Page:Melbourne and Mars.djvu/64

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62
MELBOURNE AND MARS.

deeply. These worlds are the creations of the Divinity; the father and mother God rules beneficently in both. We may take it for granted that He knows something about mating and governing planets of various sizes and kinds and adapting life to its surroundings. Here are two populations, both human, both civilised to a certain extent, both morally responsible, both religious in proportion to capacity, and yet both doubting and fearing. Why is this? Our Maker has fitted us in all respects to our surroundings. Put an earth man on Mars, and the internal pressure of air would explode him, and if he could endure our comparatively rarefied air he would not be able to adapt his muscles to our half pressure gravitation. With our light he could hardly see, and even our summer temperature would starve him. Our temperate zones in winter would remind him of Greenland and Spitzbergen; our frosts would certainly congeal his great watery body. Put a martial man on Earth and the density of the atmosphere would crush his organs together; his muscles would not enable him to drag along; the moist, hot air would suffocate him, the light would blind him, and though a man on Mars he would appear a dwarf amongst the larger and more burly and muscular earth men. Surely if the Deity has made humans with so much in common and yet so different, he has in other respects adapted them to the worlds they occupy. The human race grows upon its planet as an individual grows. It is at first little, weak and inefficient; then it gains strength and grows more rapidly. In a while it attains to its full size, but is not educated, matured, perfected. As it lives on it improves, becomes more sensible, more intelligent, more moral; it purges itself of selfishness and becomes more altruistic. A race life is the same. The race on earth is young yet, it is that of a child. It has not yet learned to talk properly; its nations remind us of children heaping up ridges of sand and saying, 'This is my house,' and fighting if one knocks down a wall and claims two shares. So far the race has wasted most of its force in fighting for small slices of cultivated land while three-fourths of the earth is yet a wilderness. Arbitration between nations is but commencing, and Federation of a few of the most civilised and powerful nations is but a dream of the future. They are where we were a thousand years before the declaration of Perpetual Peace, and our population has increased fivefold since then. It may yet increase, may even double again and be easily sustained. Science has told us this; nothing is more sensitive than population. If there is room for expansion it expands, if life becomes harder it remains stationary, and if the conditions become painfully severe, as in the Black Century, it decreases, and all this without any special action of optimist or pessimist. When a planet is full of happy human life the race may be said to have attained to manhood and maturity. It may then remain full until the conditions again change, and the human life and that of the planet pass into senility together. If there are any creators then their cry will be that the race is growing old