British army $224,300,000 British navy 224,140,000 German army 183,090,00 German navy 111,300,000 French army 191,431,580 French navy 119,571,400 Russian army 317,800,000 Russian navy 122,500,000 Austrian army 82,300,000 Austrian navy 42,000,000 Total $1,618,432,980 It was evident that taxes to meet the extraordinary expenses of war would have to be greatly increased in Germany and France. As business became at a standstill throughout Europe and every port of entry blocked, experts wondered where the money was to come from. All agreed that, when peace should be declared and the figures were all in, the result financially would be staggering and that the heaviest burden it had ever borne would rest upon Europe for fifty years to come. For when the roar of the cannon ceases and the nations are at rest, then dawns the era of payment, inevitable, unescapable, one in which for generations every man and woman must share. Chapter II. UNDERLYING CAUSES OF THE GREAT EUROPEAN WAR Assassination of the Austrian Crown Prince—Austria’s Motive in Making War—Servia Accepts Austria’s Demand—The Ironies of History—What Austria Has to Gain—How the War Became Continental—An Editorial Opinion—Is the Kaiser Responsible?—Germany’s Stake in the War—Why Russia Entered the Field—France’s Hatred of Germany—Great Britain and Italy—The Triple Alliance and Triple Entente What brought on the mighty war which so suddenly sprang forth? What evident, what subtle, what deep-hidden causes led to this sudden demolition of the temple of peace? What pride of power, what lust of ambition, what desire of imperial dominion cast the armed hosts of the nations into the field of conflict, on which multitudes of innocent victims were to be sacrificed to the insatiate hunger for blood of the modern Moloch? Here are questions which few are capable of answering. Ostensible answers may be given, surface causes, reasons of immediate potency. But no one will be willing to accept these as the true moving causes. For a continent to spring in a week’s time from complete peace into almost universal war, with all the great and several of the small Powers involved, is not to be explained by an apothegm or embraced within the limits of a paragraph. If not all, certainly several of these nations had enmities to be unchained, ambitions to be gratified, long-hidden purposes to be put in action. They seemed to have been awaiting an opportunity, and it came when the anger of the Servians at the seizure of Bosnia by Austria culminated in a mad act of assassination ASSASSINATION OF THE AUSTRIAN CROWN PRINCE