AFTER THE WAR.

Taihape Daily Times, Volume 7, Issue 263, 24 July 1915, Page 2

AFTER THE WAR.

PROSPERITY—NOT POVERTY.

A striking and unusual view of the war on its economic side was expressed by Mr. Theodore H. Price, of New York, editor of Commerce and Finance, in the course of an interview reported in the New York World. We give the following extracs: — “Hyterics is scarcely too strong a word to apply to the popular vision of a world made bankrupt for a generation by the war which is now raging in Europe. Unless we are to abandon human experience as our safest guide, it may be confidently asserted that gonral prosperity and not general poverty wiSl follow' the conclusion of peace, and that of this prosperity the present combatants will enjoy the greatest measure. “The reason why a great war creates such a tremendous impression of ruin and disaster is that the suffering and destruction are concentrated into a narrow space, and a brief period of time, and are thus, as it were, dramatised before cur eyes.

The burning up of £60,000,000 worth of property in the San Francisco fire was the subject of world-wide comment and sympathy, but from the £60,000,000 worth of property burned up every year in the United States we get no' big thrill. When the Titanic sank with 1,000 men, women and children, the whole of civilised humanity was shocked, yet we are not stirred to excitement by the deaths of 1,600 men, women, and children a day in this country front 'preventable causes.

“So it is'with war. We hear tne roar of the guns and the cries of the wounded; we see the unburied dead lying amid the smoking ruins of a village, and our imaginations run wild. “Thus out of the physical suffering, out of the mental torture, out of the ibss of life, and out of the destruction of property which spell war we build up a theory of economic loss, of commercial depression, and of industrial! stagnation altogether out of proportion to the difference between the toil levied by death, disease;, and disaster during times of war and that levied by the same agencies in times of peace.

t r.r A Prediction. “ Yet.the general consequences which are likely to follow from the present conflict niqv be predicted within reasons We, } i4mits of accuracy either by examining the records of past wars and taking account of their results, or by looking at the broad facts of to-day in the light of cool common sense instead of in the heated blaze of our impassioned pity. “Of every war in modern times it has beqn said during the progress of the, hostilities f that the misery of it would make it ,the last war, and that the expense of it , would bankrupt the nations engaged and precipitates „a genral financial! crisis throughout the family of nations. Pacificist orators have always described -war as a setting back by centuries of the march of civilisation, and professional economists have always spoken of losses which the lapse of a generation would not suffice to repair.

“The annals of history ( may be searched in vain for any fulfilment of these prophecies and for any substantial! warrant for these direful assumptions about the effects of wars.

"The Napoleonic wars were followed almost immediately by an era of economiCfUnd .. social progress such as Europe had never experienced before in so brief a period. During the Crimean War the business activity of France and osSEngland was not only unabated, but showed an expansion wdiich was more than sustained after the conclupeace. , ,

"The Fraiico-Prussian War marks the date of Germany’s entrance upon a career of phenomenal commercial growtl}*.,and’ in France, notwithstanding the indemnity of five thousand miljfon francs which was exacted from her, so far from poverty and distress appearing as consequences of her defeat, industrial recuperation was well under way before the Treaty of Frankfort was ratified.

"The Boer AVar, which cost England more than £80,000,000, ushered in a period of trade expansion which broke all previous records, and after the iSpanish-Ameri'can War the United States touched a high water mark of prosperity which ' eclipsed everything within the nation’s experience.’’