irst Aid to most of her
Allies and is maintaining a fleet almost equal to all the others
combined, let us reduce her enormous daily war bill of $25,000,000 to
simpler form. It means that participation in the greatest of all wars is
costing her $1,410,666 an hour, $17,361 a minute and a little over $289
a second. At this rate of waste John D. Rockefeller would be bankrupt in
forty days; Andrew Carnegie would be in the bread line in ten. The sum
is greater than the entire net public debt of Chicago; it equals the
assessed valuation of all the taxable property in Poughkeepsie, New
York.

Work out this immense daily outlay from still another angle and these
striking facts develop: the war is costing at the rate of 29 cents a day
for every inhabitant of the United Kingdom: 31 cents for every
individual in France: 22 cents for every person in the Kaiser's domain,
and 6 cents for each human unit in the Russian Empire.

Yet this well-nigh overwhelming rush of figures only accounts for the
actual cost of hostilities. By this I mean arms and armament, food and
military supplies, the construction, maintenance and renewal of fleets,
the cost of transport and the pay of soldiers and sailors.

To the vast sum already recorded must be added the loss registered by
the destruction of cities, towns and villages, the sinking of ships, the
wiping out of factories, warehouses, bridges, roads and railways.

Then, too, you must allow for the almost incalculable productive loss
due to the killing and maiming of millions of men: the shrinkage of
agricultural yields and the more or less general dislocation of the
machinery of output. All these factors pile up a total, the calculation
of which would almost cause a compound fracture of the brain. Sufficient
to say it puts a terrific human and financial tax on coming generations
and we in America will feel its effects when the world begins to
readjust itself to the altered social and economic conditions which will
come with peace.

Of course the inevitable question arises: Who is paying the Scarlet
Piper? In seeking the answer you encounter for the first time America's
intimate and all-important part in the costly drama now being unfolded
to the tune of billions. She sits in the armoured box-office with the
Treasurers of the embattled nations.

At the outset of the war all the belligerent countries believed that
they could finance their needs without seeking neutral aid. Less than a
year was