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THE P0PULA1! SCIENCE MONTHLY 



THE PEOGBESS OF SCIENCE 



TJIE MAD WAS 



An obscure French war of the fif- 

 teenth century is known to historians 

 as the guerre folic, but no carnage so 

 well deserves to be called the "mad 

 war" as the international slaughter 

 now raging in Europe. There existed 

 an inevitable conflict of inherited 

 memories between Germany and France, 

 an inevitable commercial conflict be- 

 tween Germany and Great Britain, an 

 inevitable racial conflict between Teu- 

 tons and Slavs. But these conflicts 

 might have been carried forward to 

 the benefit of civilization instead of for 

 its subversion. The decrease in the 

 death rate, the maintenance of the 

 birth rate, the care and education of 

 children, the improvement of the con- 

 dition of the laboring classes, the less- 

 ening of pauperism, waste, vice and 

 crime, the decrease of debts and the 

 accumulation of wealth, the progress of 

 science and its applications to manu- 

 factures and commerce — these are the 

 conditions of national greatness, and 

 each nation as it advances adds to the 

 welfare of its rivals even while it may 

 outstrip them. 



Warfare results in the reverse of all 

 these, scarcely less for the nations 

 which win than for those which lose. 

 It is terribly obvious that the death 

 rate is increased both by violence and 

 by disease. The birth rate must de- 

 cline for a time and afterwards vener- 

 eal disease is spread broadcast. A re- 

 cent test in England showed that only 

 one man in a hundred of those appar- 

 ently in good health gave the reaction 

 for syphilis, while 19 per cent, .if 

 those who had been in the army showed 

 the signs of infection. In time of war 

 children are neglected and their inter- 

 ests perverted. In the Franco-German 

 war a hundred and fifty thousand men 



died, leaving a corresponding host of 

 widows and orphans. 



Lass sie betteln geh'n, 

 Wenn sie hungrig sind. 



' ' Let them beg if they are hungry. ' ' 

 Women are in time of war thrust back 

 from their slow advance to equality 

 with men. The laboring classes have 

 the bonds of their industrial slavery 

 more closely drawn. The rich also 

 suffer, though there are always vul- 

 tures who glut themselves. In the 

 Franco-German war England supplied 

 to half a million French soldiers shoes 

 with paper soles. In the present war 

 the international commerce of Ger- 

 many, amounting to over three billion 

 dollars a year, will be annihilated. 

 Great Britain. Germany and France 

 have each voted already credits of a 

 billion dollars for the taxing of future 

 generations and a paper wealth by 

 which the well-to-do exploit the poor. 

 Each day of the war more money will 

 be wasted than is needed to endow a 

 university such as Berlin. Everywhere 

 the energies of men are diverted from 

 scientific and social progress to de- 

 struction. 



Even a, pan-European war does not 

 mean the bankruptcy or suicide of civ- 

 ilization. The hundred and fifty thou- 

 sand men of France who died in their 

 war are after all a lesser sacrifice than 

 the three million children who each year 

 die needlessly in Bussia. Alcohol costs 

 more in wealth and health and lives 

 than any war. Warfare is only a vast 

 dramatic exhibition of our savage origin 

 and semi-barbaric condition. In spite 

 of their bureaucratic military organiza- 

 tions, the great nations of Europe had 

 postponed war for more than forty 

 years. Even now both the governments 

 and the peoples of Great Britain, 

 Bussia, Italy and Belgium were dis- 



