Wars and their Cost

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 10, 1856

Wars and their Cost.

Few persons, however much they may deprecate war, realize the enormous tax they are on the wealth, population and productiveness of a nation. It has been estimated by careful statisticians, that, within the last sixty years, twenty-two thousand millions of dollars have been squandered in wars, and seven millions of lives sacrificed.

The war of the French revolution began to re-impose on France a destiny she had rejected, cost nearly three thousand millions; the war to drive Buonaparte into exile, which commenced in 1803 and ended in 1815 cost nearly fifteen millions; and the war just terminated, whose beginning was a blunder, and whose whole conduct was a series of blunders, has cost about a thousand millions.

Men are still living, men yet hale and hearty, and below the Psalmist's "three-score and ten," whose birth preceded the spending of the first cent of this gigantic waste of human treasure and life. Within that sixty years enough men have been slain in battle to build and put in working order, within the short space of three years, a railroad that would have encircled the world. Within that sixty years enough wealth has been squandered in war to educate every child on the face of the globe, to drain all the pestilential marshes, to christianize the most remote and benighted people.—Philadelphia Ledger.