Nottingham, except the Duke of Newcastle; and he trembling lest the Queen should send for him.  The tailors, bakers, carpenters, gardeners, must all be Mrs. Tailors and Mrs. Bakers.  The very name of John Smith must go out.  The Directory must be Amazonian.  This commonalty of women must also be, at one and the same time, the operatives, the soldiers, the virgins, and the legislators of the country!  They must make all we want, fight all our enemies, and even get up a Queen for us when necessary; for the sovereigns of the hive are often of singular origin, being manufactured! literally “made to order,” and that too by dint of their eating!  They are fed and stuffed into royalty!  The receipt is, to take any ordinary female bee in its infancy, put it into a royal cradle or cell, and feed it with a certain kind of jelly; upon which its shape alters into that of sovereignty, and her Majesty issues forth, royal by the grace of stomach.  This is no fable, as the reader may see on consulting any good history of bees.  In general, several Queen-bees are made at a time, in case of accidents; but each, on emerging from her apartment, seeks to destroy the other, and one only remains living in one hive.  The others depart at the head of colonies, like Dido.

To sum up then the conditions of human society were it to be re-modelled after the example of the bee, let us conclude with drawing a picture of the state of our beloved country, so modified.  Imprimis, all our working people would be females, wearing swords, never marrying, and occasionally making queens.  They would grapple with their work in a prodigious manner, and make a great noise.  Secondly, our aristocracy would be all males, never working, never marrying, (except when sent for,) always eating or sleeping, and annually having their throats cut.  The bee-massacre takes place in July; when accordingly all our nobility and gentry would be out of town, with a vengeance!  The women would draw their swords, and hunt and stab them all about the West end, till Brompton and Bayswater would be choked with slain.

Thirdly, her Majesty the Queen would either succeed to a quiet throne, or, if manufactured, would have to eat a prodigious quantity of jelly in her infancy; and so alter growing into proper sovereign condition, would issue forth, and begin her reign either with killing her royal sisters, or leading forth a colony to America or New South Wales.  She would then take to husband some noble lord for the space of one calendar hour, and dismissing him to his dullness, proceed to lie in of 12,000 little royal highnesses in the course of the eight following weeks, with others too numerous to mention; all which princely generation with little exception, would forthwith give up their title, and divide themselves into lords or working-women as it happened; and so the story would go round to the end of the chapter, bustling, working, and massacring:—­and here ends the sage example of the Monarchy of the Bees.