234 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 



advantageously with certain human efforts in the 

 same way, that you are apt to exalt all her quali- 

 ties into virtues ; and to conclude that a far-seeing, 

 wise benevolence must have gone to the making 

 of the perfect Bee-State, instead of the cold, un- 

 deviating logic that alone has fashioned it. 



This remorseless smelting-down of life into the 

 set moulds of principle, without mercy and with- 

 out reproach, has a cumulative effect on the mind 

 of the observer ; and sooner or later, though he 

 will early lose his fear of her sting, he will develop 

 a very real, but vague, awe of the honey-bee in 

 another way. 



Just as Moses Rusden, the King's bee-master, 

 held up the life of the hive as Nature's evidence 

 of the Divine will in earthly monarchy, so the 

 latter-day student is often constrained to ask him- 

 self whether the bee-commonwealth does not point 

 an authoritative moral in another way. Here is a 

 State — only a mimic one, but still not a negligible 

 example — where several of the most fiercely- 

 debated questions of modern human life are seen 

 in long adopted and perfected working-order, and 

 seen in their fullness of result. Any attempt at a 

 serious comparison between men and women, and 

 the drone and worker-bee, would justly lay the 

 writer open to the charge of grotesque trifling ; but 

 there is more than a fanciful analogy between the 

 principles on which all civilisations must be based, 

 whether they are insect or human. It cannot be 



