Unfettered: A NovelGriggs, Sutton E. (Sutton Elbert)
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Unfettered: A Novel
Griggs, Sutton E. (Sutton Elbert)
African Americans -- Fiction; United States -- Race relations -- Fiction
Prince Kropotkin, the eminent Russian naturalist, in discussing
co-operation among lower animals, remarks:
"If we * * * * ask Nature, 'Who are the fittest: those who are continually
at war with each other, or those who support one another?' we at once see
that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the
fittest. They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in their
respective classes, the highest development of intelligence and bodily
organization."
Darwin, giving the results of his observation among the lower animals, pays
tribute to the spirit of co-operation, when he says: "Those communities (of
animals) which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members
would flourish best."
Ascending from the lower animals, we find that co-operation is equally as
valuable and necessary for man. In the march of humanity toward an ideal
civilization, we find those races in the van which have best acquired the
art of co-operating, while the rear is brought up by those peoples in whom
the instinct of co-operation is thus far missing or but feebly developed.
Prof. Henry Drummond remarks: "To create units in indefinite quantities and
scatter them over the world is not even to take one single step in
progress. Before any higher evolution can take place these units must by
some means be brought into relation so as not only to act together, but to
react upon each other. According to well known biological laws, it is only
in combinations, whether of atoms, cells, animals, or human beings that
individual units can make any progress, and to create such combinations is
in every case the first condition of development. Hence the first
commandment of Evolution everywhere is, 'Thou shalt mass, segregate,
combine, grow large.'"
A recent writer has expressed the thought that "neither material
prosperity, nor happiness, nor physical vigor, nor higher intelligence,"
constitute the difference between the 'higher' and the 'lower' races, but
that "those are higher in which broad social instincts and the habit of
co-operation exist."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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