176 The Evolution of Arms and Armor. 



under plated frigates from below as readily as eels under a 

 plank, and projectiles driven with smokeless powder thi'ough 

 live inches of steel backed with fifteen of oak as easily as 

 a boy's teeth pass through slices of bread and butter, and 

 dynamite-guns throwing from the shore at marks two miles 

 otf five-hundred-pound explosive-bombs that tear up the 

 heart of old ocean itself for a hundred yards around, who 

 can doubt the result ? 



It is a result, moreover, in all these cases, which has not 

 stopped with teaching and helping on the superiority and 

 evolution of an ever finer and finer weapon alone. It has 

 taught and carried with it also the superiority and evolu- 

 tion, behind the weapon, of an ever finer and finer man. 

 It has done it, first of all, in the artisan who makes the 

 weapon. Rifles that shoot sixty balls a minute, and cannon 

 that send hundred-pound shells through twenty inches of 

 solid oak and steel, do not grow naturally, like teeth and 

 nails, out of the soldier's own body. They have to be 

 invented and wrought out by a man back of the soldier. 

 They involve, in their maker, art and science, skill of hand 

 and skill of brain, immense amounts of them. And 

 what is more, they involve in him honesty and truth. 

 There is nothing which detects cheap workmansliip and 

 base alloys quicker than the acid of war. We tolerated 

 shoddy in our sliops, in our homes, in our churches, easily 

 enough while peace reigned on our soil ; but when it came 

 to sending it to our soldiers on battle-fields, America's 

 outcry of rage brought its dealers to a very sudden halt. 

 Kotten timbers have small chance of passing the inspection- 

 eyes that fifty-ton broadsides of iron direct against them. 

 And when you touch off dynamite-guns, that exert a 

 pressure of a hundred tons to the square inch, varnish and 

 putty and tlie men who make them are apt to fly very high 

 and very far, leaving back of the soldier only solid steel 

 and solid workmen. Equally, too, finer armor has evolved, 

 in the soldier himself, an ever finer and finer man. It is 

 no longer, as it oiu;e was, physical strength alone that 

 counts in war ; no longer tJie more a brute tlie more a 

 soldier. Gun])0wder made bodies equal, and began the 

 process of having battles turn on brains. It is a process 

 that has never sto])ped. With rifles like those now made, 

 as delicate in tlieir machinery as chronometers, and with 

 cannon that have to be aimed at foes as mathematically as 



