p. 10 | War's Tribute

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jul 17, 1913

War's Tribute

ILLUSTRATIONS of the good that might be accomplished by the wise expenditure of the millions of dollars expended annually for war preparations are given in the Lutheran Witness of June 5, 1913:—

A first-class battle-ship costs as much as all the hundred buildings of Harvard University.

Europe pays annually in time of peace for keeping up her armies and navies more than one billion dollars. This is a pile of dollar bills fifty-two miles high. It represents a thousand million days' labor at a dollar a day.

A modern battle-ship costs $12,000,000. It lasts for twenty years at most, and during that time its up-keep costs $16,000,000, or $28,000,000 in all. For the cost of a single battle-ship fifty manual-training schools could be built and fitted out, and 75,000 boys and girls could learn trades every year.

Out of every dollar of our national expenditures, seventy cents goes to pay for past wars and provide for future ones.

The world's armies and navies require 5,560,000 men. Think how much better off the world would be if these millions were engaged in the productive arts of peace!

The cost of one battle-ship would buy 250,000 acres from which forests have been cut, and plant them with trees for the needs of future generations.

Every time a fourteen-inch gun is fired the cost is $800. That would give a boy or a girl two years at many colleges.

The United States army has 90,000 men, and its navy 50,000 men, or 140,000 in all, who must be fed and clothed, paid and cared for, year after year. And this is as nothing compared with other nations. The German army, for example, contains 600,000 men.