inhabitants of Mars. The immediate pressure of necessity has brightened
their intellects, enlarged their powers, and hardened their hearts. And
looking across space with instruments, and intelligences such as we
have scarcely dreamed of, they see, at its nearest distance only
35,000,000 of miles sunward of them, a morning star of hope, our own
warmer planet, green with vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy
atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses through its drifting
cloud wisps of broad stretches of populous country and narrow,
navy-crowded seas.
And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at
least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The
intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant
struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief
of the minds upon Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling and this
world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they
regard as inferior animals. To carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their
only escape from the destruction that, generation after generation,
creeps upon them.
And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless
and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon
animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior
races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely
swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European
immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy
as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?
The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with amazing
subtlety their mathematical learning is evidently far in excess of
ours and to have carried out their preparations with a well-nigh
perfect unanimity. Had our instruments permitted it, we might have seen
the gathering trouble far back in the nineteenth century. Men like
Schiaparelli watched the red planet it is odd, by-the-bye, that for
countless centuries Mars has been the star of war but failed to
interpret the fluctuating appearances of the markings they mapped so
well. All that time the Martians must have been getting ready.
During the opposition of 1894 a great light was seen on the illuminated
part of the disk, first at the Lick Observatory, then by Perrotin of
4