this organized community is that there is no apparent organization. Each individual seems to act on his own initiative, without directions or orders. There are no superiors or inferiors. The ideal of absolute equality reigns. There is no overlord, no standing army, no officers, no privates. There is a most effective government, but there are no governors. The varied and complicated facts of government in a great ant-city, its home-making, home-guarding, home-nurturing, its building of roads, storerooms, nurseries, and vast structures that, proportionately to the size of ants, are equal to great centers of human population, the gathering and distribution of supplies, the cultivation and storing of crops, the keeping of herds, waging of war, and utilizing of captives, are carried out with perfect regularity. The laws are self-enforced, are apparently never violated, and this work goes on with the regularity and precision of an automatic machine, “without guide, overseer or ruler.” Ants have lived under their laws so long that they have become perfectly fitted to them, and even the time for closing the gates requires no warning sound of a curfew. Is it not plain that ants can live and work without direction or guide because, acting by instinct, they all act precisely alike?
It cannot be denied that this experiment of Nature is, to the extent that it has gone or can go, perfectly successful. The ants have certainly a considerable degree of what we usually call intelligence. And this is so with many other animals. A herd of musk-oxen in the frozen north, when it hears the hungry cry of a band of wolves, throws itself into battle array. The bulls face outward in a circle, standing shoulder to shoulder and presenting a ring of menacing horns to the foe. The cows and calves are all protected inside the barrier of menacing horns. It seems difficult to distinguish this conduct of musk-oxen from that of a wagon train of emigrants, let us say in 1850, crossing the western plains in the United States. When an Indian attack was impending, the wagons were arranged in a circle with the human beings, the horses and cattle inside the circle. These two performances differ little in intelligence. The musk-oxen are certainly acting with just as much intelligent coöperation as the human beings. The performances of the domesticated dog or the horse betray often the highest intelligence. The amazing communal life and engineering skill and discrimination of the beavers are reserved for later illustration. Similarly, the ant, when it decides to tunnel a stream or to select its home, acts with much intelligent judgment.
It is apparent that the laws of social organization of the ant are suited only to a natural condition where the young are produced by the one ant queen. The workers are all infertile, aborted females. The drones are killed at once after the queen has taken her nuptial flight. No possible dissensions in the community can arise like those of the bulls or stags or stallions fighting over the cows or does or mares. Nor can any question arise over property, for all the property connected with the community belongs to the whole community. This was the condition among primordial men. Every worker among the ants toils with all her might in obtaining the property, and all have equal access to it. Each ant acts as if its act could become a general rule of action, and this we shall see is true of all human primeval law. The natural condition of absolute equality results from each ant having full liberty to act like every other ant. The intense devotion to the community, the total ignoring of the individual, the innate passion for acquiring property for the community, are fundamental instincts that must be developed by any social animal that requires the storing of food in order that the community may survive.
Every ant community acts on the seeming principle, so popular among Socialists or incompetents, that the society owes a living to each of its members. No trouble, even, can arise over the young, for they belong to the whole community and are the cherished possession of the whole tribe. They have no parents, they are all orphans, and are brought up with the greatest care by the joint efforts of all the workers. Finally, the fact that these ants have continued in their habits of life without change through a million years indicates that the laws of social life that govern the ants have produced animals absolutely responsive and obedient to those laws. In other words, every ant is law-abiding. What, then, can be simpler to the reformer, than to turn humankind into ant-aping social communities and to make all men law-abiding?
Is it at all strange that the ideal commonwealths, which have been devised, borrow leaves from the book of the ants? All communal socialism is based upon the jurisprudence of the ants in an attempt to apply that polity to human beings. It is assumed that, like the life of the ants, all there is to human life is the problem of enough to eat and a roof to cover our heads. This is true of savage men. This is the Marxian assumption applied to civilized men. Almost every new religion begins with this fascinating dream of goods in common, no contentions, no degrees among men, all naturally working for the common end. The Socialists seem to look without disfavor even on predatory war, for this is the lesson of their exemplars, the ants. They find no place for the monogamous family life, for that is no part of the polity of the ants. Every ant society supports each individual ant. That is the theory of Socialism. The problem of socialistic communism is a very simple one on paper. Let each human being become as purely responsive to conditions as the ant, let him attain the perfect self-discipline and self-control, the self-abnegation and self-surrender of the ant, the devotion to the good of the community which is the controlling spring of emmet life—let each human being cease to be individual, and Socialism and Communism are very easy to attain. This means, of course, as we shall see, that the fundamental nature of the human mind as the ages have produced it, must be abolished. No one but an imbecile can hope for such a transformation or expect it.
If every act of the ant were not what, for want of a better word, we call instinctive, the mental constitution of the ant would have been certain to change in the course of a million of years. We content ourselves with saying that it is the nature of ants to act as they do. The laws of ant social life are inexorable and incapable of being changed unless they be changed by some new natural condition acting upon the ant. What we mean by this is probably the great generalization of Pascal, who was thinking of human beings: “What is nature? Perhaps a first custom, just as custom is a second nature.”
The lesson we can learn from consulting the ants is that habits of acting or customary modes of acting of even intelligent animals become so fixed that it is impossible that they should be altered by mere animals, and so far as man as an animal has come out of his remote past, he has come stamped with this instinctive tendency to continue in customary habits of acting. But so far as he has become capable of altering his customary ways of acting, he has ceased to be a mere animal and has taken on, if you please, a Godlike attribute. But we may be certain that he will not alter his methods of life except to the extent that he is compelled to go. He will cling to as much of his ancestral robe of habit as he can retain.
Next, we may say that every social community of animals, by the very fact of its individuals living together, develops in each individual by nature or by habit or by customary mode of acting, an intense tendency in each individual to preserve that social community as an organization. In order to preserve the community there must be a store of food for the winter, requiring most intense labor. Hence come the ants’ tribal property, the common home, the unified labor, and the practice of slavery. We shall find in primitive men these same instincts, the same tribal feeling, the utter lack of any conception of the individual. The individual counts for nothing in the preservation of the community. This is just as true as that in the animal, whether with or without a social organization, there existed the animal tendency to propagate its species, impressed upon every normal animal as a natural and ruling passion. These two tendencies, to propagate and to continue the herd, continued to exist in men from their stage of mere animality, and the two together make up what may be called the basis of human community life as it came from the hand of Nature.
Now at this point in the beginning of this history it is necessary to emphasize a fact as to ants and to make a distinction between their development and that of men. In the case of the ants, their mentality and their rules of life have become precisely equilibrated to their physical surroundings. Just as surely as the moon, the other planets, and the earth are held in their orbits by the balance that has been reached in the natural forces that govern their movements, so the ants, by the condition of equilibrium which they have reached with reference to their natural surroundings, are rendered incapable of escape from, or of changing, their rules
