The Man from Mars: His Morals, Politics and Religion

by William Simpson

Over our business quarters these upper stories, less ornate and well ventilated, serve the purposes of factories and work shops, where the sun’s rays, not so intense as with you, owing to our greater distance from it, are let in to brighten the hours of those who toil. Among these locations of industry are conditions that would surprise you. There is the indispensable anteroom beside the entrance of each, where, enjoying the comfortable furniture, may be found a number of operatives waiting for the beginning of the three-hour shift. They are all on terms of easy familiarity, yet among them may be found the president of the grand council, who manages the affairs of the city, the lecturer who presides at the temple, and other prominent worthies mingled with the others who have achieved no honors beyond the work bench. The person who is most complimented among the number is the one who has just been granted an advance of one grade in the skill of his calling. He has attained what would be an equivalent in your society to the honors of a collegiate degree, with the very material difference in his favor, that for years to come, and perhaps as long as he lives, his income is permanently increased by an enhanced value to his labor. No competition will ever, under our system, render valueless this achievement of his.

Your degrees of learning are but empty honors compared with this profitable distinction. You insure no certain rewards for that acquirement of knowledge which has won its parchment of approval, and the holder enjoys only the slim advantage which his certificate secures. His degree wins him no bread, and the honors of his career rest uncertain, with all his struggles ahead. Our workman, at each step of his advancement, increases his income, under the assurance and protection of our industrial methods, with the certainty and stability of a government pension.

But while we have found it wise to honor and protect manual skill, the physical strength of our people has for many ages been a subject of general attention. Among the productions of the Supreme Author which he is engaged in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance on your planet is surely man himself, as a being animal as well as mental. As an indolent, weak and passive body is usually associated with a mind of the same character, it is only by the cultivation of both together that society improves. You have evidences enough of the inseparable connection between mental and physical energy, and yet your cultivation of the body has engaged but little attention. It seems to us one of the most serious objections to your religious abstractions, that the spirit of all of them tends to deny or belittle the great service of healthy sinews and nerves in the progress of social improvement.

You will find intellectual stagnation everywhere upon the face of the Earth, where incentives to muscular action are suppressed from whatever cause, and you know by experience that the decay of mental vigor, by a release from the necessity of bodily exercise, has obliged the brawn and muscle of your age, in more than one instance, to come to the front in the management of affairs.

Civilization, at a certain degree of its progress, is expected to assume duties which until then, have been faithfully performed by nature alone. Like a good mother she has provided, in your primitive state, against the degeneration of your bodies by the operation of her universal law, the survival of the fittest. In your social betterment you can reasonably be expected to provide for yourselves some substitute to maintain that standard of hardihood and strength which had formerly been kept up by your primitive struggles for existence.

Your knowledge of the laws of heredity has enabled you to improve upon the forms and qualities of all those creatures which have been taken from their native wilds to serve your uses; and yet, with a fatal inconsistency, you consign your own bodies to a carelessness of procreation which totally ignores all well known methods of improvement. The spectacle is common among you, of the skilled breeder straining his knowledge to remedy defects of form in the lower animals in his possession, while he and his progeny exhibit, in their own bodies, without concern or attention, the very same physical infirmities which he had so successfully banished in his brutes by parental selection.

The neglect of your opportunities in this direction is more surprising, when it is considered how greatly you are suffering from it; for although the achievement of a more general perfection of form and strength is invaluable to you, as laying the foundation of a larger average of mental power and activity, yet this is not more important to your society than the easy and certain eradication by judicious matings of the most persistent and fatal of your diseases. It is appalling to estimate the sum of human misery perpetually transmitted congenitally in diseased tissues and functional defects.

This evil, which has prevailed among you until your bodily ills are almost innumerable, you have been taught to consider as an arrangement of the divine will, and you rest yourselves helplessly in the belief that its endurance without remedy is the penalty of life; when, in fact, it is perpetuated chiefly by that over-powering individual selfishness which makes no account of the general good while gratifying sentiments of pleasure, or greed.

I have already drawn your observation to that infallible test which marks the progress of social development—the average willingness of attention and sacrifice of individual interests to the common welfare. From our achievements in that direction already described, you may easily imagine that we have not neglected the opportunity to improve and benefit society by the observance of some of nature’s simplest and most easily applied laws.

We are not embarrassed as you would be by protests of an infringement of personal liberty, because we have arrived beyond that stage where law and its enforcement are required. Official recommendation supported by a united public opinion, without any penalty for non-compliance except the general condemnation, is our only resort in directing the conduct of our people. Under such a system, any violation of individual rights is impossible. It is enough in our society to determine that a measure is for the common good, to secure its adoption without dissent.