Fantasy Football Challenge - Football Fanatics Library

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Popular Science Monthly

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rage than money spent in any other way. Not one per cent. of the amount devoted to these purposes, is, for the end aimed at, wasted.' It is said that the main cause of the war lay in the envy of German commerce by British rivals. This is assuredly not true. But if it were, let us look at the business side of it. Taking the net profits of over-seas trade as stated two years ago by the Hamburg-American Company, the strongest in the world, and estimating the rest, we have something like this: During the "Dry War" the net earnings of the German Mercantile fleet was about one third the cost of the navy supposed to protect it. It would take seventy years of trade, on the scale of the last year before the war, to repay Germany's expenses for a year of war. To make good all the losses of Europe would require more than one hundred years of the over-seas trading profits of all the world. War is therefore death to trade, as it is to every other agency of civilization. At the beginning of the war the value of stocks and bonds in circulation in Europe amounted to about $200,000,000,000. What is the present value of all these certificates of ownership? What is the present value of any particular industrial plant or commercial venture? A friend in London had inherited through his German wife a large aniline dye plant on the Rhine. He told me recently that he had not heard one word from it for six months. What will be its value when he hears from it? And what certainty has he as to its ownership? Is it true that this war is the outcome of commercial jealousy? Let us look at this for a moment. The two greatest shipping companies in the world before the war were the Hamburg-American Company and the Nord-Deutscher Lloyd of Bremen. These companies had grown strong because they deserved to grow. They had attended to their affairs both in shipment of freight and transportation of passengers with that minute attention to details which is so large an element in German success. The growth of these companies arose through American trade and especially through trade with Great Britain and the British possessions. Did they clamor for war--a war, whatever else might result, sure to cripple their trade for a generation. It is said that Ballin, of the Hamburg Company, unable to prevent Great Britain from rising to the defense of Belgium "went home broken-hearted." Did Ballin build the great Imperator, costing nine million--six million of it borrowed money--with a view of laying her off after a few trips for an indefinite period in Hamburg? Did the Nord-Deutscher Lloyd contemplate leaving the Vaterland and the George Washington to lie in Hoboken till they were sold for harbor dues? Nor was the jealousy on the other side. The growth of German commerce concerned mainly Great Britain. Presumably it was profitable on both sides, for all trade is barter. In any event, Great Britain has never raised a tariff wall against it, never protected her traders by a single differential duty. She has risen above the idea that by tariff exactions the foreigners can be made to pay the sages. As for envy of German commerce, who ever heard of an Englishman who envied anybody anything? Again, did the Cunard Company build her three great steamships, the Mauretania, the Lusitania, the Aquitania for the fate which has come to them? In 1914 I saw the great Aquitania, finest of all floating palaces, tied by the nose to the wharf at Liverpool, the most sheepish-looking steamship I ever saw anywhere. Out of her had been taken $1,250,000 worth of plate glass and plush velvet, elevators and lounging rooms, the requirements of the tender rich in their six days upon the sea. The whole ship was painted black, filled with coal--to be sent out to help the warships at sea. And for this humble service I am told she proved unfitted. No, commercial envy is not a reason, rivalry in business is not a reason, need of expansion is not a reason. These are excuses only, not causes of war. There is no money in war. There is no chance of highway robbery in the byways of history which can repay anything tangible of the expense of the expedition. The gray old strategists do not care for this. It is fair to them to say they are not sordid. They care no more for the financial exhaustion of a nation than for the slaughter of its young men. "An old soldier like me," said Napoleon, "does not care a tinker's damn for the death of a million men." Neither does he care for the collapse of a million industrial corporations. Of the many forms of business and financial relation among men, none is more important than those included under the name of insurance. Insurance is a form of mutual help. By its influence the effects of calamity are spread so widely that they cease to be felt as calamity. The fact of death can not be set aside, but through insurance it need not appear as economic disaster, only as personal loss. Its essential nature is that of social cooperation and it furnishes some of the most effective of bonds which knit society together. As insurance has become already an international function, its influence should be felt continuously on the side of peace. That it is so felt is the justification of our meeting together to-day, as underwriters of insurance and as workers for peace. The essence of insurance, as Professor Royce observes, is that 'it is a principle at once peace-making in its general tendency and business-like in its practicable special application.... As a result of insurance, men gradually find themselves involved in a social network of complicated but beneficent relations of which individuals are usually very imperfectly aware but by means of which modern society has been profoundly transformed.' For life insurance, in general, is not personally selfish in its motive. It is essentially altruistic, the effort of the benefit of some person beloved who is designated as the beneficiary. For the benefit of this surviving person, the efforts involved in the payment of premiums are put forth, and the insurance companies and their underwriters constitute the machinery by which this unification is given to society. To all the interests of insurance, the lawlessness of war is wholly adverse and destructive. Insurance involves mutual trust and trust thrives under security of person and property.

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