CHAPTER VII
Octopus Colossus
Sun-Rank Banardremarked, "It's time for lunch, so let's adjourn to the thought transmission-proof dining room. Our women folk are away visiting, so we will be by ourselves, and we can informally and freely converse."
During the meal we carried on an animated and pleasant conversation in which Sun-Rank Banard very often joined. The gist of it was mainly, at our earth men's lack of impression and perception of earth conditions.
Our boys were astonished at the detailed information the Martians had on our earth life. One said that he had never clearly thought through its economic ills. He had merely accepted them. Although he had heard and studied many of these points, they are beginning to now take on a new significance. Another remarked that the observers seem to be more impressed and are more retentive to what takes place, than those who are within the actual performance of the scenes of our life's functions.
Sun-Rank Banard said, "Now let's go back and continue the lecture.
"Nature on your earth has destined and caused man to come into existence, and has provided him with parents to protect him during his helpless infancy and childhood. During his growth, development, and maturity, it endowed him with a mentality higher than that of other animals. But in spite of his intelligence,he is often more cruel than predatory jungle beasts, especially to his fellow men.
"Creation is prolific even prodigal in its overabundance of production for your necessities and can produce and supply the needs of a population more than twice your number, providing you all will work; but many of you, for a life of ease, use this God-given intelligence especially for acquisition, storing and hoarding as a means of power over your fellow man.
"During the Stone Age, your each tribe lived together in caves adjoining each other for protection, primitively tilling the soil, and grazing your cattle around your habitations.
"It was then the survival of brute force. The bully domineered and became the leader of his tribe, acquiring for himself the most wives and food and the best shelter. The next best he bestowed upon his gang.
"For defensive and offensive weapons against predatory animals and tribes, you used stones and stone axes. Brute force gradually lost its power when the more progressive one of the tribe became adept and dexterous with his stone throwing sling, his lance, and his bows and arrows. He then succeeded to the leadership.
"As your numbers increased, you expanded your land holdings. This continued from generation to generation; from squatters you graduated according to your own laws of possession until the time came when you were encroaching on the lands of your neighboring tribes, starting your process of forceful aggression and acquisition. With the Iron Age started the evolution of your civilization, with sharp iron-pointed lances, arrows, and axes, leading to the barbarous Middle Ages.
"Laws of property ownership, and barter of land, slaves, cattle, furs, clothes, utensils, ornaments, food, and offensive and defensive weapons marked the beginning of this era. In its constant evolution, property ownership law was continually and mercilessly improved according to your standards, with the utter enslavement of weaker tribes, and races who were a good source for procuring slaves and extracting tribute.
"In the further property development during succeeding centuries your ancestors continually improved, and increased theirproperty power so that now it is the dominant factor controlling the very life and destiny of every one of you.
"You have defined and legalized property as everything on your earth capable and possible of being possessed, and owned, including intangibles. It even includes the waters of your rivers, your seas, and the atmosphere over your earth surface, and you seem to be disputing the ownership of the clouds. Sunshine and air, for the time being, are still free and cannot be owned and claimed.
"Your Webster's Dictionary defines property as a thing owned, exclusive right of possession.
"Your Amendments to your United States Constitution, Article V, also gives assent to property. They say, 'Nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.'
"You have created it into and described it as wealth, or money. You have advanced it from stage to stage and perfected and increased its power to make it a fluid currency system without which no one can obtain or purchase the necessities of life. You have outlawed compulsory slavery, for a better system whichcompels you to voluntarily hire yourself out.
"Those in power, to protect themselves, helped to pass strong laws for property control. Not content with the ownership of basic raw materials, real estate, financial affairs, transportation, utilities, and food production and distribution, they systematically entered into every sphere of industrial manufacturing—commercial fields, transportation, shipping, in fact every necessity of your life's existence—through individual ownership, partnership, companies, corporations, holding companies, national and international cartels, and chain company stores.
"To supply the labor they need in their enterprises, most of you, through necessity, hire yourselves out to them either individually or through union contracts.
"Their accumulative hoarding, cartel, and pool forming to control, monopolize, and corner industry are such that you are forced to purchase your necessities from them only, at the highest profit. Thus you pay for products, which, without your labor, could not have been created into value. Your ownership and lack of ownership of property, wealth, and power are the main contributivecauses for 98% of the laws you make and have on your statute books.
"Your controlling class who largely contribute to political campaigns influence your ruling class through political parties who openly or secretly help to elect some of their representatives to your Congress, or appoint former directors, and attorneys as members of important key cabinet and diplomatic offices. Their numerous inside and outside lobbyists and subservient newspapers influence the passing and suppression of laws. They even volunteer as advisers to your administrations. Most of your professional politicians 'kowtow' and are servile to them.
"There is always great agitation going on in regard to labor. Next to war, it is the most important problem to your government and most exciting discussions and newspaper headliners.
