Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/503

Rh —became a prince, duke, count, or margrave. The same process welded several of these principalities, counties, dukedoms, or marquisates into a kingdom. The advantage to the people of this was, that they had fewer masters to feed and clothe, and the exactions upon them had somewhat more system. Spain and France became the leading nations of Europe because this process of aggregation went on more rapidly there than in Germany, Italy, Austria, and elsewhere.

Progressive people everywhere saw clearly what an improvement a king was upon the Man on Horseback, and became his advocates and supporters.

If, however, there had been no brighter hope for mankind than was contained in the evolution from a swarm of petty tyrants to a monarch, the outlook would have been dark indeed. .A millennium of that kind of progress would scarcely have brought mankind up to the plane occupied by the Russian serf to-day. Fortunately, another force was born into the world. Whether "black Barthel," the German monk, discovered gunpowder, or whether Friar Bacon preceded him, is of little consequence. The fourteenth century was yet quite young when somebody found out that a mixture of sulphur, niter, and charcoal would deliver a very heavy blow, and, as it was a day when heavy blows commanded the highest price of anything in the market, the attention of all progressive men was quickly turned to it. If we except the rhythmic beat of the vibrating battering-ram, the sturdiest blow then known was that which the momentum of a galloping horse delivered at the point of a lance. But even with the first rude tubes of wood and leather, or hooped iron boxes, the new force struck a blow that dismounted the doughtiest cavalier, and breached the thickest walls.

It began its work for mankind as the slave of kingcraft. Only kings could afford the costly "mortars," "vases," "culverins," "perriers," "falcons," etc.—only monarchs could employ the skilled artisans who manipulated these

 ". . . mortal engines whose rude throats Th' immortal Jove's dread thunders counterfeit."

It had to serve an apprenticeship to autocracy before it became democracy's mighty minister. It prepared the way for its future mission, even then, for kings used it to dismount cavaliers, and beat down their castle-walls. The despotism of the Man on Horseback began to crack around the edges, and in the rifts and fissures of the iron tyranny fell the mustard-seed that was to grow up into the world-shadowing tree of liberty. Its development was dishearteningly slow, however. It was a day when all intellectual processes were as slow as the pace of the overladen battle-horses, and invention crawled languidly, instead of running and leaping, as to-day.

So it was fully a century and a half after Ferdinand IV used the first cannon to aid in capturing Gibraltar, before we find a Man on