of labor far exceed in numbers the small colonies of the social wasps with
lower social differentiation.

But the great biological functions of an entire complex civilized society
remain the same as those of a primitive savage family unit, of an insect
community, of _Hydra_, and of _Amoeba_. Let any nation fail to maintain
itself in material individual respects, it must inevitably die out; in the
islands of the South Seas many a tragic death-struggle of a people can be
witnessed. If in the second place a nation should concern itself too
greatly with the material benefits of human life without obeying the
natural mandate to propagate itself, its place in the scheme of things
becomes insecure, as in the case of the French Republic. Natural social
laws that go back to _Amoeba_ must be observed, consciously or
unconsciously, or else even the civilized community must fall, like scores
and hundreds of others that lie along the road of historic progress--a
road strewn with the remains of the unfit thrown out by natural selection.

What now are the lessons of social evolution and what guidance does
science give for human endeavor? Although it may seem that the biologist
leaves his field when he considers these questions, his duty would be
unfulfilled if he neglected an opportunity to give his results their
highest utility through their use for the betterment of human life.

The first lesson is that the history of human social organization is far
from unique, and that it is identical with the process by which insect
communities and cell-aggregates have evolved; in a word, the laws of
biological association are uniform throughout the entire organic scale. In
some respects evolution in mankind has yet to equal the heights attained
by some insects, inasmuch as no human society has accomplished so rigid a
specialization of its members that a given individual is foreordained by
its inherited structure to be a particular kind of worker and nothing
else. Furthermore, evolution in human society is still far short of a
state where some and some only are reproductive members of the group while
the others are necessarily sterile; social insects with stable colonies
are so organized that the queens and drones are solely reproductive while
the workers are destined to care for the material wants of the colony. It
is true that the birth-rate is by no means the same in all classes of
society, but the social and other adventitious restrictions