"Your moneyism and labor struggles are an old, festering sore. These struggles are the general cause of your poverty and destitution. Your system is such that you have no cure in sight. No matter how successful you may be in your unionized demands for more remuneration, prices and values are bound to spiral upward, increasing your living cost in proportion. You are infallibly moving in a vicious circle which tends for the rich to get richer. Many among you are born with pronounced natural aptitudes; some of you have strongly developed these aptitudes and inclinations and constantly use your full mentality and energy for accumulation and hoarding for your own use. But you also use this proficiency especially to gain power through the need of others. The school boy with the accumulative instinct will spend most of his time training himself to become an expert marble shooter in order to win those of his schoolmates. Even though they should find his full bag of marbles and divide them amongst themselves, or should he voluntarily give them the marbles, there is no question that he is bound to always win them back again.
"It is the same with your money and wealth; their division among all of you would not heal your economic diseases, because it would be only a question of a short time before most of you would lose yours to the shrewd and crafty ones among you; very possibly to the same ones who held them before.
"Money, which you developed as the medium of exchange to facilitate accumulation, store of value, and property transfer, grew into the agency of tribute or usury power, progressively expanding to an extent comparable to that of an enormous, monster Octopus Colossus, covering and holding your entire earth within its grasp. Each of his tentacles is a symbol representing your economic and other ills. Each one of them multiplies into clusters or parasites. They are submissive and especially amenable in the hands of those of you who are adept, and know how to manipulate them. With the connivance and at the direction of these operators, they hold humanity in bondage. Continually searching, they reach every corner, nook, and cranny within the innermost recesses of your homes. You have no hiding place or escape from them. They produce and contribute to all your ills and control every act of your life.
"'On the one side, man is so heroic and so noble, and on the other side so base and so cruel,' Mark Twain once said. Time again many of your economists have tried to extricate you; they have wrestled with these tentacles and, like the old tribal medicine men, recommended cutting each one off, but like the nine heads of Hydra, each one of these tentacles on being cut off becomes two. These economists, by their other nostrums, try to convince you they have found a cure; each one of them has his own theory. Your libraries are full of their books.
"Time and again many of you have tried to find a way to save yourselves, but have been betrayed by your corrupt leaders, who, through selfish motives, have led you deeper into the quagmire of the dangerous morass they create for you. They and theirs may some day also become the victims.
"One of these tentacles spreads and disseminates the infectious polio and other deadly diseases by distributing from person to person your disease-carrying, paper money and metal coins. It takes them out from the foulest and dirtiest parts and places of some of the unbathed, drunken, and diseased bodies of your living and dead persons. This money passes along from person to person and merchant to merchant, handled constantly by your food handlers, held by your children in their hands and even in their mouths.
"Another tentacle taints you with pride, arrogance, contempt, insatiable greed, covetousness, and lust. It brings in its wake envy, jealousy, hatred, and malice, followed by the most atrocious crimes. It breeds temptation, suspicion, dishonesty, ingratitude, and corruption, vitiates your entire morale. It was directly and indirectly the cause of 1,361,593 known crimes in the United States, ranging from murder to petty larceny for the year 1943. It is responsible for physical, mental, and organic disorders of diseases among 95% of your population. It is the cause of separations, divorces, and even of serious misunderstandings between parents and children, brothers and sisters.
"Still another one of them coiling about you incites and forms in you a strong magnetic desire to pursue wealth, even by the most unfair or illegal means and methods, destroying in you your finer human feelings. It brings out in you the primitive instinct to plot the undoing of your fellow man to gain his property. It not only distorts your good resolutions, but in many of your individuals and nations, it creates greed to the point that a promise, a contract, or a treaty, no matter how inviolable, is with impunity cancelled or broken.
"How many of you can conscientiously plead innocent to your own selves that you at no time illegally or immorally benefited from your fellow man? Many of you boast how smart you are in cheating your friend.
"Desire for money has blunted your moral views to the point that many of you do not know or do not want to know what a moral sin may be. It has created among you many flatterers, and hypocrites. Many of you join ultra-exclusive clubs, orders, lodges, and other similar organizations solely for this purpose. Some of you even choose your religions with these motives.
"For money, you even subdue your natural love instinct. The craving for money makes many of you desire, and some of you execute the death of your nearest and dearest relatives or friends, in order to enable you to inherit his property or to cash in on his life insurance policy.
"Those of you who have developed in yourselves the habit of thriftiness are very gullible. You deposit your savings in banks, for interest earnings and safety. A great many of you have lostyour life's savings through dishonest mismanagement of these banks, or other mediums of savings.
