And when once the strife of parties has broken
loose in a neighbourhood, and society divides
itself into opposite camps which hold no
communion with each other and accept no neutrals,
is the rifle a much more deadly enemy than the
tongue, or are sabre wounds more dangerous
than those made by calumny and hate? Let the
question be one of a merely private and personal
nature, the merits of which no outsider can
comprehend—as in the case of a family quarrel—
nevertheless, the whole local universe is
convulsed, and the meekest individual in the place
forced to take sides, on pain of being "cut" for
a traitor or a time-server by both. Family
quarrels are loud war-cries in country places,
and the echoes are never failing. I have known
a whole district broken up into two parties, the
dearest friends severed and the ties of years
snapped, because a gentleman of mature age
chose to marry a lady of his own standing, and
the grown-up daughter did not love her
step-mother. Incontinently at the first blast of the
trumpet, the friends and neighbours flew to
arms, and it was years before the vendetta was
fully accomplished, and peace finally proclaimed.
Politics used to possess singularly explosive
qualities, and whenever much indulged in, would
blow the peace of a wide neighbourhood to the
winds; bat politics have died away now, and the
battle of parties and electioneering colours
become among the things of the past. In their
stead we have the strife of varying faiths; and
the civil war which has burnt itself out as to
canons of political creed, blazes with full force
round the pulpit and the platform. Orthodoxy
and unorthodoxy pull caps in the seats of the
ancient Tory and Whig, and hurl defiance at
each other across the red lines of the rubric, and
over the palisadings of pew-rents and the lawful
Tenth. And is it not civil war, to the utmost
extent of civil war on the wrong side of the guns,
when men and women fail in every charity of
social life, because their brains have fructified
in different directions, and what seems clean
and wholesome to the one is decidedly
unwashed and indigestible to the other? People
are so unwilling to allow of equality in difference.
Why cannot they accept the doctrine
of equal rights, and shake hands across the
palings, instead of firing broadsides which set
the whole place in a flame? Churches and
chapels are unbefitting butts at all times, and a
pulpit—even the pope's—is the worst bull's eye
to be had. But churches and chapels have ever
been thronged with the fiercest kind of
combatants, and the creed which has love for its
root, and good works for its blossoming, has
been the fairest target of all for the slings and
arrows of dissension and division.

There is civil war in trade, and the advertising
pamphlets, and big black broadsheets, and
glittering announcements in crumpled tinfoil
or highly coloured gelatine, are the weapons—
weapons which are to slay all rivals and conquer
foreign territories in the shape of custom, at
present appropriated by the enemy. Civil war
in trade runs very high, waxing fiercer than is
advisable at times, when hostile phalanxes,
sandwiched between placarding boards, parade the
lines and provoke warm-blooded shopmen to
unruly demonstrations, whose ultimate is the
police court. Also it runs high when the question
is of masked guns and false colours, and the
Court of Chancery has to settle the legitimacy
of the trading banners, and assign to its lawful
possessor the distinctive legend. The civil war
carried on in trade is a mighty war, pervading
ships and shops alike, and penetrating into the
deepest recesses of every mill and every
workroom. It is a war of Kilkenny cats, where the
big cats devour the little cats, and all make a
horrible miawling as the exterminating process
goes on. The public, which may be likened to
the camp-followers, is the gainer, and picks up
many a pretty bargain on the field, which could
never have been got in more humane times.
For, bankrupts' stocks are the spoils taken from
the dead men, and the cost-price sales are the
tents abandoned and treasures left unguarded of
the warriors intent only on mutual slaughter,
with a sublime forgetfulness of individual advantage.
During a passage of arms in trade, the
hovering camp-followers—and specially those
terrible beings, the cruelest of all who prey upon
the dead, the women skilled in bargaining—rush
in like a pack of wolves, and pick the bones of
the warriors before they have time to look about
them. Wherefore, civil war in trade is a clear case
of suicide, where every weapon is a boomerang
that comes back with a good thumping ring on
the skull of the thrower, doing double damage,
first to the object and then to the objector, and
where the only gainers are the public—which it
was the original intention of both parties to
plunder at their leisure.

There is civil war between the employers
and the employed; the one trying to exact
more, and the other to give less, than the
strict terms of the bond will permit. For,
when once a man's life has been weighed
against so much money, his soul is assumed to
be thrown into the bargain, and to belong to the
paymaster, like his head or his hands. It is a
case of commerce, and cheating within the
liberties is not unlawful. On the other hand, a
man who has to sell his life for daily bread tries
to get as big a loaf as possible for as small a
measure of meal; and excludes from his definition
of handwork all that lies in the palm and all
that springs from the tips. He is by no means
disposed to give more than he bargained for, but
draws his lines of circumvallation as far afield
as is possible to human ingenuity. He is ever
complaining that he is being driven from his
trenches, and that the bargain was made when
justice had unhooked her scales, so that the
buyer weighted his gold with the chains. So the
war goes on, and the old adage, "Pull baker,
pull devil," expresses the condition of the case.
In the strikes, the baker pulls pretty lustily, but
seldom to any good result; never, if the battle
has been more than ordinarily fierce, and all
question of armistice or amnesty set aside. In
fact, up to the present time the poor baker has