Fantasy fiction; Utopian fiction; Utopias -- Fiction
“But in those early times men needed great physical strength and long
life to bring the world into subjection, and until that was done they
could give little attention to the cultivation of the finer qualities
of their incipient manhood. They were handicapped by the fact that the
lower animals had had the earth to themselves a few million years, more
or less, and no puny race could ever have driven them to the wall.
“At length, when the conflict was well nigh over, with victory in sight,
men had abandoned the struggle and were using all their fierce strength
in fighting each other. This had been going on so long and with such
deadly results that it seemed as if the race must be exterminated unless
some superior power could step in from the outside and prevent it.
“We can easily understand that there was no such thing as science then.
Men considered the sun, for example, only as a very useful thing which
brought them light with which they could see their foe, and the moon as
a mysterious object sent to make the night a little less dark. Sun
and moon and shining stars were all set in the sky for them, and went
through their wonderful and complicated movements solely for their
amusement.
“But what was the real condition of things on the moon at that
time? Why, there was a race of people there of such intelligence and
scientific attainments that they were seeing plainly enough everything
that was taking place on the earth. This will not appear very strange
when we consider our remarkable success in scanning the surface of the
moon at the present day, and remember that the inhabitants of the moon
were then nearing the close of their history, and so at the height of
their civilization.
“Yes, they had watched the coming of man upon the stage with the deepest
interest--with a neighborly interest, in fact--seeing in him the promise
of a companion race and one worthy of the magnificent globe which they
could see was so much larger than their own. Their powerful instruments
enabled them to see objects on the earth as distinctly as we now see
through our telescopes the features of a landscape a few miles distant.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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