Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/342

 been, in fact, the mingled peculiarity and commonsense quality of these Marsians, in all their great steps of progress since. The Old Party has ever met each successive step by a loud note of opposition and alarm; but the step once taken, all parties seem to compose and adjust themselves to the new order, and freely to admit that, one thing with another, it suited the planet's actual condition better than what preceded it.

We found ourselves in a general accord with the views and aims of the New Party, and the latter were not slow to use that fact to some purpose in their battle for progress and the new ideas. The Old Party did not deny an abstract superiority to some of the new ideas, which, with vexatious incessancy, were dinned into their unwilling ears; but they would ever plead that Marsian conditions were suited to Marsian circumstances, and that Marsian peculiarities, even allowing that they were such, ought to be left alone, more especially by outsiders, like us of the earth, who were differently circumstanced.

Amongst odd peculiarities they have happily got rid of in these recent years, none was more striking than the old and prevalent Marsian idea that food should never cross a boundary. They could readily see the advantage of freely sending one place's superabundance to another's scarcity; but if a boundary happened to intervene, that, as they thought, could no longer be done with advantage. When we advised them simply to shut their eyes to the existence of any boundary-line, as though not present, and so to go on freely exchanging, they shook their heads, or stared alternately at us and the boundary in blank amazement. But a dozen years later a decided