160 The Kvolution of Arms and Armor. 



structure. And, such being the case, who cannot see that 

 to study these, wliich have succeeded and which have 

 failed, and what have been the causes of their successes 

 and failures, and what the philosophy is which lies behind 

 them, wovdd save the statesman, the reformer and the 

 citizen many a costly experiment on human beings, and 

 would open the way for the intelligent choice of many an 

 agency and path of progress now lying, it may be, right 

 before their eyes, but which, as things are, they are grop- 

 ing for in utter blindness, or trampling down in utter con- 

 tempt ? 



One of the great questions that is before our country 

 to-day, and that every country has to meet, one that in- 

 volves millions of dollars and the principles, to some 

 extent, on which is to turn the whole future of its civiliza- 

 tion, and which in many respects is the most difficult that 

 statesmanship has to deal with, is what its people shall 

 do in the way of arms and armor for their protection and 

 defense. And it is a problem, too, that Nature, not less 

 imperatively than nations, has had to deal with all through 

 the past. War and the wager of battle, weapons and the 

 wounds of conflict, are not the accident and disease of her 

 original economy, not a human lapse and folly, but a con- 

 stituent element in her very system of things. The 

 moment she set her creatures on earth, even in their lowest 

 forms, exposed to the elements and compelled to get 

 their own living, most of them, by preying on each other, 

 it became necessary, if their lives were not at once to be 

 extinguished, to provide them with some means on the one 

 hand of assault, and on the other of defense, a necessity 

 which is bound up inseparably with those two great princi- 

 ples on which all organic evolution is based, the struggle 

 for existence and the survival of the fittest. Devices to 

 meet it have played a part in her economy second only to 

 those for alimentation itself; are a field in which she, too, 

 as much as any statesman, has had to tax all her resources 

 and lay under tribiite all her skill. The rocks below the 

 earth's surface are a vast gallery in which, while tlie mus- 

 cles, stomachs and brains of her children have perished, 

 the arms and armor with which they fought have for ages 

 been preserved, as in our museums above its surface are the 

 swords, shields and eoats-of-mail tliat our human ancestors, 

 now dust, wore to battle in their brave days of old. And 



