SOCIAL STRENGTH
A constant struggle is going on in nature, and those animals best adapted to their conditions will be the ones to survive and transmit their superior characteristics to subsequent generations. This is natural selection. This same law governed man in his early history, and in almost the same way as it governs the brute kingdom. From the time that the tribal relation is established among men the struggle for existence ceases to be one of individuals and becomes one of tribes. It little profits an individual to be strong if he belongs to a weak tribe; it little profits a tribe to be composed of strong individuals if they fail to work in harmony with each other. Natural selection will still preserve the strongest, but it will be the strongest tribe. It is mutual trust, fidelity, honesty, concert in action, patriotism, disregard of death, that form the sinews of the nation, personal strength becoming a subordinate factor. Wolves hunt in companies, and together fearlessly attack animals which would easily master them separately. Insects live in communities and tho individually they are weak, by concert of action they make themselves formidable to the strongest of animals. But the central feature of the teaching of Christ was the law of love. It constantly appears in His words—now clothed in one parable now in another. The new command given to man was to love his enemy, to do good to them that hated him, to help the weak, to pardon the erring, to resist evil, and to give to him that asked. Henceforth it was to be the peacemaker who should be blest, and he who wished to be greatest was to be servant of all.—H. W. Conn, Methodist Review.
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See [Unity, Strength in].
SOCIAL TRAITS IN CHILDREN
Pedagogs tell us that the plays of children under seven or eight are noncompetitive and noncooperative. Kindergarten children play side by side or in pairs, rarely spontaneously in groups. They are gregarious rather than social. The plays between the ages of seven and twelve are social, cooperative and competitive games, but each child usually plays for himself. After twelve group games with opposing sides are more popular, and finally tend to crowd out all others.
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SOCIAL VANITY
I read in a Paris paper an interesting account of a reception that some of our distinguished friends passing the season in Newport gave to a chimpanzee. Of course, it was mortifying to an American to have it known by Europeans that my compatriots were prepared to confess in that practical way to their belief in the evolution theory, and to have it understood in the cultivated centers of English and Continental life that over here people of advertised refinement could drop into such close relations of social reciprocity without either the Newport gentlemen and ladies or the chimpanzee feeling themselves insulted by the contact. But that first feeling, which of course was one of loathing, not for the chimpanzee, but for his companions, soon gave place to one which I am sure was more just and wholesome, this, namely, a pathetic realization of the horrid sense of emptiness which people must be suffering under to be willing to fill up the vacuum with material of such an abominably unhuman type; like a man so agonizingly hungry that he had rather fill himself with carrion than go to bed supperless, and not only that, but reduced to such an extreme point of inanition as even to acquire an appetite for carrion.—Charles H. Parkhurst.
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