Says Ernest Untermann in his fine chapter on this question, in “Marxian Economics”: “Every textbook on natural history describes the different orders. For instance, the societies of bees are ‘monarchies’, those of ants ‘republics’. But in either case, biological variation determines the form of these societies. Queen bees, drones, and workers are of organically different structure and equipped with different specialized organs. The queen bee is equipped only for the duties of conception and the laying of eggs. The drone cannot perform any other function but that of fertilizing the queen. The worker alone has organs for gathering flower dust, honey, and manufacturing wax.” Class divisions in bee society are therefore “biological” and not economic. But Haeckel’s comparison ignores this vital distinction. Before this argument can be used against the Socialist advocacy of class abolition, it must be shown that a queen cannot wash clothes with starvation as an alternative, and that a pleb woman could not wear a coronet, should her father invest in a busted duke. True there are other animal societies which have no such biological division. But these have no private property in the means of life, and therefore no classes. Pelicans and crows recognize only three grounds as justification for idleness--infancy, old age and sickness or accident. A recent Socialist writer said: “Take two babies together--the worker’s baby and the parasite’s baby. There they are, both of them, out of the great mystery. Examine their soft little bodies. Do you see spurs on the one and a saddle on the other? And yet, one is to grow up a profligate loafer, and the other a starved and beaten worker. One to rot at the top; the other to be stunted and oppressed at the bottom.” Of course these two babies would not be equal, either actually or potentially, but is that any reason why they should be given an unequal start? How are we to find out which is the best in any sense, if a multitude of opportunities open to the one are to be closed to the other? And here Haeckel’s implied parallel breaks down once more. In nature the strong and capable survive in the struggle for existence; nature gives something like a fair field and no favor. But in capitalist society, a puling son of a rich father is coddled to maturity, and reproduces others of his kind; while the lusty child of a worker is murdered by poisonous milk, or debarred from marriage by low wages. In nature, “fittest” does not mean best in any moral sense, except indirectly, as that the practice of certain moral principles in animal societies may constitute, or add to, fitness. But in present society in a vast number of instances, fitness does not mean “best” even to the extent that such a word may be used in the natural world. A real estate “shark” is a libel on the fish. An indispensable qualification in business is to have few scruples and be a first-class liar. Honesty and suicide are synonymous terms.