It has been said that the history of warfare is the history of the struggle among weapons, and that each change in tactics and even in strategy has come from scientific change affecting weapons. In the century we have seen the change from the smooth-bore to the rifle and from the ordinary to the repeating rifle. We have seen the modifications of artillery, which are beginning to give an application of the quick-firing principle to field artillery, and the use of high explosive shells, likely to affect by their explosion even those who are near the bursting shell and who are not struck by its fragments. Smokeless powder has altered the look of battles and has reduced their noise. It provides excuse for the incompetent. It would be easy, however, to exaggerate the importance of these changes as regards tactics, and still more with regard to strategy, while with tactics we are not here concerned. The great continental military nations have hitherto not allowed themselves to be much affected by the changes in the weapons, and many of the modern fads which are adopted in small armies are condemned by the leaders of these great forces. The British machine guns, for example, like British mounted infantry, are generally regarded on the continent as a fancy of our own. All nations have their military fads, except, perhaps, the severely practical Germans. Russia has its dragoon organization, from which it is receding; America has her dynamite gun; the French have their submarine torpedo-boats. Our machine guns are not thought much more of by most Prussians than the steam-gun of 1844, ridiculed by Dickens in _Martin Chuzzlewit_. If great change was to have been made in the art of war by modern weapons, one would have thought that the first things to disappear would be all vestige of protective armor and the use of cavalry in the field. Yet protective armor has been recently restored to as large a proportion of many armies as used it in the wars of the beginning of the century, and the use of cavalry in the field is defended as still possible by all the highest authorities on the continent. My own opinion on such matters is that of a layman and should be worthless, but it agrees with that of several distinguished military writers. I confess that I doubt whether in future wars between good armies, such as those of France and Germany, it will be possible to employ cavalry on the field of battle, and I go so far as to think that the direct offensive, still believed in by the Prussians, will be found to have become too costly to be possible. Our South African experience is not, however, regarded by continental authorities as conclusive.