[26] We may refer here to another loss which has never been thought of till now. It was long fancied that wealth could be acquired more rapidly by war than by work; consequently, conquest seeming to be the most rapid and therefore most efficacious way, was honored, and labor, appearing to be a slower process, was despised. In our days a large number of descendants of the knights of the middle ages retain the ideas of their ancestors and look upon labor as degrading. Hence thousands of aristocrats do nothing, but remain social good-for-nothings, retarding the increase of wealth by their inactivity.
[27] Sherman, in his march from Atlanta to Savannah alone, destroyed more than $400,000,000. The cotton famine occasioned by this war cost Great Britain a loss of $480,000,000. Who has ever thought of charging this against militarism?
[28] See E. Reclus, Nouvelle geographie universelle (French edition), vol. xvi, p. 810.
[29] A justification of this figure may be found in my Luttes entre les sociétés humaines, p. 220.
[30] A half million negroes are massacred every year in Africa in the tribal wars, which also are caused by the ctesohedonic fallacy. Suppose each one of them might have earned $20 a year. Capitalized at four per cent, this sum would have amounted to $400,000,000.
[31] See my Luttes, p. 228. Let us say, in passing, that we owe our existing savagery partly to the ctesohedonic fallacy. When we think that the most rapid way of enriching ourselves is by seizing our neighbor's territories, the fewer defenders that territory has, the better. So all pretended political geniuses glorify themselves on having killed the largest number of their fellow-men. Cæsar boasted of having killed a million and a half of Gauls. At the moment of writing these lines a terrible accident has occurred at Santander. Hundreds of persons were killed by the explosion of a boat loaded with dynamite. Great pity was expressed for the victims. Collections for their benefit were taken in France. Suppose France and Spain were now at war. If somebody had blown up some thousand Spaniards in a fortress, we should have sung Te Deums. Oh, man's logic!
[32] An address delivered at the Royal College of Science on October 6, 1898.
[33] Perkin. Nature, vol. xxxii, p. 334.
[34] Ch. Letourneau. Alphabet Forms in Megalithic Inscriptions. Bulletin of the Society of Anthropology, 1893.
[35] The Elements of Sociology. By Franklin Henry Giddings. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1898. Pp. 353. Price, $1.10.