Section one: Modern murdering machinery.
Ah, so you are on your way to the recruiting station, are you? Well, there will be plenty of time to enlist tomorrow, and there are also seven days of next week that have not been touched yet. Do not be in a hurry to sign your name. Wait a little—wait at least till you have read the first two sections of this chapter.
Perhaps you are feverish.
Cool off before you enlist.[[67]]
Go back to the 60’s and read three or four lines of American Civil War history before you enlist. Here they are in the words of a distinguished authority, A. S. Bolles:[[68]]
“With the swift cooling of the war fever bounties became necessary to stimulate enlistment.... In 1861 the highways were filled with volunteers eagerly rushing to the front; but in 1865 they went with much slower pace and with a much better conception of the hazardous game of war.”
The hateful method called drafting had to be vigorously applied by the Federal Government after the young men found out what war really meant—for them.
And Professor John B. McMaster (University of Pennsylvania) makes it clear that even the hot blood of the young men of the South also cooled down to an extremely rational temperature as the slaughter proceeded. He says:[[69]]
“Quite as desperate were the shifts to which the South was put for soldiers. At first every young man was eager to rush to the front. But as time passed ... it became necessary to force men into the ranks, to ‘conscript’ them....”
In this connection read the words of a great Union soldier, General Sherman:
“I confess without shame that I am tired and sick of the war. Its glory is all moonshine. Even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, the anguish and lamentations of distant families appealing to me for missing sons, husbands and fathers. It is only those who have not heard a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded and lacerated that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation.”[[70]]
It is especially important that before you enlist you should get a distinct idea of the horrible deadliness of modern butchering machinery. Since General Sherman made the comment just quoted on the American Civil War the killing machinery has been improved astonishingly.
In the recent Russian-Japanese war individual soldiers, as shown by actual count and official report, received as many as seventy bullet wounds,—they were riddled—torn to pieces—with lead and steel fired from MODERN slaughtering machines. If you will read all of the present and the following sections you will no longer wonder why the “very BEST people” do not enlist for actual service—at the front.
I would suggest and even urge, brothers, that, before you enlist, you visit your dear pastor and read with him all of the present section on “Hell,” and then ask him whether he and his sons will probably enlist for actual firing-line-sword-rifle-and-bayonet service. Also have a heart-to-heart talk with your loving friend, your banker, who takes care of your money for you. Read these paragraphs to him and ask him whether he is eager to rush to the front and whether he is urging his sons and sons-in-law to be ready to rush with him to the front for real fighting into “the grasp of death,” into “the hurricane’s fiery breath,” where sabres flash, bullets hiss, and cannon roar.
By the way, do you deposit much money in the bank? Do you often visit socially at the banker’s home? Did you ever see a cheap, fifteen-dollar-a-month soldier courting the banker’s or the big manufacturer’s daughter?
Well, hardly.
Wake up, my working class brother.
These leading citizens strut before you and fill you full of fierce and splendid talk about becoming “brave boys behind the gun”; but at the same time they despise you socially. Don’t foolishly get behind the gun or in front of the gun—not at least till you have studied the gun.
A high-grade modern rifle can be fired twenty-five times per minute. This gun will pierce 60 pine boards each one inch thick. It will kill a man at a distance of four miles. A bullet with sufficient force to pierce a one-inch pine board will kill a man or a horse. Actual tests show that the best modern rifles will force a bullet through a target made of the following combination:—fifteen folds of cow-hide, sixteen one-inch pine boards, and one and four-fifths inches of hard beech wood. Bullets fired from rifles used in the American Civil War would do little damage after passing into or through the bodies of soldiers in the front ranks. Men in the second and third ranks felt much protected by the bodies of men in front of them. All is different now. The best modern rifles will force a bullet through five horses at 27 yards; four horses at 220 yards; two horses at 1,100 yards. Even as recently as the war of 1870–71 and the war of 1877–78, bullets from rifles then used in the German army would not pierce a human skull at a distance of 1,760 yards, one mile; but with the best modern rifles bullets can be fired through the thick bones of an ox at a range of 3,850 yards, about two and one-fifth miles. Experiments demonstrate that the best modern rifles will force a bullet through three human bodies at a range of 3,900 feet; and through five human bodies at 1,200 feet. In the American Civil War bullets for long range work had to be fired high, describing a long high arch, thus missing all objects on the battlefield between the gun and the object aimed at. A bullet from a modern rifle will fly straight across the field for hundreds of yards with no elevation, even half a mile and more with but little elevation, sweeping the whole width of the field between the gun and the target.[[71]]
The deadliness of the modern rifle can be made clear in another way. Says Bloch:
“According to the data of the Prussian general Rohne one hundred sharp-shooters will put a battery out of action, firing at a distance of 88 yards in the course of two and two-fifths minutes, 1,100 yards in the course of four minutes, 1,320 yards in the course of seven and a half minutes, 1,650 yards in the course of twenty-two minutes.”
