Fantasy Football Challenge - Football Fanatics Library

Fantasy Football Challenge - Library of Books for Football Fanatics

Fantasy Football Challenge presents
Popular Science Monthly

66 of 119

world must pay the cost of it. As Benjamin Franklin observed: 'War is not paid for in war time) the bill comes later.' And what a bill! Yves Guyot, the French economist, estimates that the first six months of war cost western Europe in cash $5,400,000,000, to which should be added further destruction estimated at $11,600,000,000, making a total of $17,000,000,000. The entire amount of coin in the world is less than $12,000,000,000. Edgar Crammond, secretary of the Liverpool Stock Exchange, another high authority, estimates the cash cost of a year of war, to August 1, 1915, at $17,000,000,000, while other losses will mount up to make a grand total of $46,000,000,000. Mr. Crammond estimates that the cost to Great Britain for a year of war will reach $3,500,000,000. This sum is about equivalent to the accumulated war debt of Great Britain for a hundred years before the war. The war debt of Germany (including Prussia) is now about the same. No one can have any conception of what $46,000,000,000 may be. It is four times all the gold and silver in the world. It represents, it is stated, about 100,000 tons of gold, and would probably outweigh the Washington monument. We have no data as to what monuments weigh, but we may try a few other calculations. If this sum were measured out in $20 gold pieces and they were placed side by side on the railway track, on each rail, they would line with gold every line from New York to the Pacific Ocean, and there would be enough left to cover each rail of the Siberian railway from Vladivostock to Petrograd. There would still be enough left to rehabilitate Belgium and to buy the whole of Turkey, at her own valuation, wiping her finally from the map. Or we may figure in some other fashion. The average working man in America earns $518 per year. It would take ninety million years' work to pay the cost of the war; or ninety million American laborers might pay it off in one year, if all their living expenses were paid. The working men of Europe receive from half to a third the wages in America. They are the ones who have this bill to pay. The cost of a year of the great war is a little greater than the estimated value of all the property of the United States west of Chicago. It is nearly equal to the total value of all the property in Germany ($48,000,000,000) as figured in 1906. The whole Russian Empire ($35,000,000,000) could have been bought for a less sum before the war began. It could be had on a cash sale for half that now. It would have paid for all the property in Italy ($13,000,000,000); Japan ($10,000,000,000); Holland ($5,000,000,000); Belgium ($7,000,000,000); Spain ($6,000,000,000) and Portugal ($2,500,000,000). It is three times the entire yearly earnings in wages and salaries of the people of the United States ($15,500,000,000). We could go on indefinitely with this, playing with figures which nobody can understand, for the greatest fortune ever accumulated by man, in whatever fashion, would not pay for three days of this war. The cost of this war would pay the national debts of all the nations in the world at the time the war broke out, and this aggregate sum of $45,000,000,000 for the world was all accumulated in the criminal stupidity of the wars of the nineteenth century. If all the farms, farming lands, and factories of the United States were wiped out of existence, the cost of this war would more than replace them. If all the personal and real property of half our nation were destroyed, or if an earthquake of incredible dimensions should shake down every house from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the waste would be less than that involved in this war. And an elemental catastrophe leaves behind it no costly legacy of hate; even the financial troubles are not ended with the treaty of peace. The credit of Europe is gone for one does not know how long. Before the war, it is said, there were $200,000,000,000 in bonds and stocks in circulation in Europe. Much of this has been sold for whatever it would bring. Some of the rest is worth its face value Some of it is worth nothing. In the final adjustment who can know whether he is a banker or a beggar? The American Ambassador was quite within bounds when he said: "There isn't so much money in the world; you can't even think it!" Or we may calculate (with Dr. Edward T. Devine) in a totally different way. The cost of this war would have covered every moral social, economic and sanitary reform ever asked for in the civilized world, in so far as money properly expended can compass such results. It could eliminate infectious disease, feeble-mindedness, the slums and the centers of vice. It could provide adequate housing, continuity of labor, insurance against accident; in other words it could abolish almost every kind of suffering due to outside influences and not inherent in the character of the person concerned. A Russian writer, quoted by Dr. John H. Finley, puts this idea in a different form: 'Our most awful enemies, the elements and germs and insect destroyers, attack us every minute without cease, yet we murder one another as if we were out of our senses. Death is ever on the watch for us, and we think of nothing but to snatch a few patches of land! About 5,000,000,000 days of work go every year to the displacement of boundary lines. Think of what humanity could obtain if that prodigious effort were devoted to fighting our real enemies, the noxious species and our hostile environment. We should conquer them in a few years. The entire globe would turn into a model farm. Every plant would grow for our use. The savage animals would disappear, and the infinitely tiny animals would be reduced to impotence by hygiene and cleanliness. The earth would be conducted according to our convenience. In short, the day men realize who their worst enemies are, they will form an alliance against them, they will cease to murder one another like wild beasts from sheer folly. Then they will be the true rulers of the planet, the lords of creation.' Says Robert L. Duffus: 'Money spent in warfare is not like spending money in other industries. It will bring far more beastliness, far more injustice, far more tyranny, far more danger to all that is honorable, generous and noble in the world, far more grief and

66 of 119 pages. Go to page:

Go to this Book's Directory Page