Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/92

68 proportion of power on the seas might be disturbed. Already we begin to feel that nervousness in our bones, and we cannot tell how many and what kind of warships we shall be obliged to have in order to maintain what is so vauntingly called our new position among the Powers of the world.

Nor will any amount of new construction set the matter at rest for any certain time. We do not know when we shall have to rebuild the larger part of our fleet; for, as the Czar truthfully says in his manifesto, “the terrible engines of destruction which are to-day regarded as the last word of science, are destined to-morrow to lose all value by some new discovery in the same field.” All forecasts as to the expenditures for naval purposes which the new policy will impose upon us in the course of time are, therefore, futile. But whatever they may be, the people will have to pay the bills.

Moreover, we have to bear a burden of which other nations know comparatively little. During the last fiscal year we paid over $140,000,000 in pensions. More than one hundred years after the Revolutionary war, more than eighty years after the war of 1812—for we still have some widows of soldiers in those wars on our pension rolls—fifty years after the Mexican war, and thirty-three years after the civil war the number of pensioners was about one million. And still they come. It is estimated that the recent Spanish war will add $20,000,000 to our annual pension expenditure. It will probably be much more. The pension attorneys and Members of Congress looking for the soldier-vote will take care of that. But if we continue the military occupation of tropical countries there will be a constant stream of new pensioners owing to tropical diseases; and if we have any active military operations in those tropical regions, that stream will be heavy beyond calculation. And it will be without any