“The new Springfield rifle,” says Fitzmorris,[[72]] “has a range of five miles, the bullet having a velocity of 2,300 feet per second leaving the weapon, or sufficient to drive it through four and a half feet of white pine.”
The “attractiveness” of war increases, of course, with the likelihood that the improving marksmanship of the enemy will increase one’s chances for meeting an “attraction.” The accuracy of fire is being rapidly improved by tireless target practice in all the great armies of the world. Says Mr. Wright, Ex-Secretary of War:[[73]]
“The results from target practice for the year 1907 and 1908 show that the average battery-hitting capacity has been rapidly increased.... About sixteen times as many hits were made in 1906 from the same gun in a given time at the same range as were made in 1900.”
Under no circumstances should the delicate flesh of a big business man be exposed to well-aimed bullets fired from a modern rifle. His flesh is, of course, specially sensitive and precious. Moreover, it is wholly unnecessary, because he can buy the flesh of a common working class man for bullet stopper purposes very, very cheap, as a substitute. That is a much better arrangement, the big business man thinks, and, of course, the working men agree with the business men on this matter just as they do on nearly everything else.
The Danish “Rexer” rifle is another instrument ready for use in war and in pacifying hungry people on strike. The “Rexer” weighs only eighteen pounds, uses high-power, small-calibre ammunition, is easily and accurately operated from a handy, portable “rest,” can be conveniently carried on horseback, rushed up front for short distances by infantry, can be fired slowly or, if desired, by simply holding the trigger, 300 times per minute. Equipped with this rifle one full regiment of soldiers or militiamen, each firing only 75 shots per minute, could fire into the ranks of wildly hungry strikers or unemployed one million five hundred thousand prosperity slugs in twenty minutes. With this gun ten militiamen could “quiet” five thousand strikers with twenty-five thousand shots in ten minutes.[[74]]
With the improved murdering machine called the Maxim gun 700 bullets per minute can be fired, bullets that will kill a man at a range of one and a half miles, bullets that will pacify a striker at a range of two miles. The Gatling gun equipped with an electric motor will discharge 1,800 death-dealing bullets per minute.[[75]]
“The Gatling gun,” says Morris,[[76]] “... is now, in its perfected form, in use all over the world. This consists of a cluster of rifle-barrels arranged around a central shaft and rotated by a crank. The magazine contains a supply of cartridges, which drop down and are rammed home one after another as the barrels rotate. This, in the later improved forms, is done with such rapidity that the gun can discharge its balls at the rate of 3,000 per minute.... Machine guns were designed for service against bodies of men.”
One modern gatling gun will tear a board fence to pieces a mile away in four minutes, and at a range of one mile it will gnaw off a foot-thick pine post in seven minutes.
Don’t enlist till next week.
No wonder the politicians and big business men are “too busy” to get in line on the firing-line—patriotically. And, of course, they do not want their sons and sons-in-law to get up close in front of a belching Gatling gun,—in front of a modern murdering machine—patriotically.
If a battery of modern gatling guns, concealed, using smokeless powder, located out of hearing a mile away or nearer and equipped with a maxim noiseless attachment,—should be trained upon a regiment of men, each gun pouring one thousand bullets per minute into an exposed regiment, the only observable result would be this: the regiment would melt, stricken by an unseen, unheard breath of death.
General William P. Duval, of the United States Military Staff and War College, estimates that the Maxim noiseless attachment for fire-arms “would produce just as much of a revolution in the art of war as did the smokeless powder. Psychologically, this new gun would double the terror inspired by the enemy possessing it.... The fear of the enemy would ... at least be doubled.”
Ordering the working class to go to war with the present fire-arms is like ordering a working man to make a gun, load it, dig his own grave, crawl down into it, and there scream “Hurrah for death!” and then shoot himself.
