Children of other old
settlers are getting rich. I should think you'd want yours to.
SILAS: I want other things more. I want to pay my debts 'fore I'm too
old to know they're debts.
GRANDMOTHER: (_momentarily startled_) Debts? Huh! More talk. You don't
owe any man.
SILAS: I owe him (_nodding to_ FEJEVARY). And the red boys here before
me.
GRANDMOTHER: Fiddlesticks.
FELIX: You haven't read Darwin, have you, Uncle Silas?
SILAS: Who?
FELIX: Darwin, the great new man--and his theory of the survival of the
fittest?
SILAS: No. No, I don't know things like that, Felix.
FELIX: I think he might make you feel better about the Indians. In the
struggle for existence many must go down. The fittest survive. This--had
to be.
SILAS: Us and the Indians? Guess I don't know what you mean--fittest.
FELIX: He calls it that. Best fitted to the place in which one finds
one's self, having the qualities that can best cope with conditions--do
things. From the beginning of life it's been like that. He shows the
growth of life from forms that were hardly alive, the lowest animal
forms--jellyfish--up to man.
SILAS: Oh, yes, that's the thing the churches are so upset about--that
we come from monkeys.
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