$28,000,000: 1,400 churches at $20,000 each, 7,000 farms at $4,000 each, a college education for 14,000 men or women at $500 a year for four years.
For past wars and preparation for war, $423,000,000, or 70 per cent.
Left for other purposes, $181,000,000, or 30 per cent.
The Way of Militarism
Which benefits a few trusts and contractors and gives temporary and uneconomical employment, but which is rapidly impoverishing the nations.
Ordinary income of the United States for 1908–09, $604,000,000.
Our generation has not accepted Christ’s ideal of non-resistance, gentleness and humility. We believe in Dreadnaughts and armed regiments. At our conferences in The Hague and Mohonk we plead for peace; at our capitals we vote uncounted millions for cannon and bombshells. Disclaiming hypocrisy, we excuse ourselves by saying that the best way to preserve peace is to prepare for war, when in our hearts we know that a man who carries a concealed revolver in his pocket is a thousand times more likely to slay any chance enemy than if he had left his weapon at home or hurled it into the sea. We admire and love the Quaker—but we want him to stay in Philadelphia; the man we send to Washington must argue for us that a nation needs a war about once in thirty years.—N. D. Hillis.
(2025)
Military Sagacity—See [Retreat Discouraged].