--Natural right is quite a
relative idea: the right to life and its conditions. But, as in this
world, which is said to be created by a personal and perfect God,
things are so amicably arranged that living creatures can only exist
by devouring one another, the oldest effective natural right of every
living being is precisely that of devouring others weaker than itself.
This is the right of the stronger. Therefore, the absolute natural
right is the right of the stronger.

=Rights of Groups. Ants.=--These notions become altered, however, if
we regard them from the point of view of _relative_ natural right.
This does not concern all living beings, but only certain groups. The
rights of groups are relative from a double point of view. On the one
hand they give the group of individuals concerned the right of
interfering with the right to life of other groups, even to
extinction. On the other hand--and this is the better aspect of the
rights of groups--they are completed by what are called the duties of
each individual toward others of the same group, that is to say, the
obligation to have regard for and even protect their rights equally as
his own. The rights of a group include the social rights and duties in
the limits of that group.

It is among animals, especially the ants, that we find the most ideal
organization of the rights of a group. Each individual of the ant
colony acts in the interests of the community, which are the same as
its own. It has the right to be nourished and housed and to satisfy
all its immediate wants, but at the same time it is its duty to labor
unceasingly in building and repairing the common dwelling, to nourish
its fellows, to aid in the reproduction and bringing-up of the brood,
to defend the community and even to take the offensive against every
living being who does not belong to the community, in order to
increase its resources.

The rights and duties have here become completely _instinctive by
adaptation_, that is to say, they are performed without commands or
instruction. They result spontaneously from the natural organization
of ants without the least external obligation intervening. Here, the
cry of distress of the ferocious human beast, of whom we have just
spoken, is completely absent, for duty is replaced by instinct or by
appetite, and its accomplishment is accompanied by a natural sentiment
of pleasure. Every ant could be idle without being punished by its
comrades, if it were c