Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/46

 bow, which would send a small spear beyond his own reach. Gunpowder arrived; that gave still further and more powerful projection. But the principle, the one method of killing a man in war, remained the same—hit him with something hard. We had learned many ways of controlling and transmuting for the purposes of ordinary life the power stored up by the sunsteam, electricity, the energy of falling water. Military science knew but one way—the explosion of chemicals. If we look into a battleship, that “great, floating watch,” we marvel at the intricacy of her machinery. But we should find that the engines, the turbines, the delicate and complicated electrical instruments, are all devices first invented for purely industrial activities and merely adapted for war. We should find the guns, the actual killing instrument, among the simplest machines on board. In centuries of mechanical invention and mechanical improvement, very little higher intelligence and no genius at all had been put into the mechanics of killing men.

There were good reasons. The men who discovered the great principles back of modern machinery and industrial method, such as Newton in physics, Friar Bacon and Faraday in chemistry, Ampère and Volta in electricity, were concerned only with pure science, with extending the field of human knowledge. The clever inventors and adapters—such as Stephenson with his locomotive, Morse with his telegraph, Edison with his electric light and