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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



In most of the great states of Europe the increase both of men and 

 of war expenditure has been far greater than ours. Austria up to 1874 

 spent less than seven millions on her army ; she now spends £13,433,000, 

 with an increase of about fifteen thousand men. France has increased 

 her forces by fifty thousand men in the last ten years ; while her mili- 

 tary and naval expenditure has nearly doubled since the war, and now 

 reaches the enormous sum of £35,500,000. Germany during the same 

 period has raised her war expenditure by more than three millions, the 

 present amount being £20,050,000. Italy has doubled her war ex- 

 penses since 1873. In that year they were a little over nine millions, 

 now they are £18,000,000. Russia has followed the same course, hav- 

 ing increased her war expenditure from less than twenty millions in 

 1870 to £33,000,000 in 1884. 



The loss involved in these huge armaments is of three distinct 

 kinds : 1, by the number of men, mostly in the prime of life and of 

 the very best physique, who are kept idle or unproductively employed ; 

 2, by the burden of increased taxation which the rest of the com- 

 munity have to bear ; and, 3, by the actual destruction of life and 

 property in war, which, wherever it occurs, inevitably diminishes for 

 a time the productive and purchasing powers of that country. Let us 

 endeavor to form some conception of the amount of loss due to each of 

 these causes. 



From information given in successive issues of the " Statesman's 

 Tear-Book," it appears that, since 1870, the armies and navies of Eu- 

 rope have been increased by about 630,000 men on the peace establish- 

 ments. This number of men, therefore, has been wholly withdrawn 

 from productive labor ; but during periods of war a much larger num- 

 ber is thus withdrawn, and the country is, to that extent, still further 

 impoverished. But the total number thus withdrawn, though very 

 large — the standing armies and navies of Europe being estimated at 

 3,683,706 men — represents only a portion, and perhaps even a small 

 portion, of the mischief done, since the numbers employed in the 

 equipment of this force and in the production of the vast and complex 

 war-material now used are, not improbably, very much greater, and 

 these are all equally lost for productive purposes. If we think of the 

 hundreds of huge iron-clad ships which have recently been built, and 

 try to form a conception of the number of men employed upon them 

 directly and indirectly — from those who dug out the iron-ore, and the 

 coal used to smelt the ore, to those who construct the huge and beau- 

 tifully finished marine engines — from the men who felled the trees in 

 Canadian and Indian forests to the skilled workmen who design and 

 frame and finish with elaborate care the whole of the internal fittings 

 — we shall be convinced that to build one of these monster vessels re- 

 quires from first to last a small army of men, all of whose labor, so far 

 as any benefit to mankind is concerned, might as well have been cm- 

 ployed in pumping water out of the sea and allowing it to flow back 



