WHAT THE WAR HAS COST.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume III, Issue 110, 19 February 1901, Page 1

WHAT THE WAR HAS COST.

John Bull, portly of person, and bulky of purse, has just had another little bill presented to him for the trifling amount of £16,000,000, and he will be compelled to draw a cheque for that sum, chiefly because there exists, or, perhaps, to speak more accurately, there did exist a quarrelsome little State known as the Transvaal Republic, and this same little Republic contained a strange old gentleman, Mr Kruger by name, who is very good at quoting Scripture, and has a weaknor* Continental lor-r;. This I.*:16,000,000, by the way, T ~oi.v ■,ii I';em in lb'- bill ui, which, a pleasing total m -ariy v-.; haJnjvv' ■ iao.ua ior close on 430 days, and, striking an average, the Government have up to now voted a sufficient sum to cover an expenditure of almost £207,000 per day. Of course, part of this enormous sum has been expended on the Chinese and Ashanti expeditions, but by far the greater proportion is due to the South African War, £107,000 per day, viz., in round figures £8,625 per hour, and £144 per minute since the declaration of war in October of last year ! Working from the data obtainable, the details of the account sh uld be roughly as follow ■i my pay .. ... .. £17,500,000 Transport and remounts, &c. 22,000,000 Provisions, forage, and field allowances, etc. ... .. 20.000.000 'Clothing, etc... .. .. 0,500,000 War stores, equipment.etc... 21,000,000 Works, buiiam;s, and reipairs to railways damaged hPthe war .. ... 6,000,000 £89,000,008 Taking one of tlae items alone, that for transport, we should with this sum of £22,000,000 have been able to add to our fleet some fifteen or sixteen fully equipped warships and fast cruisers, an addition which might have had some influence on General Mercier's speech the other day, and his pet scheme for the invasion of our little island. The amount spent on buildings and railway repairs, though comparatively small in itself, is distinctly annoying, when one thinks of ihe vast quantity (f English money that has in past years been poured into South A frica. We are practically presenting a bill because another man has broken our win lows. Seventeen million and a.-half is a lot of money, but were it doable the amount none of us . won Id grudge the payment of it to the bravo men who have endured hardships and wounds and suffering for the honor of tb® English name. Nor are we likely to grumble at the provision and forage bill, when tales of short rations and Meagre faro are still fresh in our memories. Of the further £16,000,000 voted in this Parliament, £5,300,000 go to transport and remount expenditure, £4,250.000 to provision, forage, and field allowances, £750,000 to clothing conti acts for making uniforms and packing expenses, ££700,000 for war stores, including equipment materials and ammunition and £1,000,000 for repairs to railways, works, and buildings. This.estimate includes a provision for'‘the newly-raised South African constabuarly, and does not take into consideration the proportional charges to be Tome by our South African colonies wnh respect to their share of the charges for repairs and the maintenance of the constabulary corps. But fit st and last, the fact remains that the total amount of the bill will be no less than £89,000,000, a : sum so vast that it is bard to form any conception of its magnitude. If paid in bard cash it would mean the disbursement of 952 tons weight of solid standard gold, as used for minting purposes, or nearly one and a half-times the world’s total production of gold for the year 1898. War is always an expensive luxury to the country more so nowadays than e/er before in the history ol the world. But there is not one of us, though the French may call us a commercial nation, who would be backward in loosening the purse strings to maintain our supremacy in any quarter of the globe.