292 PROBLEMS OF HUMAN EVOLUTION 



irresistible instinct and is unable even to see the selfish alter- 

 native, we must not find any great barbarity in the cruelty of 

 bees or of cattle. 



Bees: their The social life of bees is so extraordinary and bears so upon 

 limitations our p resen t; subject that I shall pause a moment to consider it. 

 Every worker member of the community labours with the 

 utmost energy for the common weal, shortening her life by 

 unceasing toil. Social life is brought to the greatest perfection 

 that without the aid of conscious sense of duty and moral 

 principle we can imagine attainable. All this perfection must 

 be due to stringent Natural Selection, though the method of 

 its working is hard to detect. I suggest a way in which it may 

 act : I can see no other. Though none of the work of collecting 

 honey, building cells and feeding the young is done by either 

 parent, yet all the faculties and powers of the workers must be 

 present either in one or the other, or in both. Suppose that they 

 are latent in the drone. Now, it is well established that the queen 

 never unites with the drone in the hive but always on the wing, 

 and it is probable that by this means one of the most vigorous 

 drones from an enormous number is selected. If with vigour 

 in the drone are correlated the qualities that go to make a good 

 worker, then we can understand how it is that hive bees seem 

 always to be perfect models of energy and skill. 



We must now see how this bears on our argument. Stringent 

 natural selection has produced a wonderful community in which 

 there is a more ardent spirit of co-operation than among any 

 other animals lower in the scale than man. But bees and other 

 social insects are its culminating achievement, not a dim sugges- 

 tion of great possibilities some day to become realities. We see 

 in their social life the high water-mark attainable where Natural 

 Selection works unaided. And if the bees themselves give 

 point to the system by their own cruelty, we may say that, 

 though they are thus doing the best for the hive, yet that the 

 use of such means has cut them off from all possibility of 

 advance to a still higher social state. 



For man a further advance has been possible because he has 

 left such methods behind. If human altruism had been so 



