Therefore, even according to the facts and figures of those two eminent peace-men, I. S. Bloch and Dr. David Starr Jordan, the money loss today is a concern fifteen times more serious to the economic welfare of a nation than is the loss in lives.
It is a very strange paradox indeed that the professional peace-propagandists, who claim to be actuated mainly by considerations of humanity, should advocate disarmament and the inevitable reversion to the old and more deadly arms and methods of warfare, on account of the greater expensiveness of warfare conducted with modern scientific arms and methods.
By doing away with our present highly scientific and very expensive war enginery and fighting methods, the nations would be able, in a war like the present, to kill one another at very much less cost. They would then be able to kill ten times as many in a given time, while the cost would be only a small fraction of the present cost.
It is a matter of solemn certainty that the quick-firing gun is the most beneficent implement of mercy that has ever been invented, and every peace advocate in the world and every lover of his kind should appreciate this fact and use his influence in favor of armaments which serve to make war expensive, and tend both to prevent war, and to save life when war comes.
Let us for a moment suppose that the great European Powers had disarmed fifteen years ago when the Czar of Russia broached the subject to them. What would have been the result? This war would have come just the same, and probably much sooner; and it would have been ten-fold more bloody, even had the nations flung themselves upon one another armed with scythes, carving-knives, wood-axes, and common tools of trade, or even had they fought, as the simple cave men did, with clubs and stones.
Love of home and country--patriotism--on the one hand, and race hatred on the other, are far more potent in the human heart than any lately created sentiments of international brotherhood and humanity. Before this war came, it was a common preachment of the peace-men and a common belief of the multitude, that many socialists, members of brotherhoods of labor and other opponents of war, would refuse to fight, and if drafted would shoot down their officers from the rear. But nothing of this kind has happened. When this war broke out, socialist, labor unionist, and preacher of international brotherhood joined with their militant fellow-countrymen in singing the "Marseillaise," "Wacht am Rhein," "Britannia Rules the Waves," and rushed to arms and to war, and are now fighting like demons, shoulder to shoulder with the imperialist and the war lord.