whatever it may
be. He had begun without a single strong card. Neither great wealth,
personal distinction, nor noted family had fallen to him. But in the
game of Mild Humbug as in almost all other games, luck and good play go
for much; with skill and fortune a weak card may take the trick, and
Millard was in a fair way to win against odds.

IV.

THE BANK OF MANHADOES.

When a farmer turns a strange cow into his herd she has to undergo a
competitive examination. The fighter of the flock, sometimes a
reckless-looking creature with one horn turned down as a result of
former battles, walks directly up to the stranger, as in duty bound. The
duel is in good form and preceded by ceremonious bowing on both sides;
one finds here the origin of that scrape with the foot which was an
essential part of all obeisance before the frosty perpendicular English
style came in. Politeness over, the two brutes lock horns, and there is
a trial of strength, weight, and bovine persistency; let the one that
first gives ground look out for a thrust in the ribs! But once the
newcomer has settled her relative social standing and knows which of her
fellows are to have the _pas_ of her at the hayrick and the
watering-place, and which she in turn may safely bully, all is peace in
the pasture.

Something like this takes place in our social herds. In every
government, cabinet, party, or deliberative body there is the
preliminary set-to until it is discovered who, by one means or another,
can push the hardest. Not only in governments and political bodies but
in every corporation, club, Dorcas society, base-ball league, church,
and grocery store, the superficial observer sees what appears to be
harmony and even brotherly unity; it is only the result of preliminary
pushing matches by which the equilibrium of offensive and defensive
qualities has been ascertained. And much that passes for domestic
harmony is nothing but a prudent acquiescence in an arrangement based on
relative powers of annoyance.

This long preamble goeth to show that if the Bank of Manhadoes had its
rivalries it was not singular. In the light of the general principles we
have evoked, the elbowings among the officers of the bank are lifted
into the dignity of instances, examples, phenomena illustrating human
nature and human history. More far-reaching than human nature, they are
offshoots of the great struggle for existence, which, as we moderns have
had the felicity to di