66 • WAYS OF THE SIX-FOOTED 



It is strange that in the history of socialism the fact 

 has been disregarded that, thousands of years before 

 Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, and Karl Marx lived and 

 wrote, insects had already solved the problems of prac- 

 tical socialism. Surely, had Solomon been as interested 

 in social experiments as he was in industrial progress 

 he would have said, " Go to the ant, thou socialist, 

 learn her ways of community life and be wise ; for she 

 provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her 

 food in the harvest, and shareth freely with her fellows 

 the products of her labors." 



The successful socialists among insects are bees, ants, 

 and wasps, all of which belong to the order Hymenop- 

 tera. But, as if to show that the lines of social develop- 

 ment in the insect world are founded upon fundamental 

 law, we find another group of insect socialists, the white 

 ants, or termites, which belong to an entirely different 

 order. They differ as much structurally from the ants, 

 bees, and wasps as do men from horses, and yet their 

 social habits are much the same. And even within the 

 Hymenoptera the social habits of bees, wasps, and ants 

 have doubtless been developed independently. 



Let us examine the claims insects have to be ranked 

 as socialists and see if they are not well founded. The 

 efforts of human socialists have been directed toward 

 non-competitive division of labor, united capital, com- 



