His intentions were probably of the best, but the result surprised him, grieved him to death, and he did what any real man would do, killed himself. At any rate, the betrayers of virtue, the seducers of ignorant, innocent girls, the rich tyrants and extortioners, those who oppress and rob the poor, and lots of people who do abominable things, and all sinners, for every one is a traitor to goodness, should never take up even the smallest pebble to hurl at the badgered and bewildered Judas.
Another, and it may be a queer notion I have, and it is this; that about all the sins we commit are by the body. I doubt if the soul ever sins. It is the house we live in that is forever decaying and tumbling down about our ears that brings us into trouble, or as a vehicle in which we go about, always running us into some scrape or other, yet the soul is made responsible for it all.
Many become so absorbed in thinking of what they call the sins of the soul, that they have no time to look after the vices of the body. If our bodies could be kept in subjection, kept strong, healthy and clean, we need not worry much about the salvation of ourselves, our souls.
Touching the subject of food again. I was much interested in a book on Honey Bee Culture loaned me by Mr. Jasper, a subject on which I had never read.
One particular item of importance was the production of queens. There are three kinds of bees in a family. The drones are the males, large, clumsy fellows, whose only use is to furnish a husband to the queen. They are idle, never do any kind of work, but always great eaters, and like their types in human society the least useful, they make the most noise, by the loud hum of their heavy vibrating wings.
The workers, styled “the bees” by Aristotle, are neuters or undeveloped females, of which there are from fifteen thousand to forty thousand in a colony or family. They gather the honey, secrete the wax, collect the pollen, protect the hive from intrusion, and manage the general affairs of the family, the younger members, before they are strong enough to go abroad, build the comb, ventilate the hive by flapping their wings, and thus grow stronger, feed the larvæ and cap the cells until they are able to make journeys outside.
The queen is a fully developed female, the only one in the family. She is the mother of all, and only meets her husband once, at the beginning of her life. Her only work or duty is to lay eggs, which she does at the rate of two to three thousand a day, and during the extreme limit of her life of five years, may lay one million three hundred thousand eggs to keep up the family circle. This is small business compared to that of a queen of the white ants that lays eighty thousand eggs a day! No wonder that we have such an infinite multitude of these pests!
The making of a queen is peculiar and interesting. Suppose she dies, or is unfit for duty. There is then great consternation and excitement, for without a queen or mother, the bees know that their family would be extinct in a short time, as the workers only live from one to three months. If a cell can be found containing a neuter egg they enlarge it to three or four times its former dimensions to form a regal palace. After the egg has been hatched, which takes place three days after it has been laid, the bees fill this large cell with what is called “royal jelly.” This is a delicate, highly concentrated food of a rich, creamy color, made by the bees eating honey and ejecting it from their stomachs after it has been partially digested. Floating in this nectar the larva lives and thrives until after sixteen days from the laying of the egg, she appears as a full grown, graceful queen, and in a few days takes her marriage flight, meets her husband and then begins her work of life.
The point of my story is that it is the “royal jelly” that makes her a queen, elevating her and making her a mother. Had it not been for this royal food she received, she would have remained a neuter, a most honorable and necessary member of the family, but not a mother. This has given me great proof in favor of my theory of the value of good food in the making of grander men and women. If regal jelly can change a neuter worker bee into a queen, why should not good food raise ordinary human beings into kings and queens of humanity? A starved human animal must necessarily lack courage, energy, ambition, and most of the traits that go to make up manhood. Any one who has studied the rearing of domestic animals knows how almost useless it is to try and make anything of one that has been starved in its infancy by lack of food. It is often better to kill it at once than to waste time and money on it. I do not suggest this treatment in the case of stunted human infants, though the Spartans pursued this method in making themselves a brave strong race, by destroying all their puny, crippled children. However, I cannot help thinking that it were far better if some people had never been born, or had taken their quietus in infancy, than to live years of suffering, degradation and misery. When I have looked upon maimed, disgusting creatures, I have agreed with John Stuart Mill that suicide is justifiable, and that it would be Godlike to help these unfortunate spirits to escape from their pest houses. This, however, pertains to another subject, and I may have shown the perverseness or obliquity of my nature by alluding to it. What I would urge in all sincerity is, that humanity should take at least as much care in producing and rearing its progeny, as it does in rearing its domestic animals.
Another item in regard to the bees struck me. That when the queen has once received her husband, and there was no further need of the drones, the bees destroyed all or most of them as useless, idle eaters. It might be severe, and yet I cannot help thinking that humanity might imitate the wisdom of the busy bees, and destroy all the drones, the idle eaters of the world. Let not any one hold up his hands in horror at such a suggestion, for who but our God made the bees, and gave them this instinct of righteousness, and showed them how to deal with the vagabonds in their community? Instead of saying with the wise man, “Go to the ant thou sluggard,” why not say, “Let us go to the toiling bees, and learn of them how to deal with the human drones, if not to adopt the drastic method of the bees, at least make the idlers go to work.”