ce to China, and give us a monopoly of the
cotton goods trade in the Pacific; but I think cotton goods are
unhealthful, and I don't want to go to China. The Suez Canal may be the
mainstay of the British Empire, but I have no doubt that it would make
just as satisfactory a mainstay for some other empire. My interest in
the Erie Canal is connected entirely with the fact that when it was
opened somebody said, "What hath God wrought!" or "There is no more
North and no more South"--I have forgotten which.

I have always had a softer spot in my heart for the inhabitants of Mars
than for any other alien people. They have always impressed me as more
unassuming than the English, fonder of outdoor exercise than the
Germans, and less addicted to garrulity than the French. They lead
simple, laborious lives, digging away at their canals every morning, and
filling them up every night, for reasons best known to themselves and
certain professors at Harvard. I am attracted by their quaint
appearance. Mr. H. G. Wells, for instance, has depicted them with
cylindrical bodies of sheet iron, long legs like a tripod, heads like an
enormous diver's helmet, and arms like the tentacles of an octopus--as
odd a sight in their way as the latest woman's fashions from Paris.
Others have described the Martians as pot-bellied and hairless, with
goggle eyes, powerful arms, and curly, gelatinous legs, the result of
millions of years of universal culture and Subway congestion. A race so
unattractive could not but be virtuous. One feels instinctively that
there is no graft bound up with the digging of the Martian canals.

No, anything but graft. One of the principal reasons why I am so fond of
the canals on Mars is that they are the most cheaply built system of
public works on record. A professor of astronomy in Italy or Arizona
finds a few dim lines on the plate of his camera, and immediately Mars
is equipped with a splendid network of artificial waterways. Am I wrong
in thinking of the Martian canals as one of the greatest triumphs of the
human mind? An African savage might find an elephant's skeleton and from
that reconstruct the animal in life. Only science can reconstruct an
elephant from a half-inch fragment of the bone of his hind leg. Only a
scientist could have reconstructed the Martian canals from a few
photographic scratches. Of such reconstructions our civilisation is
largely made up. We build up a statesman out of a bit of buncombe and a
froc