524 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



are supported in deference to the idolatry for square miles. This addi- 

 tional military force exceeds 3,300,000 men, and costs 4,508,000,000 

 francs ($901,600,000) a year. And this is the direct loss entailed 

 by the spirit of conquest; and yet it is trifling as compared with the 

 indirect losses. 



First, there are 3,300,000 men under the flags. If they were not 

 soldiers, and were following lucrative occupations and earning only 

 1,000 francs ($200) a head, they might produce $760,000,000. 

 The $900,000,000 absorbed now by military expenditures would 

 bring five per cent if invested in agricultural and industrial enter- 

 prises. This would make another $45,000,000. The twenty-eight 

 days of the reserves are worth at least $40,000,000. Here, then, is 

 an absolutely palpable sum of $845,000,000. But what a number 

 of colossal losses escape all valuation! Capital produces capital. If 

 $1,800,000,000 were saved every year from military expenses and 

 poured into industrial enterprises, they would produce benefits be- 

 yond our power to estimate. 



To obtain a correct appreciation of the evils derived from the spirit 

 of conquest, we must take a glance at the past. We need not go back 

 of the middle ages, from which we shall only take a few examples. 

 The destruction of wealth wrought by war has been nowhere so 

 frightful as in Spain. In 1073 the Castilians tried to capture 

 Toledo from the Moors. With the military engines of the time it was 

 impossible to accomplish the purpose by a direct attack on a place so 

 admirably fortified by Nature and man; so the King of Castile, 

 Alfonso VI, ravaged the country for three successive years, destroyed 

 the crops, harassed the people and the cattle, and, in short, made a 

 desert around the old capital of the Visigoths. 



From 1110 till 1815 — seven hundred and five years — there were 

 two hundred and seventy-two years of war between France and Eng- 

 land. Now the two nations have lived in peace for eighty years, and 

 it has not prevented them from prospering. What better proof could 

 we have that all the previous wars were useless? 



We need not speak of the massacres of the Thirty Years' War, 

 by which a third of the population of Germany perished, or of the 

 frightful hecatombs of Napoleon I, for these facts are in everybody's 

 memory. We shall confine our attention to the losses caused by the 

 spirit of conquest, at least since the Thirty Years' War. Here, again, 

 we shall proceed by analogies. From 1700 to 1815 England ex- 

 pended 175,000,000 francs ($35,000,000) a year for war. Suppose 

 that the expenditures of the other great powers — Germany (including 

 Prussia), Austria, Spain, France, and Kussia — were similar. This 

 would make, without counting the smaller states, 1,050,000,000 

 francs ($210,000,000) for all Europe. Still, as war was not so 



