No man has ever sung of spiders or earwigs or any other of our pet antipathies among the insects like that.  The moth is the only one of the insects that fascinates us with both its beauty and its terror.

I doubt if there have ever been greater hordes of insects in this country than during the past spring.  It is the only complaint one has to make against the sun.  He is a desperate breeder of insects.  And he breeds them not in families like a Christian but in plagues.  The thought of the insects alone keeps us from envying the tropics their blue skies and hot suns.  Better the North Pole than a plague of locusts.  We fear the tarantula and have no love for the tse-tse fly.  The insects of our own climate are bad enough in all conscience.  The grasshopper, they say, is a murderer, and, though the earwig is a perfect mother, other insects, such as the burying-beetle, have the reputation of parricides, But, dangerous or not, the insects are for the most part teasers and destroyers.  The greenfly makes its colonies in the rose, a purple fellow swarms under the leaves of the apples, and another scoundrel, black as the night, swarms over the beans.  There are scarcely more diseases in the human body than there are kinds of insects in a single fruit tree.  The apple that is rotten before it is ripe is an insect’s victim, and, if the plums fall green and untimely in scores upon the ground, once more it is an insect that has been at work among them.  Talk about German spies!  Had German spies gone to the insect world for a lesson, they might not have been the inefficient bunglers they showed themselves to be.  At the same time, most of us hate spies and insects for the same reason.  We regard them as noxious creatures intruding where they have no right to be, preying upon us and giving us nothing but evil in return.  Hence our ruthlessness.  We say:  “Vermin,” and destroy them.  To regard a human being as an insect is always the first step in treating him without remorse.  It is a perilous attitude and in general is more likely to beget crime than justice.  There has never, I believe, been an empire built in which, at some stage or other, a massacre of children among a revolting population has not been excused on the ground that “nits make lice.”  “Swat that Bolshevik,” no doubt, seems to many reactionaries as sanitary a counsel as “Swat that fly.”  Even in regard to flies, however, most of us can only swat with scruple.  Hate flies as we may, and wish them in perdition as we may, we could not slowly pull them to pieces, wing after wing and leg after leg, as thoughtless children are said to do.  Many of us cannot endure to see them slowly done to death on those long strips of sticky paper on which the flies drag their legs and their lives out—­as it seems to me, a vile cruelty.  A distinguished novelist has said that to watch flies trying to tug their legs off the paper one after another till they are twice their natural length is one of