In the foregoing little fantasy, the one thing that should have most impressed you is the fact of the suppression of sex.  But now comes the last and most astonishing fact of all:  this suppression of sex is not natural, but artificial—­I mean that it is voluntary.  It has been discovered that ants are able, by a systematic method of nourishment, to suppress or develop sex as they please.  The race has decided that sex shall not be allowed to exist except in just so far as it is absolutely necessary to the existence of the race.  Individuals with sex are tolerated only as necessary evils.  Here is an instance of the most powerful of all passions voluntarily suppressed for the benefit of the community at large.  It vanishes whenever unnecessary; when necessary after a war or a calamity of some kind, it is called into existence again.  Certainly it is not wonderful that such a fact should have set moralists thinking.  Of course if a human community could discover some secret way of effecting the same object, and could have the courage to do it, or rather the unselfishness to do it, the result would simply be that sexual immorality of any kind would become practically impossible The very idea of such immorality would cease to exist.

But that is only one fact of self-suppression and the ant-world furnishes hundreds.  To state the whole thing in the simplest possible way, let me say the race has entirely got rid of everything that we call a selfish impulse.  Even hunger and thirst allow of no selfish gratification.  The entire life of the community is devoted to the common good and to mutual help and to the care of the young.  Spencer says it is impossible to imagine that an ant has a sense of duty like our own,—­a religion, if you like.  But it does not need a sense of duty, it does not need religion.  Its life is religion in the practical sense.  Probably millions of years ago the ant had feelings much more like our own than it has now.  At that time, to perform altruistic actions may have been painful to the ant; to perform them now has become the one pleasure of its existence.  In order to bring up children and serve the state more efficiently these insects have sacrificed their sex and every appetite that we call by the name of animal passion.  Moreover they have a perfect community, a society in which nobody could think of property, except as a state affair, a public thing, or as the Romans would say a res publica.  In a human community so organized, there could not be ambition, any jealousy, any selfish conduct of any sort—­indeed, no selfishness at all.  The individual is said to be practically sacrificed for the sake of the race; but such a supposition means the highest moral altruism.  Therefore thinkers have to ask, “Will man ever rise to something like the condition of ants?”