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Updated: May 20, 2025
Heretofore the concrete which was available for this purpose required at least a fortnight of exposure before it was sufficiently firm and hardened; but when Fraulein Bertha Krupp's engineers escorted the Fraulein's newest and most impressive steel masterpiece to the war, they brought along with them the ingredients for a new kind of concrete; and those who claim to have been present on the occasion declare that within forty-eight hours after they had mixed and molded it, it was ready to bear the weight of the guns and withstand the shock of their recoil.
The commerce of the island is a stronger factor in the problem than mere politics; it is the active agent of civilization all over the world. It is not cannon, but ships; not gunpowder, but peaceful freights, which settle the great questions of mercantile communities. Krupp's hundred-ton guns will not control the fate of Cuba, but sugar will.
To give some instances, I will mention that among the workmen at Krupp's factory at Essen the daily earnings have increased from 1879-1906 by 77 per cent., the pay per hour for masons from 1885-1905 by 64 per cent., and the annual earnings in the Dortmund district of the chief mining office from 1886 to 1907 by 121 per cent.
But they are like giants, are rendered top-heavy by their own weight, and are thus easily capsized, and the loss of an ironclad battleship, apart from the effect it might have upon our chances in the war, entails the loss of more than a million pounds. The cruisers, again, I would not without urgent necessity expose to the steel projectiles of a Krupp's coast battery.
After the field batteries came the horse artillery and after the horse artillery the pom-poms each drawn by a pair of sturdy draught horses driven with web reins by a soldier sitting on the limber and after the pom-poms an interminable line of machine- guns, until one wondered where Krupp's found the time and the steel to make them all.
It was not until a week afterward that the news leaked out that Herr Heinzelle, one of Krupp's best designers, had been "killed on the Western Front," and that information put the finishing touch to Tam's joy. "But," asked the brigadier-general to whose attention Tam's act of genius had been brought, "how did your man know it was the gun?"
It is the penalty and the safeguard of genius that it computes itself by troy weight in a world that measures by vulgar hundredweights. "Once in a way the great man would be seized with a desire to watch the effect of his master-efforts, just as the guiding brain of Krupp's might wish at a supreme moment to intrude into the firing line of an artillery duel. And such an occasion was the present.
All the Turkish, almost all the Russian and the greater part of the German warships are built in England. Armour plate of the best type is made almost exclusively in Germany. Of the three iron foundries which are alone in the position to turn out the heaviest artillery, two of them, Woolwich and Elswick, are in England, the third Krupp's is in Germany.
Holland was in February 1911 compelled to buy twenty-four inferior big guns from Krupp, without contract or competition, for the defence of her Javanese possessions, which no one thinks of attacking. Do you suppose that Krupp's Company regards war as disadvantageous, or circulates Norman Angell's book for a new gospel? "What plunder!" cried Blücher, looking over London from St. Paul's.
We now have openly the policy of force revealed to us. £250,000 is to be spent upon the completing of a fort at Pretoria, £100,000 is to be spend upon a fort to terrorize the inhabitants of Johannesburg, large orders are sent to Krupp's for big guns, Maxims have been ordered, and we are even told that German officers are coming out to drill the burghers.
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