Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Politics volume 4 .djvu/20

8 industry. Your fleets, forts, dockyards, arsenals, cannons, muskets, swords, and the like, are provided at great cost, and yet are unprofitable. They do not pay. They weave no cloth; they bake no bread; they produce nothing. Yet, from 1791 to 1832, in forty-two years, we expended in these things $303,242,576, namely, for the navy, &c., $112,703,933; for the army, &c., $190,538,643. For the same time, all other expenses of the nation came to but $37,158,047. More than eight-ninths of the whole revenue of the nation was spent for purposes of war. In four years, from 1812 to 1815, we paid in this way, $92,350,519-37. In six years, from 1835 to 1840, we paid annually on the average $21,328,903 ; in all, $127,973,418. Our Congress has just voted $17,000,000, as a special grant for the army alone. The 175,118 muskets at Springfield are valued at $3,000,000 ; we pay annually $200,000 to support that arsenal. The navy-yard at Charleston, with its stores, &c., has cost $4,741,000. And, for all profitable returns, this money might as well be sunk in the bottom of the sea. In some countries it is yet worse. There are towns and cities in which the fortifications have cost more than all the houses, churches, shops, and other property therein, This happens not among the Sacs and Foxes, but in "Christian" Europe,.

Then your soldier is the most unprofitable animal you can keep. He makes no railroads; clears no land; raises no corn. No, he can make neither cloth nor clocks! He does not raise his own bread, mend his own shoes, make his shoulder-knot of glory, nor hammer out his own sword. Yet he is a costly animal, though useless. If the President gets his fifty thousand volunteers, a thing likely to happen—for though Irish lumpers and hodmen want a dollar or a dollar and a half a day, your free American of Boston will enlist for twenty-seven cents, only having his livery, his feathers, and his "glory" thrown in—then at $8 a month, their wages amount to $400,000 a month. Suppose the present Government shall actually make advantageous contracts, and the subsistence of the soldier cost no more than in England, or $17 a month, this amounts to $850,000. Here are $1,250,000 a month to begin with. Then, if each man would be worth a dollar a day at any productive work, and there are 26 work-days