nto existence again. Certainly it is not
wonderful that such a fact should have set moralists thinking. Of course
if a human community could discover some secret way of effecting the same
object, and could have the courage to do it, or rather the unselfishness
to do it, the result would simply be that sexual immorality of any kind
would become practically impossible The very idea of such immorality would
cease to exist.

But that is only one fact of self-suppression and the ant-world furnishes
hundreds. To state the whole thing in the simplest possible way, let me
say the race has entirely got rid of everything that we call a selfish
impulse. Even hunger and thirst allow of no selfish gratification. The
entire life of the community is devoted to the common good and to mutual
help and to the care of the young. Spencer says it is impossible to
imagine that an ant has a sense of duty like our own,--a religion, if you
like. But it does not need a sense of duty, it does not need religion. Its
life is religion in the practical sense. Probably millions of years ago
the ant had feelings much more like our own than it has now. At that time,
to perform altruistic actions may have been painful to the ant; to perform
them now has become the one pleasure of its existence. In order to bring
up children and serve the state more efficiently these insects have
sacrificed their sex and every appetite that we call by the name of animal
passion. Moreover they have a perfect community, a society in which nobody
could think of property, except as a state affair, a public thing, or as
the Romans would say a _res publica_. In a human community so organized,
there could not be ambition, any jealousy, any selfish conduct of any
sort--indeed, no selfishness at all. The individual is said to be
practically sacrificed for the sake of the race; but such a supposition
means the highest moral altruism. Therefore thinkers have to ask, "Will
man ever rise to something like the condition of ants?"

Herbert Spencer says that such is the evident tendency. He does not say,
nor is it at all probable, that there will be in future humanity such
physiological specialization as would correspond to the suppression of sex
among ants, or to the bringing of women to the dominant place in the human
world, and the masculine sex to an inferior position. That is not likely
ever to happen, for reasons which it would take very much too long to
speak of now. But there is e