The last Gahendra rifle that I will restore has arrived.  I’ve restored five, and have kept one – this will provide me a second.  This time I purchased one of IMA’s last grade 2 untouched rifles – and I think I’ll only have to build one screw to complete the restoration.

Twenty years ago, the Gahendra was considered to be the rarest of the Martini rifles . . . which makes sense because it isn’t really a Martini.  Actually, it’s a modification of the Peabody rifle (patented in the US in 1862) The Peabody Military Rifle – Shooting Times 

“ The name Henry O. Peabody ought to be well known by all fans of military firearms–but it isn’t. As has been the case with so many inventive geniuses over the ages, Peabody’s name and work have been overshadowed by others who took what he designed, changed it, and attached their own monikers to it. As with writers/artists, the lot of the inventor/designer is not always an easy one.

In 1862 Peabody patented a breech-loading rifle but was unable to perfect it in time to play a major role in the American Civil War (1860-1865). His basic design was based upon a pivoting breechblock, the front of which pivoted down on a transverse pin fixed through both the upper rear of the breechblock and the upper rear of the box-like receiver. As the breechblock was lowered, it exposed the barrel chamber and permitted the insertion of a cartridge. The rifle was fired by means of a musket-style outside hammer whose lockwork was inletted into the buttstock behind the receiver.”

The next step was the Wesley-Richards alteration – by 1869, this established British gunmaker had taken the Peabody design, adapted it to an internal hammer, then wound up with a second-place finish to the Martini-Henry design.  If you want to see the Martrini in action, get online and check out the movie Zulu.  Somehow it has made it into the public domain, and I think the real lead belongs to the Martini rifle.

Gahendra  was the brother of Nepal’s Prime Minister, and a bit of a scientist and mechanical engineer.  When the Brits wouldn’t supply the modern Martini to the Gurkhas, he went on tour to find designs that could be built with the technology available in Katmandu.  He succeeded – with what became the Gahendra rifle, and with the Biri gun – a mechanical machine gun – a great improvement on the Gatling – designed by American William Gardner in 1874.  I still wake up after dreams of building a bolt-together aluminum receiver that would accept an extended 10-22 magazine and let folks build a single-barrel version of the Gardner at home.

Part – probably a large part – of my enjoying restoring the Gahendra rifles is due to the Nepali graduate students I worked among.  I heard of the evils of the Rani dynasty, and had folks who could translate the numbers and words stamped on the actions.  This last Gahendra was photographed on the IMA page, and now the words “Out of Stock” grace the photograph.  The damage seems less than the photograph suggested.

Some knock the Gahendra because the parts don’t interchange – the arsenal where they were produced had skilled craftsmen at work, and the lack of interchangeable parts doesn’t translate to poor quality.  The thing is, each was made individually, and the arsenal produced only 4 rifles per day over a dozen years.  Even now, they are rare – at the most, ten or twelve thousand were made, while there were over a half-million Martini rifles made.  Some have knocked the barrel as being basically Damascus . . . but I’ll be using it with a Colt 45 cartridge inside a stainless steel adapter.  While it does cut down the pressure when I fire it, it is also a lot more affordable than buying the 577/450 cartridges.

Plato thought that political leadership should be the place for the best and the brightest.  Thomas Jefferson was the second US Vice-President . . . but it was a different job back then.  The candidate with the most votes got the presidency, the runner-up became vice-president.  Obviously, they didn’t run on the same platform, or as members of the same party. 

The article at americanacorner does a nice job of describing the politicization of American politics that came after 8 years of George Washington:

“For the most part, the election split along geographic lines with Adams and the Federalists capturing the north and Jefferson’s Republicans the southern states plus Pennsylvania. The final tally of electoral votes was 71 for Adams and 68 for Jefferson.

This election was held under the original rules of the Constitution in which the top vote getter (Adams) was declared President and the second highest (Jefferson) was named Vice President. Naturally, having the President and Vice President from opposing political parties was a recipe for trouble.

Although this problem was fixed in 1805 with the passage of the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, it would prove to be a very real problem for the newly elected President, as Vice President Jefferson worked to undermine the Adams’ administration for the next four years.

Jefferson went so far as to hire newspaper editors to run anti-administration articles, and he met secretly with French officials to keep them informed of decisions made by Adams and the federal government. Not exactly a devoted subordinate.

The Federalist party tended to be pro-British and favor a strong central government. They wanted a standing army and centralized control of the economy. Conversely, Jefferson’s Republicans were fanatically pro-French despite the bloody French Revolution, and they favored strong states’ rights. It was like mixing oil and water.”

