The amount of money expended for direct war purposes alone since August
1, 1914, is equal to three times the par value capitalization of all
the American railroads. It represents fifty times the net national debt
of the United States: eighteen times the amount of money in actual
circulation in this country: and eleven times the total deposits in all
our savings banks. With it you could build 146 Panama Canals or pay for
the Napoleonic, Crimean, Russo-Japanese, South African and American
Civil Wars and still have a surplus of $34,000,000,000 left. Such is the
New and High Cost of War!
The price of glory is being constantly advanced. The expenditures for
the first year of the war were $17,500,000,000: for the second they had
increased to $28,000,000,000: the estimate for the third year, to end
August 1, 1917, at the present rate of spending is about
$33,000,000,000. This means that by the time the next harvest moon
shines (and no man in Europe to-day doubts that it will gleam on
carnage), the war will have represented a sacrifice for military
purposes alone of $78,500,000,000.
Taking the daily cost of the war you find that England is $25,000,000
poorer for every twenty-four hours that pass: that France must check
out $20,000,000: Russia $16,000,000: Italy $5,000,000. Little Roumania
is cutting her war expenditure teeth at the rate of $1,000,000 per diem.
Cross the frontier (for war expense is no respecter of cause or creed),
and Germany is "discovered," as they say in play-books, spending
$17,500,000 every day: Austria, Turkey and Bulgaria, $11,000,000.
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