reality, he assured us, these people are not insane. They are simply deluded, carried away by a wrong and intensely harmful conception of honor and of Martian greatness.
My most intense hope is, continued the Martian philosopher, that by proper mental training we may be enabled to re-direct their quasi-noble impulses into better and more constructive channels. As I contemplate the struggling armies, I see their banners raised high above the surging regiments. But I see the national colors dimmed with powder-smoke and the dust of the battle, so that now the banners look all alike to me; and over the smutty surface of every one of them, I see the word FOLLY glaring in the vivid red of warm young blood. How much better will it be to see in the near future the same banners, the national marks of distinction dimmed by factory smoke and the dust of the quarries, and to see written on all of them in letters of gold: FOR THE FEDERATION AND WELL-BEING OF HUMANITY; PEACE AND GOOD-WILL TO ALL MEN OF ALL NATIONS.
At this moment Professor FANSEE bethought himself of a question that he had all along intended to put to the Martian philosopher, but that had so far been crowded out by the Martian’s interesting narrative. “For what purpose,” he finally asked, “did you Martians construct those straight-lined canals that cross your planet?” Came from the Martian the counter-question: “What canals?” “Well,” replied Professor FANSEE, somewhat taken aback, “we on earth notice straight lines across your globe every spring, and we reached the conclusion that they are canals used to guide the water when it rushes down from the thawing ice-fields at the poles.” “Ah,” said the Martian, “this is extremely interesting. Straight lines you say? Let me think a moment. Oh, yes, they are....”
Here a strange thing occurred. We heard a few clicks of a nature to suggest that the apparatus had suddenly gone out of order. The Professor looked over some of the details of the machinery, but found nothing wrong. Then, of a sudden, the Martian communications were resumed. With a speed as if our distant philosopher had suddenly turned into a maniac, his message was now rushing in.
One of the nations involved in this miserable cataclasm, known as the Chopper-Knees, it said, has at the last moment invented an engine of destruction excelling all others in deadliness. It consists of an enormous thin metal globe, to which a device is attached that causes it to fly up in the air to a considerable height. The device is timed; so that, when it has reached a certain height and has drifted in a certain direction, it suddenly comes to a standstill, and by its own dead weight falls with increasing speed toward the soil. The horror of it is that upon reaching the surface it explodes, and spreads a thick cloud of smoke, of such a nature that by powerful electrical action it gathers unto itself various materials from the atmosphere and from the soil, with the result that the cloud, instead of diminishing, grows ever thicker and vaster. The cloud kills all life it comes in contact with, and it is feared that it may encircle the whole planet. It is guaranteed to kill every forest and every animal that lives in the forest, to kill every living creature in the water whose surface it touches. It is guaranteed to kill every flower, every grassblade, every thistle; to kill the ass who is eating the thistle as a much desired delicacy, as well as the flies that pester his bushy hide; and as a minor effect, it will also kill the followers of NAZARRO who, according to the legend, once rode through the streets of Jairoosolom on his patient back. As I have erected my apparatus on the highest promontory of the planet Mars, just as you probably have done at your end, I shall be the last to be attacked by the deadly fumes. Already do I see the cloud fill the valley below me. I see it rising, rising!...
And then, as if in the despair of his agony he were addressing a world already laid waste, and a race already wiped out, a few additional sentences reached us from the depth of space: Abandon your petty jealousies, your tricky international schemes and your malice. Form a friendly federation by which everyone of you will benefit. Establish international courts of justice and of honor. Do away with your national armies and navies, and use their remnants as international guardians of the peace. Give up your futile efforts to be guided by blind Nature in the treatment of your fellowmen. Morality, whether considered from an international or a national point of view, is a set of rules of wholesome living, founded on the requirements of an ever further developing social organization. It does not refer merely to a respectable limitation of sex-life. It embraces good-will, loyalty, justice, fairness, the absence of all underhand thoughts and methods, and the total lack of malicious intent. Many of these laws have been lucidly compiled in the Nazarrano manuscripts. Enthrone ye then, therefore, once more, if not NAZARRO’S divinity, then at least such of His precepts as are practicable and beneficent for men of all faiths and for men of no faith, for the human race at large!... Thus alone shall ye thrive without unnecessary disturbances, social upheavals, industrial calamities, wanton slaughter, and without the despicable arousal of savage passions!
The Martian admonition ceased. And then I saw Professor FANSEE grow deadly pale; and as he reeled as if about to swoon, he whispered: “I feel as if my mind were giving way. That voice, that solemn message, did it come from space, or did it come to me from the heaps of the dead and dying that I seem to see dispersed on the battlefields of Belgium, France, and Poland? Was this the voice of departing spirits dying on our fair earth itself?” “Since we left for these vast fields of ice,” he said to me with a sickly smile, “many things may have happened!”