The election of 1800 came along, and Jefferson became the third US President.  This was the election where the electoral college came up with a tie vote, so the election was decided by the House of Representatives – and the Brittanica United States presidential election of 1800 | Candidates, Results, & Facts | Britannica covers this long-ago decision:

“The 1800 election was a rematch between Adams and Jefferson, and to forestall the recurrence of the same situation from the 1796 election, the parties sought to ensure that all their electors were united. On the Federalist side Adams ran with Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, while Jefferson’s running mate was Aaron Burr.

As in the previous elections, there was no popular vote. Instead, the state legislatures appointed electors, and the Democratic-Republicans swept most of the South, including all the electors from Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, while Adams ran strong in the northeast, capturing all the electoral votes from Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont. With Burr, a New Yorker, on the ticket, Jefferson won that state, and the electors from the remaining states (Maryland, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania) split their votes. The Federalists, realizing the potential for a tie, arranged for one of their electors, from Rhode Island, to cast a ballot for John Jay. All of the Democratic-Republican electors, however, cast their ballots for Jefferson and Burr, and since electors could not indicate a presidential or vice presidential choice, the result was a tie.

The House of Representatives chooses

Under the existing rules, a tie was to be decided by the lame-duck Federalist-controlled House of Representatives, with each of the 16 states casting a single vote. Almost all the Federalists wanted to coalesce behind Burr rather than elect their political enemy Jefferson, but Alexander Hamilton, a Federalist and longtime enemy of Burr’s, tried to engineer support for Jefferson. Still, Burr maintained that he would not challenge Jefferson—an assertion that Jefferson did not wholly accept.

Voting in the House of Representatives began on Feb. 11, 1801, and on the first ballot Jefferson was the choice of eight states, while Burr was supported by six (all with a Federalist majority among their congressional representatives), and two were split. After more than 30 more ballots held over the next several days, the results were the same. Finally, after 36 ballots and with Federalists in Maryland and Vermont abstaining, giving those states to Jefferson, Jefferson was elected president (with Burr as vice president) on February 17 by a majority of 10 states to 4 (Delaware and South Carolina cast blank votes). The election was a catalyst for the adoption of the Twelfth Amendment (1804), under which electors would cast separate ballots for president and vice president.”

The tie wasn’t between Adams and Jefferson – it was between Burr, the vice-presidential candidate, and Jefferson.  That twelfth amendment seems like a pretty good idea when you think of the possibility of having President Trump and Vice-President Hillary, or President Biden and Vice-President Trump.  Still, the record shows that intense political feelings and election chicanery has been with us for a long time . . . and that the best and brightest of the founding fathers still had some serious and hostile disagreements.

It’s been most of my adult lifetime since I first encountered the writings of Albert J. Nock. Back in 1976, his work was mentioned in F. Paul Wilson’s SciFi book An Enemy of the State.  I have an idea that it is a lot easier to beat the state in Science Fiction than in the world I occupy.  This week I stumbled across a reference to the Nockian Society ( The Nockian Society | Albert Jay Nock ) and realized that the old guy’s writings have been online for a dozen years, that it’s Jay not J., and that the society has no meetings, no dues and no officers.  Organizationally, it sounds like a good fit for Trego.

The first book of Nock’s that I encountered was his 1935 work Our Enemy the State.  At a time when folks had a huge selection of ideologies to select between, Nock described political systems in their ultimate simplicity:

“Besides the idea that an individual person could be superfluous, and along with many other original notions, Nock also contributed three more fundamental ideas to American — indeed, worldwide — social and political thought:

• He defined the State as a monster distinguishable from government.
• He made a clear distinction between education and job training.
• He defined Isaiah’s job, giving the thinking person a reprieve from the burden of educating the world.”

Probably the most current application of Nock’s thought can be shown by this quotation on the society page – all taken from Nock’s writings, and showing the difference between economic means and political means.  To Nock, political means breaks down to uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others:

“There are two methods or means, and only two, whereby man’s needs and desires can be satisfied.  One is the production and exchange of wealth; this is the economic means.  The other is the uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others; this is the political means.

The State, then, whether primitive, feudal or merchant, is the organization of the political means.  Now, since man tends always to satisfy his needs and desires with the least possible exertion, he will employ the political means whenever he can — exclusively, if possible; otherwise, in association with the economic means.  He will, at the present time, that is, have recourse to the State’s modern apparatus of tariffs, concessions, rent monopoly, and the like.