"You who are called the general public; farmer, professional man, small businessman, white collar worker, laborer, widow, orphan, old person; those who pinched penny by penny to accumulate a little nest egg, those who mortgaged your homes, those who saved it at extreme sacrifices, denying yourselves certain luxuries or necessities, to the point of avarice—you have listened to the evil persuasion of high pressure. You have read the enticing overstatements in your newspapers, financial papers, and company reports, you have listened to professional tipsters, financial wizards, or your bank's financial expert and adviser offering you a lifetime opportunity to purchase investments supposed to pay good interest and dividends. Or you have diligently read your stockbrokers' pamphlets and daily sheets. You have watched stock and bond fluctuations on ticker or boards in their sumptuous board rooms. You have been enticed into high finance, stock exchanges, boards of trade, and commodities—all of them types of gambling producing revenue. It is a wonderful system to fleece you of your savings. Your big financiers with their executives, whom you helped to elect with your proxies, have a permanent stranglehold on all your basic industries. They always aim to have you 'the public,' invest your money into their companies and corporations, in fact, become majority holders of their securities. It's with your money that they finance them. They are satisfied to be the insiders with control and management holding a minority of stock. Presumptuously, these executives not only pay themselves from $50,000 to $600,000 and over, yearly salaries, but some of them also have the impudence to get themselves voted large yearly lifetime retirement pensions. They are past masters in creating and influencing a demand for their stock among you, declaring and increasing interests and dividends, manipulating the stock markets to create an artificial boom, and spreading news of a bull market. They load you with the supposed gilt-edged investments at high prices from their portfolios, that they are gradually emptying. After they have sold their securities to you and have entirely emptied their strongboxes of them, these philanthropists sell you more on 'short' sales of sharesthey don't possess. Thus they make you the 'holder of the bag.'
"Then they start their bearish news and decrease and even pass interest and dividends, bringing on a depression, forcing you to sell at a sacrifice. They wipe out your margin and your collateral bank loans; then they gradually purchase the shares back again at bargain prices.
"They are very discriminating. They do not purchase back securities of those enterprises which by their mismanagement they wrecked. They are sure of getting control of them again for a song during reorganization. Thus, you are left with many valueless stock and bond certificates and with a complete loss of your savings. Every ten or fifteen years they use the same scheme to plunder and to again entrap you, adding new dupes each time. Your stock market collapse of 1929 was not a natural phenomenon, but a man-made concerted crime. With their old tactics of surreptitiously bidding for stocks, they created a boom and a demand for the securities, until every one of you got the stock-buying fever and craze. No one of you was immune—the street sweeper, dishwasher, bellboy, all were becoming rich, pyramiding your stock holdings, and your paper profits were increasing from day to day. Then the time came when the financiers generously unloaded the last of their securities on you, as well as sold you more on short sales. They then stopped bidding for stocks, taking out the props from under the market and letting it decline through its own momentum.
"The market was like a large overflowing lake with a weak dam. It burst and created a flood overwhelming your whole house of cards in your financial world. It was followed by the most drastic panicky drive against all commodities and industrial production prices. The crash brought on ruin by closing weak banks, building and loan companies, and financial houses. It wiped out the savings of millions of people through bankruptcies and foreclosures of an unprecedented panic. The result was a large world wide depression which lasted for years.
"And when you, the public, had finished throwing over securities at the bottom of market prices, who purchased them? Why, those who originally sold them to you.
"Not content to rig the stock markets, they also trade andcorner in futures of your most staple commodities. Again, the 'public' is inveigled, and again you are made the losers, not only in the gambling losses but also in the increase of your costs of bread, meats, sugar, coffee, and other necessities.
"These people are more treacherous to each other than wolves. They would just as soon ruin their own set as not. Their financial activities according to your laws are not only legal, but very respectable.
"They are among the most respected of your world. They belong and are the leaders of not only your most exclusive clubs, and societies, but are the top members of your so-called high class social world, and live in the utmost luxury and affluence.
"The Octopus has other mediums in which his tentacles excel. To exploit from you enormous profits, he craftily and mercilessly by seductive propaganda, and intensive methods of advertising, subverted and succeeded in turning 90% of your Earth population toward habits of indulgence, greatly contributing to your extensive organic diseases, and early deaths.
"Your federal, state and city governments attempt to enforce laws but are powerless against organized crime, because so many of your citizens prefer criminal activity for its easy money. They control gambling, narcotic drug sales and other illegal vices in lucrative territories by their strong-arm methods or corruption.
"Many of you are deeply impregnated with the gambling and venture habit. Octopus Colossus has invented many more avenues through which you can give vent to this habit, other tempting pastimes, sports, and devices to attract your earnings and bets, be they ever so small.
"Gambling is legally forbidden (except on your stock exchanges and boards of trades); in most of your national states; in spite of that, it is actively carried on in all its forms as you all know everywhere; powerful gangsters reach and ever entice from the poorest and their children. They also live in affluence and luxury and travel around in expensive bullet-proof automobiles, and live in electrically guarded and protected mansions.
