PART I. PHYSICAL EVILS OF WAR. CHAPTER I. WASTE OF PROPERTY BY WAR, WAR is the grand impoverisher of the world. In estimating its havoc of property, we must inquire not only how much it costs, and how much it destroys, but how far it prevents the acquisition of wealth; and a full answer to these three questions would exhibit an amount of waste beyond the power of any imagination adequately to conceive. I. Consider, then, how war prevents the accumulation of property. Its mere uncertainties must operate as a very serious hindrance; for while everything is afloat, and no forecast can anticipate what changes may take place any month, men will not embark in those undertakings by which alone wealth is rapidly acquired. This cause alone, an invariable attendant upon war, is sufficient to paralyze the energies of business in all its departments. Still worse, however, are the sudden changes of war. These discourage enterprise, defeat the best plans, and produce a vast multitude of failures. The mere dread of such changes must paralyze, more or less, every department of business, and cripple nearly all efforts for the acquisition of wealth. Hence ensue a general derangement and stagna tion of business, which leave the main energies of a people, even if not absorbed in the war, to rust in idleness, or be frittered away in fruitless exertions. Enterprise is checked, because there is little reward or demand for its products. There is no foreign market for the fruits of agriculture; and land ceases to be tilled with care and success. There is no outlet for manufactures; and the shop and the factory are closed, or kept at work with little vigor and less profit. Intercourse between nations is almost suspended; and commerce stands still, vessels rot at the wharves, and sea-ports, once alive with the hum of business, are cut off from the principal sources of their wealth, and sink into speedy, perhaps irrecoverable decay. All the main-springs of national prosperity are broken, or crippled, or kept in operation at immense disadvantage. An incalculable amount of capital in money, and ships, and stores, and factories, and workshops, and machinery, and tools, and raw materials, and buildings, and inventions, and canals, and railways, and industry, and skill, and talent, is withdrawn from use, and for want of profitable employment, goes more or less to waste. How much is thus lost, it would be vain even to conjecture; but we should be safe in sup- 1 posing that in these ways alone war might reduce for a time the value of a nation's entire property, from thirty to fifty per cent.! But the most direct waste comes from the sudden withdrawal of men in the vigor of life. In such men are found the mines or laboratories of a nation's wealth; but what multitudes of these does the war system require for its support! The standing warriors of Europe are (1846) about three millions even in peace, and exceed four millions and a half in Not a few of these millions may have been the main-springs of business, and all of them must war. possess an unusual share of strength for labor, since no others would be equal to the hardships of war; and the sudden abstraction of such men by thousands from every part of a country, and from every kind of employment. must paralyze the entire industry of a nation. Still worse is the influence of war on the habits indispensable to the thrift of a people. It mars the character necessary for the acquisition of property. It renders them idle, dishonest and profligate. It destroys the habits needed to enrich a people, and introduces others fatally calculated to impoverish any country. Such considerations we might pursue to almost any extent; but enough has been said to show, that all the enormous expenses of war would not equal the loss of property occasioned by such causes alone as we have here specified. Take an illustration. When our population was some fifteen or sixteen millions, the annual production of the United States was estimated at $1,400,000,000; and, if we suppose war to prevent only one-fifth of all this, the loss would be $280,000,000 a year! If our population were forty millions, the annual sacrifice would be about $700,000,000; and at only half this rate, the whole globe, with 1,000,000,000 inhabitants, would lose no less than $8,750,000,000 a year! Hardly credible; and yet the calculation is moderate, and may serve as a clue to the boundless waste of property by war, even in ways generally overlooked. II. Glance next at the incidental havoc of property by war. Follow an army, savage or civilized; trace the course of the French in Russia or Portugal, setting fire, in one case, to every house for one hundred and fifty miles; look at even British troops in Spain or India, trampling down harvests, and burn. ing villages, destroying towns, ravaging entire provinces, and pillaging city after city; and can you conceive the amount of property thus wasted? We can ascertain more nearly, yet very imperfectly, what is destroyed on the ocean. Our own exports and imports range from two hundred to two hundred and forty millions of dollars a year; a still larger amount is interchanged along our immense coast; and no small part of both would be liable in war to be seized by our enemies. Since the close of our Revolution, we have been (1846) engaged in foreign war less than three years; but it would probably require some hundreds of millions to cover all the losses sustained in our commerce alone. Another source of pecuniary loss is found in the waste of life by war. It takes men at the very age when their labor would be most productive, and shortens their life more than twenty years in war, and some ten or fifteen in peace! The statistics of mortality among men devoted to this work of blood, are truly startling. Soldiers, though generally young and vigorous, live on an average only about three years in war, and die even in peace twice as fast as galley slaves, and more rapidly than men ordinarily do at the age of fifty and sixty! What a loss of property is here! Let us suppose it costs an average of $500 to raise a soldier, and reckon his labor for the ten years of his life shortened in peace, and twenty years in war, at $150 a year. If the standing armies of Europe are three millions in peace, she sustains, at this rate, a loss of $1,500,000.000 for their training, $450,000,000 a year for labor, and $4,500,000,000 for the shortening of their life ten years; an average in peace of $840,000,000 a year from this source alone!! duce these estimates one half, and you still have, even in peace, the enormous sacrifice of $420,000,000 Re a year. In a time of war, the armies of Europe, when full, are supposed to be some four millions and a half; but putting them in round numbers at four milions, the loss would be for their training $2,000,000,000, for their labor $600,000,000 a and for cutting short their life twenty years, $12,000,000,000; an average loss in war, if we suppose a soldier's life then to be only three years, of $5,266,000,000 a year!! year, Even III. Look, now, at the actual cost of war. in peace, it is enormous. The amount of money wasted on fortifications and ships, on arms and ammunition, on monuments and other military demonstrations, it is impossible to calculate. France alone has more than 120 fortified places; the expense of the wall round Paris was estimated (1840) at 250,000,000 francs, or nearly $50,000,000; and single triumphal arch in that city, only one among the hundreds scattered through Christendom, cost 10,000,000 francs. Go to Greenwich or Chelsea, and there see what immense sums are spent on England's diseased, crippled and worn-out servants of war. She has about 100,000 pensioners, nearly all the offspring of her war-system. Survey her grand arsenal at Woolwich, and imagine how many millions have been wasted on its 27,000 cannons, and its hundreds of thousands of small arms. Millions of dollars have been expended on some single forts in our own country; and a hundred millions more would not suffice to complete and fully arm the whole circle of fortifications demanded for our defense. The single arsenal at Springfield, contains muskets alone to the value of $3,000,000; upon the Military Academy at West Point, we have (1846) already squandered more than $4,000,000; and in our Navy Yard at Charlestown are sunk nearly five millions more! The average cost to us of a |