The Stakes of Diplomacy

an be engaged, the friends and relatives can line up, and disorderly friction is turned into an orderly battle. When civil war breaks out in a country, no real fighting is possible until the contending factions are organized on separate territory. The more compact the two territories are, the more cleanly they divide a country, the better for the fighting, the nearer the whole business is to a real war. Two populations cannot fight successfully if they are entirely interlaced. Our own Civil War was one of the completest wars in history because the North and the South were not only pretty clearly divided in territory, they were separate in their culture andtradition. Unless you can find some territorial division upon which to base political differences, it is impossible to turn civil war into anything more than a riot. A frontier is necessary to organized fighting. Experience with the industrial struggle bears this out. The strikes which have produced large violence always take place in regions where labor and capital can really pair off. In the bloody West Virginia struggle, the miners were in gullies and on the slopes of the mountains; the operators and their agents did not live in the same community with them. When you find a town or a county completely devoted to one industry, with the owners living in another city, there you have the makings of civil war. This was the case in Colorado and in Calumet. The segregation of the two sides makes possible a real line...