ly as much apiece. Thus in the course of a year, a
debt of $300 was piled upon every man, woman, and child in the British
kingdom. The average family consists of five persons, so that this
means a debt of $1500 per family for each year that the war lasted.
The income of the average family in Great Britain is less than $500 in
a year, and the amount of money that they can save out of this sum is
very small. Yet the British people are obliged to add this tremendous
debt to the already very large amount that they owe, and will have to
go on paying interest on it for hundreds of years.

In the same fashion, debts piled up for the peoples of France,
Germany, Austria, Russia and all the countries in the war. In spite of
what we have said above of the average income of English families,
Great Britain is rich when compared with Austria and Russia. What is
more, Great Britain is practically unscarred, while on the continent
great tracts of land which used to be well cultivated farms have been
laid waste with reckless abandon. East Prussia, Poland, Lithuania,
Galicia, part of Hungary, Alsace, Serbia, Bosnia, northern France,
south-western Austria-Hungary, and all of Belgium and Roumania, a
territory amounting to one-fifth of the whole of Europe, were scarred
and burned and devastated.

It will be years and years before these countries recover from the
effects of war's invasion. For every man killed on the field of
battle, it is estimated that two people die among the noncombatants.
Children whose fathers are at the front, frail women trying to do the
work of men, aged inhabitants of destroyed villages die by the
thousands from want of food and shelter.

In the trail of war come other evils. People do not have time to look
after their health or even to keep clean. As a result, diseases like
the plagues of olden times, which civilization thought it had killed,
come to life again and destroy whole cities. The dreadful typhus fever
killed off one-fifth of the population of Serbia during the winter of
1914. Cholera raged among the Austrian troops in the fall of the same
year. For every soldier who is killed on the field of battle, three
others die from disease or wounds or lack of proper care.

[Illustration: Rendered Homeless by War]

In time of war, the first men picked are the very flower of the
country, the strong, the athletic, the brave, the very sort of men who
ought to be carefully saved as the fathers of the people to co