164: PEACE ESTABLISHMENTS 



contract at Birmingham, and in times of pressure elsewhere ; 

 for example, at Liege. Then in respect to war-ships, and 

 more especially iron war-ships, the government dockyards are 

 hardly yet competent to enter into rivalry on equal terms with 

 private firms. Gunpowder, a state monopoly in most coun- 

 tries, is an absolutely open manufacture in this. Competition, 

 ever so theoretically beneficial, does not fail to develop and 

 make known its benefits through the evidence of the private 

 British gunpowder manufacture. The result is held to be 

 equal at least in every respect to that produced at the govern- 

 ment mills ; wherefore in times of war, and occasionally in 

 times of peace, the naval and military services of this country 

 are supplied with the gunpowder of private mills. 



Through such examples do we see that the supply of the 

 munitions of war does not need a previous military or naval 

 education on the part of those who minister to the supply. 

 The mere circumstance that a man, after a considerable ex- 

 penditure of time and training, had made himself a thoroughly 

 efficient engineer or artillery officer, would imply the exist- 

 ence of no special quality favouring the hypothesis that he 

 would be a successful manufacturer of gunpowder. A man 

 might be a most accomplished artillerist, with all the formulas 

 of times of flight and resistances, that had ever been com- 

 mitted to paper from the time of Galileo and Tartalea, at his 

 fingers' ends ; he might be deep in all the utilities of time, 

 and percussion and concussion fuses, and still a mere igno- 

 ramus in all that concerns the efficient manufacture of these 

 things. Practically the military and naval authorities of this 

 country fully admit the competence of private manufacturers 

 of war-material and appliances to stand on even ground with 

 manufacturers of the same conducting their operations under 

 special government auspices. 



On this admission certain economists have founded an 

 incrimination against the government factories in toto, the 

 argument being, that, inasmuch as the competence of private 



