War Debts | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Dec 13, 1883

War Debts.

The national debts of the world are war debts. They represent, not art, science, nor improvement; not steamships, railways, commerce, nor discovery; but simply war, bloodshed, butchery, and slaughter. For the national debts of the world are almost entirely caused by the accumulated cost of wars. Most nations cannot go to war except on borrowed money; but having stirred up some internal quarrel among themselves, they sound the trumpet, beat the drums, collect a lot of baubles and gewgaws to beguile fools from their homes, and so entice and compel the young and strong, the bone and the sinew of the land, to engage in mutual butchery; and then they borrow money, issue bonds, contract debts, and mortgage the toils of future generations, in order to buy arms and accoutrements, muskets and cannon, powder, shot, and shell, with which to blow out the brains of their fellow-men.

All over the civilized world is felt the pressure of these intolerable burdens. Every man in Christendom is taxed to pay war debts. The New York Tribune, in the following table, gives the war debts of the civilized world, in the year 1865 and also 1879:—

Nations.	1865.	1879.
Germany,	$616,470,000	$1,047,200,000
Austria-Hungary,	1,473,220,000	2,005,150,000
France,	2,646,560,000	3,927,000,000
Great Britain,	3,848,460,000	3,704,470,000
Russia,	990,080,000	2,856,000,000
Italy,	871,080,000	1,944,400,000
Spain,	999,600,000	2,499,000,000
Netherlands,	414,120,000	390,320,000
Belgium,	119,000,000	296,072,000
Denmark,	45,220,000	48,790,000
Sweden,	21,420,000	57,120,000
Norway,	9,044,000	24,990,000
Portugal,	190,400,000	302,700,000
Greece,	34,510,000	95,200,000
Turkey, Europe,	228,480,000	1,190,000,000
Turkey, Asia,	952,000	99,960,000
Switzerland,	714,000	6,664,000
Total,	$12,503,330,000	$20,495,096,000
United States, (1865 and 1880),	2,756,431,571	1,886,019,504

From these statistics it appears that, from 1865 to 1879, the war debt of Europe increased more than eight billions of dollars ($8,081,766,000). Only two of all these nations reduced their debts during this period,—Great Britain and the Netherlands. The United States also reduced her debt more than eight hundred millions of dollars ($870,412,067). The annual interest of the war debt of the United States has been reduced from one hundred and fifty millions—or more than $3 per year for each man, woman, and child in the country—to seventy or eighty millions, which is from $1.25 to $1.50 per head; or about $8 or $10 for every family of six persons in the United States. This money must be earned and paid, whether people have clothes, shoes, books, papers, or anything else, and this, with the amount of principal on which the interest is paid, represents a portion of the tax saddled upon national industries by the expenditures of bloody war. If the United States kept up to the standard of France and Germany, she would have to support 700,000 soldiers; and one strong man in every twenty would be a paid soldier, or fighting pauper. The armies of Europe, producing nothing, cost more than all the iron miners, iron workers, and manufacturers of textile fabrics in the United States, whose labor so benefits the human family.

At the same time that war imposes taxes, it reduces the ability to pay them, by drafting, drilling, and butchering the young, strong, and able-bodied men, leaving the aged, the infirm, the cripples, the women, and the children to produce their own living, maintain the national life, and earn money to pay these dressed-up idlers for parading and marching, for drilling, and killing, and scattering blood, rapine, conflagration; and havoc, among their fellow-men in other lands.

People tell us of the approach of the millennium, when nations shall learn war no more. Will they compare the amount of money raised for mission purposes with the amount raised for purposes of butchery and war? It costs as much to build, equip, and manage a first-class war vessel as it does to found, endow, and sustain a college. A soldier costs more than a missionary; and yet Christendom—the so-called domain of Christ—probably sends out a thousand soldiers to one missionary; and after spending all the ready money that can be gathered, in preparing and waging war, Christendom mortgages her lands, and wastes in advance the resources of centuries in mutual and self-destructive slaughter.

The standing armies of Russia, France, Germany, Spain, Austria, Italy, and Great Britain, with British India, comprise 2,740,362 men, supported at a yearly cost of $143,579,000; and their navies are manned by 186,696 men, at a yearly expense of $143,579,000. More than one in each 110 inhabitants is a soldier in active service, or about one in each twenty-two able-bodied men. And with all the senseless and ungodly waste in the past, the nations, as if drunken with blood and thirsting for fresh draughts, are straining every nerve to increase their facilities for human butchery. Krupp's great gun factory at Essen in Prussia, which has ordinarily employed 8,000 men in constructing the most efficient machinery for human slaughter, as the boasted millennium is right upon us, has been obliged to add some four thousand men to its working force, making about 12,000 in all employed in a single manufactory of death-dealing artillery.

At this rate of progress, how long will it require for men and missionary societies to bring in the reign of peace on earth and good-will to men? Will not the shortest and surest way to bring in the millennial glory be to carry the gospel of the kingdom into all the world, and to continue, meanwhile, to cry, 'Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven'?—The Safeguard.