There is one feature of this war which has always struck me as possessing a very humorous side. The anarchists, you remember, were foreigners, chiefly Germans, Irishmen and a few Russians. When the war was ended, by the destruction of very nearly all the Republican contingency, the anarchists broke out into dissension among themselves. The German element would not submit to Irish dictation--the latter leaders having, apparently, a great opinion of their own talent for political leadership--and the Irish in turn violently resisted the German dicta. A veritable anarchy ensued, a war so fierce that it looked at one time as if the whole continent might be left a howling wilderness, with neither conqueror nor conquered to enter and take possession of what was now, in truth, but a desert. Fortunately, however, a few of the Americans had survived. Among them were some of the descendants of the ancient New England statesmen. These men, although under sentence of death, were liberated, that they might act as peacemakers between the two factions. Americans, you see, had had so much experience in reconciling, conciliating and pacifying the difficulties between the Irish and German parties during the American Republican era, that these survivors were eminently fitted to adjust affairs at issue between them now. The American Council decided that the Irishmen should draw up the laws and regulations for the new Communal and Socialistic constitution, while the Germans should see that the new society was properly organized; a decision which proves the real genius for statescraft which these ingenious Americans possessed. For Irishmen are proverbially affluent of ideas and incapable of putting them into action, unless it be violent action, while the Germans have proved themselves practical organizers and ideal political policemen. The sagacity of the old American Republicans was shown in the manner in which they themselves, in their era of power, had made use of the distinguishing qualities of the two races, when such hordes overflowed the land during the great emigration period. The Irishmen were kept in the large cities, where they were allowed to misgovern the towns to their hearts’ desire, being thus given a vent for their turbulent political spirit; while the Germans, on the contrary, were sent into the still unconquered wilderness to turn it into a garden by their industry and thrift. The American having thus made use of the Irishmen to run his political machinery for him, and of the Germans to extend the territorial lines of order and civilization, secured unto himself all his own time for money making. Hence the colossal American fortunes, which, as we read of them now, seem to us like a tale of magicians. Such a policy must have seemed to a nineteenth-century American as a very shrewd and ingenious way of utilizing elements which otherwise might prove dangerous. The policy was, in truth, a fatally short-sighted one, as was proved later;