Think of this matter in still another way.
The total cost of militarism in the United States for the year 1907–8 was over six and a half times as great as the total income ($66,790,924) of all our 464 universities, colleges and technological schools from all sources and for all purposes for that same year.[[45]]
The total cost of militarism in the united states for the fifteen and a half months ending june 30, 1909, was greater than the total value of all the books, libraries, lands, grounds, buildings, furniture, scientific apparatus, machinery, and all the endowments, all the investments and all “productive funds” of all kinds belonging to all our 464 higher institutions of learning.
There are in the United States 464 colleges, universities and technological schools admitting men only and both men and women; these institutions have in their libraries a total of 12,636,656 volumes, having (according to our Commissioner of Education, in his Report for the year ending June 30, 1908, page 617) a total value of $16,262,027—which sum is almost equalled by the cost of one first-class modern murdering machine, one “Dreadnought.”
One 14–inch cannon and equipment costs $170,000. One target-practice shot costs as much as President John Adams’s education at Harvard University.
“Whether your shell hits the target or not,
Your cost is six hundred dollars a shot.
You thing of noise and flame and power,
We feed you a hundred barrels of flour
Each time you roar. Your flame is fed