"At your well known gambling dens of Monte Carlo, many spend the last moments of their lives sitting in despair on the suicide bench before jumping over the high cliff.
"Reno, Nevada, called "The Biggest Little City in the World," the divorce capital of your country, has legal gambling of all kinds and is wide open twenty-four hours a day. Gamblers two lines deep stand around dice tables and roulette wheels, play at twenty-one card tables, and bet on horse races. Many mechanical gambling devices and card games are constantly busy, mostly on the receiving end.
"Here you can discern your extreme human weakness; in spite of the many humorous warning posters in one of its most sumptuous gambling houses, your rich and even your poor take gambling chances.
"Rich society men and women, business and professional men, low and high paid workingmen and women, housewives, mechanics, laborers and lumber camp workers, cowboys, old miners, Indians, Chinese, and Africans—men and women of all ages, social security and state welfare recipients in all kinds of attire, elbow each other as they stand or sit alongside each other around these tables, gambling most of their pay, savings, and pensions away. There are no limits on the bets, from a nickel up to a thousand dollars. Gambling palaces, night clubs, and saloons, all with gambling paraphernalia, seem to occupy most of the largest and best stores and buildings in the business section as well as in other commercial zones all over the state.
"Most restaurants, retail food stores, and drug stores have gambling devices of some kind. Outside of mining, gambling may be the largest paying industry for the whole state and its population. The federal government, the state, county, and city governments of Nevada derive, directly and indirectly, large taxes and license revenues from these games of chance in every one of its cities and villages. If you Earth people must indulge in that pastime, we here feel that it's very commendable for these authorities to tax them.
"The gambling system in Nevada is praiseworthy, because it's in the open and legal, whereas in all your other states, gambling is operated clandestinely and on much larger scale, where they are thriving on their pay-offs. They either buy protection from, or are in cahoots with, politicians, officials, or police helping to greatly corrupt government. Large numbers of visitors pour intoReno from adjoining and distant states for divorces and gambling purposes."
Washington, April 22, (UP)—Sen. Estes Kefauver, D., Tenn., said today that the annual gambling "take" in the United States is reliably estimated at $20,000,000,000.Kefauver, in his weekly radio address to Tennessee, did not give the source of his figure. But he said it amounts to nearly one-half this country's budget. Crime and gambling have grown to such proportions that a congressional investigation has become a "matter of urgent necessity," he said. Kefauver is the author of a resolution to hold such an inquiry—a resolution now pending before the Senate."We ought to cut out the cancer when gambling and crime reach the point of endangering our system of government," he said.[27]
Washington, April 22, (UP)—Sen. Estes Kefauver, D., Tenn., said today that the annual gambling "take" in the United States is reliably estimated at $20,000,000,000.
Kefauver, in his weekly radio address to Tennessee, did not give the source of his figure. But he said it amounts to nearly one-half this country's budget. Crime and gambling have grown to such proportions that a congressional investigation has become a "matter of urgent necessity," he said. Kefauver is the author of a resolution to hold such an inquiry—a resolution now pending before the Senate.
"We ought to cut out the cancer when gambling and crime reach the point of endangering our system of government," he said.[27]
"These gambling losses do not include the billions lost on the stock exchanges, and boards of trade.
"Your Octopus derives his blood soaked profits, from your poison habits, as follows:
"The saloon and liquor lounge is your poor man's heaviest burden. It not only takes away and robs him and his family of his meager earnings, but it wrecks his health and turns him into either a criminal or a drunkard. Every dime or dollar they extract from you means one nursing bottle less for your babies, less food and medicine for your families.
"Thus come need and destitution. The saloon is one of the chief causes of poverty and degeneracy, crime, insanity, and suicides. It is both directly and indirectly the cause of the killing and injury of many people.
"You may know from your own experience that after drinking a very small quantity of an alcoholic beverage, you have an obnoxious breath. Nature biologically did not intend alcohol for human consumption. It is an unhealthy digestive irritant, stimulant, and narcotic.
"Seemingly many people from top to the bottom of your social strata have fallen for the wiles of John Barleycorn and his side-kicks. At sumptuous social functions and at the parties of the poor, alcohol is freely consumed. It is served in the homes, cocktail lounges, night clubs, cafes, and the cheapest corner bars. No home of the well-to-do is fashionable unless it has the latest push wagon liquor service or a permanent, small, drinking mixing bar. Alcohol drinking seems to be the fad. The serving of alcoholic beverages is supposedly a sign of hospitality.
"Afternoon and early evening cocktail hours are an important event to patronize cocktail lounges and bars. Both sexes guzzle liquor and make new acquaintances. Women and men companions of all ages, mothers who are neglecting their children and homes, mothers with their daughters, youths, businessmen, brokers, politicians, and clubmen mingle with idlers, gamblers, bookmakers, policy operators, and narcotic distributors, and other human vultures. All are fashionably attired with assumed social graces and smooth voices. The smoky and noisy atmosphere is drowned by music.
