The Pine Caterpillars are exempt from the duty of preserving the race. They have no sex, or rather are obscurely preparing one, as undecided and rudimentary as all that is not yet but must one day be. With the blossoming of maternity, that flower of adult age, individual property will not fail to appear, attended by its rivalries. The insect now so peaceable will, like the others, have its displays of selfish intolerance. The mothers will isolate themselves, jealous of the double pine-needle in which the cylinder of eggs is to be fixed; the males, fluttering their wings, will challenge one another for the possession of the coveted bride. It is not a serious struggle among these easy-going ones, but still it presents a faint picture of those mortal affrays which the mating so often produces. Love rules the world by battle; it too is a hotbed of competition. The caterpillar, being almost sexless, is indifferent to amorous instincts. This is the first condition for living pacifically in common. But it is not enough. The perfect concord of the community demands among all its members an equal division of strength and talent, of taste and capacity for work. This condition, which perhaps is the most important of all, is fulfilled preeminently. If there were hundreds, if there were thousands of them in the same nest, there would be no difference between any of them. They are all the same size and equally strong; all wear the same dress; all possess the same gift for spinning; and all with equal zeal expend the contents of their silk-glands for the general welfare. No one idles, no one lounges along when there is work to be done. With no other stimulus than the satisfaction of doing their duty, every evening, when the weather is favourable, they all spin with equal industry and drain to the last drop their reservoirs of silk, which have become distended during the day. In their tribe there is no question of skilled or unskilled, of strong or weak, of abstemious or gluttonous; there are neither hard-workers nor idlers, neither savers nor spendthrifts. What one does the others do, with a like zeal, no more and no less well. It is a splendid world of equality truly, but, alas, a world of caterpillars! If it suited us to go to school to the Pine Processionary, we should soon see the inanity of our levelling and communistic theories. Equality is a magnificent political catchword, but little more. Where is it, this equality of ours? In our social groups, could we find as many as two persons exactly equal in strength, health, intelligence, capacity for work, foresight and all the other gifts which are the great factors of prosperity? Where should we find anything analogous to the exact parity prevailing among caterpillars? Nowhere. Inequality is our law. And a good thing, too.