Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/107

 those of the Argentine are complaining that they have slack markets for their food-products.

What shrewd observers expect of the next few years in Europe may be seen in the present policy of the British Labor Party. Rightly or wrongly, the party leaders believe that they can take over the power in England. But they say frankly that they do not intend to do it now, because the next four or five years will bring such economic consequences of the late war as to swamp and discredit the faction in power. They prefer to let the “old crowd” take the onus. Possibly, the heaviest costs of the late war are still to come.

Nor can we reckon the economic losses of Armageddon without counting in the past—the thirty or forty years of intensive preparation which preceded the explosion of 1914. During that period, when chancellories kept the peace by the old-fashioned system of checks and balances, Europe was traditionally an armed camp. Economically, it was in a state of perpetual warfare. National wealth grew in this period, but national expenditure on armies and navies grew faster. In France, which for various reasons we may study most easily, the military and naval budget increased from fifteen to twenty per cent during each decade; and the indirect appropriations for the army, as for example in the item of strategic railways, even faster. Directly and indirectly, she was by 1905, ten years before the great war, spending between two hundred and ten and two