THE MUSKET AS A SOCIAL FORCE. 493 



strove to raise its powers to the highest mechanical limits of the day. 

 By rifling the inside of the barrel, and placing a sight on the rear end, 

 he made his aim mathematically certain. With such a weapon he 

 could encounter every mortal foe with entire confidence. Rattlesnake 

 nor panther, wild Indian nor foreign mercenary, had any terrors for him. 

 If his foe had brain or heart, his unerring bullet was sure to find it. 



With his rifle in hand the common man reclothed himself with all 

 the rights that had been torn from him by a thousand years of the 

 despotism of the Man on Horseback. He brooked so little of tyranny 

 that he would not endure so much of it as was involved in the attempt 

 to tax him without his full consent. The assertion in the preamble to 

 the Declaration of Independence differed from most similar fulmina- 

 tions in that it was not ahead but only abreast of the popular accept- 

 ance of the principles which it afiirmed. Men were not only endowed 

 with the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happi- 

 ness, but on this side of the ocean they exercised them to the fullest 

 extent. 



Still moi-e : they taught the Frenchmen who had come here to 

 assist them in their final struggle for freedom, by precept, and those 

 who had stayed at home by example, that the musket was the means 

 by which those rights were obtained and maintained. They demon- 

 strated in practice the axioms to a perception of which all Europe had 

 been slowly rising : that before the musket's muzzle all men are equal ; 

 that lordly lineage, boundless wealth, nor privileged caste can hedge 

 a man with a divinity impervious to bullets ; but that any set of men, 

 who love liberty well enough to peril life for it, must be met on equal 

 terms, with equal hazard of life, by those who would deprive them of 

 it ; that the reign of the few was ending, and that of the many be- 

 ginning, for, with all men equally able to kill their opposers, only 

 those governments and systems of governments can maintain them- 

 selves which can rally to their supj)ort more than can be arrayed in 

 opposition. 



In all the world's history no teaching ever had such immediate and 

 tremendous results. Within a quarter of a century after the close of 

 the American Revolution the new Evangel of Freedom had flamed 

 from the Seine to the Moskwa, at the muzzles of millions of muskets, 

 borne by men who had suddenly risen from the abasement of serfdom 

 to the full stature of manhood. In France, the chosen home of 

 chivalry, the degenerate sons of the IMen on Horseback had been 

 drowned in a sea of their own vicious blood. In all the fairest parts 

 of Continental Europe the land had been wrested from the heirs of the 

 banditti-lords, and restored to the ownership of those who tilled it. 

 The whole civilized world had begun that rapid march toward popular 

 government 



" • • • whose coinpulsive course 

 Ne'er knows retiring ebb," 



