There, too, each form of social commerce find,
So late by reason taught to human kind.
Behold th' embodied locust rushing forth
In sabled millions from th' inclement north;
In herds the wolves, invasive robbers, roam,
In flocks, the sheep pacific, race at home.
What warlike discipline the cranes display,
How leagued their squadron, how direct their way.
[1348] The Guardian, No. 157: "Everything is common among ants."
[1349] "Anarchy without confusion" is a contradiction in terms, according to the meaning which is now universally attached to the word anarchy. Pope understands by it the mere absence of all inequality of station.
[1350] The Guardian, No. 157: "Bees have each of them a hole in their hives; their honey is their own; every bee minds her own concerns." The natural history of former times abounded in fables, and among the number was the fancy that each bee had its separate cell, and private store of honey.
[1351] An adaptation of the Latin proverb, mentioned by Cicero, Off. i. 10, and Terence, Heaut. iv. 5, that over-strained law is often unrestrained injustice. The letter contravenes the spirit.
[1352] The imagery of the passage is derived from an observation of a Greek philosopher, who compared laws to spiders' webs,—too fragile to hold fast great offenders, and too strong to suffer trivial culprits to escape.—Wakefield.
Pope upbraids men for enacting laws too strong for the weak instead of following the laws of bees, which are "wise as nature, and as fixed as fate." Such is their superior consideration for the weak that the workers kill the drones when they become burthensome to them, and so far are we behind them in our poor law legislation that we are compelled to maintain the useless members of society,—the old, the crippled, the hopelessly sick, the insane, the idiotic—all of whom, if we would only learn mercy and wisdom of the bee, we should immediately put to death. The doctrine of Pope is altogether childish. The contracted routine of a bee's existence has too little in common with the complicated relations of human life for bee-hive usages to displace the statutes of the realm.
[1353] Till ed. 5:
Who for those arts they learned of brutes before,
As kings shall crown them, or as gods adore.—Pope.
[1354] Roscommon's version of Horace's Art of Poetry: