Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/117

 interest on the national debt, caused by old wars, plus the direct cost of supporting armament. Still using France as an example; if she spends as much on her army and navy in the period between 1920 and 1930 even as she did in the period between 1900 and 1910, her war-bill will be multiplied by about three and a half. She may get a certain amount of German indemnity. That, probably, will not be enough to restore her North and to finance her pensions; it will not go toward lightening the taxes which pay the war-bill. France, like the other European nations, was taxed in 1914 to the point of absurdity; now, she must eventually multiply the taxes by three or four. Even this calculation does not involve a sinking-fund to pay off the debt. Fifty years from now, possibly a hundred years, France will still be paying the bill of 1914–18. And this is true not only of France, but of all the other nations who fought through the great war. In hardship, toil, reduced standard of living, the next two generations will pay—or elsethis is still possible—European civilization will tumble into the gulf of anarchy. H. G. Wells said to the writer, a month after the war began, “All our lives we shall be talking of the good, old days of 1913.” That war-prophecy is being fulfilled.

Let us now bring the subject home. We, of all, lost the least in property as in men. We had, indeed, profited greatly in the two years and a half of our neutrality. We held, by the end of that