Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/124

 ninety-three per cent. We could make all the common roads of the United States like the famous main highways of France or Belgium, for the cost of our wars, past, present and future—and still have money in the bank.

In our government are a number of bureaus concerned with increasing production, fighting disease, supervising, as it seems that only governments can supervise, the agencies which conserve life and increase production. Our entomologists have reduced such plant scourges as the San José scale and grape phylloxera almost to impotence, so saving us many millions yearly; they are on their way to conquer the boll weevil in cotton. Our ichthyologists have plans, now only partly realizable from lack of money, greatly to increase our fish supply. Our boards of health, under national supervision, have virtually killed yellow fever and smallpox, greatly reduced malaria and typhoid fever, are beginning to attack those “social diseases” which are next to war the great scourge of the human race.

Go into any of these Washington bureaus and some specialist, some practical dreamer struggling along at a salary running from fifteen hundred dollars to three thousand dollars a year, will tell you what “his people” could do to multiply production and improve human conditions, to lengthen and fortify life, to increase the beauty or usefulness of the world “if we only had the money.” But they haven't the money. For these activities, the