"The same kinds of crowds frequent the night clubs with sensually contorted dancing and floor shows until early morning. That's where some of you take your daughters, sweethearts, and wives, and you think you are having a good time. That's where your daughters and sons from adolescence to maturity go with their dates or to pick up dates. They think it very smart. That's where they acquire pernicious habits.
"Look or walk into any of the great numbers of night clubs, high class hotel cocktail lounges, or neighborhood saloons and you will see daughters, sweethearts, wives, mothers, or sisters, of your friends and perchance your own, sitting on stools around the bar or in booths, close to known or unknown male companions. A man may take a girl out for just a little moonlight spin in his waiting automobile and even perhaps in a call house, a wayside cabin or in his bachelor apartment.
"In some of the sumptuous ladies' restrooms in the finest of these places brothel and call house madams sometimes recruit their new inmates.
"These are the fathers and mothers of your future generations.Half of your population in the near future may be prison, insane asylum, or hospital inmates, and a great many of the rest may be atrocious supermen of Hitler's type of moron.
"The best your federal, state, county and city governments can do is to tax alcohol and liquor to the limit, which they commendably do.
"No wonder that
"On December 10, 1945, at Miami Beach, Florida, Edgar Hoover, Chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, bluntly warned the nation's police chiefs that the United States is headed for a major crime wave, with juveniles taking the lead in an era of 'Bloody' postwar lawlessness."Here, at the convention of the nation's police chiefs, Hoover revealed statistics showing an amazing increase in arrests of bobby-sox girls of 18 and under. Hoover asserted that one out of every twenty-three Americans had been criminally fingerprinted by the F.B.I., whose files, he said, contain records of 6,000,000 such persons. He cited figures showing that persons under twenty-one commit 15% of all murders, 36% of the robberies, 30% of all rapists, 34% of thieves, 26% of the arsonists, and 62% of all car thieves."Hoover said arrest of bobby-sox girls under eighteen jumped 198% since 1939, while arrests for boys in the same age group increased 48% for homicide, 70% for rape, 72% for assault, 55% for auto thefts, and 101% for drunkenness and drunken driving."Lawlessness has taken on such proportions as to even startle the imagination," he said."In Miami Beach, December 11, 1945, President Truman in a personal message called on the nation's police officials to organize a country wide crime prevention drive aimed at the roots of juvenile delinquency. Mr. Truman said in the message read to more than 700 delegates to the International Association of Chiefs of Police Convention that he lookedupon the rise of juvenile delinquency as perhaps the most alarming problem faced by law enforcement officers."Americans cannot afford to regard that problem passively or to postpone the action necessary to its solution," the President said. "I am convinced that the active cooperation of all welfare, religious and social agencies, civic leaders, businessmen and citizens in the broad national crime prevention program directed at the roots of the evil is the path to be followed and without delay."[28]
"On December 10, 1945, at Miami Beach, Florida, Edgar Hoover, Chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, bluntly warned the nation's police chiefs that the United States is headed for a major crime wave, with juveniles taking the lead in an era of 'Bloody' postwar lawlessness.
"Here, at the convention of the nation's police chiefs, Hoover revealed statistics showing an amazing increase in arrests of bobby-sox girls of 18 and under. Hoover asserted that one out of every twenty-three Americans had been criminally fingerprinted by the F.B.I., whose files, he said, contain records of 6,000,000 such persons. He cited figures showing that persons under twenty-one commit 15% of all murders, 36% of the robberies, 30% of all rapists, 34% of thieves, 26% of the arsonists, and 62% of all car thieves.
"Hoover said arrest of bobby-sox girls under eighteen jumped 198% since 1939, while arrests for boys in the same age group increased 48% for homicide, 70% for rape, 72% for assault, 55% for auto thefts, and 101% for drunkenness and drunken driving.
"Lawlessness has taken on such proportions as to even startle the imagination," he said.
"In Miami Beach, December 11, 1945, President Truman in a personal message called on the nation's police officials to organize a country wide crime prevention drive aimed at the roots of juvenile delinquency. Mr. Truman said in the message read to more than 700 delegates to the International Association of Chiefs of Police Convention that he lookedupon the rise of juvenile delinquency as perhaps the most alarming problem faced by law enforcement officers.
"Americans cannot afford to regard that problem passively or to postpone the action necessary to its solution," the President said. "I am convinced that the active cooperation of all welfare, religious and social agencies, civic leaders, businessmen and citizens in the broad national crime prevention program directed at the roots of the evil is the path to be followed and without delay."[28]
"Mr. Edgar Hoover, chief of your Federal Bureau of Investigation, and your President Harry Truman know full well one of the main reasons for these conditions; but with liquor and alcohol traffic protected by the 21st Amendment to your Constitution, with the strong financial interest in the manufacturing and distribution of alcohol, and with the strong propaganda which strengthens the desire for the existence of these conditions, their hands as heads of Government and Investigation Bureau are tied and powerless. They and your Congress would greatly hesitate to try to do away with this evil, if doing so would close those industries with their large numbers of workers out of work and bring back prohibition conditions.
