AN INVASION FROM MARS.
MR. H. G. WELLS, the novelist who has made such notable use of the scientific imagination as applied to fiction, is at the present moment enchanting the readers of Pearson's Magazine with an account of an invasion of the earth by the inhabitants of Mars. He depicts the landing among us of a set of Marsmen endowed not only- with more than human intelligence, but possessed of a scientific military outfit which makes them practically invincible. Their use of rays of various kinds puts the globe and all its inhabitants absolutely at their mercy, for there is no resisting the new weapons of offence. We shall not attempt to forecast how this hideous visitation ends, nor can we enter into the details of the awful struggle which makes the whole population of London stampede in panic, thinking of nothing but how to escape from their assailants. These things must be sought for in Mr. Wells's delightful story, which we presume will soon be with us in book-form. Our present intention is merely to ask, given the possi- bility of communication with the inhabitants of another planet, given their possession of an infinitely greater and more complete scientific knowledge than we possess, and given also a desire to conquer and enslave us, whether such conquest and enslavement would in all probability be permanently successful. That is, supposing the sudden appearance here of a race superior to us in power and knowledge, should we have to sink at once to the position of the Mexicans or the Peruvians after the Spanish conquest? Must we submit to being the hopeless, helpless slaves of a set of men inferior to us very likely in moral ideas, but infinitely stronger in the arts and sciences, and especially in those which lend them- selves to the work of destruction?
The subject is a very interesting one, for even if we reject the chain of hypotheses which makes a Martian invasion possible, the consideration of the problem throws no little light upon the conditions which govern the rule of a superior race by an inferior. Given the assumptions made above, it is difficult to see how there could be any escape from the condition of permanent enslavement. If the Martians were so armoured against our attacks that we could not wound them, and were at the same time capable of slaying us by the thousand by merely pressing a lever, how could we ever hope to regain our freedom of action ? We must either be slain or submit. But we know that when this alternative is placed,!not before individuals, but large bodies of men, submission invariably carries the day. Perhaps it will be argued that history teaches us that when a race physically superior, or superior in the arts of war, has subdued a race morally superior, the conquered in the end regain their old position, captivity is taken captive, and the superior moral qualities gain the day. If, on the other hand, the two races are about equal in moral qualities—as was the case of the Normans and Saxons—a very short time suffices for a complete amalgamation. In two generations the conquered and the conquerors are indistinguishable. But this is assuming that our conquerors from Mars would be morally inferior to ourselves, — a pleasant supposi- tion, no doubt, but not really a necessary one. Suppose instead that they were genuinely superior to us in moral qualities. That could not be, or else they would not attack us? Surely that is not tenable ground. The Martians might be extremely moral as well as extremely strong. They might find us full of every sort of folly and wickedness, and might consider it a moral duty to subdue us for our own good.
They might argue These earthmen are a set of evil children who must be taught that their pleasant planet was not meant to be treated as they treat it. We must show them by a century or two of stern and righteous government that those who sweat and pinch in pigmy wars, who hate each other for a creed, and who even against us do their little best to bite, are not making a proper use of even their puny powers. It may be tiresome work drilling tiger-apes into decency and good manners, but even that task must be attempted in face of such dreadful evils as we see before us.' If our invaders sincerely took up that sort of attitude towards us, and determined to dragoon us for our good, we must admit that very little consolation is to be got out of history. If, that is, they were to hold the globe as we hold India, and were to deliberately govern it as a trust, it must be confessed that the chances of emancipation would be very small,—unless, of course, we improved so greatly that the Martians could be induced to feel that their task was accomplished. Possibly it might be very good for us to be drilled into righteousness and good living by the stern hand of the Martian, but we doubt whether any of us would much appreciate the process. The best of us, and no doubt not without truth, would argue with our moral tyrants that being made good bylaw was useless, and that unless we were given the right to do wrong as well as to do well, there could be no virtue in our good behaviour. But in all probability the Marsmen would pay no more attention to an argument of this kind addressed to them by a Committee composed of the heads of all the religious creeds on the face of the earth than we should, could they speak, to a committee of sheep who objected to the restrictions of the sheepfold. But, in truth, the really terrible thing about the Martian tyranny, whether moral or anti-moral, would be the impossibility of getting into touch with it in any shape or form. Remember that on the hypothesis the men from Mars would not really be men at all, but creatures of a perfectly different breed.
