olleges of a certain great state.
Two thirds of the money passing through the treasury of the Republic
goes to the support of the military system. Computing two hundred
dollars a year as the average loss to society occasioned by the
withdrawal of each soldier and sailor from productive toil, and adding
this sum to the war budgets of the nations for the past fifty years,
we obtain a total of billions, beyond the reach of all imagination.
The money which armies, navies, wars, and pensions have cost the world
in fifty years would have installed in China a system of education
equal to that of the United States; would have transformed the arid
deserts of India into a modern Eden by irrigation; would have laid
railways from Cape Town to the remotest corner of Africa; would have
dug the Panama Canal; and, in addition, would have sent a translation
of the Bible, of Shakespeare, Homer, Goethe, and Dante to every family
on the globe. In a word, the wealth spent on wars in the last half
century would have transformed life for a majority of human beings.
The stoppage of this waste will shorten the hours of labor, reduce
pauperism, elevate the peasantry of Europe, lighten taxation, and work
an economic revolution.

The argument for moral education mistakes national gratitude to
warriors for tribute to the training of the camp. But grant that war
develops the combative qualities, the argument forgets a darker moral
phase. It forgets the moral wrecks which are the sad products of war;
it forgets the effect of the loss of the refining influence of
womanhood upon the soldier; it forgets the debasement of sinking men
to the physical type of life. And the argument assumes that peace has
no "equivalent for war," declared by a famous educator to be the
greatest need of the age. Courage and endurance are as necessary in
social reforms as in carnal battle. To wrestle against principalities
and powers and rulers of the world-darkness calls forth the maximum
powers of manhood. Wendell Phillips stands in the ranks of heroes as
high as Philip Sheridan. The moral loss from war transcends the moral
gain.

Yet war levies toll more tragic than any toll of dollars, more
appalling than any moral cost. A famous painting reveals the world's
conquerors, Xerxes, Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, and a lesser host,
mounted proudly on battle steeds, caparisoned with gorgeous trappings;
but the field through which they march is paved with naked, mutilated
corps