Perhaps the best way, at least the safest way, to get an accurate idea of the effectiveness of the slaughtering machinery of our day is to read what these guns accomplish in actual operation on the battlefield, pouring showers, streams, storms of lead and steel into the ranks of men. The propaganda of peace is powerfully served by books giving distinct impressions of war as it may be seen (and felt) on the field where modern arms are used. Some specially excellent books for such use are: Human Bullets, by T. Sakurai, a Japanese soldier;[[77]] Port Arthur, A Monster Heroism, by Richard Barry;[[78]] The Red Laugh, by Leonid Andreief;[[79]] The Downfall, by Emile Zola;[[80]] The Future of War, by Jean Bloch.[[81]]
Here following are some paragraphs from a vigorous book of this type, Human Bullets, just noted, passim, which treats of the Russian-Japanese War:
“The dismal horror of it [battle] can best be observed when the actual struggle is over. The shadow of impartial Death visits friend and foe alike. When a shocking massacre is over, countless corpses covered with blood lie flat in the grass and between the stones. What a deep philosophy their cold faces tell! When we saw the dead at Nanshan, we could not help covering our eyes in horror and disgust.... Some were crushed in head and face. Their brains mixed with dust and earth. The intestines were torn out and blood was trickling from them.... Some had photographs of their wives and children in their bosoms, and these pictures were spattered with blood.... After this battle we captured some damaged machine-guns. This fire-arm was most dreaded by us.... It can be made to sprinkle its shots as roads are watered with a hose. It can cover a larger or smaller space, or fire to greater or less distance as the gunner wills.... If one becomes the target for this terrible engine of destruction, three or four shots may go through the same place making a wound very large.... And the sound it makes ... is like a power-loom. It is a sickening horrible sound! The Russians regarded this machine as their best friend. And it certainly did very much as a means of defense. They were wonderfully clever in the use of this machine. They would wait till our men came very near them, four or five ken only, and just as we were ready to shout a triumphant ‘Banzai!’ this dreadful machine would begin to sweep over us the besom of destruction, the result being hills and mounds of dead. After this battle we discovered one soldier ... who had no less than forty-seven shots in his body.... Another soldier of a neighboring regiment received more than seventy shots. These instances prove how destructive is the machine-gun. The surgeons could not locate so many wounds in one body, and they invented a new name [meaning] ‘whole-body-honey-combed-with-gun-wounds.’ ... It was invariably this machine-gun that made us suffer most severely.... The bodies of the brave dead built hill upon hill, their blood made streams in the valley. Shattered bones, torn flesh, flowing blood, were mingled with broken swords and split rifles. What could be more shocking than this scene! We jumped over or stepped on the heaped up corpses and went on holding our noses. What a grief it was to have to tread on the bodies of our heroic dead!... What a horrible sight! Their bodies were piled up two or three or even four deep.... A sad groaning came from the wounded who were buried under the dead. When this gallant assaulting column had pressed upon the enemy’s forts, stepping over their dead comrades’ bodies, the terrible and skilful fire of the machine-guns had killed them all, close by the forts, piling the dead upon the wounded.... After a while the shells ... began to burst briskly above our heads. Percussion balls fell around us and hurled up smoke and blood together. Legs, hands and necks were cut into black fragments and scattered about. I shut my eyes....”
In what unqualified contempt do the masters of the world hold the toilers whom they send into such blood-wasting hells. Shakespeare has expressed the masters’ scorn for the common soldier’s flesh and blood thus:
“Tut, tut; good enough to toss; food for powder; food for powder; they’ll fill a pit as well as better.”
Here is a glimpse of the battle of Sedan:[[82]]
“Let your readers fancy masses of colored rags glued together with blood and brains, pinned into strange shapes by fragments of bones. Let them conceive men’s bodies without legs, and legs without bodies, heaps of human entrails attached to red and blue cloth, and disembowelled corpses in uniform, bodies lying about in all attitudes with skulls shattered, faces blown off, hips smashed, bones, flesh and gay clothing all pounded together as if brayed in a mortar, extending for miles, not very thick in any one place, but recurring perpetually for weary hours, and then they can not with the most vivid imagination come up to the sickening reality of that butchery [the battle of Sedan, 1870].”