Wherever economic exploitation has been for any reason either impractical or unprofitable, the State has never come into existence; government has existed, but the State, never.

Based on the idea of natural rights, government secures those rights to the individual by strictly negative intervention, making justice costless and easy of access; and beyond that it does not go.  The State, on the other hand, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely antisocial.  It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing.

---

“…justice costly and difficult of access.”  A court run by a benevolent government would deal with laws in plain text and would not need lawyers to persuade the court what mysteries are hidden in the law, which, in America and under the State, is not law but regulations promulgated by the un-elected fourth branch of government, the regulatory branch, which branch finds no support in the Constitution.  -DAW-

---

[This is] the great truth which apparently must forever remain unlearned, that if a regime of complete economic freedom be established, social and political freedom will follow automatically; and until it is established neither social nor political freedom can exist.  Here one comes in sight of the reason why the State will never tolerate the establishment of economic freedom.  In a spirit of sheer conscious fraud, the State will at any time offer its people “four freedoms,” or six, or any number; but it will never let them have economic freedom.  If it did, it would be signing its death warrant, for as Lenin pointed out, “it is nonsense to make any pretense of reconciling the State and liberty.”  Our economic system being what it is, and the State being what it is, all the mass of verbiage about “the free peoples” and “the free democracies” is merely so much obscene buffoonery.

---

All of the foregoing is taken chiefly from Our Enemy the State, with pieces from Memoirs of a Superfluous Man and Nock’s letters.”

“The popularity – possibly even the acceptability – of Nock’s writing has never approached mainstream, or been included in the platforms of our political ideologies.  Perhaps this is explained by including another description, not written by Nock:

The Reverend Edmund A. Opitz wrote this in a 1996 review of Robert M. Thornton’s book, The Disadvantages of Being Educated:

Our Enemy, the State appeared in 1935 and has been the subject of some controversy ever since concerning the distinction Nock makes between Government and The State; essentially it is the same distinction made by Bastiat between The Law, whose purpose is justice between persons, and The Law perverted to advantage some at the expense of others.  This arrangement is clear in the case of the Norman Conquest of England.  The Normans parceled out the land — 20 percent to the king, 25 percent to The Church, and the rest to 170 Norman noblemen.  Such a regime is The State, and may have been the kind of thing that Ludwig von Mises had in mind when he pointed out that All ownership derives from occupation and violence.  (Socialism, p. 32 and Human Action, p. 679) Nock’s words clarify the issue:… when society deprives The State of the power to make positive interventions on the individual — power to exercise positive coercion on him in his economic and social life — then at once the State goes out of existence, and what remains is government… government as contemplated by Mr. Jefferson in the Declaration, by Paine, by Franklin, and the 18th century British Whigs and Liberals.  That’s all.  But, as Nock pointed out in another context, most people do not want a government that will let them alone; they want a government they can use to their own advantage, and at the expense of everyone else, i.e., they want The State.”

I suppose it’s only fair that as an old retired guy I fill out the Census of Agriculture.  For at least 25 years I’ve had times when I was paid to get information out of the Ag Census – so a little bit of payback seems just. 

The first time I got the message “Everyone who receives a census is required by law to respond” it was due to fouled up records and poor penmanship – when I moved back to Montana from Colorado, one of the requirements of crossing state lines with cats was a vet certificate of health.  Transferring data back then kind of counted on data entry perfection – my two cats were entered into the early computer as two calves, and my invitation to the Census of Agriculture was set in motion.  Then it was all pen and paper entries, and it wasn’t easy to figure out why I had the invitation where my response was required by law.

This time it was easier – go to the USDA website and see what they had on me.  It still had the South Dakota phone number – and that reminded me that with 3 acres there, I had been listed as a livestock producer when I purchased 200 perch for the pond.  I think I had to respond once for the cats in the eighties, and another time this century for fish.  This time it was real – I filled out entries confirming that I had raised and sold a crop of hay, and as I continued through the form, I reported the firewood sales too.  The only disheartening thing was finding out that the Census of Agriculture includes property taxes as an expense . . . and when that happens, I’m not reporting a profitable operation.  Well, I’ve never been much of a businessman, and I do understand that when you live in a county that the Economic Research Service classifies as Recreation Dependent and Retirement Destination, you’re probably assessed differently than in a county where you’re Agriculture Dependent.  This year I guess I’m a hobby farmer.

I don’t use the Census of Agriculture so much, now that I actually meet the definition of having a farm – but it’s online at https://www.nass.usda.gov/AgCensus/