Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, February 1899: Volume LIV, No. 4, February 1899Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, February 1899: Volume LIV, No. 4, February 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
We need not speak of the massacres of the Thirty Years' War, by which
a third of the population of Germany perished, or of the frightful
hecatombs of Napoleon I, for these facts are in everybody's memory. We
shall confine our attention to the losses caused by the spirit of
conquest, at least since the Thirty Years' War. Here, again, we shall
proceed by analogies. From 1700 to 1815 England expended 175,000,000
francs ($35,000,000) a year for war. Suppose that the expenditures of
the other great powers--Germany (including Prussia), Austria, Spain,
France, and Russia--were similar. This would make, without counting
the smaller states, 1,050,000,000 francs ($210,000,000) for all
Europe. Still, as war was not so costly to Russia or Prussia as to
England, we will reduce this figure one fourth. We shall then have,
between 1700 and 1815, an annual expenditure of 787,500,000 francs
($157,500,000).[24] Let us estimate the cost of the wars of the
seventeenth century at a slightly lower sum, putting it at only
500,000,000 francs (or $100,000,000) a year for all Europe. That would
make 41,000,000,000 francs ($8,200,000,000), or for the entire period
from 1618 to 1815, 131,562,500,000 francs ($26,312,500,000).
We have more certain data for the nineteenth century. The Crimean,
Italian, Schleswig-Holstein, and American Wars, and the war of 1866,
cost 46,830,000,000 francs ($9,366,000,000).[25] The war of France
cost 15,000,000,000 francs ($3,000,000,000) at the lowest; that of
1877 at least 4,000,000,000 francs ($800,000,000). Add for the war of
Greek independence, the French and Austrian expeditions to Spain and
Naples, the Polish war of 1830, the Turco-Russian war of 1828-'29, and
the wars of 1848, 3,000,000,000 francs ($600,000,000) more--a very
moderate estimate; we reach a total sum of 68,830,000,000 francs
($13,766,000,000). None of the extra-European conflicts are comprised
in this figure; neither the war between Russia and Persia in 1827,
that of Mehemet Ali against the Turks, the struggle against the
mountaineers of the Caucasus and against the Arabs in Algeria, or the
English campaign in Afghanistan--concerning all of which we have no
figures.
Counting only the figures we have been able to obtain, we have for the
period from 1618 till our own days 200,392,000,000 francs
($50,078,500,000) as the bare direct losses by war, which have had to
be defrayed by the budgets of the different European states. How shall
we calculate the indirect losses? Between 1618 and 1648 Germany lost
6,000,000 inhabitants. The destruction of property was prodigious, the
ravages were frightful. How can we represent them in money? It is
absolutely impossible. There are, too, some expenses arising from the
spirit of conquest that almost wholly escape observation. We shall
give only two examples of them.
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