AFTER THE WAR

Taihape Daily Times, Volume 7, Issue 263, 9 August 1915, Page 2

AFTER THE WAR

PROSPEHITY —NOT POVERTY

A strik.ng ai:cl unusual view of the

war cn its economic side was expressed by MR Theodors PI. Price, of New York, editor of “Commerce and Finance,” in the, “New York .World." We giv e the following extracts: “Hysterics 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 general prosperity and not general poverty will follow the coi | lusion of peace, and that of this prosperity the present combatants will enjoy the greatest share

“Th e reason why a great, war creates such a tremendous impression of ruin and disaster is that the suffering and destruction arc concentrated into a narrow space, and a brief period of .time, and are thus, as it were, dramatised before nor 6 yr : s. The burning up of £00000,009 worth of in the San Francisco fire was tlie subject of world-wdd e - 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 1600 men women and children the whole world was shocked, yet we, are not stored to excitement by the deaths of- 1600 men, women and children a day in this country from ‘preventable causes.

“So it is with walr. We hear the rear of the guns and the cries of the wounded ; we see th e unburied dead lying amid th 0 smoking ruins of a village, and our imaginations run wild. “Thus out of the. physical suffering, out of the mental torture, out of the less of life, and out of the destruction of properly which spell war w e build up a 'tbod-y of economic loss of comn;< rc’a! depression, and of industrial stagnation altogether out of proportion to the difference between the toll lov■Tod. by death, disease and disaster during Unies of war and that levied by tlio sam e agonies in times of peace. A PREDICTION. “Tel,, the general consequences which are likely to flow from the present confir r ’w- !)■-> predicted within reasonabie limits of accuracy either by examining tbp records cf 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 blase of on): Impassioned pity.

“Cf every war in modern times it has Von ■ ■] .during the progress of the hostilities that the misery of it would make it the last war, and that the exnensp cf it; would bankrupt the nations -••wygfA and p- > 1 yta-te a frenrjfia.l finano al crisis throughout the family cf nations. Pacifist orators have always described war as a setting back by centuries of the march of civilisation, and professional economists havei always spoken of losses which the lapse of a generation would not suffice to repair “The annals of history may be scorched hi vain for any fulfilment of these prophecies and for any substantial warrant for these direful assumptions about the; efforts of wars “ The Napoleonic wars were followed almost immediately by an era of economic and social progress such as Europe had never experienced before in so brief a period During the Crimean War the business activity of Prance and of England was not only unabated, but showed an expansion which was more tha sustained after the conclu-

sion of peace. “Th e Franco-Ffrussian War marks the

date of Germany’s entrance upon a career of phenomenal commercial growth, and in France, not.hwithstanding hte indemnity of five thousand million francs which was exacted from her, so far tVom poverty and distress appearing as consequences of her defeat, industrial recuperation was well under way before the Treaty ot Frankfort was t-atitied

“Thr Bor” War which cost England more than £200,000.000, ushered in a period of trade expansion which broke all urevims records and after Ftuanish-American. War the United Stafps touched a hi eh water mark of prosperity which eclipsed everything withnl the nation's experience.”