Pine Bluff daily graphic., 1913-09-07
WAR WITH MEXICO
 IS INEVITABLE ::
 Official Washington Sure Conflict With Republic is
 Bound to Come. IS THE LATEST RESORT New Rapid Fire Gun That Will Be Most Effective Adopted By the Government.
IS THE LATEST RESORT

servant persons in Washington is an apparently well-founded belief that war between the United States and Mexico is inevitable These persons believe that diplomacy, with polite notes and honey-coated words, may delay armed conflict, probably for years, but that eventually war will come.
 President Wilson has made known 1 that he regards war only as last and desperate resort. Secretary of State Bryan apparently alone has no fear that war will finally result. Congress, as a whole, seems willing to trust
 President Wilson and Secretary Bry- an.
 But thinking persons in Washing ton, persons endowed with a goodly share of conservatism. regard war as
 inevitable and point out numerous in- cidents of recent occurrence as signi- ficant of the fact that the administra- 1 tion, while openly regarding war as most unlikely, is secretly preparing
 for battle with Mexico.
 One of these recent incidents, which passed almost unnoticed by the public and which was commonly regarded as in no way indicative that Uncle Sam
 is quietly putting his army and navy
 in readiness for quick move, was
 the adoption by the government of a new rapid-fire machine gun, which is regarded by some experts as the most
 deadly weapon yet invented.
 It was noted that this new gun is of
 adaptable in war such as this na-
 tion would wage with it's southern
 neighbor These observers even say
 that if Uncle Sam had ordered a wea-
 pon peculiarly designed for use in
 Mexico, the rapid fire gun just adopt
 ed would have filled the order per
 fectly.
 As an instrument for killing men,
 the new gun attains a degree of pro-
 ficiency which surpasses all man.
 killing weapons now in use, accord
 ing to fire arm experts. It is regard
 ed as the last word in small arms and the destruction of which it is cap
 able, when properly handled, is so
 great as to be astounding to the lay
 man, unversed in the fine points of the
 latest weapons of war.
 It is estimated that one soldier : equipped with this new gun, is worth : 25O soldiers equipped with the style of gun which was used by our army in the war with Spain. The new gun weighs only thirty pounds and easily can be carried by one man, even on a long and hard march. It has the gen. . eral outlines of the ordinary army rifle and can be brought into action almost as quickly.
 The chief advantage of the gun is that it fires thirty ball cartridges in |
 in the brief space of one minute, the soldier operating the gun could fire nearly 600 bullets at an enemy. A com pany of soldiers equipped with guns could fire nearly 100000 bullets in an hour The strength of an army equipped with the new gun can hard ly be estimated.
 Experts say that one man. in an ad- vantageous position, could wreak as much havoc among an advancing body of men as five companies of men in the same advantageous position armed with the old style rifle. One small army expert says that if Custer and his men had been armed with , weapons such as the new rapid-fire gun, they could have eXterminated the Indians by whom they were massa- cred
 The new gun is fed by clips ol
 cartridges. In each clip, or string of cartridges, are thirty cartridges and those clips can be fed into the gun so rapidly that bullets are leaving the barrel almost continuously. If 600 cartridges as fired, or in other words. if the gun is used continually for one minute, the gun barrel be- comes so hot from the friction that
 new barrel has to be substituted. TAe designer of the weapon realiz- ed that the necessity of changing barrels every minute while the gun was in use probably was the weakest feature of the death-dealing device and this weakness, if it could be properly so called, was overcome to
 a certain extent by designing a barrel
 so that it can be removed and new
 barrell substituted in the brief space of twelve seconds.