The Cost of War | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jul 21, 1898

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 24, No. 29.

The Cost of War.

—According to the New York Journal of Commerce, the direct expenditure of the government during the four years of the Civil War was $3,180,000,000, of which the war was responsible for $2,920,000,000. Of this amount $730,000,000 was raised by taxation, while $2,450,000,000 was obtained by issuing greenbacks and bonds. The interest of the war debt during and since the war to July 1, 1897, amounts to $2,664,000,000; pensions since the war, $2,126,000,000, making the total cost of the war to the end of the last fiscal year $7,711,000,000. Much of this expense is continuing, and if we are to believe a recent statement of the Commissioner of Pensions, the pension part of the expenditure is to be increased. The country is now paying in pensions and interest money on account of the Civil War about $3,500,000 every week. It is estimated that by the time all the liabilities are settled, the cost of the late war will have amounted to no less than $12,000,000,000, a sum equal to the entire assessed valuation of all the property in the United States at the beginning of the conflict. The present war is costing, it is said, over $1,000,000 a day. This is the moneyed cost. Only God can measure the human and moral liabilities.