This sum would pay all the salaries of twenty-five thousand school teachers at $625 per year from the birth of Christ to the year 1909, and leave sufficient to establish fifty universities, each institution provided with ten million dollars’ worth of buildings and equipment and each institution provided also with a ten-million dollar endowment fund for running expenses; or,
This sum is equal to the total savings of five million wage-earners, each saving one dollar per day, three hundred days per year for twenty-one years.
And we are not yet through with our Civil War expenses and shall not be for a long time. Professor Albert S. Bolles calls attention to the fact that we are not even yet through with the expenses of our Revolutionary War of more than one hundred years ago. Professor Bolles also says of the Civil War:[[39]]
“A hundred years are likely to pass before the account books for suppressing the Rebellion will be closed.”
This is a good place to remind the reader that, of course, as soon as the soldiers got home from the Civil War they had to go to work to help create the wealth to pay the principal and the interest on the war bonds held by the bankers and other leading citizens who were too shrewd to go to the war themselves. Professor John C. Ridpath wrote thus of the war bond-leech:[[40]]
“To him (the capitalist) it is all one whether this world blooms with gardens, ripens with oranges, smiles with harvest of wheat, or whether it is trodden into mire and blood under the raging charges of cavalry and the explosions of horrid shells; that is, it is all one to him if his coupons are promptly paid and his bond is extended.”
Now, my friend, when the Honorable Mr. Noisy from Washington or your legislature or elsewhere, gets you and your neighbors out in the woods next Thirtieth of May or Fourth of July and proceeds to fill the forest full of cheap and stupid noise about the grandeur and glory of war, you should promptly treat him with the contempt he deserves. You should also protect the young people of your family and community from the savage and dangerous suggestions made by many speakers on such occasions—protect them by having the “other side” of war presented. The literature of peace-born-of-justice might well be distributed on such occasions.
The cash cost of war is easily made evident by an examination of our annual current national bill for militarism. Indeed, the annual cash cost of prize-fighter statesmanship, the annual cost of developing the national fist, the annual cash cost of this hypocritical “preservation of peace” by preparing for war, needs special attention.
The combined average annual expense of militarism, that is, of the Department of War and the Department of the Navy (the Departments of Murder), is, for the United States, as follows:
| The Army and the Navy | $200,000,000 |
| The loss of producing power, the worse than lost labor-power, of 121,786 “picked” men (83,286 in the Army and 38,500 in the Navy), estimated at $600 each per year | 73,071,600 |
| Interest on Public Debt (chiefly an expense of militarism), at present | 22,000,000 |
| Pensions (admittedly a war burden) | 150,000,000 |
| Depreciation of forts, arsenals, ships, weapons and other war equipments by decay, and from the necessary discarding of “outgrown” murdering machinery | 5,000,000 |
| Total | $450,071,600 |