GOING TO THE ANT.

Auckland Star, Issue 154, 2 July 1934, Page 6

GOING TO THE ANT.

Hie ant and the bee have fallen from grace (says the "Manchester Guardian"). To the Victorian moralist the thriftiness antl diligence of those insects were irresistibly attractive; they were endowed with human, almost superhuman, virtues. To-day we know them for the little monsters they are—the horrid symbols and forerunners of the servile State. The kingdom of the aula and tevmitg, said Dean Inge at Oxford, is the Socialist State in pxcelsis; and it may even be that before they developed and stereotyped their organisation, ants and bees enjoyed the blessings of liberty and democracy like ourselves. There is something in what the Dean says. One may drop a habit, a routine, which becomes too strong to break; in fact it might be argued that in many respects we have already done so. A great part of our lives is already regulated by habit, and we resemble the ants, not because we have not even the wish to do so, because it does not occur to us to do anything else. It might be that, with the coming of the corporate State, the dead hand of habit would settle upon the whole of our activities. But in one point the Dean's analogy seems to falter. The Socialist State, when once it has emerged from the period of transition, embodies a classless socicty. Among the ants and the bees classes are. preserved for all time. I Can it have been the ultimate fate of the |Fascist State which tho Dean liad ir. mind?