Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/127

 grants less than one per cent of the National revenue. In 1920, the existing army and navy absorbed thirty-eight per cent; and the whole war bill, as I have said, was ninety-three per cent.

What could we, “the pacifist nation of the world,” not do with that ninety-three per cent? You remember the Roosevelt Dam in the Far West—hundreds of thousands of acres transformed from desert to fertile farms with a little government money. Millions more are awaiting the same transformation. Here is a chance to increase our true national greatness; but the government, of course, cannot undertake that because it cannot spare the money. Our forests are shrinking; we feel the effect in the rising price of lumber, the shortage of wood-pulp. We need to reforest on a large scale; that work, European countries have learned, can be most cheaply, easily and intelligently done by a central government. We are reforesting, if at all, on a microscopic scale; we are barely keeping down fires. All because we cannot afford the money from our national revenues. Wars, past, present and future, cost too much.

Then comes the period when our long preparation for new wars becomes—action. Then arrives an orgy of spending without return—and a greater war-bill for the future.

But we are treating of “the next war.” By that we mean of course not a little “settling” war such as the present British and French campaigns in the