180 The Evolution of Arms and Armor. 



that the nations which shorten their swords lengthen their 

 borders, historically a fact. But, ultimating the same 

 principle, we are now learning that the nations which go 

 still further, and shorten their swords into nothing at all, 

 lengthen their borders still more, and at the same time 

 lengthen their lives. Wherein is the wisdom of voting mil- 

 lions of dollars for forts and frigates which in a few years 

 will be as passe as cross-bows and coats-of-mail, and when 

 the genius that, by its other, liner inventions, is to make 

 them so, is growing of itself in our laboratories and Avork- 

 sliops ? It is the people hereafter who can raise Ericssons, 

 not Napoleons, send to the field the best manhood, not 

 the biggest mortars, boast the completest social, not 

 soldierly organization, that can laugh at their foes. " Damn 

 the torpedoes ! " shouted the grim old naval hero of our 

 civil war, as he took his unarmored flagship into the hottest 

 hell of the fight at Mobile Bay ; and well the old Hartford 

 might despise them, for within its wooden walls were iron- 

 clad hearts, and above it waved Liberty's banner, a^^ it 

 was sheathed all over with a cause that gunpowder could 

 as little blow up as it could omnipotence itself. And no 

 matter though every sea were to be filled with explosives, 

 and every bay with dynamite, let America carry stalwart 

 manhood on her decks, and unfettered liberty at her mast- 

 head, and the sheathing of a righteous cause at her prow, 

 and, if need demand, she can go into the hottest hell of the 

 world's battle, exclaiming again, with the sacred profanity 

 of her dear old Farragut, " Damn the torpedoes ! " 



Of course this does not mean that the country should 

 rush all at once from its policy in the past over to the 

 opposite extreme ; does not mean that in the interests of 

 peace it should wipe out the army and navy and beat into 

 ])low-shares the swords it now has, or that it should abate 

 in any degree its reverence for the brave soldiers on its 

 own soil, and all though the ages, who by their use have 

 filled history with heroisms and the world with salvations. 

 For peace, when it comes, will be the result of evolution, 

 not manufacture; and evolution here, as everywhere else, 

 must have the root and stalk of the past on which and from 

 which to untold; and to cut down the armor-part of the 

 l>ast would be to cut down the very tree on which, as things 

 look, its flower at last is to bloom. But it does mean that 

 we should recofrnize what has been the bent and strain of 



