At last Congress and the executive departments awoke. The act for an increase of the army, asked for two months before, was hastily passed. It was even amended so as to give the President power to call out a hundred thousand volunteers from the natural militia of the States, if such a measure should in his judgment become necessary. But the action, which might possibly have been useful in the early summer, came too late at the end of August. The war which had broken forth was such a combat as had never before been waged. There have been civil wars in other times and other countries, but they always have been more or less sectional. Whether eventually successful or not, there always has been a part of the land involved in which the friends of existing government were in the majority, and which could be relied upon as a base for operations against insurgents. But this revolt was at every man’s door. Except in a few rural and sparsely populated districts, all forms of government were disrupted or blocked. The law-abiding citizens found themselves suddenly without organization and at the mercy of predatory bands, which fell upon them one after another. The anarchists, by a strange paradox, were the best disciplined and the best organized. Here and there hasty levies were made among the friends of good order; but they did not know whom to trust. A man’s nearest neighbor, who never had been suspected of sympathy with the socialists, was not unlikely to prove their agent and propagandist in secret, and in communication with them, revealing the intentions of their opponents. Volunteers, who under other circumstances and to repel any other form of attack would have flocked to the Government’s service from the smaller villages and country towns, dared hardly stir out of their own fields, from fear of attacks on their homes. In the midst of this panic, and uncertainty, and lack of organization, the telegraph lines between the chief centres of communication were cut. It was made impossible for the authorities to transmit information or to perfect arrangements. Despatches from the National Government to the governors of different States or to its own subordinates were stopped by agents of the revolutionists and reported to their own chiefs. These leaders in some instances acted upon the intelligence thus secured in defeating the Government’s plans. In other cases they sent back misleading answers, purporting to come from the officials addressed; thus doubly confusing the Government’s operations.