Therefore the great fact, the fact of a common humanity,
which tempers all conquests and controls all tyrannies would be absent. A thousand ties spring up between the conquered and the conquerors when they are men. For example, the maiden dragged by force to the victor's tent may become the King's favourite wife, and may influence his whole policy in favour of the conquered race. The natives of the soil enter every conqueror's household as servants and dependents, and little by little insensibly leaven the mass. But between the Martians and the earthmen no such ties would arise. They would—supposing them to be anything like the people in Mr. Wells's story—regard us simply as animals, or as we should no doubt regard the people of Mars supposing we burst in upon their secular seclusion and found them inferior to ourselves in power and knowledge. They would probably look upon us as bees or ants, or rather, perhaps, as very intelligent beavers. They would describe us as angry, busy little creatures, showing a good deal of ingenuity in their way, but absurdly vain and self-conscious, and full of a sort of futile cunning which they mistake for real science.' Though we might be very much hurt at this Olympian attitude, we should probably be unable to shake the Maramen's belief in our hopeless inferiority, for they simply would not hear, or at any rate heed, the buzzing of the angry insects in the hive, or the chattering of the beavers, furious because some of their queer little works had been de- stroyed, or one of their number killed for trying to bite one of his masters.—Fancy the humiliation of knowing that some new Charlotte Corday was thus described after an attempt to strike a blow for the whole human race.—But can we doubt that if our conquerors sincerely and consistently treated us as we treat the dumb animals, the intellectual and moral vigour of the race must decay ? Suppose that in our abject need we learned to understand a portion of their language, but that they, assuming that we were only animals and had no language—possibly we should not, in their sense, have a language, for their ideas might be so complex and so far-reaching as to be without equivalents even in ancient Greek or modern German—never troubled to secure any means of learning our wishes. In that case we should stand to them exactly in the position of intelligent dogs. When they called, we should run eagerly for fear of blows—alas ! also for love and worship, so abject is the human heart—and should wait with crossed hands and bowed heads for the order which we should be able to understand, for necessity teaches the dog to understand his master, though the master does not understand the dog. A mute is a good servant. When we answered, am your slave,' and went to fetch or carry, we should perhaps hear the comment : I believe the clever beast understands half of what I say to him. I wonder, however, what he means by his own shrill cries. There is clearly no language in them, for there is not sufficient change of intonation. That has been proved by recent experiments.' Imagine the exasperation of hearing in enforced and un- breakable silence—when none can understand you, you are, in effect, silent, though you make a noise—such a description of a language believed by the poor human animal to be capable of expressing, and expressing so exquisitely, every emotion, from anger to joy.
Practically, then, if the Martians were to descend upui n e,
and were to prove to be far greater men of science than we are, they would occupy towards as almost exactly the position which the horses occupy in Swift's account of the Yahoos. Their superiority would be so great and so unbridgeable that there would be no chance of our ever being able to reconquer our freedom. The only hope would be either in the dying out of the Martian race, or else in their reaching such a point of degeneracy from internal causes that their domestic animals would become too strong for them. Though the notion sounds wild, we presume it possible that a tribe of savages might so degenerate that they would go in fear of the animals living in their neigbourhood. Were similar conditions to arise, man might, of course, regain his power, and once more cease to be the slave of a superior race. But no doubt the whole notion is fantastic, or at any rate we have a right to assume so until the Martians signal to us that they have for centuries had us under close observation, and have just perfected an aerial boat, which will arrive on the day of the summer solstice, a date chosen to avoid ambiguity. In that case we shall have to decide whether or not to allow them to land. It will be a notable struggle between prudence and curiosity. Prudence will say, 'We had better atop them, or even kill them at once, lest they kill or enslave us.' Curiosity will argue, Let us first hear whether the square root of minus two means something more to them than it does to us, and what they know of the laws of motion, the nature of matter, and the extent of the universe.' In our belief, strange as it may seem, curiosity would win. We should ran any risk, rather than shut out such a store of new knowledge. After all, the most fundamental thing in man is his curiosity, his desire for knowledge. He knows he must perish on the earth, and that all sufferings have an end, but above all things he longs before he goes hence to hear the answers to the great riddles that have been set before him these millions of years. Rather than miss his chance of hearing what the Martians could tell him he would risk anything and everything. Very possibly the Martians would know as little as we, and would ask as many or more questions than they answered; but at least they would have come from a far country through the thrilling regions of the ether, and would be able to tell us something of the vast plains of inter-planetary space through which the sun and stars are hurrying, swept onward from an unknown starting-point to an unknown goal.
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