Across the Zodiac (16 page)

"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?"

"We have," he replied, "learned pretty fully the chemistry of life. We
have found remedies for that hardening of the bones and weakening of
the muscles which used to be the physical characteristics of declining
years. Our hair no longer whitens; our teeth, if they decay, are now
removed and naturally replaced by new ones; our eyes retain to the
last the clearness of their sight. A famous physician of five thousand
years back said in controversy on this subject, that 'the clock was
not made to go for ever;' by which he meant that human bodies, like
the materials of machines, wore out by lapse of time. In his day this
was true, since it was impossible fully to repair the waste and
physical wear and tear of the human frame. This is no longer so. The
clock does not wear out, but it goes more and more slowly and
irregularly, and stops at last for some reason that the most skilful
inspection cannot discover. The body of him who dies, as we say, 'by
efflux of time' at the age of fifty is as perfect as it was at
five-and twenty.
[8]
Yet few men live to be fifty-five,
[9]
and most
have ceased to take much interest in practical life, or even in
science, by forty-five."
[10]

"That seems strange," I said. "If no foreign body gets into the
machinery, and the machinery itself does not wear out, it is difficult
to understand why the clock should cease to go."

"Would not some of your race," he asked, "explain the mystery by
suggesting that the human frame is not a clock, but contains, and owes
its life to, an essence beyond the reach of the scalpel, the
microscope, and the laboratory?"

"They hold that it is so. But then it is not the soul but the body
that is worn out in seventy or eighty of the Earth's revolutions."

"Ay," he said; "but if man were such a duplex being, it might be that
the wearing out of the body was necessary, and had been adapted to
release the soul when it had completed its appropriate term of service
in the flesh."

I could not answer this question, and he did not pursue the theme.
Presently I inquired, "If you allow no appeal to popular feeling or
passion, to what was I so nearly the victim? And what is the terrorism
that makes it dangerous to avow a credulity or incredulity opposed to
received opinion?"

"Scientific controversies," he replied, "enlist our strongest and
angriest feelings. It is held that only wickedness or lunacy can
resist the evidence that has convinced a vast majority. By
arithmetical calculation the chances that twelve men are wrong and
twelve thousand
[11]
right, on a matter of inductive or deductive
proof, are found to amount to what must be taken for practical
certainty; and when the twelve still hold out, they are regarded as
madmen or knaves, and treated accordingly by their fellows. If it be
thought desirable to invoke a legal settlement of the issue, a council
of all the overseers of our scientific colleges is called, and its
decision is by law irrevocable and infallible, especially if ratified
by the popular voice. And if a majority vote be worth anything at all,
I think this modern theory at least as sound as the democratic theory
of politics which prevailed here before the Communistic revolution,
and which seems by your account to be gaining ground on Earth."

"And what," I inquired, "is your political constitution? What are the
powers of your rulers; and how, in the absence of public discussion
and popular suffrage, are they practically limited?"

"In theory they are unlimited," he answered; "in practice they are
limited by custom, by caution, and, above all, by the lack of motives
for misrule. The authority of each prince over those under him, from
the Sovereign to the local president or captain, is absolute. But the
Executive leaves ordinary matters of civil or criminal law to the
Courts of Justice. Cases are tried by trained judges; the old
democratic usage of employing untrained juries having been long ago
discarded, as a worse superstition than simple decision by lot. The
lot is right twelve times in two dozen; the jury not oftener than
half-a-dozen times. The judges don't heat or bias their minds by
discussion. They hear all that can be elicited from parties, accuser,
accused, and witnesses, and all that skilled advocates can say. Then
the secretary of the Court draws up a summary of the case, each judge
takes it home to consider, each writes out his judgment, which is read
by the secretary, none but the author knowing whose it is. If the
majority be five to two, judgment is given; if less, the case is tried
again before a higher tribunal of twice as many judges. If no decision
can be reached, the accused is acquitted for the time, or, in a civil
dispute, a compromise is imposed. The rulers cannot, without incurring
such general anger as would be fatal to their power, disregard our
fundamental laws. Gross tyranny to individuals is too dangerous to be
carried far. It is a capital crime for any but the officers of the
Sovereign and of the twelve Regents to possess the fearfully
destructive weapons that brought our last wars to an end. But any man,
driven to desperation, can construct and use similar weapons so easily
that no ruler will drive a man to such revengeful despair. Again, the
tyranny of subordinate officials would be checked by their chief, who
would be angry at being troubled and endangered by misconduct in which
he had no direct interest. And finally,
personal
malice is not a
strong passion among us; and our manners render it unlikely that a
ruler should come into such collision with any of his subjects as
would engender such a feeling. Of those immediately about him, he can
and does at once get rid as soon as he begins to dislike, and before
he has cause to hate them. It is our maxim that greed of wealth or
lust of power are the chief motives of tyranny. Our rulers cannot well
hope to extend a power already autocratic, and we take care to leave
them nothing to covet in the way of wealth. We can afford to give them
all that they can desire of luxury and splendour. To enrich to the
uttermost a few dozen governors costs us nothing comparable to the
cost of democracy, with its inseparable party conflicts,
maladministration, neglect, and confusion."

"A clever writer on Earth lately remarked that it would be easy to
satiate princes with all personal enjoyments, but impossible to
satiate all their hangers-on, or even all the members of their
family."

"You must remember," he replied, "that we have here, save in such
exceptional cases as my own, nothing like what you call a family. The
ladies of a prince's house have everything they can wish for within
their bounds and cannot go outside of these. As for dependents, no man
here, at least of such as are likely to be rulers, cares for his
nearest and dearest friends enough to incur personal peril, public
displeasure, or private resentment on their account. The officials
around a ruler's person are few in number, so that we can afford to
make their places too comfortable and too valuable to be lightly
risked. Neglect, again, is pretty sure to be punished by superior
authority. Activity in the promotion of public objects is the only
interest left to princes, while tyranny is, for the reasons I have
given, too dangerous to be carried far."

At this point of our conversation an ambâ entered the room and made
certain signs which my host immediately understood.

"The Zamptâ," he said, "has called upon me, evidently on your account,
and probably with some message from his Suzerain. You need not be
afraid," he added. "At worst they would only refuse you protection,
and I could secure you from danger under my own roof, and in the last
extremity effect your retreat and return to your own planet; supposing
for a moment," he added, smiling, "that you are a real being and come
from a real world."