This net cost, this sum of $8,885,000,000, represents what the Government paid in transporting the 4,000,000 men of the Army, in feeding them, clothing them, and providing them with all other sorts of expendable supplies which they actually consumed, and in paying the troops their wages. The supply cost, of course, includes the cost of the industrial liquidation after the armistice and the losses from the shrinkages and wastes of war. The whole bill comes out at about $2,200 a man. This, too, is but the direct cash cost, the cost in money. The intangible costs, which are never brought into a tabulation of this kind, are, after all, the true costs of war. They include the 50,000 American soldiers killed in battle in Europe. They include also the 200,000 Americans who were wounded in the fighting--some of them still, two and a half years after the armistice, in hospitals and thousands of them facing life with permanently impaired bodies. These usually unreckoned costs, too, include the 57,000 who died of disease or accident while in the service. But beyond these losses of life there were other profound penalties which the people paid and are still paying. These, too, must be set down to the account of war in any complete reckoning. One of them was the greatly increased cost of almost everything necessary to sustain life and render it pleasant, including particularly an increase of rentals, bringing with it, as a natural consequence, the overcrowding of living quarters, to the detriment of the health of those existing in such conditions. The high costs of living are aggravated by the special war taxes laid everywhere, taxes which, in one form or another, must be imposed for many years to come in order to pay for the losses of the war. There were, moreover, spiritual losses--an incredible moral slump from the national exaltation of the war to the bickering and bitterness of the demobilization. Governments fell as the war-ridden peoples of the earth blindly and brutishly vented their spleen and irritation for the hardships they had experienced upon those who chanced to be in power. Erstwhile statesmanship lapsed into a narrow, advantage-seeking partizanship that regarded not, it sometimes seemed in this country, even the fate of the world. The United States turned its back upon the League of Nations, which was the most ambitious attempt ever made by the nations of the earth to substitute a rule of reason for the rule of force.