"Terrestrial humanity is young," answered Spero. "You must not despair. It is a child, and still in primitive ignorance. It is amused at trifles, and obeys masters of its own giving. You like to divide yourselves into nations, to trick yourselves out in national costumes, and to exterminate each other to music! Then you raise statues to those who have led you to butchery. You ruin yourselves, you commit suicide, and yet you cannot live without wresting your daily bread from the Earth. That is a sad condition of things, but one which fully satisfies the greater part of the dwellers on your planet. If some of them, with higher aspirations, think occasionally of problems of the higher order, of the nature of the soul or the existence of God, the result has been no better, because they have put their souls outside of Nature, and have invented strange, horrible gods, who never existed except in their perverted imaginations, and in whose name they have committed all kinds of outrages against the human conscience, have blessed all crimes, and bound weak minds in a slavery from which it will be difficult for them to escape. The lowest animal on Mars is better, finer, gentler, more intelligent, and greater than the god of the armies of David, Constantine, Charlemagne, and all your crowned assassins. There is therefore nothing surprising in the coarseness and stupidity of terrestrial humanity. But the law of progress governs the world. You are more advanced than at the period of your ancestors of the stone age, whose wretched existence was spent in fighting night and day with ferocious beasts. In a few thousands of years you will be more advanced than you are now. Then Urania will reign in your hearts." "It would require a brutal material fact to teach and convince human beings. If, for instance, we could some day enter into communication with the neighboring world which you inhabit, not into physical communication with one isolated person of it, as I am now doing, but with the planet itself, by hundreds and thousands of witnesses, that would be a gigantic stride towards progress." "You could do it now if you chose, for we Martials are all prepared for it, and have even tried it many times. But you have never replied to us. Solar reflections, showing geometrical figures on our vast plains, prove to you that we exist. You could reply to us by like figures also displayed on your plains, either during the day by the sun, or during the night by the electric light. But you never even think of it; and if some one should propose to try it, your courts would interpose to prevent it, for the very idea is immeasurably too high for the general approval of the denizens of your planet. What do your scientific assemblies work for? The preservation of the past. To what do your political assemblies direct their attention? Increasing the taxes. In the land of the blind, one-eyed men are kings.