Page:Robert William Cole - The Struggle for Empire; A Story of the Year 2236 (1900).djvu/23

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INTRODUCTION
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uninhabited, and only waiting to be taken possession of. The others were inhabited, but the natives were quite harmless. A virgin soil that hardly required any cultivation, a salubrious climate, trees laden with the most luscious fruits, myriads of animals, and vast mineral wealth spread quite a fever for emigration. Hundreds of thousands of pioneers, adventurers, and scientists rushed into the deep unknown, and reached their destination in safety. More followed, and soon the whole of the planetary system became fully colonized, and most of the planets are, at the time when we write this history, almost as populous as the earth is.

But the moral progress of the race did not go hand-in-hand with its intellectual advances. The human race had gradually become divided into two parts—those who had great brain power and those who had very little. The former did all the commanding and organizing, the latter did the