It is reliably estimated that modern artillery is capable of doing one hundred and sixteen times more damage than the artillery used by the German army in 1870. Even the simple instrument known as the range-finder adds much to effectiveness,—it enables soldiers to find the range in three minutes and pour death-dealing missiles into the human targets promptly. This instrument weighs about sixty pounds and is being rapidly improved.[[83]] A single battery of modern artillery can hurl 1,450 rounds upon ten regiments of men while they march one mile and a half. These 1,450 shells arranged with time fuses to burst at the target would sweep these ten thousand men with 275,000 bullets and ragged iron scraps. Bloch says:[[84]]
“In 1870 an ordinary shell when it burst broke into from 19 to 30 pieces. Today it bursts into 240 pieces. Shrapnel in 1870 scattered only 37 death-dealing missiles. Now it scatters 340. A bomb weighing about 70 pounds, thirty years ago, would have burst into 42 fragments. Today, when it is charged with peroxilene, it breaks into 1,200 pieces, each of which is hurled with much greater velocity than the larger lumps which were scattered by a gunpowder explosion. It is estimated that such a bomb would destroy all life within a range of 200 metres [about 200 yards] of the point of the explosion.... With the increase in the number of bullets and fragments, and in the forces which disperse them, increases also the area which they affect. Splinters and bullets bring death and destruction, not only as in 1870, to those in the vicinity of the explosion, but at a distance of 220 yards away, and this tho’ fired from a distance of 3,300 yards [about two miles].... In a time when rifle and artillery fire were beyond comparison weaker than they are now, those who were left unhelped on the battlefield might hope for safety. But now, when the whole field of battle is covered with an uninterrupted hail of bullets and fragments of shells [at night too, with a searchlight equipment], there is little place for such hope.”
Surely you can easily see that a business man’s soft, fat flesh won’t do for a bullet-stopper. Here is where the cheap, meek, weak wage-slaves come in handy—the very stuff for bullet-stoppers.
In connection with this subject, remember that a bullet fired from a modern rifle or a Gatling gun rotates over 3,800 times per second. This rotary motion produces the effect of an explosion when the bullet strikes the stomach, bladder, or heart—where there are liquids. The effect is horrible; with terrible violence “the liquids are cast on all sides with the destructive effect of an explosion.”—(Bloch.)
Of course, the business man knows that his flesh should never be torn with such a horrible thing. He has nothing to fear, however. He will not go to war. He will send a cheap man, a wage-slave substitute. He knows it doesn’t make any difference in the case of a cheap wage-earner who is only a working-class slave.
Ah, my working-class reader, it will make a difference when the working class become proud enough and shrewd enough to defiantly declare that it shall be different. The business man is too proud and shrewd to stand up before these modern flesh-tearing machines.
Don’t be in a hurry to enlist, brother. Wait a few more days. Two weeks after next will do. The “very best people” in your town are not hurrying to enlist. Can’t you see the point? Before you enlist, or before you consent to have your son or younger brother enlist, be sure to read some books describing real war with improved murdering machinery. A brilliant war correspondent, Mr. Richard Barry, thus describes a modern war-storm in his book, descriptive of the Japanese-Russian War, Port Arthur, A Monster Heroism, passim:[[85]]
“Toward three o’clock a second advance is ordered ... nearly 15,000 men close in ... now they are through [the wire fence] ... half naked, savage, yelling, even Japanese stoicism gone. Up to the very muzzles of the first entrenchments they surge, waver and break like the dash of angry waves against a rock-bound coast.... Officers are picked off by sharp-shooters, as flies are flecked from a molasses jug.... So up they go, for the tenth time.... Spottsylvania Court House was no more savage.... Thus hand to hand they grapple, sweat, bleed, shout, expire. The veneer of culture sloughed as a snake his cast-off skin; they spit and chew, claw and grip as their forefathers beyond the memory of man.... The cost! The fleeing ones left five hundred corpses in four trenches. The others paid seven times that price—killed and wounded—to turn across the page of the world’s warfare that word Nanshan.... A hospital ship left every day for Japan carrying from 200 to 1,000.... I lay in the broiling sun watching the soldiers huddle against the barbed-wire, under the machine guns ... only to melt away like chaff before a wind.... The ‘pioneers’ met with the death-sprinkle of the Maxim [guns] ... a machine rattled and the shale beyond spattered. I was carried back [in memory] to a boiler factory and an automatic riveter. Of all war sounds that of the machine gun is least poetic, is most deadly.... The regiment under fire of the machine guns retreated precipitately, leaving one-half its number on the slope.... Overwhelmed on all sides, tricked, defeated, two-thirds