tradesman nor _naïf_ "booby" who did not bother his head day and night
with calculations about impossible trajectory engines.

Now when an American has an idea he seeks another American to share it.
If they are three, they elect a president and two secretaries. Given
four, they elect a clerk, and a company is established. Five convoke a
general meeting, and the club is formed. It thus happened at Baltimore.
The first man who invented a new cannon took into partnership the first
man who cast it and the first man that bored it. Such was the nucleus of
the Gun Club. One month after its formation it numbered eighteen hundred
and thirty-three effective members, and thirty thousand five hundred and
seventy-five corresponding members.

One condition was imposed as a _sine quâ non_ upon every one who wished
to become a member--that of having invented, or at least perfected, a
cannon; or, in default of a cannon, a firearm of some sort. But, to tell
the truth, mere inventors of fifteen-barrelled rifles, revolvers, or
sword-pistols did not enjoy much consideration. Artillerymen were always
preferred to them in every circumstance.

"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