WHAT is the strange magic of the Sword? None, young or old, can behold a Sword without a stir of interest. The very word is a challenge to the attention. In even the most prosaic mind it awakens thoughts of epic days of the past and tales of high adventure.

That interest is wholly natural and the thinker knows whence and why it comes.

For the Sword and its history are woven into the very fabric of our civilization. Its form and size, its use and its misuse are an index of racial culture, and the commanding place it has assumed in art and symbolism has imbedded it into the mental heritage of all humanity.

It was the Sword that first freed man from the domination of physical superiority, and it was the school evolved from the Sword that made brain the master of brawn in individual combat. Through the Sword and its school, physical advantages were equalized, and men reduced to one size. Thus the Sword became, not what most weapons are, a mere extension of man’s arm, but it became in actuality, an extension of his mind.

And personal combat became transferred from the plane of physical forces into the arena of minds in conflict. Slowly the school of fencing was evolved, and all of it contributed by men who were the thinking fighters of their time. Its influence survives and governs human thought today. When you or I, or any man with fighting instinct finds himself confronted by a hostile, opposing