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 isa 
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 
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