Competitive System Amongst Lower Animals 761 



voiired the crops of the underlings for whom little or no re- 

 dress was possible. 



But the appearance within the past 8000-10,000 years of 

 money gave a weapon of most terrible import wherewith the 

 competitor could squeeze, mold, subdue, and even starve groups 

 of fellow mortals in the evolving process. Its recognition 

 and legalization have permitted one or a few — like the story 

 of Pharaoh and Joseph — to buy up crops, lands, dwellings, 

 labor, and even their fellowman wholesale, and to utilize or 

 oppress the last as the whim of the hour best suited. Groups 

 of dependents and of slaves naturally followed. So for thou- 

 sands of years a relatively few men have callously looked on 

 and even arranged for giving a living wage to so many, while 

 others had to shift for life along the starvation line of existence. 

 The sight is keenly competitive and analytic — truly the oppo- 

 site of cooperative and synthetic — where in hundreds of cities 

 of the world men have again and again been left unprovided 

 for, been left to wear their increasingly tattered garments, 

 and, unhelped or rejected, been left with their families to face 

 starvation and despair. 



We would regard it as a ludicrous sight biologically, did 

 we come on ant nest after ant nest in some favored region 

 where we knew that great stores of grain were stowed away 

 safely and were being gluttonously devoured by a few, while 

 for yards round each nest solitary ants or groups of hundreds 

 or thousands of them with broken down aspect were longing 

 to enter in order to share in the general work of the nest, and 

 not least to share in the stores their earlier industry had cre- 

 ated. Biologically we might well paraphrase the voluptuous 

 king's advice and say, "Go to the ant, thou civilized human 

 one, consider her ways and be wise." The ants are wise; 

 they have got rid of their tyrannical ''bosses." Man is slowly 

 but the more surely learning wisdom betimes. 



It is no cause for wonder, then, that under such a system 

 man has evolved a highly specialized and scientifically beauti- 

 ful system of war, devastation, and bloodshed that even the 

 ants fail to equal. Such a system has been the gradual out- 