"Man's poison habits are often the cause of an innocent person losing his life or being disabled through the recklessness of the moderate or social drinker.
"Your Congress should at least pass, as soon as possible, a Federal law completely outlawing the drinking of alcoholic liquor, no matter how moderate, to anyone who has a driver's license for motor cars, buses, aeroplanes, or any other rapidly moving vehicle and make it a crime punishable with strict and heavy penalties. Driver's licenses should be issued by the Federal government only, after a thorough examination.
"Tobacco is another avenue where your Octopus gains nearly four billion dollars per year.
"If you smoke a pack a day, you inhale 400 milligrams of nicotine a week."Said Dr. J.L. Myers of Kansas City, "Nicotine irritates the mucous membranes of the respiratory tract. Tobacco tar injures those membranes.""Non-smokers, in four years at Yale and at Amherst, grew more in height and weight and lung capacity than did their smoking colleagues."Knute Rockne was definite: "Tobacco slows the reflexes, and any advertising which says it helps an athlete is falsehood and fraud."Habitual smokers have a 50 percent higher incidence of palpitation of the heart than non-smokers. There is evidence that heart disease is more prevalent among smokers than among non-smokers.It is generally agreed that cancer of the mouth, tongue and lips is unduly prevalent among smokers.[29]
"If you smoke a pack a day, you inhale 400 milligrams of nicotine a week."
Said Dr. J.L. Myers of Kansas City, "Nicotine irritates the mucous membranes of the respiratory tract. Tobacco tar injures those membranes."
"Non-smokers, in four years at Yale and at Amherst, grew more in height and weight and lung capacity than did their smoking colleagues."
Knute Rockne was definite: "Tobacco slows the reflexes, and any advertising which says it helps an athlete is falsehood and fraud."
Habitual smokers have a 50 percent higher incidence of palpitation of the heart than non-smokers. There is evidence that heart disease is more prevalent among smokers than among non-smokers.
It is generally agreed that cancer of the mouth, tongue and lips is unduly prevalent among smokers.[29]
"Study fire statistics from your fire insurance companies. They will show you that most fires you have are started by smokers.
"One of the more sinister activities of the Octopus lies in relation to drugs.
"The drug habit, as I understand, has been acquired by many on your earth through your purchase and use of many cheap, unsuspected mild patent medicines, or through your doctor's prescriptions for medical purposes, or through the narcotic drug traffic by your gangsters, with the connivance of some of your unscrupulous politicians. The Octopus's slimy tentacles here surpass themselves. Once the habit takes hold of its victim it is very hard to free him of it, and he becomes enslaved to its use. Unless he gets his daily dose, his overpowering desire and need for it become acute. In that state he will commit any crime to obtain the drug to alleviate his acute hunger.
"Some of your doctors, nurses, medicine manufacturers, mostly your gangsters are to blame. Those who, against human decency and law, deliberately induce those tendencies are reprehensible human hyenas. There is nothing so monstrous as the extreme lust and selfishness of some of you who grind out profits through the suffering of your fellow man. Through neglect or by designyou turn him into a lifelong addict so that you can live in affluent luxury and security. There is no conscience guilt, compassion, nor pity, in your soul for him and his babies; but inexorable retribution is bound to seek you out and have vengeance against you and yours in your future progeny.
"Your intensive money-craving tends to cause you, when you are ill, to hazard your health by delaying medical examination, by trying to cure yourself with home remedies or patent medicines, very often risking your health and life by postponement. For the lack of funds, you are often at great disadvantage by not being able to procure competent medical attention.
"Politics and certain politicians give the Octopus another stronghold.
"Earth—Man by instinct is not wicked, he is molded by environment and force of circumstances. Beset with the stress of uncertainties and insecurity of life. And with vicissitudes of selfishness, greed, temptations, desires for riches and power. Contributive to the breaking down in some of you of love, honor, chastity, character, honesty, respect, ethics and morality.
"Your lack of our sense of thought reading, and under your present moneyism system of life the best form of your earth government cannot guard itself against isolated cases of weak, unscrupulous, and treacherous persons.
"Some of your opportunists, amateur and professional politicians, with the lust for wealth and easy money, seek and secure high offices, and permanent soft jobs in your Government. Few hirelings of crooked political bosses and machines reach high places in Government, or attain them through political campaign work, contributions, fixed elections, and dishonest political maneuvers.
