The monetary cost, that is. …

THE COST OF WAR

A million dollar bills packed solidly like the leaves in a book make a pile 275 feet high. One thousand million dollars, the price which Europe annually pays for armaments in time of peace, equal a pile of dollar bills over 52 miles high. This expenditure for the supposed prevention of war represents one thousand million days’ labor at one dollar a day, and this, be it remembered, every year, to enable each nation merely to hold its own.

A second pile of dollar bills over 52 miles high represents the annual payment for interest and other costs of past wars.

To these inconceivably large amounts must be added the earnings of the millions of able-bodied men in army and navy who are withdrawn from productive industries and are supported by taxed peoples.

Since 1850 the population of the world has doubled; its indebtedness, chiefly for war purposes, has quadrupled. It was eight billions fifty years ago, it is thirty-two billions today.

The year 1900 added nearly another thousand millions to the war debt of the world. This about equals the annual cost of boots, shoes, and bread in the United States.

—Lucia Ames Mead. from The Public, July 28, 1906.