The cost of this war would pay the national debts of all the nations in the world at the time the war broke out, and this aggregate sum of $45,000,000,000 for the world was all accumulated in the criminal stupidity of the wars of the nineteenth century. If all the farms, farming lands, and factories of the United States were wiped out of existence, the cost of this war would more than replace them. If all the personal and real property of half our nation were destroyed, or if an earthquake of incredible dimensions should shake down every house from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the waste would be less than that involved in this war. And an elemental catastrophe leaves behind it no costly legacy of hate; even the financial troubles are not ended with the treaty of peace. The credit of Europe is gone for one does not know how long. Before the war, it is said, there were $200,000,000,000 in bonds and stocks in circulation in Europe. Much of this has been sold for whatever it would bring. Some of the rest is worth its face value Some of it is worth nothing. In the final adjustment who can know whether he is a banker or a beggar? The American Ambassador was quite within bounds when he said: "There isn't so much money in the world; you can't even think it!" Or we may calculate (with Dr. Edward T. Devine) in a totally different way. The cost of this war would have covered every moral social, economic and sanitary reform ever asked for in the civilized world, in so far as money properly expended can compass such results. It could eliminate infectious disease, feeble-mindedness, the slums and the centers of vice. It could provide adequate housing, continuity of labor, insurance against accident; in other words it could abolish almost every kind of suffering due to outside influences and not inherent in the character of the person concerned. A Russian writer, quoted by Dr. John H. Finley, puts this idea in a different form: