Note 1352 — AN ESSAY ON MAN, IN FOUR EPISTLES (continued 3)

The imagery of the passage is derived from an observation of a Greek philosopher, who compared laws to spiders' webs,—too fragile to hold fast great offenders, and too strong to suffer trivial culprits to escape.—Wakefield.

Pope upbraids men for enacting laws too strong for the weak instead of following the laws of bees, which are "wise as nature, and as fixed as fate." Such is their superior consideration for the weak that the workers kill the drones when they become burthensome to them, and so far are we behind them in our poor law legislation that we are compelled to maintain the useless members of society,—the old, the crippled, the hopelessly sick, the insane, the idiotic—all of whom, if we would only learn mercy and wisdom of the bee, we should immediately put to death. The doctrine of Pope is altogether childish. The contracted routine of a bee's existence has too little in common with the complicated relations of human life for bee-hive usages to displace the statutes of the realm.