Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/105



So far, we have discussed mostly the direct effects of war—the last and the next—on human life. The loss of that accumulated wealth of the world which is property touches human life indirectly in a thousand ways, and is therefore of more than secondary importance. And here, we run into bewildering perplexities. What in the arbitrary terms of money the late war cost the European peoples, we already know. We know also approximately what it cost in out-and-out destruction of houses, fields, factories, mines and railroads by bombardment and conflagration. But the shrewdest economist cannot guess the final cost. It is not enough to compile the national debt, so great as to lie beyond the imagination of the average man. Those debts cannot all be paid; in some manner or other, many of them will be repudiated. The true economic loss, which cannot be repudiated, lies in the disturbance of that delicate machine of manufacture and trade by which modern industrial nations lived and worked before the great war. We see that loss every day in the absurd conditions of the third year after the Armistice. There