Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/114

 were destroyed—omitting those merely damaged—as there are in Greater New York; and New York has twelve or thirteen times the population of San Francisco at the time of the disaster. The region of San Francisco lost no canals, railroads, or improved highways. She was not a manufacturing city; and such factories as she had mostly escaped. But France did lose factories, canals, railways, highways in her most thickly populated country—a belt four hundred miles long, from five miles wide in Alsace to fifty miles wide north and west of Noyon, In the region merely invaded, about Lille, she lost enormous values in machines turned into scrap-iron, and eventually into shells, by the conquerers. The disaster of 1906 destroyed no agricultural land. France lost to agriculture, for at least a generation, from four to five hundred thousand acres—land with its top-soil blown to the winds, or ground into the clay subsoil. Roughly, I estimate that the destruction of visible, physical property in Northern France—to say nothing of Belgium, Italy, Serbia, Greece and East Prussia—was equivalent to twenty or twenty-five San Francisco disasters. Leaving out the direct property loss of other nations, the orgy of spending during four and a quarter years, the incredible national debts and their interest, this belt of destruction in France alone would almost account for the present disturbances of conditions in the whole world.

The war-bill of nations in peace times consists of