492 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



his mercenaries. As the musket now enabled battles to be determined 

 by the superior manhood of superior numbers, and there was always 

 a great deal of downright killing, he lost his keen interest in war as a 

 business, and loved best to fight by proxy. The plaint of the fop to 

 Harry Hotspur was an anachronism of about two hundred years for 

 Henry IV's reign, but it expressed pretty accurately the feelings of 

 the aristocracy in Shakespeare's time : 



"And that it was a great pity, so it was, 

 This villainous saltpeter should be digged 

 Out of the bowels of the harmless earth, 

 Which many a good tall fellow had destroyed 

 So cowardly ; and but for these vile guns 

 lie would hiiuscU" have been a soldier." 



The Man on Horseback still continued to don his suit of " complete 

 steel" from time to time for nearly a century after it was last worn in 

 line of battle, but it was only to impress the popular imagination and 

 enhance his personal appearance when he took part in the pageantry 

 of government. The long warfare between him and the king had 

 ended in his entire subjugation, and he was now an obsequious attend- 

 ant upon " his royal master," with whom he had entered into an offen- 

 sive and defensive alliance against the common people. 



Steady improvement of the weapon through the seventeenth and 

 eighteenth centuries, by the men who were wielding it to gain for 

 themselves the commonest rights of ownership in their own souls and 

 bodies and the fruits of their toil, had made the musket so handy that 

 the cumbrous fork-rest could be dispensed Avith, and had given it the 

 flint-lock, the bayonet, and the front-sight, which latter greatly in- 

 creased the accuracy of aim. 



By another of those remarkable providential dispensations, grim 

 old Leopold of Dessau devised the iron ramrod, just at the time when 

 it was most needed to enable the little Prussian army to withstand the 

 overwhelming masses of barbaric Russia, stupid old Austria, and in- 

 trio-uing France. As Frederick II's men were able to fire five times to 

 their enemies' twice, the reactionary waves beat in vain against the 

 new bulwark raised up to protect the progressivism which had made 

 its home in Northwestern Europe. 



Across the "Western seas a still greater development was taking 

 place. In the grasp of the men who had sought refuge from tyranny 

 in the wilds of America the musket was not the mysterious and awk- 

 wardly handled engine it was in the hands of most Europeans. To 

 the colonist it was the most familiar of his every-day tools. The 

 daily food of the family was provided M'ith it ; the fiercest wild beasts 

 were slain by it, and the fiercer wild Indians were conquered by it and 

 driven from the lands which they claimed as their birthright. Being 

 its owner's main dependence in his struggle for life, he naturally 



