COST OF THE WAR

Gisborne Times, Volume V, Issue 120, 31 May 1901, Page 3

COST OF THE WAR

If the British taxpayer docs not by tli is time realise the cost of the Boer War, the fault does not lie with the Speaker. This liberal weekly deplores the fact that the public mind cannot readily grasp the meaning of big figures. The average patriot, it says, is staggered when he hears that the war has cost one hundred millions, but not more so than he would bo if the cost had been ten millions. Ho does‘not realise the difference. At tho time of the general election the Chancellor of the exchequer announced that the war had cost seventy millions sterling. ■ Now sixteen sovereigns placed one on another make an inch, and the seventy millions, if put together in this way, would make a pile more than thirteen times the height of Mount Everest. By March the cost of the war had reached one hundred millions, that is to say, ten thousand times ten thousand pounds, and the Speaker proceeds to explain what might be done with the money. “If any one of us,” it declares, “ were to live 1000 years longer (i.e., live to be as old as Alfred the Great would now be if he were still surviving) and, throughout the whole of this prolonged existence, were every single hour (night and day) to destroy a £5 Bank of England note, he could not, by the time of his death, have got rid of one-half as much •money as has been squandered in this war.” Thero are other useless ways of disposing of the money. If the sovereigns were strung closely together like a necklace they would encircle Great Britain. But there is no need to waste the money, for, as the Speaker points out, it might have been invested at 31- per cent and tho proceeds applied in discharge of local rates, in which case it would have freed for ever all rates the whole of the inhabitants of Birmingham, Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield, Bristol, Newcastle and Hull. Finally, the money would have endowed two hundred British towns with splendid universities and technical schools.