International Socialist Review (1900) Vol 17

18
We have enough confidence in Congressman
London's courage to believe
that he would have defied the Bourbons
of the House and taken the consequences.
But he evidently did not have the courage
to defy the Bourbons of his own
party. What cowed him was undoubtedly
the thought that he might be expressing
THERE
\
SOCIALISM IN THE PLANT WORLD
doctrines which were irregular, heterodox,
"revolutionary," from the official
socialist point of view.
This makes the episode perhaps less
disgraceful for Congressman London, but
so much more so for the socialist movement
of this country. L. B. B., in The
Nezv Review.
Socialism in tke Plant World
By ELIZA FRANCES ANDREWS
are probably few people, even
among Socialists, who are aware
that the principles of cooperation and
collectivism have been carried, by
certain races of the plant population of the
world, to a state of perfection unapproached
in human society. Following the
guidance of nature, these unconscious
Socialist comrades of ours have met the
simple requirement of their lives by developing
a system of cooperation in which the
division of labor is so perfectly adjusted,
and the individual is so completely identified
with the community that no one but an
expert botanist ever thinks of drawing the
line between them.
Take, for instance, a sunflower, an
oxeye daisy, or any kind of a flower cluster
like that shown here and probably
ninety-nine people out of one hundred
would unhesitatingly pronounce it a single
blossom. But examine it more closely, and
you will see that the little button in the
?
f
center is composed of a number of tiny
flowers so closely united that the community
and its members could not exist
separately. Each individual blossom has
all its parts complete—the miniature pouch
containing the unripe seed, surrounded by
a ring of little stalked bodies bearing the
yellow powder called pollen, which is necessary
to the maturing of the seed. These
are enclosed in the protecting circle of colored
leaves or petals called a corolla—here
united into a small cup or tube which
envelopes them so closely that it may be
necessary to slit it open with a pin^ in order
to see what is inside.
I suppose most people who read this
paper know—every farmer certainly ought
to know—that unless some of the pollen
from the stamens, as the little stalked
bodies are called, reaches the interior of
the seed case, the plant could never set a
seed. This, we know, is the most important
industry of plant life, and hence these
modest little flowers that can hardly be
recognized for what they are, without the
aid of a magnifying glass, may be regarded
as the productive laborers of the community.
Examine now the showy ring of bright
petal-like bodies that surround the obscure
little group of productive workers, and you
will probably fipd that they have neither
seed case nor pollen ; or at best, that either
the one or -the other is wanting, so that as
a rule they cannot set seed, but are for
show and display only. "Aristocrats and
deadbeats" you will say. But no, not a bit
of it. They represent the class of workers
Fig. 1. A single (so-called) flower of cosmos, showing
(a) the ring of conspicuous ray flowers that serve to not engaged in directly productive labor,
attract the visits of insects, and (b) the obscure cluster
of productive flowers in the center.
such as teachers, physicians, authors, ed-
18 Digitized by Google