I reside within a city of Mars which, in point of population and grandeur, is one of the first on our planet. In accordance with our custom of designating such places with names of quality, it would be known in your language as the city of Good Will. As it is the type of all others, you are already informed of a few of its general features. I will, however, give you some fuller description of our society and surroundings, in only the hasty and imperfect manner which this opportunity affords.

With much the same feelings and inclinations as yours, and with that love and cultivation of the beautiful which we have pursued as an element of our religion, uninterrupted as with you by those delusions which destroy art, we have advanced much beyond you in that direction.

It is to be noted, as a coincidence proving the unity of all intelligence within the universe, that we have designed an architecture not unlike that of your ancient Greece. Our isolated exteriors, such as villas and country residences, bear a close resemblance to some of your ancient[Pg 250] styles. In our cities we have been obliged to conform to the condition of aerial navigation, which has greatly restricted our elevated ornamentation, and forced upon us a system of curves instead of angles in our projections.

One of the most notable differences between your construction and ours is the material and form of our roofs, which are uniformly of solid glass, and dome shaped. The substance is laid on in a plastic state, hardens in a short time, is purely transparent, and as difficult to fracture as stone. The upper story of every house becomes by this method the chief source of light for its interior, and by ingeniously formed horizontal curtains can be darkened at will. We believe this to be one of the most important sanitary arrangements we possess, and to which may be chiefly ascribed the health and vigor of our bodies. In these bright upper apartments we bathe ourselves in the sun, and enjoy the constant bloom and fragrance of flowers.

By a natural adaption, these glass roofs have become inseparably connected with our religious lives. Our interest in the wonderful nightly exhibitions which they permit is increased by the general knowledge we have cultivated of the character and motions of the heavenly[Pg 251] bodies. As a consequence, there are but few among us who cannot describe the paths and directions of the planets; and it is quite safe to say that a majority of our people can compute the periods of opposition and conjunction between them. No other exhibition so feeds and stimulates our religious impulses, as the grand display of divine power in the unceasing motions of the spheres. We bring the spectacle within our households, and dwell with it. It is the altar upon which we worship the great unseen.

Each block of buildings is surmounted by a single roof of the transparent character I have described. In this way we have utilized all the space for dwelling or business purposes, and prevented those unsightly back yards which disfigure the cities of the Earth and lower their sanitary condition. Usually there are no partition walls except in the lower stories, and these lofty upper apartments, especially if over dwellings, have their flattened dome-shaped roofs supported by a series of columns and arches artistically wrought and decorated, and their interiors adorned with growing flower and statuary, so as to furnish a delightful resort, convenient to the neighborhood and open to all.

[Pg 252]These extensive halls are a necessity to the social character of our people. You may imagine how an intercourse based on perfect equality, and with the paramount idea of obtaining pleasure by bestowing it, would have its enjoyments enlarged by the unrestricted and unselected numbers participating. Music and dancing are delights with us beyond your experience. We enjoy the advantages of atmospheric conditions and a degree of gravitating force which are peculiarly adapted to heighten these enjoyments. Our voice tones, seldom without cultivation, acquire an energy and brilliancy in our atmosphere unknown to you. A combination of trained voices with us is so vastly superior to instrumental music, that the latter is not known except as a novelty. Since the force of gravity is less with us our bodies are much lighter than yours, and our motions are consequently more airy and graceful. In movements like dancing there is less muscular energy expended, and a greater pleasure attained.

Under these vast transparent domes, looking out upon the universe of planets and stars, we dance, and sing our hymns of praise to the Deity, asking for nothing, but uniting our voices in the rhythms of poetry and music in[Pg 253] a thanksgiving for the pleasures of life, and for that guidance which has directed us clear of the deadly superstitions of our neighboring planet, and for that intelligence which has led us to find our true religious duties in exercising our better impulses within our own fields of action.

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[Pg 254] 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[Pg 255] 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[Pg 256] 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[Pg 257] to you, as laying the foundation of a larger average of m............