“I have not merely dreamed of this grand, this noble, this happy state of human affairs, but I have actually enjoyed them for twenty long Marsian years. I have seen and experienced them in their practical workings. With countless others, I have even been a tiny link in the endless chain of development and progress, which has brought us to that high state of civilization which the Marsites now enjoy. “As I have said before, everything I met on earth appeared perfectly natural and familiar to me except the scientific, social and industrial spheres. It seemed so strange to me when I first arrived on earth that about half of your population desire to live in comparatively filthy, crowded, smoky, unhealthy cities and towns, while the other half want to live a lonely, toilsome, country life, deprived of nearly all the blessings and enjoyments of a healthy society; and it seemed still more strange to me that you believed that you could not get along without the cities and without the country. The evils and needlessness of both cities and country appeared so plain to me, and yet you are, at the present age, unable to see the bad effects of them. “It appeared so strange to me that each small family desired to live in a small home, located so disorderly that they were almost completely cut off from any convenient intercommunication. How the agriculturist, or farmer, fenced his little patch of land, which he worked single-handed so cruelly and toilsomely with a draught animal--ox, horse, etc., which require almost as much food and care as they can earn. How poorly the majority of the little homes were furnished. What domestic slaves wives and children are when the human hand must do the work of machinery. “It seemed strange to me why only so few can distinguish between _productive_, _unproductive_ and _destructive_ labor. Why millions upon millions of men, women and children are toiling early and late and are producing nothing. Why the poor laborer could not see that the rich parasite appropriates a large portion of the products of his labor. Why thousands upon thousands of frugal, industrious carpenters have been building houses all their lives and have no house of their own to live in. Why a large number of shoemakers have been making shoes and have no decent shoe to put on. Why a multitude of farmers have toiled year after year and are now even farther from owning the land they work than they were when they began their toil years ago.