130 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 
through the experience of countless generations, 
and applied by each individual to the common 
want, just as hunger impels all mankind to eat. 
Such a condition of affairs, even in a community 
of human beings, would imply a very high state of 
mental, if not of moral, development in the indi- 
vidual. It would mean entire negation of self in 
the interest of the common good. Even with all 
the forces of heredity at work, it would need stern 
ascetic training for the young, and for the trans- 
gressing adult a swift and merciless retribution, if 
the last dream of communism—the abolition of all 
law and penalty, and the establishment of a natural 
autonomy of well-doing—were ever to be realised 
in fact. And yet some such state of things appears 
to exist in the bee-commonwealth : the individual 
worker-bee seems to be the product of some such 
system carried on through an indefinite space of 
time. Order is preserved, public works go dili- 
gently forward, the clock of the national progress 
keeps time to the second, not because there is a 
central wisdom-force to plan, to govern, to awe 
recalcitrants, but because every worker-bee is her- 
self the State in miniature, all propensities alien to 
the pure collective spirit having been long ago 
bred out of her by the sheer necessities of her case. 
The worker-bee, as we see her in the hive to- 
day, although evolution must have been busy 
through the ages determining her present mind- 
power and bodily conformation, is nevertheless as 
