Cheaply spilt human blood surely indicates a civilization fundamentally coarse and cheap.
Until human blood, human life, becomes too sacred to be sold for cash to escape starvation or bought for cash to win a profit on the bartered labor power—too sacred to be thus placed on sale, exchanged in the “labor market” as horses and sheep are bought and sold in the “live-stock market,”—until then it will simply be impossible to realize the hideousness of the blood cost of war, impossible to compute and realize the vastness of the red crime committed against the working class,—against
“The poor souls for whom this hungry war opens its vast jaws.”
The blood cost of war?
War spills the blood of slain soldiers.
War spills the blood of non-combatants.
War weakens the blood of soldiers who are smitten with befouling fevers and whose wounds and sores fester unattended on the battlefield or are ill-attended in rude military hospitals. Disease, in war, strikes with death four times as many soldiers as are killed with lead and steel.[[28]]
War weakens the national blood by selecting the strong-blooded for slaughter, thus reversing nature’s method of selecting the weaker blooded for destruction.
War tends to open opportunity in the struggle for existence for the relatively weaker blooded to multiply in disproportionate degree.
War, it is estimated,[[29]] prevents, on the average, the birth of one child per soldier slaughtered on the battlefield, or serving three years or more in peace or war.