It is apparent that the laws of social organization of the ant are suited only to a natural condition where the young are produced by the one ant queen. The workers are all infertile, aborted females. The drones are killed at once after the queen has taken her nuptial flight. No possible dissensions in the community can arise like those of the bulls or stags or stallions fighting over the cows or does or mares. Nor can any question arise over property, for all the property connected with the community belongs to the whole community. This was the condition among primordial men. Every worker among the ants toils with all her might in obtaining the property, and all have equal access to it. Each ant acts as if its act could become a general rule of action, and this we shall see is true of all human primeval law. The natural condition of absolute equality results from each ant having full liberty to act like every other ant. The intense devotion to the community, the total ignoring of the individual, the innate passion for acquiring property for the community, are fundamental instincts that must be developed by any social animal that requires the storing of food in order that the community may survive.
Every ant community acts on the seeming principle, so popular among Socialists or incompetents, that the society owes a living to each of its members. No trouble, even, can arise over the young, for they belong to the whole community and are the cherished possession of the whole tribe. They have no parents, they are all orphans, and are brought up with the greatest care by the joint efforts of all the workers. Finally, the fact that these ants have continued in their habits of life without change through a million years indicates that the laws of social life that govern the ants have produced animals absolutely responsive and obedient to those laws. In other words, every ant is law-abiding. What, then, can be simpler to the reformer, than to turn humankind into ant-aping social communities and to make all men law-abiding?
Is it at all strange that the ideal commonwealths, which have been devised, borrow leaves from the book of the ants? All communal socialism is based upon the jurisprudence of the ants in an attempt to apply that polity to human beings. It is assumed that, like the life of the ants, all there is to human life is the problem of enough to eat and a roof to cover our heads. This is true of savage men. This is the Marxian assumption applied to civilized men. Almost every new religion begins with this fascinating dream of goods in common, no contentions, no degrees among men, all naturally working for the common end. The Socialists seem to look without disfavor even on predatory war, for this is the lesson of their exemplars, the ants. They find no place for the monogamous family life, for that is no part of the polity of the ants. Every ant society supports each individual ant. That is the theory of Socialism. The problem of socialistic communism is a very simple one on paper. Let each human being become as purely responsive to conditions as the ant, let him attain the perfect self-discipline and self-control, the self-abnegation and self-surrender of the ant, the devotion to the good of the community which is the controlling spring of emmet life—let each human being cease to be individual, and Socialism and Communism are very easy to attain. This means, of course, as we shall see, that the fundamental nature of the human mind as the ages have produced it, must be abolished. No one but an imbecile can hope for such a transformation or expect it.
If every act of the ant were not what, for want of a better word, we call instinctive, the mental constitution of the ant would have been certain to change in the course of a million of years. We content ourselves with saying that it is the nature of ants to act as they do. The laws of ant social life are inexorable and incapable of being changed unless they be changed by some new natural condition acting upon the ant. What we mean by this is probably the great generalization of Pascal, who was thinking of human beings: “What is nature? Perhaps a first custom, just as custom is a second nature.”
The lesson we can learn from consulting the ants is that habits of acting or customary modes of acting of even intelligent animals become so fixed that it is impossible that they should be altered by mere animals, and so far as man as an animal has come out of his remote past, he has come stamped with this instinctive tendency to continue in customary habits of acting. But so far as he has become capable of altering his customary ways of acting, he has ceased to be a mere animal and has taken on, if you please, a Godlike attribute. But we may be certain that he will not alter his methods of life except to the extent that he is compelled to go. He will cling to as much of his ancestral robe of habit as he can retain.
Next, we may say that every social community of animals, by the very fact of its individuals living together, develops in each individual by nature or by habit or by customary mode of acting, an intense tendency in each individual to preserve that social community as an organization. In order to preserve the community there must be a store of food for the winter, requiring most intense labor. Hence come the ants’ tribal property, the common home, the unified labor, and the practice of slavery. We shall find in primitive men these same instincts, the same tribal feeling, the utter lack of any conception of the individual. The individual counts for nothing in the preservation of the community. This is just as true as that in the animal, whether with or without a social organization, there existed the animal tendency to propagate its species, impressed upon every normal animal as a natural and ruling passion. These two tendencies, to propagate and to continue the herd, continued to exist in men from their stage of mere animality, and the two together make up what may be called the basis of human community life as it came from the hand of Nature.
Now at this point in the beginning of this history it is necessary to emphasize a fact as to ants and to make a distinction between their development and that of men. In the case of the ants, their mentality and their rules of life have become precisely equilibrated to their physical surroundings. Just as surely as the moon, the other planets, and the earth are held in their orbits by the balance that has been reached in the natural forces that govern their movements, so the ants, by the condition of equilibrium which they have reached with reference to their natural surroundings, are rendered incapable of escape from, or of changing, their rules of existence and of conduct toward one another. But with man it has not been so, for man’s mentality in the long ages has suffered a great development.
Man began as an animal, responding merely to his surroundings, and the fact that he so began has led the Behaviorists to assert that such he has always remained. Their favorite thesis is that the individual man to-day is just what society has made him. This is true in a measure, but since man became civilized, the exact converse is shown to be true by the history of the law. Society now is what the individual man is making it. Somewhere in its development, by gradual and imperceptible degrees, the animal man passed from the stage of a brute wholly obedient to its circumstances and surroundings, to that of a being who, by his own purposeful mentality, could so alter the impact of his surroundings upon himself, that he could rise above the external world of the senses into the realm of the inner life of the spirit and could make it true that human society will become what the individual shall make it. To quote George Sand, the ideal life will become man’s normal life as he shall one day know it. If it be said that this change of mentality is a mystery, the answer is that the change in mentality can be traced, that it is not nearly so great a mystery as the initial change from inorganic matter to organic life, that beginning of life in which all are compelled to believe. Human society has been altered and will continue to be altered and to be made still better as men continue to rise higher in the realm of that inner life of the spirit. The world of thought, the world of dream, and all the past and the future will become the possession of more and more men.
We can anticipate that man will never become like the ant, perfectly law-abiding and perfectly fixed in his obedience to the rules of his social life, for should that day come man would be incapable of improving his rules of life and incapable of progress. Yet this does not mean that progress lies in violating the law, but rather in the capacity to alter the law. It will always be true that the highest type of man will be the one who recognizes his duty to obey the laws, as witness Socrates who without compulsion or necessity, even probably against the desire of