Butchers' Bills

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 39, 28 September 1905, Page 1

Butchers' Bills

Somebody has said that the Rothschilds are the arbiters of war and peace in Europe. The ebullition of war-feeling is- like champagne— a costly luxury, with a nagging after-neadache in every bottle. Many countries —Great Britain, France, Germany, and Ruasla, for instance—keep vast war-funds hoarded up in yellow ingots.

Btitf tlicy are barely sufficient for mobilisation and the initial -expense* of a serious war. When the ingots are melted- down and coined and spent, borrowing must en<«ue.- And that is where the Rothschilds and the rest of thd money-lenders come in. In 'her latest war with 'America^, Spain had to pay the usurious rate of eight perc ent., and to eke out hier diminishing war-chest by hoarding currency and forbidding the export of Silver. H>ad the war been drawn out rrvuch longer, she would nave had to resort — as Italy and other countries .did-'-to a ' cor so forzoso ' or foiced and incontrovertible paper money, or, like Greece, to suspension of interest on' the National Debt. But few countries nowadays Would care to ruin their credit by either of these last-mentioned resorts. The white flag would go up to the mainmast first.

Japian's late war with Russia cost the slant-eyed Eastern taxpayer the tidy fortune of £200,000,000— a vast outpouring of treasure for a country where a few pence a day are high wages and a man might be literally, and not in the figurative sense, ' passtn-g rich on forty pounds a year.' Nippon's deadm'eat'bill was stated as follows in a cable-message a few days ago : 46,180 killed in action, 10,970 died of wounds, and 13,300 succumbed to sickness— 7,0,450 all told. For an up-to-date war of such magnitude and duration, this/ butcher's bill seems, as the Italians phrase it, * very discreet.' The United States holds the record for the price it has paid for the luxury of a war The Civil War of 1861-4 cost the North £960,000,000 and 280,000 men. The South paid less in treasure (£460,000,000) and more in blood (520,000 men). The grand total £>f the ' little bill ' was £1,420,,000,000 and B#o,ooo men. iNo other war of the nineteenth century, nor profbably of any age, ever approached this in lavish expenditure of igold and human lives. The Crimean War — about the most >blunderi7ig of all military campaigns with the possible exception of that of South Africa—involved an exix»nditure of £310,000,000 a>nd (according to Dr. Engel) 15,0,000 lives. The six-weefcs' Austro-Prus-sian conflict of 186/6 cost £61^000,000 and 45,000 men ; the Italian war of 1859 about the same ; the FrancoGerman struggle of 1870-1 at least £5.00,000,000, with a los'siof 60,000! men to Germany and I^OCO to France. And over £200,000,000 and some 250,000 lives were spent on the Russo-Turkish war of 1877.

The figures gi\en above (which are Dr. Engel's) do not include I/he hea!\ y item of mortality from illness 1 . Except among the Japanese in the late war, disease has almost constantly slain more fighting men than 'bullet or cold steel. It is the old, old story of war, back to the days of 'g«c4od old Homer, whose famous lines in pointj received the following) metrical version at the hands of . Samuel Butler • —

' A skilful leech is better far Than half a hundred men of war.'

(Readers of Sir Waller Scott will hardly need to be reminded that * leech ' is the old name for physician). The war against the 31,000 armed burghers oi the two Dutch Republics of Scuth Africa ran v\cll into the hundreds of millions sterhmv— a rather high price 1o pay for the blessed prhilege of intioducing a horde of slant-eyed yollow serfs into the Rand, in order to fill to further) repletion Ihe bulging pockets of foreign speculators Add 1o Ihe wars mentioned abo\e, the Indian Mutiny and a number of other minor wars of the past sixty years, we reach a total expcndihire of over i;;i,noo,<ilio,noo and about 2,5(10,000 lues In war, th'O next greatest calami ty to defeat is \iei'<uy And the moral of it .ill is this When a cusis is at hand, clap the raucous, jingoes under lock and key mul gne the still, small \ out of reason iuid prudemce a chance of being heard. TS1 1 Labouohere once suggested a still more drastic remedy for the jingo fe\er— namely, rough-on-rats.