“As for sickness, you cannot understand how strange the word sounds to me. Just think for a moment how useless, how out of place, such a thing as sickness is. Like the subject just spoken of, it comes from disobedience to law, and although I know we were a long time in ridding ourselves of it, it seems to me now that it must be one of the easiest of your troubles to remove. With us the science of medicine became so perfect that it accomplished a great deal of the reform, but more was done by each individual acquiring full knowledge of himself and acting up to that knowledge. In learning to love our neighbors we did not forget to foster a proper love for ourselves. In fact, our creed teaches that self-love is one of our most important duties. When one is instructed to love his neighbor as himself it is presupposed that his affection for himself is of that high quality that will always lead him to do the very best he can for every part of his being. So, as our development continued, we came in time to love ourselves too well to despise or abuse or neglect the bodies we lived in. We studied how best to nurture and care for those bodies, and when that lesson was thoroughly learned we found that sickness and pain were gone, and with them, also, all fear of death. For now we die when our days are fully ended. The span of our life has been doubled since we began to know and care for ourselves, and, at the close, death is anticipated and recognized as a friend.” CHAPTER VII. RAPID TRANSIT ON MARS. Here Thorwald paused and said he should be obliged to leave us a short time to attend to some duty in the management of the vessel. When he returned I remarked that neither he nor his companions seemed to have to work very hard. “That,” he answered, “is just the thought I want to speak of next, as the doctor has said many earthly troubles arise from severe labor. Here there is no hard work for us. It is all done by some kind of mechanism. Look at the handling of this ship, in which, as you say, no one is burdened. The hard and disagreeable parts of the work are taken out of our hands and are put into the hand of machinery, which in its perfection is almost intelligent. It is so in all departments of work. Inventions looking toward the saving of labor have closely followed each other for so many years that their object is about accomplished, and all the pain and sorrow accompanying daily toil are things of the dead past. Even our animals are relieved from distressing labor and share with us the blessings of an advanced civilization, every heavy weight being raised and every burdensome load being drawn by an arm of steel or aluminum, which neither tires nor feels. We do not need to pity a machine. Why should flesh and blood, whether of dumb beasts or of more intelligent beings, suffer the agony of labor when the work can be better done by mechanical means?