empires ought to be worth at least one page somewhere in the annals of the nation it has created and defended. But thus far that page has been begrudged. Let us write one. When Brought to Pennsylvania. "The art of making rifles was brought to this country in the year 1721, when a small colony of Swiss

location as a frontier set- tlement, every settler, as a rule, was provided with firearms of some de- scription, rifles or smooth-bores, be- cause a gun was almost as much a ne- cessity as the axe and the plow. lt is more likely that these earliest weapons came with the earliest pio- neers than that they

fifteen minutes or more. And the rifles of 1700 were in the same stage of undevelopment as they had been two centuries earlier." 1 This record is supplemented by another writer who says : "the development of firearms during the centuries was influenced by national characteristics, use and •local