“Certain facts will surely, some day, burn themselves into the consciousness of thinking men.... The extravagance of the militarists will bring about their ruin. They cry for battleships ... and Parliament or Congress votes them. But later on it is explained that battleships are worthless without cruisers, cruisers are worthless without torpedo boats, torpedo boats are worthless without torpedo destroyers, all these are worthless without colliers, ammunition boats, hospital boats, repair boats; and these all together are worthless without deeper harbors, longer docks, more spacious navy yards. “And what are all these worth without officers and men, upon whose education millions of dollars have been lavished? When at last the navy has been fairly launched, the officials of the army come forward and demonstrate that a navy, after all, is worthless unless it is supported by a colossal land force. Thus are the governments led on, step by step, into a treacherous morass, in which they are at first entangled, and finally overwhelmed.”[53] J. H. Rose, in his _Development of European Nations_, Vol. II., p. 336, surveying the chief events in the evolution of Europe since 1870, writes: “The individual is crushed by a sense of helplessness as he gazes at the armed millions on all sides of him. Tho’ a freeman in the constitutional sense of the term, he has entered into a state of military serfdom. There he is but a bondman, toiling to add his few blocks to the colossal pyramid of war.... From that life there can come no song ... some malignant Fury masquerading in the garb of Peace.” Nearly everywhere war debts are piled like mountains upon the backs of the people. Twenty-three years ago (1887) Professor H. C. Adams (University of Michigan, Department of Finance) sounded the alarm and stated the case strikingly:[54] “The civilized governments of the present day are resting under a burden of indebtedness computed at $27,000,000,000. This sum, which does not include local obligations of any sort, constitutes a mortgage of $722 [now about $950] upon each square mile of territory over which the burdened governments extend their jurisdiction, and shows a per capita indebtedness of $23 upon their subjects. The total amount of national obligations is equal to seven times the aggregate annual revenue of the indebted states. At the liberal estimate of $1.50 per day, the payment of the accruing interest, computed at five per cent., would demand the continuous labor of three million men.... Previous to the present [nineteenth] century, England and Holland were the only nations that had learned by experience the weight of national obligations; but at the present time the phenomenon of public debts is almost universal....