"Then your marriages," I said, "are permanent?"
"Not by law," he replied. "Nothing like what our remote ancestors called marriage is recognised at all. The maidens who come of age each year sell themselves by a sort of auction, those who purchase them arranging with the girls themselves the terms on which the latter will enter their family. Custom has fixed the general conditions which every girl expects, and which only the least attractive are forced to forego. They are promised a permanent maintenance from their master's estate, and promise in return a fixed term of marriage. After two or three years they are free to rescind the contract; after ten or twelve they may leave their husbands with a stipulated pension. They receive an allowance for dress and so forth proportionate to their personal attractions or to the fancy of the suitor; and of course the richest men can offer the best terms, and generally secure the most agreeable wives, in whatever number they please or think they can without inconvenience support."
"Then," I said, "the women can divorce themselves at pleasure, but the men cannot dismiss them! This hardly looks like equality."
"The practical result," he answered, "is that men don't care for a release which would part them from complaisant slaves, and that women dare not seek a divorce which can only hand them over to another master on rather worse terms. When the longer term has expired, the latter almost always prefer the servitude to which they are accustomed to an independent life of solitude and friendlessness."
"And what becomes," I asked, "of the younger men who must enter the world without property, without parents or protectors?"
"We are, after youth has passed, an indolent race. We hardly care, as a rule, to cultivate our fields or direct our factories; but prefer devoting the latter half at least of our lives to a somewhat easy-going cultivation of that division of science which takes hold of our fancy. These divisions are such as your conversation leads me to think you would probably consider absurdly minute. A single class of insects, a single family of plants, the habits of one race of fishes, suffice for the exclusive study of half a lifetime. Minds of a more active or more practical bent will spend an equal time over the construction of a new machine more absolutely automatic than any that has preceded it. Physical labour is thrown as much as possible on the young; and even they are now so helped by machinery and by trained animals, that the eight hours' work which forms their day's labour hardly tires their muscles. Our tastes render us very anxious to devolve upon others as soon as possible the preservation and development of the property we have acquired. A man of moderate means, long before he has reached his thirtieth [7] year, generally seeks one assistant; men of larger fortune may want two, five, or ten. These are chosen, as a rule, by preference from those who have passed the most stringent and successful collegiate examination. Martial parents are not prolific, and the mortality in our public nurseries is very large. I impute it to moral influences, since the chief cause of death is low vitality, marked nervous depression and want of animal spirits, such as the total absence of personal tenderness and sympathy must produce in children. It is popularly ascribed to the over-cultivation of the race, as plants and animals highly civilised—that is, greatly modified and bred to an artificial excellence by human agency—are certainly delicate, unprolific, and especially difficult to rear. There is little disease in the nurseries, but there is little health and a deficiency of nervous energy. One fact is significant, however interpreted, and bears directly on your last question. Since the wide extension of polygamy, female births are to male about as seven to six; but the deaths in public nurseries between the first and tenth years are twenty-nine in twelve dozen admissions in the stronger sex, and only about ten in the weaker. Read these facts as we may, they ensure employment to the young men when their education is completed—the two last years of severe study adding somewhat to the mortality among them.
"A large number find employment in superintending the property of others. To give them a practical interest in its preservation and improvement, they are generally, after a shorter or longer probation, adopted by their employers as heirs to their estate; our experience of Communism having taught us that immediate and obvious self-interest is the only motive that certainly and seriously affects human action. The distance at which they are kept, and the absolute seclusion of our family life, enables us easily to secure ourselves against any over-anxiety on their part to anticipate their inheritance. The minority who do not thus find a regular place in society are employed in factories, as artisans, or on the lands belonging to the State. To ensure their zeal, the last receive a fixed proportion of the produce, or are permitted to rent land at fixed rates, and at the end of ten years receive a part thereof in full property. By these means we are free from all the dangers and difficulties of that state of society which preceded the Communistic cataclysm. We have poor men, and men who can live only by daily labour; but these have dissipated their wealth, or are looking forward at no very distant period to a sufficient competence. The entire population of our planet does not exceed two hundred millions, and is not much increased from generation to generation. The area of cultivable land is about ten millions of square miles, and half a square mile in these equatorial continents, which alone are at all generally inhabited, will, if well cultivated and cared for, furnish the largest household with every luxury that man's heart can desire. Eight hours' labour in the day for ten years of life will secure to the least fortunate a reasonable competence; and an ambitious man, with quick intelligence and reasonable industry, may always hope to become rich, if he thinks wealth worth the labour of invention or of exceptionally troublesome work."
"Mars ought, then," I said, "to be a material paradise. You have attained nearly all that our most advanced political economists regard as the perfection of economical order—a population nearly stationary, and a soil much more than adequate to their support; a general distribution of property, total absence of permanent poverty, and freedom from that gnawing anxiety regarding the future of ourselves or our children which is the great evil of life upon Earth and the opprobrium of our social arrangements. You have carried out, moreover, the doctrines of our most advanced philosophers; you have absolute equality before the law, competitive examination among the young for the best start in life, with equal chances wherever equality is possible; and again, perfect freedom and full legal equality as regards the relations of the sexes. Are your countrymen satisfied with the results?"
"Yes," answered my host, "in so far, at least, that they have no wish to change them, no idea that any great social or political reforms could improve our condition. Our lesson in Communism has rendered all agitation on such matters, all tendency to democratic institutions, all appeals to popular passions, utterly odious and alarming to us. But that we are happy I will venture neither to affirm nor to deny. Physically, no doubt, we have great advantages over you, if I rightly understand your description of life on Earth. We have got rid of old age, and, to a great extent, of disease. Many of our scientists persist in the hope to get rid of death; but, since all that has been accomplished in this direction was accomplished some two thousand years back, and yet we continue to die, general opinion hardly concurs in this hope."
"How do you mean," I inquired, "that you have got rid of old age and of disease?"