Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/506

492 his mercenaries. As the musket now enabled battles to be determined by the superior manhood of superior numbers, and there was always a great deal of downright killing, he lost his keen interest in war as a business, and loved best to fight by proxy. The plaint of the fop to Harry Hotspur was an anachronism of about two hundred years for Henry IV's reign, but it expressed pretty accurately the feelings of the aristocracy in Shakespeare's time:

 "And that it was a great pity, so it was, This villainous saltpeter should be digged Out of the bowels of the harmless earth, Which many a good tall fellow had destroyed So cowardly; and but for these vile guns He would himself have been a soldier."

The Man on Horseback still continued to don his suit of "complete steel" from time to time for nearly a century after it was last worn in line of battle, but it was only to impress the popular imagination and enhance his personal appearance when he took part in the pageantry of government. The long warfare between him and the king had ended in his entire subjugation, and he was now an obsequious attendant upon "his royal master," with whom he had entered into an offensive and defensive alliance against the common people.

Steady improvement of the weapon through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by the men who were wielding it to gain for themselves the commonest rights of ownership in their own souls and bodies and the fruits of their toil, had made the musket so handy that the cumbrous fork-rest could be dispensed with, and had given it the flint-lock, the bayonet, and the front-sight, which latter greatly increased the accuracy of aim.

By another of those remarkable providential dispensations, grim old Leopold of Dessau devised the iron ramrod, just at the time v.-hen it was most needed to enable the little Prussian army to withstand the overwhelming masses of barbaric Russia, stupid old Austria, and intriguing France. As Frederick II's men were able to fire five times to their enemies' twice, the reactionary waves beat in vain against the new bulwark raised up to protect the progressivism which had made its home in Northwestern Europe.

Across the Western seas a still greater development was taking place. In the grasp of the men who had sought refuge from tyranny in the wilds of America the musket was not the mysterious and awkwardly handled engine it was in the hands of most Europeans. To the colonist it was the most familiar of his every-day tools. The daily food of the family was provided with it; the fiercest wild beasts were slain by it, and the fiercer wild Indians were conquered by it and driven from the lands which they claimed as their birthright. Being its owner's main dependence in his struggle for life, he naturally