V[ToC]
THE DRONES AND THE BEES
Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufactures, and others, to make large fortunes.—John Stuart Mill.
Most people imagine that the rich are in heaven, but as a rule it is only a gilded hell. There is not a man in the city of New York with brains enough to own five millions of dollars. Why? The money will own him. He becomes the key to a safe. That money will get him up at daylight; that money will separate him from his friends; that money will fill his heart with fear; that money will rob his days of sunshine and his nights of pleasant dreams. He becomes the property of that money. And he goes right on making more. What for? He does not know. It becomes a kind of insanity.—R.G. Ingersoll.
Is it well that, while we range with Science, glorying in the time,
City children soak and blacken soul and sense in City slime?
There, among the gloomy alleys, Progress halts on palsied feet,
Crime and Hunger cast our maidens by the thousand on the street.
There the master scrimps his haggard seamstress of her daily bread,
There a single sordid attic holds the living and the dead;
There the smouldering fire of fever creeps across the rotted floor,
In the crowded couch of incest, in the warrens of the poor.
—Tennyson.
When you and I were boys going to school, friend Jonathan, we were constantly admonished to study with admiration the social economy of the bees. We learned to almost reverence the little winged creatures for the manner in which they
Improve each shining hour,
And gather honey all the day
From every opening flower.
We were taught, you remember, to honor the bees for their hatred of drones. It was the great virtue of the bees that they always drove the drones from the hive. For my part, I learned the lesson so well that I really became a sort of bee-worshipper. But since I have grown to mature years I have come to the conclusion that those old lessons were not honestly meant, Jonathan. For if anybody proposes to-day that we should drive out the drones from the human hive, he is at once denounced as an Anarchist and an "undesirable citizen."