Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/699

Rh and permanently gregarious species, as distinguished from such as merely flock together temporarily for some casual purpose, shows plain marks of a subdivision into nationalities. These tribes, by whatever name man may condescend to call them, possess the main features of similar aggregations among the human species. They lay claim to some particular territory; they defend it to the best of their ability against outsiders, and at the same time in a manner truly human they are not unwilling to encroach upon the domains of their neighbors. They have even two distinct moral codes, one to be observed toward fellow-citizens and the other for aliens of their own species.

Nationality among the lower animals shows itself in two very different types. Among vertebrates, the nation, wherever it exists, is composed, as in the human species, of a number of families, monogamous or polygamous as the case may be.

Among the Articulata, at least in the only cases where true nationality can be traced—i. e., among insects—the social unit is not the family but the individual. In the case of the hive bee we might, indeed, say that the family and the nation are coextensive. Among ants this is not the case, since in every well-established ant-hill there are several queens, so that the community is not linked together by blood. It may be contended that the absence of the family, viewed as a something which for most individuals has claims stronger than those of the state, is the cause which has permitted the successful organization of communism in insect societies.

Among ants, bees, wasps, etc., the state has no rival. She absorbs all those sympathies and energies which in human society the average individual devotes to the interests of his wife and children.

We thus see that, from their own point of view, theorists on social reform have been logically consistent in attacking the institution of marriage and the entire system of domestic life, though unwittingly they have sought to approximate man to the condition of the ant and the bee. They would form society, not as heretofore of families, but of individuals; or, as it might be expressed in physical language, they seek to build up the community not of molecules, but of atoms!

But suppose that communism were successful in the abolition of marriage among mankind, would it therefore reach its ideal? Let us look a little more closely into insect life.

It is not enough to show that the failure of communism among mankind and its success among ants and bees are due to the existence and the power of the family in the former case and to its absence in the latter. We must yet inquire into the why and the wherefore of so important a distinction. Vertebrate society,