The Evolution of Arms and Armor. 179 



into ports where our protective commercial policy has 

 driven from the seas every flag of ours needing protection. 

 And this very Winter the proposition is before our Congress 

 to vote the nation's money by the score of millions for 

 the building of a steel-clad navy that shall match those of 

 the old world. 



But if there is anything to be learned from the long 

 experience of the mighty past, alike animal and human, 

 is not the question's true answer largely, if not entirely, 

 the other way, an answer that tells us to go on as we have 

 in part begun, and as the real genius of our country 

 prompts, letting Germany, Eussia and France follow the 

 lead of the Dinichthys and the Megalosaur in heaping up 

 outward armor, while we seek to develop as the man-nation 

 of the earth by unfolding from within ? It is, indeed, 

 true that the man-animal of the earth has -been a fighter, 

 one of the worst ; and that all the world's great historic 

 nations have been fighters, and terrible ones, too ; but the 

 poir^ to be remembered is that they have got their best 

 means of fighting, got the real qualities which enabled 

 them to come off victors in their fights, by cultivating the 

 arts of peace rather than those of war. "A nation of 

 shop-keepers ! " exclaimed Napoleon, contemptuously, as he 

 looked across the English Channel; but one day, in his 

 dealings with the shop-keepers, he found, very uncomfort- 

 ably, that among their wares they had a Waterloo. How 

 was it in the recent struggle on our own soil between the 

 North and the South ? The South was the military part of 

 the nation. It had the most accomplished generals. Its 

 children had been trained from their youth up in the use 

 of arms ; and in courage and in direct fighting qualities it 

 certainly was not inferior to the North. But the North 

 had the freedom, the wealth, the inventive genius, the 

 mental training, the higher interior development, all 

 those qualities which are the outgrowth of peace. It 

 called them at once into action ; where it wanted a new 

 rifle, new war-ship, new sanitary device, called on its 

 rear guard, back of all other rear guards, to invent it. 

 The rear guard never failed to do so ; and the resvilt was 

 just as certain with the first gun at Sumter, as with the last at 

 Appomatox Court-House, was wrought out by the school- 

 mistress and the aproned mechanic quite as largely as by the 

 brave general and the baimered soldier. It has beeu said 



