James B. Alexander

“ The Third Sex.
“It is a painful tale you have told me, Professor,” said I, “I sincerely hope you have got a pleasanter sequel to take off its sting. Well, our race has always had its ups and downs. The one seems always to breed the other. So as it has received a check now, that must be a prophecy of better times ahead. After all I shall be disappointed if human wit has been so completely baffled by that problem of population that it has failed to find a way for its regulation without violation of the generous instincts of humanity.” ”

“ But the fact is that under equal conditions the influence that each exerts on the other is equal, and they are mutually benefitted. The nearest to a golden age your race has ever come was during the one hundred years from the middle of the 20th to the middle of the 21st century, and that is the period of the most complete equality of the sexes in all respects—numbers, liberty, similarity of occupations and equal duties and responsibilities, and the total ignoring and rejection of the notion of any difference of ‘spheres’ for the activities of the two. ”

“ From this time forward, law and liberty will gradually grow together until, at a period long before the end of this millennium, they will precisely coincide. Things will not be perfect at first. Men will learn better every day how to live and every day will subjugate more and more of the energies and materials of nature to their own ends. The millennium that begins now will be succeeded by ninety-nine more before your race will have passed its high tide and begun its final ebb. ”

“ By banishing war and want and disease, and reducing the problem of life to an easy pleasant certainty, society, they say, has caused herself to be invaded by fresh innumerable hordes of human beings that step into the arena of life from the secret caves of non-existence as if attracted by the feast of good things that she has provided for herself. When the repressive hand of suffering is lifted a little the human species breed and grow like rabbits until they feel its hard pressure again. ”

“ Our astronomers have assured us that the moon is a desolate played out barren world without air or water; totally unfit for inhabitants.”
“The astronomers could only report what they could see, and the side of the moon visible from the earth is as they describe it, but they have never seen the further side and never will, for that side is always turned from the earth. But the population of the moon is not far from half that of the earth and the people live in greater comfort. But there is no population living on the surface on the hemisphere facing the earth—I see this puzzles you,” he said. ”

“ Wealth carries power and power commands respect. Your wealth is distributed without justice, sometimes by accident and to those who are merely lucky, at other times to those who are simply selfish greedy and unscrupulous, and generally least to those who create it, and so luck and greed become prominent objects for your attention and emulation. How very young your race is and how much you have to learn! ”

“ If we are competent, we will find some way out of this difficulty without losing our civilization; if we are not, nature will put us back in the primer of barbarism, to learn it all over again as she has done a dozen times before. We have it in our power, and it is our obvious duty to reduce the population, or to stop its increase, and to do it in the very scientific manner that is at our disposal, by which the best blood is selected for transmission and the poorest is quietly eliminated without shock or pain to the individual or to society. ”

“ You are I think now enabled to judge what your third sex is like, that is just now being introduced as an active factor in human affairs. Your race is now for the first time in its history, able in a perfectly scientific manner, to defend itself against its own encroachments. Your long looked for millennium dates from this very moment—the practical introduction of this new factor. The disorders of the past half century that seemed to many to mark the beginning of a chaotic anarchy in reality mark its termination. ”

“ Our dreamers and prophets of the nineteenth century always pictured the coming man to us as a Hercules with brawny limbs and muscles of steel; he was never to be less than six feet high, and he was to be as graceful as he was powerful and all that. He was to be intellectual, too, of course; a Daniel Webster in brain. And they seemed to have the experience of the race in their favor in this prognostication, because it does not appear that the average stature of the race diminished any, but probably increased, during the 4,000 or 5,000 years before the 20th century. ”

“ From this lofty elevation the view is charming, and there is also a strange fascination in watching the solemn revolution of the great cable moving with the deliberation and precise regularity of the hour hand of some enormous time piece. There is a little cabin built over the shaft at the pole which revolves with the cable. The man whose business it is to oil the shaft constantly stays in that cabin, and even sleeps there. While we were admiring the view we suddenly heard a scream from the man in the cabin. The eye of the cable is oval and is not filled by the shaft at its inside end. ”

“ Men were becoming educated and mentally developed by strides instead of inches, by moles instead of molecules. In forming the “Anglic Union” they had given expression to a new feeling into which mankind was just being born, a feeling of human brotherhood, a new instinct that drew men together and acquainted them with the fact that they were all the result of common natural causes and animated by common loves and hopes and fears. ”

