CHAPTER XII. Who Pays The Military Bills? 1. Milking the People With Armaments. A high German official recently avowed that it was well the German navy had made no demonstration in Samoan waters for it could not cope with the American navy, to say nothing of the English sea power; and he then entered upon a demonstration that German wealth warrants the elevation of the naval arm to equivalence with the land force, an imperative necessity, he argued, if Germany is to hold her own. There is evidence that this darling project of William the Crazy will be achieved, and it signalizes a momentous step in the military evolution of Europe, where hitherto there have been powers with great armies and one power with a great navy, but none with the two combined as Germany proposes. Since England's pert policy is to hold her fighting fleets superior to those of any two united powers, if Germany's cue prevails each continental state must build a navy like England's, a prodigy of expense nearly doubling the military burden of its inhabitants. England cannot be a leaden spectator of this process, which aims directly at the degradation of her commerce and empire and opens the British islands to invasion by armies that far outnumber hers; she must struggle for her naval supremacy by building two warships to every rival's one, or raise her standing army to their magnitude, which introduces a distinctly new order of affairs in liberty-loving Anglo-Saxony. She will do both. Without moderating her naval designs she is about to begin the task, revolutionary for her, of bringing the army into correspondence with the navy. Showing the hastening military drift of English things the present occupant of the London Lord Mayor's chair conceived "the happy idea of giving a great military banquet." "We discern," remarks the lively London editor, "a peculiar fitness and harmony in the hospitable scheme, for the city represents the wealth of the nation, which pays for the Army, and the heads of the Army represent the defensive organization which protects the wealth of the nation." Mark this with some care. Lord Wolseley, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, was there and he declared in sufficiently plain terms that a substantial increase in our military establishment is contemplated. Our army, as he pointed out, is one of the smallest and one of the cheapest maintained by any great power in Europe. He believes that "the conviction has been brought home to the minds of the people of England that, if they are determined as a nation to extend the confines of their Empire, they must make up their minds once and for all to increase the size of the Army, which means an addition of more battalions of foot, more regiments of cavalry, and more batteries at home." As taxpayers, we may grumble a little at the prospect; as patriotic Englishmen we must welcome the plan of making our second line of defence more worthy of the first. We have a great Navy; it behoves us to have an Army not quite ludicrously disproportionate to it.* M. Edmond Thery, the well-known statistician, has formed an estimate which places the cost of the European war establishments at slightly less than $900,000,000 annually. The prospect ahead is seen from the fact that the cost has nearly doubled since 1870, when it was $505,775,000. Peace-loving England pays out more than any other power for war arrangements. This direct drain of nine hundred millions nearly equals the value of all the railroads in the United States, yet is only about one-third of the entire cost of war business to Europe. The number of men actually in these armies all the year round was (in 1897) 3,121,430, the productive labor of whom, M. Thery considers, would average a value of six francs each *The Morning." London, July 14, 1898. †Editor of L'Economiste Europeen. The figures here are taken from an abstract of Thery's paper in the Philadelphia American, Sep. 3, 1898. In these estimates the countries of the Spanish, Scandinavian aud Turkish peninsulas are not included. for all working days,* and amount for the six powers to $1,084,385,000-which is somewhat more than the value of all the railroads in the United States. But these three million men are not all the soldiers, for a large proportion of the male citizens between certain ages on the continent, are required to leave their labor, assume camp life, and spend a considerable period in military drill. The number of this reserve force in 1897 was 19,650,000, and counting what was lost to production by each man during that term of idleness, $1,000,000,000 was sacrificed, another sum equal to the total value of American railroads. Various items have been neglected in this computation, among them public works like railroads constructed exclusively for military ends, and what is withdrawn from productive labor by seamen, so that it is safe to put the total at $3,000,000,000, the annual bill of luxury which six European states pay for their military outfits. Still we are only at the beginning of it. Real military expansion did not fairly set in till thirty years ago; there is a reason for its setting in then, a law of its increase, and certain assurance of continued increase according to that law. It began then with full vigor because at that period civilized nations became fully stocked with capital and the era of surplusage opened. Investments ceased to pay as before, since there was much more capital accumulated to invest than profitable places for investment. This was an epoch and turning point in the economic history of the world; later events will likewise show that it was epochmaking in political and social destinies. Three movements of paramount meaning arose through this industrial event: (1) A desire for stable forms of investment, (2) The impulse for new markets by appropriation or conquest, (3) The tendency to develop armed force for the protection of monopolized capital. All of these processes are organic elements of the grand transformation which the surplus of saved capital is *This sum does not represent, merely, the wages of each, but the total product of his labor, including profit to employer, taxes, and wages, and is therefore far from extravagant. - causing. They combine to show that military armaments will continue to expand according to a definite law, because they combine to enforce that increase. The growth of armies and navies is simply the struggle of surplus capital to find profitable investment. They are to conquer and protect markets for capitalists in uncivilized parts, which causes the nations to compete for the largest armaments as basis for the most extensive markets, and this necessity will insure the unlimited increase of war machinery. But besides this, every military addition creates two instant calls for surplus capital which capitalists have on hand and cannot otherwise remuneratively use: it purchases war implements and supplies of them, setting the factories in move, and it augments the war debts by forcing the government to engage new loans. It also prevents the payment of the already stupendous national debts. These debts are opportunities for absolutely secure investment of some of the enormous and growing surplus of saved capital and are therefore the dearest cynosures of capitalist eyes. It is their supreme advantage as business men to swell these debts and prevent their liquidation; therefore it is their supreme aim to multiply military expenses by distending armies and navies. The capital which they loan describes a circle and returns to them. They loan it to the government for untaxed bonds on which they garner interest, the surest investment that exists. With this money With this money government buys munitions of war, which of course it can only purchase of those who possess. And who possesses? In these days only great capitalists, united in our country in trusts. Of them government buys. But these great owners are just the ones who loaned the money to the government which is now being spent back to them and from which they will draw a large commercial profit. For example, the government calls for a war loan and Phil Armour and the other cancers of beef patriotically sub scribe; part of the loan is now used to purchase immense orders of canned beef from Armour and others, who make their ten, twenty or fifty profit per cent on the higgle, thus regaining into their hospitable pockets a fourth or half of what they advanced as war-loan patriots, while continuing to receive interest on it and having the government permanently in their debt for the whole amount. Likewise the great battleship-builders, the manufacturers of armor-plate, ordnance and rifles, the owners of the railroads which transport troops, the members of the great trusts which supply necessaries for the maintenance of soldiers on the field and in garrison, loan their money to the government to have it turned back to them by political manipulators, with contract profit, as purchase money for their wares. An index of the surplus of these capitalists and their anxiety for its investment is furnished by their avidity in snapping up these national loans. Early in 1896 President Cleveland desired to place a loan of $100,000,000, in response to to which $568,269,850 was subscribed, by 4,640 persons. This showed nearly 5,000 persons with an average of over $135,ooo loose in their pockets which they did not know what to do with. Nearly six times the amount of the loan was subscribed, and if the wealthy had not been restrained by a knowledge of the hundred million limit probably many times more still would have been offered. As there is hardly an industry which is not actually or virtually in a trust, and hardly a man of noted wealth who is not a trust magnate, a great part of the money raised for military purposes must be spent in buying goods from its loaners, a condition at once abnormal and most highly dangerous, for it places before the wealthy, our influential citizens, a tempting bribe to encourage military concerns. His constantly growing surplus capital makes the rich man an inevitable conspirator against the interests of peace. |