Human blood, human life, under the present industrial form of society, is so cheap that even a sweet child’s life, as a _wage_-earner, in the factory, can be bought for a few cents a day—almost a drug on the market, the “labor market.” So cheap indeed is the life of the wage-working class that the blood cost of war is regarded as comparatively unimportant—considered unimportant by all except those who are sneeringly referred to as “sentimental people.” These “sentimental people” presume to assert that the superiority of a nation’s civilization is more convincingly indicated by its sacred regard for the purity and dignity of human blood than by its cheap and swaggering boasts about big battleships, “blooded” cattle, “blooded” horses, and “young men not only willing but _anxious_ to fight,”[27] or by the nation’s strutting announcement of our “readiness” to spill the toilers’ blood at the factory door and on the battlefield. Cheaply spilt human blood surely indicates a civilization fundamentally coarse and cheap. Until human blood, human life, becomes too sacred to be sold for cash to escape starvation or bought for cash to win a profit on the bartered labor power—too sacred to be thus placed on sale, exchanged in the “labor market” as horses and sheep are bought and sold in the “live-stock market,”—until then it will simply be impossible to realize the hideousness of the blood cost of war, impossible to compute and realize the vastness of the red crime committed against the working class,—against “The poor souls for whom this hungry war opens its vast jaws.” The blood cost of war? War spills the blood of slain soldiers. War spills the blood of non-combatants. War weakens the blood of soldiers who are smitten with befouling fevers and whose wounds and sores fester unattended on the battlefield or are ill-attended in rude military hospitals. Disease, in war, strikes with death four times as many soldiers as are killed with lead and steel.[28] War weakens the national blood by selecting the strong-blooded for slaughter, thus reversing nature’s method of selecting the weaker blooded for destruction. War tends to open opportunity in the struggle for existence for the relatively weaker blooded to multiply in disproportionate degree. War, it is estimated,[29] prevents, on the average, the birth of one child per soldier slaughtered on the battlefield, or serving three years or more in peace or war. War weakens the blood of the nation by worse than wasting enormous supplies of food material and thus underfeeding those who toil. War weakens the national blood by tainting the blood of great numbers of soldiers and through these tainting the blood of women and children—with venereal diseases contracted in unusual degree near the barracks and during war, and immediately following war. President William H. Taft, as Secretary of War, has said:[30]