As long ago as 1861 a terrific engagement occurred in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. It lasted forty hours, and was fought with hundreds of the biggest and best guns of the period. Not a man was killed nor wounded. In the spring of 1862, below New Orleans, Porter’s mortar boats bombarded Fort Jackson for nearly five days and nights, throwing about 16,800 shells, mostly thirteen inches in diameter. “Nearly every shell,” says the commandant of the fort, “lodged inside the works.” Even in those days, it will be observed, there were “arms of precision”; and an exploding 13-inch shell is still highly esteemed and respected. As nearly as I can learn, the slaughter amounted to two men. A year later Admiral Dupont attacked Fort Sumter, then in the hands of the Confederates, with the _New Ironsides_, the double-turret monitor _Keokuk_, and seven single-turret monitors. The big guns of the fort were too much for him. One of his vessels was struck 90 times, and afterward sank. Another was struck 53 times; another, 35 times; another, 14; another, 47; another, 20; another, 47; another, 95; another, 36, and disabled. But they threw 151 shots from their own “destructive” weapons, and these, being “arms of precision,” killed a whole man by cutting down a flag-staff, which fell upon him. The total number of shots fired by the enemy was 2,209, and more than two men were killed by them I am unable to find any account of it. But it was a splendid battle, as every Quaker will allow! In the stubbornest land engagements of our great rebellion, and of the later and more scientific Franco-German and Turko-Russian wars, the proportionate mortality was not nearly so great as in those where “Greek met Greek” hand to hand, or where the Roman with his short sword, the most destructive weapon ever invented, played at give and take with the naked barbarian or the Roman of another political faith. True, we must make some allowance for exaggeration in the accounts of these ancient affairs, not forgetting Niebuhr’s assurance that Roman history is nine parts lying. But as European and American history run it pretty hard in respect of that, something, too, may be allowed in accounts of modern battles—particularly where the historian foots up the losses of the side which had not the military advantage of his sympathies.