between nations, by the firm establishment of the understandings of international law as the actual rule of conduct among governments, and by the maintenance of justice and a scrupulous respect for all treaty obligations in the dealings of organ

ized peoples with one another, the High Contracting Parties agree to the Covenant of the League of Nations."

Who is there who will not take this ideal and help to give it form and substance?

Upon the signing of the Peace Treaty with Germany June 28, 1919, the following brief address by President Wilson was made public:

My Fellow Countrymen: The treaty of peace has been signed. If it is ratified and acted upon in full and sincere execution of its terms it will furnish the charter for a new order of affairs in the world. It is a severe treaty in the duties and penalties it imposes upon Germany; but it is severe only because great wrongs done by Germany are to be righted and repaired; it imposes nothing that Germany cannot do; and she can regain her rightful standing in the world by the prompt and honorable fulfillment of its terms.

And it is much more than a treaty of peace with Germany. It liberates great peoples who have never before been able to find the way to liberty. It ends, once for all, an old and intolerable order under which small groups of selfish men could use the peoples of great empires to serve their ambition for power and dominion. It associates the free Governments of the world in a permanent League in which they are pledged to use their united power to maintain peace by maintaining right and justice.

It makes international law a reality supported by imperative sanctions. It does away with the right of conquest and rejects

the policy of annexation and substitutes a new order under which backward nationspopulations which have not yet come to political consciousness and peoples who are ready for independence but not yet quite prepared to dispense with protection and guidance-shall no more be subjected to the domination and exploitation of a stronger nation, but shall be put under the friendly direction and afforded the helpful assistance of governments which undertake to be responsible to the opinion of mankind in the execution of their task by accepting the direction of the League of Nations.

It recognizes the inalienable rights of nationality, the rights of minorities and the sanctity of religious belief and practise. It lays the basis for conventions which shall free the commercial intercourse of the world from unjust and vexatious restrictions and for every sort of international cooperation that will serve to cleanse the life of the world and facilitate its common action in beneficent service of every kind. It furnishes guarantees such as were never given or even contemplated for the fair treatment of all who labor at the daily tasks of the world.

It is for this reason that I have spoken of it as a great charter for a new order of affairs. There is ground here for deep satisfaction, universal reassurance, and confident hope.

WOODROW WILSON.

TH

the Napoleonic Wars was estimated at $4,050,142,500. Practically the debt has not yet been paid, although it is estimated that $7,500,000,000 has been paid in interest thereon during the century that the debt has run.

The history of the national debt of England and perhaps of every other nation is practically the history of endeavoring to pay back in years of peace the debt caused by often only a few months of war. For example, the wars of Marlborough, under Queen Anne, raised the debt at the time of the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, exclusive of interest and annuities from a very small sum to about $250,297,742.

One difficulty in paying national debts is the tremendous increase in cost of armaments. In 1820 there was spent for military and debt charges £48,740,000 out of a revenue of £55,000,000. In 1824, out of a net revenue of £58,625,000, but £10,000,000 was left as free income. after paying for interest and war charges. In 1836 similarly there was left but £6,000,000 out of a gross income of £50,000,000. In 1880, out of £84,000,000, £73,000,000 was spent for debt, Army and Navy.

In England, as in America, pension charges following each war amounted to a large figure. At the close of the Napoleonic Wars, the

from

£3,398,805 in 1820, to £4,965,114 in 1823-about 50% a commentary upon the $5,215,000,000 that America has paid for pensions since the founding of the Republic exclusive of about $1,000,000 already assumed by America under the War Risk Insurance Bureau-practically our pension system for this warthus adding in a little over one year of war, one-fifth the total amount paid for pensions since the founding of the republic.

Professor Robert Hamilton declared that the limit of the taxable capacity of Great Britain was reached in the last year of the Napoleonic Wars, when the taxation of the middle classes was about one-half their income, and added, "and therefore we are already advanced to the utmost limit that taxation can ever reach," a statement which he afterwards modified by conceding that it might be possible, with great difficulty and danger to increase this taxation one-half.

During the Boer War the British debt rose to $3,999,000,000, sweeping away in three years of war the savings of 36 years of peace. It has been estimated that it takes about 16 years of peace to discharge one year of war. For example, from 1688 to 1816 there were 66 years of war and 62 years of peace. The debt contracted during the 66 years of war was computed at £802,819,000, and

discharged during the 62 years of peace £44,837,000.

From England's condition after the Napoleonic Wars and the effect of those wars upon England and the condition of the world, and particularly America to-day, the following general conclusions can be drawn:

First. Wars are increasingly expensive not only from the increasing cost of modern army and navy equipment, but because the burden of modern war falls on the whole nation and not on the army and navy only. When an Indian tribe started out on the warpath, no further drain was made upon the tribe at home. If they returned defeated or victorious, or not at all, the tribe was little worse off. This was measurably true when the Creek phalanxes or the Roman legions left Athens or Rome upon foreign expeditions. Trains of supplies and ammunition were not then required to follow the army during its entire existence. It was the army, then, that waged the nation's wars. To-day the entire nation, with all its resources, industries, wealth and credit, is necessary to the successful conduct of a war.

It is impossible, of course, now to state the cost of this present war, not only because it cannot yet be determined, but because we do not know how much of the nearly $10,000,000 loaned our Allies will be repaid. Our previous war costs from 1791 to 1916 inclusive, have been:

This is in itself a colossal bill for a peaceful nation that has flattered itself as having hitherto been comparatively free from the war mania of Europe. What this considerable sum would have accomplished for education, health, public improvements or other good purposes we may imagine. But the cost of this one war, lasting less than two years, and in which our active part has been comparatively short and small, is at least as great as the previous war bill of a century and a quarter, and this not counting the legacies of either interest on that part of it we have borrowed or the War Risk Insurance payments which will extend far beyond this generation, and possibly add as many billions more to the present cost.

A few hours' barrage is said to have cost fifty million dollars to a single nation-a sum sufficient to have paid for a considerable war a century or so ago. The loss of one battleship would pay for any of several wars of England during the last century. The national debt of single nations caused by this war is not very far from the total debt of the entire world before it.

Second. The destruction wrought by war is becoming increasingly great. Reliable estimates as to the damage done to Northern France and Belgium are as yet unobtainable, but we know that it runs up into billions of dollars. And when every resource of civilization and of science is utilized, as it has been in the pres ent war, to destroy-under sea, on the surface, and in the air-not only

armies but industries of every kind, the damage is great partly because there is so much to destroy. When Atilla overran Europe, and when it was said that not a blade of grass grew where his horse's hoof trod; when savage Indian tribes devastated the enemy's property, the destruction was comparatively little, because there was comparatively little to destroy and no "civilized" instruments to destroy them. Modern civilization is so intricate and so dependent upon expensive industries, machinery, transportation systems, and the like, that there is not only so much to be destroyed but the use of high-power explosives and such engines of death as submarines and aeroplanes is making the devastation wrought by war increasingly great. And had the late war continued and

Period

1718-1768

the quantities of more deadly gas, launched from wirelessly directed machines been used; had the inventive genius of the whole world continued to devise and employ new destructive instruments, who can tell where destruction would have stopped-or will stop in another war?

Third. Generally speaking, the war debts of a nation are never paid -they accumulate. There are exceptions, as, for example, where America and France have measurably paid their war debts. But on the whole, war debts simply impose an added burden, not only of principal but of interest. The following table shows the debt increase of the world from the time of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713-about the time that national debts arose until the present time:

4,987,200,000

$18.12

France

5,198,884,520