of its men killed or wounded ... for out of that [another] brigade of 6,000 men there are ... uninjured but 640.... Moreover in throwing up their trenches ... corpses had to be used to improvise the walls.... The dead were being used to more quickly fill the embankments.... Soon dawn came and with it hell. The battle was on again. Within his sight were more than a hundred dead and twice as many wounded. Groans welled up like bubbles from a pot. Arms tossed feverishly. Backs writhed in despair.... Almost crazed by thirst and hunger, he nearly two-thirds of the command was mowed down at once.... Then came the thud of a bullet. It was a different thud from any we had heard up to that time, and though I had never before heard bullet strike flesh, I could not mistake the sound. It goes into the earth wholesome and angry, into flesh ripping and sick with a splash like a hoof-beat of mud in the face.... The parapets of four forts were alive with bursting shrapnel. A hundred a minute were exploding on each (at fifteen gold dollars apiece). The air above them was black with glycerine gases of the motor shells, and the wind blowing ... held huge quantities of dust.... ‘No, the truth about war can not be told. It is too horrible. The public will not listen. A white bandage about the forehead with a strawberry mark in the center—is the picture they want of the wounded. They won’t let you tell them the truth and show bowels ripped out, brains spilled, eyes gouged away, faces blanched with horror.... Archibald Forbes predicted twenty years ago that the time would come when armies would no longer be able to take their wounded from the field of battle. That day has come. We are living in it. Wounded have existed—how, God knows—on that field out there without help for twelve days, while shells and bullets rained about them, and if a comrade had dared to come to their assistance, his would have been a useless suicide. The searchlight, enginery of scientific trenches, machine-guns, rifles point blank at 200 yards with a range of over 2,000—these things have helped to make war more terrible than ever before in history. Red Cross societies and scientific text-books—they sell well and look pretty, but as for “humane warfare”—was there ever put into words a mightier sarcasm!’”
Read all of Mr. Barry’s thrilling book and thus learn why the haughty “very best people,” who despise the workingmen, socially, don’t go themselves, up close, to the foul and bloody hell called war.
In the Russian-Japanese war 275 officers and 1,349 men were treated in a single hospital for insanity. Says Dr. Awtokratow:
“As might be anticipated, in the acute insanities, particularly in neurasthenic and confusional cases, the influence of the war gave a characteristic color to the mental symptoms, phases of panic terror, with hallucinations of bursting shells, pursuing enemies, putrefying corpses, and so forth, being especially frequent.”[[86]]
A special despatch in the New York Times of December 11, 1909, reads:
“A carload of insane soldiers from the Philippines passed through Pittsburgh [Pennsylvania] today in charge of Major J. M. Kennedy, who was taking them to Washington from the Pacific Coast.”[[87]]
The soldiers of the American Civil War did not use—had not even heard of—the terrible explosives of our day. Melinite, dynamite, cordite, indurite, motorite, ecrasite, peroxilene and other explosive compounds vastly increase the effectiveness of modern arms and in other ways also multiply the dangers of the modern battlefield.
Mr. Charles Morris describes a dynamite gun as follows:[[88]]
“The dynamite gun, compressed air usually being employed, while forty feet long, has a barrel of three-eighth inch iron, with one-eighth inch brass tubing. The projectile is of brass, forty inches long, rotation being given it by spiral vanes fixed to its base. It has a conical cast-iron point, twelve inches long. At a trial in 1895 shells were thrown as far as two thousand five hundred yards, and one containing one hundred pounds of dynamite was thrown a distance of two miles. Great accuracy of aim was attained. This dangerous weapon is an object of dread by naval officers.”
Writing of modern explosives, M. Bloch says, in substance: Such enormous energy is developed in firing cannon using some of these explosives that gun, gunners and horses have been dragged a considerable distance. In the case of a shell exploding by slight accident due to excitement the body of the gun was broken into twenty pieces, the carriage and wheels were reduced to a pile of shapeless steel and wooden splinters; single fragments of the destroyed gun “weighed 363 pounds and were hurled 99 yards forward and backward from the place where the gun was fired, and nearly 108 yards on either side.” He calls special attention to the dangers due to having such explosives on the field of battle. He says:[[89]]
“Notwithstanding the distance between guns, a single explosion might embrace several guns and all their ammunition.
“Not far from the battery ammunition cases will be placed. If these be not exploded by the concussion of the atmosphere they may very easily be exploded by some of the heavy fragments which fall upon them.”
Let us look for a moment at a new kind of storm—a possible dynamite storm.
