As the incessant bickering of private guerilla warfare has given way in modern times to occasional, large, organized, brief, and terribly destructive campaigns, so it is in trade.

In both cases the aggregate of friction and waste is probably much less under the modern _regime_, but the dread of these dramatic lessons is growing ever greater, and the tendency to postponement and conciliation grows apace.

But just as the fact of a growing identity in the interest of different nations, the growing recognition of that fact, and the growing horror of war, potent factors as they seem to reasonable men, make very slow progress towards the substitution of international arbitration for appeals to the sword, so in industry we cannot presume that the existence of reasonable grounds for conciliation will speedily rid us of the terror and waste of industrial conflicts.

It is even possible that just as the speedy formation of a strong national unity, like that of Prussia under Frederick the Great, out of weak, disordered, smaller units, may engender for a time a bellicose spirit which works itself out in strife, so the rapid rise and union of weak and oppressed bodies of poorer labourers make for a shortsighted policy of blind aggression.

Such considerations as this must, at any rate, temper the hopes of speedy industrial pacification we may form from dwelling on the more reasonable effects and teaching of organization.