It is especially significant and pertinent that the added employment of labor in the construction of armaments adds greatly to the number of taxpayers. Consequently, the burden of taxation is thereby borne by a larger number of persons, with a corresponding lessening of the burden on each individual. This is one of the reasons why poverty is not increased by increased government expenditures in the employment of labor. The enjoyment of life being derived entirely from exercise of our faculties, the more useful exercise we get within our strength, the happier we are. The building of battleships, by putting us more to use, serves the double purpose of getting more wealth out of the ground and making us happier. It may be argued that this would not be true if our economic institutions were not slack, and that, by perfecting these institutions, every one would receive his due amount of normal stimulus, and would be getting out of the ground his normal amount of wealth. This is all very true, but our economic institutions are not yet perfected, and the cost of building battleships comes out of the slack in our institutions. The work merely helps take up some of the slack. When we have looked upon our Navy, remembering what the pacifists have told us about its enormous cost, we are strongly impressed with the colossal expenditure, not realizing that the Navy has actually cost nothing. Its production has been a source of profit and benefit to the people. That which determines the size of a burden is the ability to bear it. Our burden of armaments, borne upon the united backs of a hundred million people, with an aggregate wealth of more than a hundred and thirty billion dollars, with an annual increase of wealth of over four billion dollars, becomes insignificant compared with the ability to support it. Size, like distance and time, has no meaning, except in a relative sense, for space and time are limitless. As compared with space, a mustard seed is exactly as large as the sun. We hear much about the tremendous burden of the present conflict upon the warring nations. The pacifists tell us that they are destined so to exhaust themselves that, when the war is over, we need have no fear of any one of them, or of a coalition of them, because they will have neither men nor money with which to fight. [Illustration: Enormous Resources of the Warring Nations]