Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/537

Rh again. Then consider the equipment, clothes, arms, and ammunition of all these great European armies; the manufactories of powder and explosives, the monster guns and projectiles, the rockets and torpedoes, the horses and horse accoutrements, and all the innumerable variety of stores that arc required to supply a modern army in the field—and then follow back every one of these things to the raw material brought from various parts of the world, and to the numerous processes of manufacture through which it has to pass—and further consider the amount of purely intellectual power required, the origination and improvement and detailed designs for the rifles and cannons, the projectiles and explosives, the pontoons, the fortifications, the torpedo-boats, and the iron-clads—and we shall probably think it not an extravagant estimate that for every ten thousand men in a modern army and navy at least another ten thousand are wholly employed in making the necessary equipment and war-material, the labor of the whole twenty thousand being utterly wasted, inasmuch as all that they produce is consumed, not merely unproductively and uselessly, but destructively. We may fairly estimate, then, that the military preparedness of modern Europe involves a total loss to the community of the labor of about men, and a corresponding amount of animal and mechanical power and of labor-saving machinery. If, now, we consider that the weight of guns, the thickness of armor-plating, the size and engine-power of ships, and the complex requirements of an army in the field, have all been rapidly increasing during the last ten or fifteen years, we may fairly estimate that one fourth or one fifth of this number of men have been abstracted from the productive workers of Europe during the last ten years, the period over which the commercial depression has extended.

Let us next consider the heavy burden of taxation upon all the chief European peoples, the increase of which during recent years has been almost wholly caused by increased military expenditure and the interest on debts incurred for wars or preparations for war, for fortifications, or for military railways. This increase may be best estimated by comparing the expenditure of 1870, the year before the Franco-German War, with that of 1884. During this period of fourteen years our own expenditure has increased from £75,000,000 to £87,000,000; that of Austria from £55,000,000 to £94,000,000; that of France from £85,000,000 to £142,500,000; that of Germany from £54,000,000 to £112,500,000; that of Italy from £40,000,000 to £01,500,000; and that of Russia from £00,000,000 to £114,500,000. Altogether the expenditure of the six great powers of Europe has increased from £345,000,000 to £612,000,000, an additional burden of £200,500,000 a year. The population of these six states is now a little over 200,000,000, so that they have to bear, on the average, an addition of taxation amounting to nearly a pound a head, or about five pounds for each family, a most oppressive amount when we consider the