A rifle bullet fired into a stick of dynamite will explode the dynamite. A bullet accidentally fired from a high-power rifle into a dynamite factory even a mile distant might easily destroy the entire factory and destroy at the same time all life in and within hundreds of yards of the factory, because of the highly explosive nature of the dynamite. The same is true of factories in which other terrible explosives are being prepared for use on the battlefield. Such explosive materials in chests on the field of battle create, of course, enormous danger that thousands may be destroyed with their own ammunition. One steel bullet, or one shell, fired from a modern high-power gun into a chest of shells or bombs, loaded as they are with highly explosive material,—one such bullet or shell thus fired, might set off a chest of shells and carry death to all around, these shells, exploding other chests of shells, and these still others, creating a sort of hell in all directions. The possibilities thus created by modern highly explosive ammunition materials are terrible, horrible to contemplate. Suppose ten thousand men on the battlefield, and suppose an explosion due to a single shell crashing into a chest of shells. A series of explosions might follow. The first explosion, caused by one shot, might be communicated from the first bursting shell to the next, and so on in succession with startling rapidity. The thundering explosions would cause a cyclone of flying splinters of wood and steel, scrap-iron, cannon barrels, wagon wheels, the torn carcasses, the mingled flesh, blood and bones of dismembered horses and men,—a storm of hopeless and hideous confusion, a harvest of death utterly indescribable. Thousands of brave young fellows from the farm, factories, mines and other industries would thus be practically annihilated with their own ammunition.
What a place this would be (up close) for “prominent citizens”—bankers, priests, preachers, bishops, senators, lawyers and “captains of industry”! A storm of blood and steel! No, brother, oh, no. No dynamite cyclone for these pulmonary patriots. Hardly. There is plenty of “common” flesh and “common” blood of the “plain people” which can be bought cheap, dirt cheap.
Reflect for a moment on the horrible possibilities of the airship carrying a light machine gun with a good supply of ammunition, or carrying 1,000 or 1,500 pounds of dynamite aloft over an army, a city, or a fleet. The airship, though still very new, is already sufficiently developed to make it practicable to work wholesale ruin in this way. In March, 1909, Count Zeppelin’s dirigible airship, 445 feet long, 50 feet in diameter, carrying three motors, a searchlight, and twenty-five people, fifteen of them soldiers, made a hundred-and-fifty-mile trip at the rate of almost forty miles an hour. Hudson Maxim, the inventor and expert in high explosives, torpedo boat-destroyers, noiseless gun attachments, and the like, speaks thus of the airship as a fighting machine:[[90]]
“The great field for operations with high explosives carried in airships will be the raiders’ outfit. Aerial raiders would be able to do wide destruction on unprotected inland cities and towns, destroying railroads, blowing up bridges, arsenals, public stores, powder magazines and powder mills, and in levying ransom on moneyed institutions.... In future wars, the fronts of battle will be skyline and opposing skyline, and over the stupendous arena missiles of death will shriek and roar, while sharp-shooters with silent rifles will make ambush in copse and every hedge and highway.”
Now let us look for a moment at the greater cannon.
“A day will come,” said Victor Hugo,[[91]] “when a cannon will be exhibited in the public museums, just as an instrument of torture is now, and people will be astonished how such thing could have been.”
The new 14–inch gun fires a 1,600–pound projectile. Used at its maximum capacity it puts itself out of commission in six and one-half hours because of the frightful wear of the gun’s heavy charges upon itself.[[92]] The 16–inch seacoast gun exhibited at the World’s Fair in 1904 is officially described as having a “muzzle energy of projectile ... 76,904 foot tons.”
“The Masonic Temple in Chicago, until recently the largest office building in the world, weighs 30,000 tons. In firing a 14–inch gun, sufficient energy is developed to lift the Masonic Temple two feet in one second. The force behind a single eight-gun broadside from 14–inch guns would raise that building sixteen feet in a single second.”[[93]]
The United States Government has a 16–inch cannon; it can throw a shot weighing 2,000 pounds to an extreme range of twenty-one miles, and has an effective range of twelve miles. It has been fired four times.
And now think of a murdering machine 50 feet long, weighing 260,000 pounds, consuming 612 pounds of smokeless powder per charge, firing a projectile weighing 2,400 pounds through 23½ inches of Krupp steel armor, and having a range of almost nine miles—a monster butchering machine. The United States Government exhibited such a gun at the World’s Fair, at St. Louis, in 1904,—exhibited this hell’s masterpiece with pride, true, Christian, savage pride.
This huge gun was exhibited—shrewdly.
What for?
Many youths from Christian homes looked upon this mechanical monster and themselves became monsters—in their hearts—eager to butcher, “not only willing, but anxious to fight.”
Human slaughter has become a science. The machines are perfect and ready, all ready, for the working class to use—on the working class.