43 § 
Our Six-footed Rivals. 
[Odtober, 
same diredtion. Among men there is a great diversity both 
in intellect and in energy. The more highly-endowed indi- 
vidual, if he does not leave his children in a better position, 
materially speaking, is likely to transmit to them his own 
personal superiority. In this manner the theoretical equality 
assumed as one of the bases of Communism is in practice 
annihilated. Among ants nothing of this kind can prevail. 
The workers and the fighters are sexless. If any individual 
is superior to its fellows in strength or in intelligence — and 
we have every reason to believe that such must be the case 
— it has no posterity to whom its acquisitions could be 
bequeathed or its personal superiority handed down. Hence 
the formation of an aristocracy is impossible, and whatever 
benefit may result from the labours of such an exceptional 
individual flows to the entire community. In the converse 
manner the formation of a pariah-, a criminal-, or a pauper- 
class is frustrated, and the public is not burdened with 
useless or dangerous existences. 
It is indisputable that this arrangement, joined to the 
brief term of insedt-life, must greatly retard the progress of 
the ant in civilisation. It has been remarked that were 
human life longer our development in knowledge and in the 
arts would be much more rapid. Take our present condi- 
tion : by the time a man has completed his education, 
general and special, — has fully developed his own mental 
faculties and mastered the position of the subjedt he has 
seledted, — he will be rarely less than five and twenty years 
of age. By the time he is fifty, as a rule, his power of 
origination begins to decline, and the remainder of his life 
is spent more in completing and rounding off the work of 
his younger days than in making fresh inroads into the 
unknown. Did our full vigour of intelledt extend over a 
century, instead of over a fourth of that duration, we should 
undoubtedly effedt much more. On the other hand, a 
shortening of our time of adtivity would have a powerfully 
retarding effedt on the career of discovery and invention. 
Can we then wonder if the short-lived ant and bee sometimes 
appear to us stationary in their civilisation ? But this very 
brevity of the career of each individual adts decidedly in 
favour of the preservation of social equality. If either ant 
or man is disposed to rise or to fall, then the shorter the 
time during which such rise or fall is possible the better will 
the uniform level of society be preserved. To prevent mis- 
understanding we must remark that castes with a cor- 
responding difference of duties, and, according to some 
authorities, with a diversity of honour also, do occur in the 
