Would anyone think, he exclaimed, of trying to advocate the law of gravitation as a guide to proper conduct? No one would, because it would be utterly absurd. For no Martian can add one iota to its power or take away one iota from its everlasting activity by conscious effort. We can add to or subtract from it no more than we could add to or subtract from the material of which our Universe is composed. And just as little good or bad as our conscious scheming can do to the law of gravitation, just as little can it aid or hamper the law of the survival of the fittest, except in so far as we may be able to protect ourselves against its indiscriminate lack of consideration. That law has ruled long before there was any self-consciousness, long before there was intelligence in the living entities, long before one group of specimens of a deluded species envied another group its industrial or political importance. If life were to be ruled by this law, it would be absurd to devise remedies against epidemics. In that case, we should allow the disease to ravage the nation all it wants to. Nature would thus render the Martians a special favor by destroying those unfit to survive that particular disease. And after epidemic Number One had passed, we might allow some new epidemic to destroy all the survivors, even though among those killed by the first disease there might have been many who could successfully have survived epidemic Number Two, had they only still been alive to face it. The absurdity of the proposition of being guided by this automatic law had, therefore, become plainly apparent to our Martian philosopher. And then it was, he told Professor FANSEE, that he began to realize the truth of what had been said by others, that the moral precepts contained in the Heebron and Nazarrano manuscripts had sprung from the verdicts of human reason, after many centuries of experience and observation of social requirements; and that they had become obnoxious to certain Darvinianos, not because they were in themselves wrong or misleading, but because they had until now always been imparted as if inseparably founded on a devoted faith in personal semi-human Deities. Separate them from that ancient faith, and they are strong enough in themselves to remain standing, fastened deep into the rock of human experience, as efficient guide-posts on the road that leads through the labyrinth of life. As experience erected them, experience may perhaps later still further improve them. Not your experience alone, or my experience alone, but the experience of all the Martians combined, scientifically founded on the decrees of further advanced logic. After this relaxation by way of a heart-to-heart confession, our noble Martian returned to his narrative of the struggling nations, and here he showed at once in what way his confession was connected with his interesting little chapter of political history.