chiefs of the army to permit a gang of politicians to destroy all the institutions without which France cannot live?

"Mercier, Gonse, Roget and all back of them are fighters. They have long known that the ministry and Parliament are after their scalps, but their attitude is admirably described by Mercier's exclamation when he learned that the Cabinet was discussing the expediency of arresting him: 'I'll be hanged if I'll allow that lot of hack politicians and that bogus renegade Gallifet to touch me.' ..

"The army was canvassed recently. It was then overwhelmingly with us, and it is now so even more thoroughly. Our returns prove that, from the Colonels down, all the regiments await only the sign from their generals to upset the government and to rid the country of the last of the Dreyfusards.'

The pigs squealed, 'You mustn't destroy the prestige of pigs or France will go to pieces. Anybody that says we lie is a 'bogus renegade.' We're fighters! Nobody in civil office shall touch us. If the people attempt to get rid of us and stop our swill, we'll fight; we'll upset the government and rid the country of the last of those who hate the rule of hogs and demand the reign of justice.'

They called in a great admirer of pigs called Freycinet, who had been Minister of War and Premier of France. and he testified by alluding to his fear that “attacks on the chiefs of the army might be prejudicial to discipline,' adding: "Might not these attacks lead to the disappearance of discipline, and what then would be the result if we found ourselves in difficulties with a foreign country?” Addressing the court-martial of pigs who were conducting the trial, he said: "Let us cease throwing into one another's faces remarks that will discredit us in the eyes of our rivals. Gentlemen, let us prepare--and I would that my feeble voice could be heard by all-let us prepare

*Dumay, in a cable to N. Y. World from Rennes, Aug. 29, '99.

to receive and accept your judgment with respect and silence."* A most noble pig and Iscariot idea for all who defend the divine right of swill. The General pigs treated this witness with prodigious respect. Frenchmen call him "The Little White Mouse," for 'his ability to speak lengthily without conveying much information.'

An ounce of foresight is worth a good many pounds of bullets. We are in for a reign of pigs in this country unless the sternest measures are taken to shut off their rising volume of swill. Congressman Hull now remarks, "Congress will certainly have a military bill which will provide for a three-battalion regiment and a provision allowing the President to increase the present 50,000 fighting strength to 100,000 if necessary." (Aug. 30.) Pig rule has been handed down from antiquity. The army is a pig caste miraculously trained to make itself seem indispensable; which grows on the wars it is supposed to prevent, and draws to itself all national vigor. We can repeat or avoid the history and folly of France, but given the pigs the pig transactions will follow; given the army we shall soon learn what hogs can do with America. The sty of Europe is near enough, can we not get army experience enough from our noses? Must we turn clean America into one?

*Associated Press, Aug. 29.

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.

tEditor 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.