one must be kept alive until its task is done,
or the whole association would have no place in nature. Similarly in the
higher insect community, the superadded duties to fellow-components are
even clearer, for in the competition of colony with colony, involving
terrific battles whose casualties may be numbered by thousands, the
stronger wins; and strength depends upon the concerted efforts of all the
members of the kingdom, that only collectively constitute a complete
biological whole. Mere self-protection demands altruistic conduct: if the
worker ceased to bring in food when its own hunger was satisfied, there
would be no tribal stores for the stay-at-home queens and nurses; and if
the soldier fled from the field of battle to save its own life, its act
would be suicidal ultimately, for to the degree of one unit the defense of
its non-military supporters would be weakened and they would be so much
the less unprotected during their service for the soldiers and all others.
Furthermore, we must admit the reality of natural criteria of ethical
values, established far below mankind in the scale of life. In an
ant-republic, laws are instinctively obeyed quite as implicitly as though
they were intelligibly proclaimed to all of the emmet citizens. Right is
might when community battles with community, for right is that which is
biologically favorable. And what may be correct conduct on the part of the
members of one species may be naturally wrong and evil in another case. To
kill the princesses in order to obviate the possibility of civil war seems
advantageous and therefore right when the queen remains in the persistent
colony of honeybees, ready to do her part the following spring; but it
might result in disaster and evil in the case of the social wasps, where
the community dies as such in the fall, and the continuity of the species
from one year to another requires the production of many queens lest the
severe conditions of the winter's hibernation should kill all fertile
females if only one or two were available. The standards of conduct are
simple indeed; and whether or not it may seem best to separate the
processes of social and ethical evolution culminating in human phenomena,
the fact remains that these processes begin with elements discovered by
the biologist among organisms of the lower levels in the scale.

* * * * *

We come at length to the biological interpretation of human social
evo