Thus
between sunrises that break over these warring hosts very nearly
$100,000,000 has gone up in smoke, splinters or ruin of some kind, or
the upkeep of fighting.
Since England's cost each day is heavier than any of the other countries
at war, due to the fact that she is Financial First Aid to most of her
Allies and is maintaining a fleet almost equal to all the others
combined, let us reduce her enormous daily war bill of $25,000,000 to
simpler form. It means that participation in the greatest of all wars is
costing her $1,410,666 an hour, $17,361 a minute and a little over $289
a second. At this rate of waste John D. Rockefeller would be bankrupt in
forty days; Andrew Carnegie would be in the bread line in ten. The sum
is greater than the entire net public debt of Chicago; it equals the
assessed valuation of all the taxable property in Poughkeepsie, New
York.
Work out this immense daily outlay from still another angle and these
striking facts develop: the war is costing at the rate of 29 cents a day
for every inhabitant of the United Kingdom: 31 cents for every
individual in France: 22 cents for every person in the Kaiser's domain,
and 6 cents for each human unit in the Russian Empire.
Yet this well-nigh overwhelming rush of figures only accounts for the
actual cost of hostilities. By this I mean arms and armament, food and
military supplies, the construction, maintenance and renewal of fleets,
the cost of transport and the pay of soldiers and sailors.
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