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238 has the wise cuckoo become a sort of byword for the singular economy with which it has disentangled its life from care or responsibility?

It is surely very unfair thus to erect the cuckoo into a moral emblem for reprobation, if it is only doing by instinct, what man would do by reason and logic were the darkness of his own destiny made clear to him.

And similarly, it is surely disingenuous on our part to exalt as a moral emblem the instinct of ant and bee to subordinate the life of the individual to the general—if we deny to ant and bee the immortality by which alone such altruism can be recompensed; or if we are to believe that a clearer knowledge of their future lot would cause them in logic and reason to declare that life on those terms was not worth living, and that "to eat, drink, and die to-morrow" were better than to live longer and labour for a vain repetition of lives like their own indefinitely multiplied. It is ridiculous to impose the moral emblem unless you grant also the justifying conditions.

Because the bee and the ant live unconscious of their impending doom, are we, therefore, to regard them as a hoodwinked race, set to labour at the dictates of the Creative capitalist on terms which contain in them no adequate reward? Suppose, for a moment, that revelation could descend upon ants' nest and hive, and tell these workers that beyond death the future held for them no