Nevertheless, this burden of past debt, with all its many ramifications and its interest charges, is not the heaviest the nations have placed on themselves. The annual cost of army and navy in the world before the war was about double the sum of interest paid on the bonded debt. This annual sum represented preparation for future war, because in the intricacies of modern warfare "hostilities must be begun" long before the materialization of any enemy. In estimating the annual cost of war, to the original interest of upwards of $1,500,000,000 we must add yearly about $2,500,000,000 of actual expenditure for fighters, guns and ships. We must further consider the generous allowance some nations make for pensions. A large and unestimated sum may also be added to the account from loss of military conscription, again not counting the losses to society through those forms of poverty which have their primal cause in war. For in the words of Bastiat, "War is an ogre that devours as much when he sleeps as when he is awake." It was Gambetta who foretold that the final end of armament rivalry must be "a beggar crouching by a barrack door." When the great war began, the nations of Europe were thus waist deep in debt, the total amount of national bonded indebtedness being about $30,000,000,000, or nearly three times the total sum of actual gold and silver, coined or not in all the world. A year of war at the rate of $50,000,000 to $70,000,000 per day has increased this indebtedness to nearly $50,000,000,000, the bonds themselves rated at half or less their normal value, while the actual financial loss through destruction of life and property has been estimated at upwards of $40,000,000,000. In "The Unseen Empire," the forceful and prophetic drama of Mr. Atherton Brownell, the American ambassador, Stephan Channing, tries to show the chancellor of Germany that war with Great Britain is not a "good business proposition." He says: 'Our Civil War has cost us to date, if you count pensions for the wrecks it left--mental and physical--nearly twenty billions of dollars. And that doesn't include property losses, nor destruction of trade, nor broken hearts and desolate homes--that's just cold hard cash that we have actually paid out. You can't even think it. There have been only about one billion minutes since Christ was born. Now if there had been four million slaves and we had bought every one of them at an average of one thousand dollars apiece, set them free and had no war, we should have been in pocket to day just sixteen billion dollars. That one crime cost us in cash just about the equal of sixteen dollars a minute from the beginning of the Christian era.' The war as forecast in the play is now on in fact, and one certain truth in regard to it is that it is assuredly not "a good business proposition" for anybody in any nation, excepting of course, the makers of the instruments of death. DAILY COST OF GREAT EUROPEAN WAR (Charles Richet, 1912)