p. 720 | After the War

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Nov 16, 1915

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 42, No. 45.

After the War

SPEAKING of the loss of energy represented in war, a genius has figured out what is necessary in order to overcome this waste. After stating that there is hardly a man who works up to the limit of his capacity, that there are millions who try to do as little work as possible, he further says that it has been jokingly remarked that the collective energy of the baby's cry would run the railroads of New York State if it could be conserved, that only fifteen per cent of the energy of coal is utilized, that the unharnessed water power of the United States represents millions of horse power going to waste, and that probably less than five per cent of the available human energy in the world is productively employed.

Figuring out the cost of the war, and then considering this increase in efficiency, he concludes: “If, by greater industry or concentration, 50,000,000 men working three hundred days a year can increase their production by the equivalent of ten cents a day for thirteen years, the resulting increment at the end of that period will offset the assumed loss, interest and principal.”

It is quite probable that the demand for labor after the war will bring about even a greater increase. For example, in Europe, the era of railroad building that succeeded the Napoleonic wars increased the world's wealth by many times the sum the wars had cost. In our own country, industrial coordination and the use of automatic machinery was so rapidly extended after the war of the Confederacy that our national wealth, estimated at seven billion dollars in 1850, had grown to one hundred and eighty-seven billion in 1912.