The lands and houses, the goods and merchandise and money of the world are owned by a very few. All the rest in some way serve that few for so much as the law of life and trade permit them to exact. At the best, this is but a small share of the whole. All the property destroyed by war belongs to the owners of the earth; it is for them that wars are fought, and it is they who pay the bills. When the war is over, the property must be re-created. This, the working men will do. In this re-building, they will work for wages. Then, as now, the rate of wages will be fixed by the law of demand and supply—the demand and supply of those who toil. The war will create more work and less workmen. Therefore labor can and will get a greater share of its production than it could command if there was less work and more workmen. The wages must be paid from the land and money and other property left when the war is done. This will still be in the hands of the few, and these few will be compelled to give up a greater share. The destruction of property, together with its re-creation means only a re-distribution of wealth—a re-distribution in which the poor get a greater share. It is one way to bring about something like equality of property—a cruel, wasteful, and imperfect way, but still a way. That the equality will not last does not matter, for in the period of re-construction the workman will get a larger share and will live a larger life. As the war goes on, the funds for paying bills will be met in the old way by selling bonds. These too will be paid by the owners of the earth. True, the property from which the payment comes must be produced by toil, but if the bonds that must be paid from the fruits of labor had never been issued this surplus would not have gone to labor, but would have been absorbed by capital. This is true for the simple reason that the return to labor is not fixed by the amount of production, the rate of taxation, the price of interest and rents, but by the supply and demand of labor, and nothing else. If labor shall sometime be wise enough, or rather instinctive enough to claim all that it produces, it will at the same time have the instinct or wisdom to leave the rulers’ bonds unpaid. But all of this is far, far away; in determining immediate effects we must consider what is, not what should be. And the jobless and propertyless can only look upon the destruction of property as giving them more work and a larger share of the product of their labor. Chicago was never so prosperous, or wages so high, as when her people were re-building it from the ashes of a general conflagration. San Francisco found the same distribution of property amongst its workmen after the earthquake and the fire had laid it waste, and her people were called upon to build it up anew.