The Evolution of Arms and Armor. 181 



Nature in all her kingdoms and all her ages, and ourselves 

 work with her in the same direction. It does mean that, 

 without destroying what now is on her armor-tree, we 

 should join with her, so far as we do anything, in cultivat- 

 ing its finer industrial branches, as good alike for peace or 

 war, not spend our millions in merely crowding it with 

 bigger ones of the old type that will be of value for neither 

 state. 



It is in this way, by a simple and natural unfolding from 

 the past, not cutting loose from it or sticking to it, that 

 will come the supreme stage in the evolution of arms and 

 armor, that in which Avars will be waged with no guns, 

 no forts, no ships, no outward explosives at all; with no 

 need, therefore, even of the arts that made them, but 

 with missiles only that are forged out of mind. So far as 

 fighting of some kind is concerned it would indeed be a 

 fool's security for humanity to suppose that its days are 

 over, and that peace in the sense of harmony is close at 

 hand. Problems are before it to-day more perplexing than 

 any that the past has ever known ; passions at work in it 

 fiercer than ever fired hearts in the jungle with rage ; inter- 

 ests at stake with it more conflicting than any that a Mar- 

 athon or Waterloo decided, and there is no possibility of 

 settling them without contests. It is their very greatness 

 and intricacy, however, that are going to make it all the 

 more a matter not of sentimental choice but of military 

 necessity, to meet them with weapons of a corresponding 

 substance and temper. It is a process that has already 

 begun, a new bud that, like all buds, is springing directly 

 from the axil of the old war-tree. The best general, even 

 now, is not he who fights the most battles with guns, but 

 he who so maneuvers his army as to win victories with the 

 fewest actual conflicts ; not he who, when a battle comes, 

 takes part himself in the deadly charge, but he who sits 

 quietly in his tent with a map before him, directing charges 

 with a pencil's point, and neither sees nor sheds personally 

 a drop of blood. Literature in all ages has had its words 

 that were half-battles ; eloquence its vibrations of air that 

 have shaken the world wider than parks of artillery; 

 religion its love-whispers that neither Greek phalanx nor 

 Roman legion could withstand, and before which empires 

 have tumbled down as readily as savages before canister 

 and grape. Paws and claws, if not yet extinct, have 



