Thus came its final metamorphosis to the buzzing little
torment that has been at intervals for the last twenty years flying
over all the continents and perplexing the nations.
It was not till 1852 that the Enfield rifle was settled on as the
standard weapon of the British army. Machinery and machinists were
imported for its fabrication from the United States, the appliances
of our government armories being copied, and Colonel Bruton, of the
Harper's Ferry Works, employed to set them going. Prior to that time
all firearms of public or private manufacture, in England, had been
made by hand, the interchangeability of all the parts of any given
number of guns being an end accomplished in this country alone. The
advantage of having every corresponding detail of each piece a fac
simile of the same part in all the firelocks of an army must have been
perceived from the time when such weapons were first invented;
and nothing but the most inveterate conservatism, or the steadiest
opposition of that stamp which mobbed threshing-machines and the
spinning-jenny, could have so long staved off its practical adoption.
Once awakened, however, England became, as she usually does, active,
innovating and experimental enough. Rifled cannon, breech-loaders and
armored ships--all the legitimate offspring of the Venetian barrel
and its American employment--have kept her ever since in a ferment of
boards, commissions and target-firing.
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