“The estimation in which they are held,” said one day a learned orator of the Gun Club, “is in proportion to the size of their cannon, and in direct ratio to the square of distance attained by their projectiles!”

A little more and it would have been Newton’s law of gravitation applied to moral order.

Once the Gun Club founded, it can be easily imagined its effect upon the inventive genius of the Americans.  War-engines took colossal proportions, and projectiles launched beyond permitted distances cut inoffensive pedestrians to pieces.  All these inventions left the timid instruments of European artillery far behind them.  This may be estimated by the following figures:—­

Formerly, “in the good old times,” a thirty-six pounder, at a distance of three hundred feet, would cut up thirty-six horses, attacked in flank, and sixty-eight men.  The art was then in its infancy.  Projectiles have since made their way.  The Rodman gun that sent a projectile weighing half a ton a distance of seven miles could easily have cut up a hundred and fifty horses and three hundred men.  There was some talk at the Gun Club of making a solemn experiment with it.  But if the horses consented to play their part, the men unfortunately were wanting.

However that may be, the effect of these cannon was very deadly, and at each discharge the combatants fell like ears before a scythe.  After such projectiles what signified the famous ball which, at Coutras, in 1587, disabled twenty-five men; and the one which, at Zorndorff, in 1758, killed forty fantassins; and in 1742, Kesseldorf’s Austrian cannon, of which every shot levelled seventy enemies with the ground?  What was the astonishing firing at Jena or Austerlitz, which decided the fate of the battle?  During the Federal war much more wonderful things had been seen.  At the battle of Gettysburg, a conical projectile thrown by a rifle-barrel cut up a hundred and seventy-three Confederates, and at the passage of the Potomac a Rodman ball sent two hundred and fifteen Southerners into an evidently better world.  A formidable mortar must also be mentioned, invented by J.T.  Maston, a distinguished member and perpetual secretary of the Gun Club, the result of which was far more deadly, seeing that, at its trial shot, it killed three hundred and thirty-seven persons—­by bursting, it is true.

What can be added to these figures, so eloquent in themselves?  Nothing.  So the following calculation obtained by the statistician Pitcairn will be admitted without contestation:  by dividing the number of victims fallen under the projectiles by that of the members of the Gun Club, he found that each one of them had killed, on his own account, an average of two thousand three hundred and seventy-five men and a fraction.

By considering such a result it will be seen that the single preoccupation of this learned society was the destruction of humanity philanthropically, and the perfecting of firearms considered as instruments of civilisation.  It was a company of Exterminating Angels, at bottom the best fellows in the world.