“ They are merely little despotisms and endure only while their leaders are people of exceptional ability. We do not regard such a state of society as desirable even if it could be made permanent.
“With us,” he replied, “the greatest liberty is accorded to the individual, but so well grounded is our predisposition to work for the benefit of the community, that no one has any fear or suspicion that another is not doing what he ought, or is able to do for the common good. There are extensive colleges for art, literature, science and invention, accessible to any according to their several tastes. ”

“ When people have such enormous fortunes they can come into personal contact with only a small portion of them. An individual owning many millions can only use on himself a few hundreds or thousands, and the rest of it buys him nothing but the respect homage, consideration, obsequiousness and sycophancy of the crowd. For all this he does not have to pay a cent, but must own or be supposed to own millions. The funds which our Lunarians owned in canal stock made them the lions of Mars. ”

“ That was the great rise in the cost of food. Of course the rents of the lands were simply added to the cost of the production of grain and other foods, and finally were paid by the consumer. It came to be seen after a time that the public revenues raised out of the agricultural lands were finally paid by all the people in proportion—not to their wealth or ability, but to their appetites and the amount they consumed—so that a laboring man with a vigorous appetite paid more to support the state than a dyspeptic millionaire. ”

“ The same is true of savages when the mental burdens of civilization are too suddenly laid upon them, and the same principle holds in civil life when from any cause the burden of life becomes too heavy—as, to the poor man when he struggles against odds for bread for his family, and to the rich when he struggles doubtfully for the superfluities required by fashion. The negro race is not extinct by any means even in the United States, but its extinction is only a question of comparatively short time easily estimated from the advance in that direction already made. ”

“ Those abodes, as we have them fixed up on the moon, you would regard as more delightful than anything you have on earth, and as equalling your dreams of paradise. There are as you suppose no storms and no extremes of temperature. ”

“ To be permanently successful it must be founded upon such an instinct for industry, that makes it more agreeable for a person to work, than to be idle, or to be merely amused. That is, the individual must love work for the sake of the work rather than for the reward that is to come after it. ”

“ There are some pessimists who declare there is no remedy. They say it was an egregious blunder on the part of society to attempt the banishment of suffering. It was suffering that had in all ages kept down the population, so that the world remained roomy enough to live in with some comfort. They hold that suffering is a necessary concomitant of comfort and we are bound to have it both before it, as a necessary antecedent and after it, as a necessary consequent. It is the law of nature and it is vain to try to evade it. ”

“ I admit that many of us are workers by instinct or at least a semi instinct, that controls us after some habit got by practice, and it is also instinctive with us to care for the young and those who are helpless from disease or old age, but there are plenty of people with whom it is equally instinctive never to do a lick of work if they can help it, and at the same time their instincts allow them to help themselves to the proceeds of the labor of others without any limit, except that of forcible restraint. ”

“ If you had been most accustomed to people four feet high, you would regard six feet people as coarse unwieldy overgrown monsters, and when you become accustomed to the people of these times with their gentleness patience, industry, unselfishness, sympathy and kindness and unfailing good humor, their ability ingenuity, almost divine wisdom and learning, their stature and form will be transformed before you to become your standard of perfection. ”

“ It is strange that after these organs are thus discarded and atrophied, nature continues to perpetuate the remembrance of them by reproducing in every individual that is born, these odd and grim caricatures, like a miserly old woman that carefully hoards her cellar full of old tin cans and broken jugs, bottles and dishes—of no use to anybody.—But this is nature’s way. ”

“ The architecture is light and graceful and suited to a mild and quiet climate, for we have the pleasant air of your tropics without their storms or excessive heat. A slight sprinkle of rain is all we ever have in the shape of a storm in any part of the interior continent, and these sprinkles are rendered periodical by artificial means. There are no wide agricultural tracts with us, nor densely populated cities, but the population is distributed in towns, and continuous villages line the roads, each of which is devoted to some principal productive industry. ”

“ If we consider how great the changes are, in the structure and functions of one body during the living of one life; we cannot feel surprised at the changes in human anatomy that we know to have occurred in the long ages up which we have so laboriously toiled, nor at the further changes which the foresight of the Professor points out to us, and for which he helps himself to such a prodigal allowance of time. The changes we have met and passed are far greater than those assumed for the future. As to our evolution we are certainly not yet half through.
See page 225, Notes on Mars. ”

“ And yet many of the men of this generation, while still holding to the sacred books, have not only repudiated witchcraft, but even the devil himself, and an attempt to burn a witch would now be met by an insurrection. Then you have a sect, or a nation rather, of people, who claim that they are the peculiar favorites of your Deity, who chose them from among all the nations and set them apart as his own, and ordered them to practice a certain peculiar mutilation on the bodies of their children as an evidence and seal of his promises to them. ”

