Unfettered: A NovelGriggs, Sutton E. (Sutton Elbert)
General
Unfettered: A Novel
Griggs, Sutton E. (Sutton Elbert)
African Americans -- Fiction; United States -- Race relations -- Fiction
While paying strict attention to our home influences, we must not be
unmindful of the outside world. If we can bring to bear upon the local
situation the moral support of other sections of our country and of other
civilized lands, our travel in the direction sought will be the faster. One
of the chief labors of our racial organization will be to lay the case of
the Negro upon the heart of the world and cause all humanity to lift a
voice in our behalf. As evidence that this course is pregnant with hope, we
cite the following authorities:
Herbert Spencer designates "the control exercised by public sentiment over
conduct at large" as "irresistible." He further says: "It requires only to
contemplate the social code which regulates life, down even to the color of
an evening necktie, and to note how those who dare not break this code have
no hesitation in smuggling, to see that an unwritten law enforced by
opinion, is more peremptory than a written law not so enforced. And still
more on observing that men disregard the just claims of creditors, who for
goods given cannot get the money, while they are anxious to discharge
so-called debts of honor to those who have rendered neither goods nor
services, we are shown that the control of prevailing sentiment, unenforced
by law and religion, may be more potent than law and religion together,
when they are backed by sentiment less strongly manifested. Looking at the
total activities of men, we are obliged to admit, that they are still, as
they were at the outset, guided by the aggregate feeling, past and
present."
Huxley remarks: "It is only needful to look around us to see that the
greatest restrainers of the anti-social tendencies of men is fear, not of
the law, but of the opinions of their fellows. The conventions of honor
bind men who break legal, moral and religious bonds; and while people
endure the extremity of pain rather than part with life, shame drives the
weakest to suicide."
Moses, recognizing the influence of the crowd even when in the wrong, felt
the necessity of imbedding in the Jewish code this declaration: "Thou shalt
not follow a multitude to do evil."
Jesus Christ in projecting a world-wide kingdom designates public
reprobation as the highest form of punishment to be known in his realm.
"Let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a publican."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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