The speeches at agricultural meetings this year are even duller
than usual. Colonel North has so far ventured on politics at some of them as to applaud the plan of an experimental campaign, and to quiz the War Office, remarking that he meant to quiz the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Lowe, who was really responsible for the shortsighted stinginess which keeps the Army half supplied with the nustdriel of war ; and Mr. W. C. Cartwright seems to have expressed at Theme a rather exaggerated horror of Strikes, without any mention, so far as our report goes, of Lock-outs. He describes strikes as a barbarous method of solving social questions, because they simply mean war and all war is detrimental to the interests of the combatants. The observation strikes us as erroneous, unless it be also war, for civil servants or officers of a regiment to resign in a body when they are convinced that the terms offered to them are inadequate, and are prepared to take the con- sequence of their resignation being accepted. If this be war, war will be of the very constitution of society and business as long as the world endures. All that can be properly said is that either masters or men who break off relations without exhausting in every way the possibilities of agreement, are very foolish. But to be prepared for that result, if it should prove inevitable, and to have a clear notion exactly what you ought and ought not to agree to, is, in either masters or men, simply practical wisdom. War' iu its metaphorical sense is now-a-days worked far too hard. It will soon he called 4 war' to say ' No' if anybody suffers from it.
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