GREAT GUNS | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 16, 1878

GREAT GUNS.

It seems that a mania like a flood is spreading over the world, exciting men to invent and produce all kinds of implements of destruction and weapons of slaughter. Human inventive genius has been strained for the last few years to produce cannon that could carry heavier shot, and to a greater distance, with greater destructive force, than any now in use. Italy seems now to be preparing the most wonderful piece of ordnance of which history gives any account. The Baltimore Sun gives the following statement:—

“The Italian government owns two of the largest ironclads afloat,—the Duilio and the Dandolo,—and contemplates the construction of another, with a thickness of armor never before attempted. In the meantime, the minister of war is experimenting with a gun fifty feet long. It almost seems as though such a weapon should have a new name, but at present this enormous mass of iron and steel is simply called a gun. This monster gun will require, as a charge, nine hundred and fifty pounds of powder, and the projectile will weigh about six thousand pounds. It is calculated that the gun will throw its projectile twelve miles. The distance seems wonderful, but is not impossible. The same government already has one gun weighing a hundred tons, which throws a bolt weighing twenty-five hundred pounds nine measured miles. With even the Whitworth guns carried by the Inflexible, and the Palliser projectiles, a weak nation may be battered in pieces all along the coast line, where the most important cities are generally situated. Stone fortresses are no protection at all, and engineers are going back to earth works.”

Men talk about the wonderful instrumentalities now made ready to convert and

save the world, but it is certain that the very nations upon whom they depend to accomplish this work of salvation have, for the last twenty-five years, expended ten dollars for the purpose of destroying men where they have expended one to evangelize them. Preparations to destroy men are increasing much faster than those to save them.—World’s Crisis.