The world is spending every year eight billion dollars on militarism. The expenditure of that ocean of treasure leads nowhere but to the slippery slope of bankruptcy. It creates nothing by which future generations will benefit or of which any but the superficial can be proud. It robs the treasury of the busy bees of commerce and industry and withdraws from active participation in constructive affairs seventeen million men, the strongest and best types, whose brain and muscle should be used for the advancement of their kind. Women, in consequence, as in Germany, have often to undertake work for which nature did not equip them, and so a double wrong is wrought upon the human race.
If the interest only on the money spent on militarism were used on education, 32,000,000 more students would be accommodated at college every year; or the housing problem of every land could be solved as if by a magic wand, to the immeasurable conservation of human health and vigor.
During the South African War the “Investors’ Review” of London said: “In one short eighteen months the war party now sitting on our necks has dissipated more money than the working class managed to accumulate out of their wages during the whole sixty-four years of the reign of Queen Victoria.”
Chancellor Lloyd-George, as recently as the last budget, said in the House of Commons that the money spent on building Dreadnoughts in England in one year would add a dollar a week to the income of every workingman’s family in Europe.
The United States, though not yet in the same parlous plight as the European nations, is heading in that direction, and devotes the enormous proportion of seventy per cent. of its national expenditure to preparations for war. That is to say, every year we waste more than would construct an epoch-making Panama Canal.
Were it possible immediately to reconstruct the scheme of things so that reason ruled, there would be no need to cry aloud for the development of the barren lands of our continent. Waterways would be extended, irrigation works would carry the life-giving fluid to arid areas that need but that to release their dormant fertility, herbage and fruit would spring from regions now productive of only scrub and cacti, and the reforestation of natural timber land would cause the birth of new resources formerly despoiled by the ignorance and greed of man.
But, some may say, surely these shipyards, barracks, Dreadnoughts, and war equipment circulate money and employ millions of men. That, I contend, is a common fallacy a little thought will dissipate. Money being but the tool used in the purchase of labor or the product of labor, is in itself of no account. But the building of a Dreadnought to fire away the product of labor in thin air is to bring all that has gone to prepare for that achievement to nought. The chain of production is broken; henceforth mankind is so much the worse off for that loss of money, labor and its products. But in the true conservation of resources, the labor and its products employed in peaceful and constructive enterprises achieve benefits that flow on continuously in an ever-widening stream, till the entire humanity is made to feel the blending of each man’s labor in the commonweal.
Brain, sinew, time, energy and material resources are being thrown into the melting pot of war, yet but for that very war the evolution of the human race would be eons further on.
Every time a war scare sends the exchanges of the world’s capitals into panic, deadly injury is done to the commerce of the entire globe. Ruin has not to wait for the actual outbreak of hostilities. The wolf of war has but to bare his fangs in menace to cause a premonitory slump to spread devastation through the ranks of the investors. Yet instead of meeting, as the delegates of this Congress are meeting, to debate the best methods of insuring national and international thrift, in statesmanlike preparation for the future needs of the human race, many powerful minds are spending their time devising nightmares with which to scare humanity into ruinous expenditure.
I venture to predict that in the future it will be found that the chief instrument of Conservation has been established already in the arbitration court at The Hague, and generations yet to come will say of its founders, “They builded better than they knew.”