t
more of their wives do. Matthew Arnold spoke not too pleasantly of the
curious sensation that he experienced in addressing a bookseller in
America as "General." The "bookseller" in question was a man widely
respected in the United States, the head of a great house of publishers
and booksellers, a conspicuously public-spirited citizen, and a _bona
fide_ General who saw stern service in the Civil War. To Englishmen,
knowing nothing of the background, the mere fact as stated by Matthew
Arnold is curious.

But if civil war were to break out in Great Britain--England and Wales
against Scotland and Ireland--and the conflict assumed such titanic
proportions that single armies of a million men took the field, then
would Tennyson's "smooth-faced snub-nosed rogue" indeed have to "leap
from his counter and till and strike, were it but with his cheating
yard-wand, home." The entire population of England that was not
actually needed at home would be compelled to take the field, and in the
slaughter (it is curious how little English men know of the terrific
proportions of the conflict between the North and South) the demand for
officers would be so great that there would not be enough men of
previous training to fill the places. Men would rise from the ranks by
merit and among those who rose to be generals there might well be a
publisher or bookseller or two. On the termination of the war, the
soldiers would turn from their soldiering to their old trades and it
might be General Murray or General Macmillan or General Bumpus; and the
thing would not then be strange to English ears.

An American story tells how, soon after the close of the Civil War, a
stranger asked a farmer if he needed any labourers; and the farmer
replied in the negative. He had just taken on three new ones, he said,
all of them disbanded soldiers. One, he added, had been a private, one a
captain, and one a full-blown colonel.

"And how do you find them?" asked the other.

"The private's a first-class workman," said the farmer, "and the captain
he isn't bad."

"And the colonel?"

"Well, I don't want to say nothing agin a man as fit as a colonel in the
war," said the farmer, "but I know I ain't hiring no brigadier-generals
if they come this way."

They are growing old now, and fewer, the men who held commissions in the
war that ended over forty years ago; but during those forty years there
has been no community, no trade or profession or calling, in which