The Evolution of Arms and Armor. 177 



telescopes at stars, it is obviously impossible to trust clod- 

 hoppers with their use. New weapons involve precisely 

 the same necessity for a more highly organized solaier that 

 new teeth and new claws did of old for a more highly or- 

 ganized animal. It is not the lighter in the mass, as it was 

 in ancient Greece and Rome, but the fighter in the man, 

 that makes an army's strength. With each more intricate 

 arm more responsibility rests on the individual soldier,* not 

 on his captain or his corps, for its efficiency ; the more 

 need, therefore, there is of his individual training. Bayonets 

 haife had to learn not only how to thrust but how to think. 

 Battle-fields, which hitherto have been supposed to necessi- 

 tate the most absolute despotism in command, and to be the 

 last places where personal liberty could be allowed, are 

 having the way opened through their new weapons to taste 

 for themselves what they have won so long for peace. And 

 the armor which began with a sharp animal spine is mount- 

 ing up step by step to that quality in the soldier's soul 

 which can say, in all its sharpness, the grand word I. 



It is not only individuals and bnite races, however, but 

 tribes and nations also, that use arms and are combatants 

 in the struggle for existence ; and as such, they are going 

 through the same experiments as to the best ways and means 

 of doing it that animals and individuals have tried, only 

 on a larger scale. Originally a tribe's entire corporate 

 body was a soldier going out to battle as one man. Every 

 male member of it was accustomed to the use of arms alike 

 in war and the chase. Fighting was considered to be the 

 only employment worthy of a man ; and honor and leader- 

 ship and wives, and the best of everything, waited on his 

 courage and success. But gradually nations found tliat, to 

 fight well, something more was needed than brute courage 

 and the rude weapons that each man could make for him- 

 self. Food was needed, and finer weapons, and resources 

 to fall back upon when the struggle was long, the tribes 

 which had the most of these being the ones that finally 

 survived. And so a differentiation took place, the inevit- 

 able process in all Evolution, some of the members 

 devoting themselves exclusively to the raising of food and 

 clothing, and others to the manufacture of arms, and with 



* See H. Ij. Abbott's article in March Foriim (1890) on War uiuler Xew Con- 

 ditions. 