"Some few do not hesitate while in public office, through inside information and political maneuvers, to influence and benefit through a rise or decline of stocks, bonds, commodities, and real estate. They use it to speculate on the commodity markets tending to increase food costs. They obtain high salaries, Government offices, and other positions for their near and distant inexperienced relatives and friends, and get kick-backs on their salaries.
"Few of them have procured their nominations and electionsby paying for them in advance or by promising future favors. They get your vote by promises that very often are not kept. Some officials sometimes have been tempted to accept bribes. Dishonest ones demand them openly or by subterfuge. In return, they help individuals or organizations to operate unlawfully. Some, in Government office, have helped to contribute to crimes of the worst exploitation, and extortion, against your nationals, or other nations.
"Your money packs the potentiality of the greatest power force and medium for most all your evils and is a constant strong tempting magnet staining with its putrid stigma of corruption, some of your low and high pillars of your temples of justice, law, righteousness, and benevolence, since historical times they have shaken its foundation and toppled over the weak edifice you call civilization.
"No matter how impregnable your officials may be, their jobs are difficult. There are always a few who sooner or later are tempted by economic necessity or desire for social betterment to advance themselves at the expense of their principles. The men resisting must have the integrity of flint. It is unfortunate that the weak ones by their action break down the good done by the strong. In your three branches of government we find that the officials of the upper strata, except for a few isolated instances, have kept their records clean.
"Your world history shows that dictatorship, unjust political, or government ruling power nearly always caused political violence and the early death of most of your leaders through revolutions, assassinations, overwork, and extreme tension.
"Even your religions are not immune from its contamination. Your money greed Octopus through his enticement has unlawfully violated and corrupted your most sacred religious commandments and sacraments.
"Disrupting and weakening your safety protection is another function of your Octopus.
"Property caused you to surround with guards all your government departments and bureaus, and all your business establishments and industry, from the largest to the smallest. Youroffice, your home, in fact, every building at immense costs is provided with all safeguards, contrivances, and precautions.
"Your legislative departments everywhere have passed innumerable stringent laws and created law enforcement departments of all kinds. You have built your so-called impregnable safes, safe deposit vaults, and burglar alarms. You have developed intricate and costly systems of business protective methods; and services and guards of all kinds to check and counter check every deal, item, and number of articles, down to the last penny or article of the lowest value.
"You have insurance of all kinds against loss and fraud; real estate title insurance, indemnity bonds, postal insurances. With all these precautions, you are still vulnerable to loss through your most trusted partners or employees, through your competitor, through unforeseen circumstances, through dishonest and crafty speculative plots against you by individuals, gangsters, or through a rapacious dictator, through plundering governments, or through predatory national wars.
"The double latches on your windows or the double locks on your doors do not always protect you. Day or night, awake or asleep, through all the regions on your Earth, you are prey to the most atrocious crimes. Alive or dead, your body is in jeopardy. Alive, you are in danger of being blackmailed, kidnapped, or waylaid openly or from ambush. Some will kill you for a few pennies or for your clothes; in a rooming house in England, persons were murdered in order that their bodies might be sold to dissecting rooms; and ghouls may desecrate your grave to sell your body.
"The overwhelming temptation for the possession of money, wealth, affluence and power is so great that all your laws, and enforcement agencies are powerless against your criminal elements, with venal tendencies in some members of your police departments, and in certain members of large political organizations, one of them is reported to be dominated by an underworld leader, and whose friends are appointed to official positions, when a court witness can be intimidated or murdered, when the services of a murderer can be ordered or bought, as per a statement to your senate crime committee that there exists an underworldnationwide Murder, Inc., when some of your law enforcement officers, some of their superiors and some politicians associate with and are friends and partners of criminals, when gangsters who not only contribute to and are active in political campaigns buy protection, and carry open shooting and bombing wars on the crowded streets of your cities in the daytime, and when your most secret government and arms information is easily obtained by other nations through your traitors and their spies, you certainly have no law enforcing security."
"Washington, (AP)—F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover said today that crimes in 1946 broke all records for the past decade. Every 5.7 minutes, there was a case of murder, manslaughter, rape, or assault to kill.""Major crimes in all categories throughout the country totaled 1,685,203 last year, an increase of 119,622 over 1945, he said in a report. He noted this meant an average of one such crime every 18.7 seconds."[30]"Moscow, Ida., July 20 (UP)—A serious crime is being committed in the United States every 18.7 seconds, Paul Shine, assistant F.B.I. agent in charge at Butte, Mont., told Law Enforcement Institute delegates today at the University of Idaho, here.""Shine added that each day 36 persons are slain, 150 robberies take place and 1,032 burglaries are committed."[31]
"Washington, (AP)—F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover said today that crimes in 1946 broke all records for the past decade. Every 5.7 minutes, there was a case of murder, manslaughter, rape, or assault to kill."
