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| VIEW OF LIFE-SAVING STATION AND BATTLESHIP - A
visitor at the World's Fair might go aboard the structure illustrated
on this page before us, and receive all the impressions to be
conveyed on an actual steel-clad man-of-war. Many persons had seen
the thick armor-plates in Krupp's Building, in the Bethlehem exhibit
in the Transportation Building, and at the
Government Building, and
when they descended into the shot-laden hold of this museum of war,
they had a sensation of foundering, though they knew the ship was
built on the bottom of the lake, and could not be floated without
contravention of the treaty whereby we are to keep the great lakes
free of these beligerent machines. To inspect the apparatus of
patriotic murder as it was here exposed was a horrible privilege, for
it could be seen that the ingenuity and the needs and extremities of
human life still appertain to slaughter, and to a means of death so
skillful that the wars of the future must blanch even the faces of
their inventors. Here we stood by a machine gun that could be aimed
by orders through a telephone from the conning tower aloft, where the
captain stands. A few turns of the crank would destroy a line of
yawls at a distance of three miles. The great guns would move around
by the turning of a wheel, but there is always danger that their
recoil will destroy the upper works. Many of the cannons were real.
The sinking of the Victoria made this strange exhibit especially
instructive. |
