Breech-loading guns of all kinds, the percussion cap, cartridges for small-arms, fixed ammunition for quick-firing guns, the breech mechanism for all guns, the built-up gun, the great improvements in steel manufacture, the revolving turret and the _Monitor_ type of fighting-ship, the steam turbine, the internal-combustion engine, all of the great inventions in smokeless powders and high explosives, and their adaptability to use in ordnance, the submarine torpedo-boat, the self-propelled torpedo, the aëroplane and the dirigible, and any number of other inventions indispensable to modern warfare, have been the invention of civilians. Of course, army and navy officers have invented a great many important things themselves, and have rendered great service in the development of civilian inventions. But it must be remembered that army and navy officers constitute but a very small part of the population. Even were army and navy men ten times more proficient in the invention of war-materials than civilian inventors, the number and value of civilian naval and military inventions would preponderate enormously over those of government officers. We have been assured all along by the peace sophists that, if war should come, the great American genius would rise to the occasion and spring to our rescue, with all manner of destructive contrivances, capable of annihilating armies and sweeping fleets of fighting-ships off the seas. If the beautiful nationalization plan of the peace sophists, however, were to be carried out, the great American genius would get no opportunity to fructify the prophesied militant cataclysmic ogerism to the discomfiture of our enemies. No other government has nationalized the manufacture of armaments and war-materials to the exclusion of private manufacturers. On the contrary, other governments strongly encourage private manufacture, for they realize the vast importance of drawing upon the inventive genius of the whole people, and of enlisting private energy, private enterprise, and private capital in government work. The French government for more than a hundred years has made all its own gunpowder, but its chief gun-works are private enterprises. Possibly, if the French smokeless powder had been perfected by private enterprise to meet government requirements, those requirements would have been more exacting with private manufacturers than with government manufacturers, and the battleships _Jéna_ and _La Liberté_ would not have been blown up by the spontaneous combustion of bad gunpowder. If this government were to nationalize the manufacture of its war-materials, we know, by what has been done in the past, through private enterprise and private inventive genius, that the government would suffer enormously.