Yes, this electric chain from East to West
      More than mere metal, more than Mammon can,
        Binds us together kinsmen, in the best
      As most affectionate and frankest bond,
      Brethren at one, and looking far beyond
        The world in an electric union blest.”

CHAPTER XXXVI.

THE RIFLE:  A PATRIOTIC PROPHECY.

There is an extinct pamphlet, now before me, published by Routledge in 1860, entitled “The Rifle Movement Foreshown in Prose and Verse from 1848 to the Present Time,”—­from my pen,—­which proves that, in conjunction with my friend Evelyn and a few others, I may justly claim to have originated that cheap defence of England, at Albury, more than a dozen years before it was thought of anywhere by any one else.  Take the trouble to read the following longish extract from the fifth edition of the above, and please not to omit the leash of ballads wherewith it ends.

“And now, next, about this Rifle pamphlet.  Every page carries its date honestly, and several very curiously.  In some of the editions there appears a rifle ballad of mine, written in 1845, and published in 1846 (in the first issue of my Ballads and Poems—­Hall & Virtue) with the strange title “Rise Britannia, a Stirring Song for Patriots in the Year 1860:”  an anticipation by fourteen years of the actual date of the Rifle Movement.  In all the editions, the papers on ‘Cheap Security’ (being Talks between Naaman Muff (a Quaker), Till (a commercial gent), Dolt (a philanthropist), Funker (an ordinary unwarlike paterfamilias), and a certain Tom Wydeawake (patriotic but peculiar)) contain detailed allusions, though written several years before any definite existence, to the National Rifle Association, and to exactly such annual prize gatherings of riflemen as those at Wimbledon Common and Brighton Downs, and this latest at Blackheath.  The discouragements of Tom Wydeawake and his few compeers were remarkable.  He himself might fairly have claimed the honours of origination, discussed some two or three years ago, but he left them to others—­Sic vos non vobis, &c.”

“Without mentioning names, several—­since distinguished as prominent in Rifledom—­were once, to my certain knowledge, and still to be evidenced by their extant letters, bitterly opposed to the whole movement,—­and I cannot conclude these remarks better or more appositely than by adding here, with real dates, the three following ballads, which tell their own tale briefly and suggestively.”  I print them here, as they are now to be found nowhere else.

The first, published in newspapers during June 1859 (following several others of a like character, with my name or without it), was the origin of the Volunteers’ motto—­being headed

    Defence not Defiance.

    “Nearer the muttering thunders roll,
      Blacker and heavier frowns the sky,—­
    Yet our dauntless English soul
      Faces the storm with a steady eye;
    Hands are strong where hearts are stout;
    Our rifles are ready—­look out!