“ As they are all working for the good of all, the inventor is not afraid his idea will be stolen, he finds the assistance he gets invaluable, and is often saved the useless labor of doing something that has been done already or attempting something in contravention of the principles of physics and therefore impossible. An invention, when made, is the property of the public, and if it lightens labor in any [69] direction, it allows it to take on greater activity in some other direction. ”

“ The accumulation of excessive wealth was possible only when the speculator got hold of something it was necessary for other people to have, and who then made them pay for it much more than it cost him. This was all stopped as I said, before the close of the 20th century. But it was reserved to the beginning of the millennium to produce wealth in such abundance that it was not possible for anybody to have a single thing that it was essential for anybody else to have. ”

“ If he borrows ten dollars in money and returns the full amount there is no wear to make good. If a man borrows ten dollars for which he must pay one dollar interest, then buys a plow and wears it one dollar’s worth he is out two dollars. So he must charge one dollar above its cost, for his crop, when he sells it, and this is called profit. He does not keep it, however, but must pass it over to the capitalist. He might charge two dollars profit, in which case, he would keep one for his profit and give the other to the capitalist for his. ”

“ I have observed that the same law holds in the accumulation of wealth. It undulates. It is lively awhile, then dull. Business men accumulate a pile, then lose it. It is the same with money engaged in business, it sometimes gains, sometimes loses. A man may drink twenty hogsheads of wine, but he cannot accumulate that much inside of him at once.
“It may be possible for one little kik in the course of 7,000 years to earn on Mars all the wealth both real and personal that there is on all the planets in the solar system and much more besides. ”

“ The society is largely but not exclusively socialistic. The state makes everything necessary for existence, but no superfluities. In these necessaries it has the monopoly, and no one else is allowed to make or sell them. The state thus makes all food and clothing and clothing material builds all houses, makes all furniture, carriages, flying machines, furnishes heat, light and power, takes care of the young and educates them. Everybody works; is obliged to work in fact for his living. Eight tenths of the people work for the state, and not over two-tenths directly for other employers. ”

“ And they aver that it would be better even now to drop a large part if not all of the artificial stimulations to the expansion of the population that have by insensible degrees been grafted upon state policy during the last century. Let every tub stand on its own bottom, say they, let natural selection secure the survival of the fittest, and let the unfit be quietly eliminated by whichever of the numerous methods nature finds most applicable. In opposition to these are the optimists who hold that the human race is nature’s pet. ”

“ One was the very rapid elevation, almost deification of women. As there was now but one woman to three men her value and importance rose in the inverse ratio; and it became the habit to say that women were worth three times as much as men. They were in fact worth a good deal more than that, for they soon perceived that they held the key of power and the destiny of the race and were able to construct the conditions of life to suit their own whims and caprices. They became in fact the ruling sex. ”

“ The new power that has been developed and already brought into considerable use and which will soon become a substitute for all others and endure as long as the earth is habitable is simply sunlight; and the discovery that is to prove by far the most valuable ever made by your race is the direct conversion of its force into electricity, which can as you know be conveyed hundreds of miles and applied to any sort of machinery required. When coal is used to produce electricity, the process is after all an indirect way of utilizing the force of the sun’s rays. ”

“ One thing that has a considerable effect on the food supply, is the change in fashions, that often takes place in a manner that the authorities cannot foresee or provide for.”
“Then fashion holds sway in the moon as well as the earth! Well, I am surprised! But as your clothes appear to grow on you I don’t see how fashion can interfere very much, or how it could affect the question of food.”
“Fashion with us has nothing to do with dress. As you say, nature has provided us with a dress at once suitable and beautiful. Whatever faults we have, personal vanity is not among them. ”

“ In a society where there are no artificial distinctions on account of sex it is not possible to find any one who would willingly exchange with another. Why should not a non-marrying sex be happy? Do you not remember that one of the great teachers of earth declared that in the kingdom of heaven they neither marry nor are given in marriage? Certainly the third sex is in a better condition to comply with this celestial regulation than either of the others. ”

“ The people lived from hand to mouth, and if the earth had failed to bring forth her bounty in crops for one year, half the population would have perished. Now if sun and rain should fail to mature the crops, the giant laboratories of artificial food can soon supply the deficiency. The tendency of the times is to depend less and less on the cultivation of the natural foods that are liable to the chances of unfavorable wind and weather, and to rely on the artificial products the creation of which is a matter of scientific certainty and accuracy. ”