POLITICS AS A FORM OF CIVIL WAR. 589 



" rank and file," " party loyalty," " campaigns," " spoils of victory," 

 etc., which figure so conspicuously and incessantly in political discus- 

 sion, there is only a fit appropriation of the militant terms invented 

 by one set of fighters to describe with vividness and precision the 

 conduct of another set. What is new about the matter is the failure 

 of thoughtful persons to perceive and to act upon their perception 

 that in politics, as in war, vast economic, social, and political evils are 

 involved. To be sure, lives are not often sacrificed, as in a battle, nor 

 property destroyed, as in a siege or an invasion. But even here the 

 analogy is not imperfect. Political riots have occurred that have 

 brought out as completely as any struggle over a redoubt or barricade 

 the savage traits of human nature. People were maimed and killed, 

 and houses wrecked and burned. Especially was that the case in this 

 country during the antislavery struggle and the period of reconstruc- 

 tion. Even in these days of more calm, political contests as fatal as 

 the Ross-Shea emeute in Troy are reported from time to time. 

 Owing, however, to the advance in civilization since the sack of Ant- 

 werp and the siege of Saragossa, the devastation wrought by political 

 warfare has assumed forms less deplorable. But in the long run 

 they will be found to be just as fatal to everything that constitutes 

 civilization, and just as productive of everything that constitutes 

 barbarism. " Lawless ruffianism," says Carl Schurz, pointing out in 

 his Life of Henry Clay the demoralizing effects of the fierce political 

 struggles during Jackson's administrations, " has perhaps never been 

 so rampant in this country as in those days. , ' Many of the people of 

 the United States are out of joint,' wrote jSTiles in August, 1835. 'A 

 spirit of riot and a disposition to " take the law in their own hand " 

 prevails in every quarter.' Mobs, riots, burnings, lynchings, shoot- 

 ings, tarrings, duels, and all sorts of violent excesses, perpetrated by 

 all sorts of persons upon all sorts of occasions, seemed to be the order of 

 the day. . . . Alarmingly great was the number of people who ap- 

 peared to believe that they had the right to put down by force and 

 violence all who displeased them by act or speech or belief ui politics, 

 or religion, or business, or in social life." It is only familiarity with 

 such fruits of violent political activity, only a vision impaired by pre- 

 conceived notions of the nature of politics, that blinds the public to 

 their existence. 



To see why politics must be regarded as a form of civil war rather 

 than as a method of business, as a system of spoliation rather than 

 as a science to be studied in the public schools,* it is but needful to 

 grasp the fundamental purpose of government as generally under- 

 stood. It is not too much to say that nothing in sociology is re- 

 garded as more indicative of an unsound mind or of a mean and self- 



* An absurd suggestion made by the State Superintendent of New York. 



