and power. Why should you not be
ashamed also to do it in public place and power? If you quarrel with
your neighbour, and the quarrel be indeterminable by law, and mortal,
you and he do not send your footmen to Battersea fields to fight it out;
nor do you set fire to his tenants' cottages, nor spoil their goods. You
fight out your quarrel yourselves, and at your own danger, if at all.
And you do not think it materially affects the arbitrement that one of
you has a larger household than the other; so that, if the servants or
tenants were brought into the field with their masters, the issue of the
contest could not be doubtful? You either refuse the private duel, or
you practise it under laws of honour, not of physical force; that so it
may be, in a manner, justly concluded. Now the just or unjust conclusion
of the private feud is of little moment, while the just or unjust
conclusion of the public feud is of eternal moment: and yet, in this
public quarrel, you take your servants' sons from their arms to fight
for it, and your servants' food from their lips to support it; and the
black seals on the parchment of your treaties of peace are the deserted
hearth and the fruitless field. There is a ghastly ludicrousness in
this, as there is mostly in these wide and universal crimes. Hear the
statement of the very fact of it in the most literal words of the
greatest of our English thinkers:--

'What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the
net-purport and upshot of war? To my own knowledge, for
example, there dwell and toil, in the British village of
Dumdrudge, usually some five hundred souls. From these, by
certain "natural enemies" of the French, there are
successively selected, during the French war, say thirty
able-bodied men. Dumdrudge, at her own expense, has suckled
and nursed them; she has, not without difficulty and sorrow,
fed them up to manhood, and even trained them to crafts, so
that one can weave, another build, another hammer, and the
weakest can stand under thirty stone avoirdupois.
Nevertheless, amid much weeping and swearing, they are
selected; all dressed in red; and shipped away, at the
public charges, some two thousand miles, or say only to the
south of Spain; and fed there till wanted.

'And now to that same spot in the south of Spain are thirty
similar French artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, in like
manner