Now, my friend, when the Honorable Mr. Noisy from Washington or your legislature or elsewhere, gets you and your neighbors out in the woods next Thirtieth of May or Fourth of July and proceeds to fill the forest full of cheap and stupid noise about the grandeur and glory of war, you should promptly treat him with the contempt he deserves. You should also protect the young people of your family and community from the savage and dangerous suggestions made by many speakers on such occasions—protect them by having the “other side” of war presented. The literature of peace-born-of-justice might well be distributed on such occasions. The cash cost of war is easily made evident by an examination of our annual current national bill for militarism. Indeed, the annual cash cost of prize-fighter statesmanship, the annual cost of developing the national fist, the annual cash cost of this hypocritical “preservation of peace” by preparing for war, needs special attention. The combined average annual expense of militarism, that is, of the Department of War and the Department of the Navy (the Departments of Murder), is, for the United States, as follows: The Army and the Navy $200,000,000 The loss of producing power, the worse than lost labor-power, of 121,786 “picked” men (83,286 in the Army and 38,500 in the Navy), estimated at $600 each per year 73,071,600 Interest on Public Debt (chiefly an expense of militarism), at present 22,000,000 Pensions (admittedly a war burden) 150,000,000 Depreciation of forts, arsenals, ships, weapons and other war equipments by decay, and from the necessary discarding of “outgrown” murdering machinery 5,000,000 ———————————— Total $450,071,600 Since none of the items here set down is over-estimated and since several of them are much underestimated, the grand total of four hundred and fifty millions must be regarded as an extremely conservative estimate of the annual cost (in times of peace) of keeping the national fist ready for a fight.[41] But four hundred and fifty million dollars means nothing sufficiently definite to the human mind until it is considered in units larger than single dollars and smaller than a million dollars. The sum of money “_necessary_” to defray a year’s expenses of a _poor_ man’s son or daughter in a high-grade Middle Western college or university—may be taken as a convenient unit of expense in considering the cash cost of war.