WHAT A TRIAL BALANCE OF COMMERCE SHOWS
If a balance could be rightly struck in this country is there any one who believes that our interests would be best served by war in some other country? This is quite apart from any question of humanity or civilization. Let it be a trial balance of commerce alone and it will show a heavy debit against war. And an accounting will show the same result in all other countries. If this be true, with only current commerce entering into the equation, how staggeringly true it becomes when the piled up debts caused by war are considered. Economists who have examined the matter state that this war has already cost over forty billions of dollars. And the end is not yet.
So why shouldn’t business, which has been binding the world more closely together for centuries, be employed to protect the world against the waste and loss of war? Hague Conferences have sought earnestly for penalties that would save their Conventions from being treated as mere “bits of paper.” Penalties that every nation would be bound to respect could be enforced through economic pressure. The loss in trade would be small or great in proportion to the amount and duration of the pressure; but it would be at most only an infinitesimal fraction of the loss caused by war.