Written by Frederick Engels on January 21, 1858, and published unsigned in The New American Cyclopaedia, edited by George Ripley and Charles A. Dana (New York, D. Appleton and Co.), vol. IV (1859), p. 412. Text of the Cyclopaedia from the public-domain scans in the Internet Archive (newamericancycl10danagoog), read by OCR and corrected against the page images; collated paragraph by paragraph with the German version in Marx/Engels, Werke, vol. 14 (Berlin, 1961), p. 235, and found complete; authorship after the Werke. The last sentence (“Several improvements… July, 1858”), absent from the Werke, was probably added by the editors of the Cyclopaedia. Traducción al español
CARABINE, or Carbine, a short barrelled musket adapted to the use of cavalry. In order to admit of its being easily loaded on horseback, the barrel ought not to be more than 2 feet 6 inches long, unless it be breech-loading; and to be easily managed with one hand only, its weight must be less than that of an infantry musket. The bore, too, is in most services rather less than that of the infantry firearm. The carabine may have either a smooth or a rifled bore; in the first case, its effect will be considerably inferior to that of the common musket; in the second, it will exceed it in precision for moderate distances. In the British service, the cavalry carry smooth-bored carabines; in the Russian cavalry, the light horse all have rifled carabines, while of the cuirassiers ¼ have rifled, and the remaining smooth barrels to their carabines. The artillery, too, in some services (French and British especially), carry carabines; those of the British are on the principle of the new Enfield rifle. Carabine-firing was at one time the principal mode of cavalry fighting, but now it is principally used on outpost duty, and with cavalry skirmishing. In French military works, the expression carabine always means an infantry rifle, while for a cavalry carabine the word mousqueton is adopted. Several improvements in breech-loading carabines have recently been made in the United States, and submitted for trial to an ordnance board at West Point (July, 1858).