A BANKRUPT WORLD | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 3, 1874

A BANKRUPT WORLD.

France is at the head of the list of public debts with a burden of $5,000,000,000, the sad legacy of the German conflict. Great Britain follows with $3,750,000,000, and the United States comes third with a debt of over $2,000,000,000. The aggregate public debts of all the governments of the world amount to the enormous sum of $20,000,000,000, a figure so vast as to be almost incomprehensible. If a man were to count it as rapidly as he could handle it, dollar by dollar, he would not finish in fifteen centuries. When we come to add to this the debts of States, provinces, municipalities, villages, corporations, and individuals, we have a mountain of debt perfectly appalling. And the worst of it is that, though nations and individuals are bankrupt, they are going on piling up more liabilities year after year. Wealth, which is the product of labor, is completely outstripped in the race. Some day this enormous bubble will burst. Then comes the deluge.