"Major crimes in all categories throughout the country totaled 1,685,203 last year, an increase of 119,622 over 1945, he said in a report. He noted this meant an average of one such crime every 18.7 seconds."[30]
"Moscow, Ida., July 20 (UP)—A serious crime is being committed in the United States every 18.7 seconds, Paul Shine, assistant F.B.I. agent in charge at Butte, Mont., told Law Enforcement Institute delegates today at the University of Idaho, here."
"Shine added that each day 36 persons are slain, 150 robberies take place and 1,032 burglaries are committed."[31]
"What about the numbers of hushed up, unknown and secret crimes?
"Your overcrowded prisons where you confine your adults and very often in the same cells mixed with your juvenile offenders are breeding places not only for many hardened criminals and murderers but also habitual sex depraved fiends. Many of them become habitual drug addicts, induced by their fellow prisoners, or by some of their guards who sell the drugs.
"There is no need for me to detail all crimes and offenses for material gain; where your Octopus excels in his violent and constantaggressiveness. Your newspapers every day, everywhere give you innumerable, criminal deeds and happenings.
"You men may have been wondering why I have again gone into such detail to sketch briefly some of the ills of the world in which you have lived. You may feel that we Martians should consider the case hopeless. But the contrary is true. Because there have been and are many leaders of integrity and high principles in your midst, we feel they should be commended and given the support of greater numbers of your citizens. The paths of virtue, kindness and tolerance should be made more attractive than the paths of dishonesty, vice and crime. Much of the energy of your people is dissipated in activities of the Octopus that destroy not only themselves, but those near them and around them. We here in Mars believe that there are not enough of your citizens awake and aware of what is happening. Many of those living in palaces, beautiful suburbs, or in the quiet villages are not aware of the crowded living quarters, the poverty and the ignorance of many of their fellow citizens who live in the slums where fresh air and sunshine are lacking, and sanitary conditions are most primitive, where your poor are crowded in dark, filthy small living quarters, where large families with many sick and diseased adults, children and animal pets live together, communicating diseases to each other. These families barely have enough for necessities, causing malnutrition, and desperation. There is no privacy in their home life; parents and small and adolescent children of both sexes live together in small apartments, in tenement houses, cabins, and shacks, where families, and vice dens are neighbors.
"Narrow, filthy yards are full of wash lines; streets and sidewalks are crowded on both sides with pushcarts loaded with fish, fruits, and vegetables and smelly eatables; gutters reek with rotting garbage, but the poor man's club, the saloon, is at every corner, which gets most of his earnings.
"This is fertile soil where crime and vice are born and flourish, where venereal diseases are rampant, and where many of their daughters and wives are forced or enticed to become drunkards and prostitutes. Vice, disease and crime wave epidemics that begin in these slums, spreads quickly to and within your ownneighborhood and you are not immune from its contamination, suffering or falling its victim.
"Your money is the primary and only cause which creates some of your greedy and hard driving executives and employers, disloyal, distrustful, malicious, and wastefulness in some employees, false friends, extreme envy, dangerous, and criminal covetousness, undue influence, bribery, corruption, extortion, and brings into existence among some of your so-called educated, ruling and leader classes prejudices to an irrational influence and selfishness; in their social intercourses, class struggles and human exploitation resulting in all the evils of your world. From your infancy your cruel taskmasters inculcated and built up in you a deeply rooted man-made system like a quagmire into which you sink deeper and deeper.
"You are completely under the spell of your Octopus. You yield to its will and influence. Your reason, intelligence, will, conscience, emotions, in fact, even your soul is directed by its grasping tentacles. He is the Godfather of 'Mammon' the Demon you worship, above mother love, children's love, parent love, mate and brother love.
"Unless you drive these money changers out of your temple, chaos, terror, forced slavery, annihilation of most of your humanity, complete destruction of your present culture, inventions, and discoveries, all that you have built and created will become rubble, and deeply buried and earth covered. The few left of you will revert to the primitive status of your primordial life.
"Indications point that the Octopus now even in his own stronghold, there is the beginning of decay, but he is still all powerful, and full of fight.
"My mental vision discerns beyond the distant horizon, after the storm a rainbow, a ray of hope, with symptoms of a gradual change in his fundamental functions."
Addressing himself to me, Sun-Rank Banard said, "Now Lieutenant Balmore, I want to let you know that the President of our planet is to tender you a farewell dinner before your departure.
"Among those invited will be the highest dignitaries, of all races of Mars; they will include the President, his cabinet members, supreme court judges, congressional leaders, representativesof some professional and craft academies, including some of our top scientists, and some of our highest Sun Rank members, and not forgetting also myself.
"They all look forward and are very desirous to meet and make the acquaintance of men of their sister planet. You and your friends may be called on and are expected to speak; especially on matters pertaining to Earth conditions.
"We are aware that certain members of your crew were active in Germany before and during the last War. Being that we all know in detail of all the atrocious happenings, we would prefer that they would recount them to us.
"You will be advised of the exact date."