many luxuries upon which money is spent in times of peace and prosperity? If not, then the wastes of war exceed those of peace only by the value of the lives destroyed or rendered useless.

A powder factory is no less economic than an ice factory except in that it may aid in the destruction of life and property.

If we assume that, out of 20,000,000 fighting men, 25 per cent. will be killed or crippled an excessively high estimate and that the economic value of these 5,000,000 lives is fairly capitalized at $3,000 each, the maximum loss so resulting will not be in excess of $15,000,000,000 and probably much less.

Regarding the other economic wastes of war, it is probable that they are exceeded by the wastes of peaceful extravagance, and the profits derived from war expenditures are certainly no less than those accruing from an equal amount of non-military commerce.

Although $15,000,000,000 is less than the estimated annual increase in the world's wealth, it is a large sum and, though it may not produce a cataclysm, such a loss may well give us pause unless we can see some means of quickly recovering it. Is such a recovery possible and, if so, how will it be accomplished?

In order to answer this question intelligently, it will be well to go back to first principles.

Wealth is the marketable surplus of a man's production, or increment, over his needs. The creation of wealth presupposes a surplus production and a demand for it.

Robinson Crusoe and his man, Friday, might have produced twice as much food as they could eat, but so long as there was no one to whom they could sell what they did not use, wealth was for them nonexistent.

The moment that it became possible for them to exchange what they could produce but did not need for something else that was valuable, not only to them but to others, then they commenced to accumulate wealth. It is plain that the value of the things so accumulated depends upon their desirability to others.

A man may own a beautiful country

place or picture, but unless others are willing to buy them they are not wealth.

Production and demand in combination are, therefore, necessary to the creation of wealth; and it is to their reciprocal growth that the increase in wealth is due.

As the productive power of the individual increases, he comes to have new desires and is able to satisfy them because he is producing more. This is described as an "increase of the purchasing power" and it almost invariably accompanies an increase of the productive power. It is possible to conceive of a dozen intelligent men on an unknown and unvisited island starting out with nothing and rapidly becoming wealthy through an interchange of production, but the value of their accumulation would be restricted by the limited demand for it and would be immensely increased as soon as the markets of the world were opened to them.

It is plain, therefore, that the accumulation of wealth has a very definite relation to the productive power, the number of producers, and their trade facilities, for every producer is a potential buyer by whose purchases the value of the product is stabilized and enhanced.

In a world in which all persons-men, women, and children-were working up to the economic limit of their productive capacity, the increase of wealth would be marvelously rapid, and would be accelerated by every labor-saving device that in effect increased the number of producers because it multiplied their efficiency.

It is a little difficult to visualize such a world, for none of us has ever seen it.

THE UNUTILIZED ENERGY OF THE WORLD

There is hardly a man who works up to the limit of his capacity. There are millions who try to do as little work as possible. The waste even in the most scientifically conducted industries is enormous, and there is an immense amount of energy generated that is not utilized at all.

It has been jokingly said that the collective energy of the baby's cry would run the railroads of New York State if it could be conserved, and when we consider that only 15 per cent. of the energy of coal is utilized, that the unharnessed water

power of the United States represents millions of horse-power going to waste, and that probably less than 5 per cent. of the available human energy in the world is productively employed, we must admit that a very slight increase in industry or efficiency will recover an enormous loss of wealth.

This statement may perhaps be clearer if reduced to figures. As suggested, the capitalized value of the lives lost in the war may be $15,000,000,000. Five per cent. per annum is a fair interest on this sum and a further 5 per cent. will amortize the loss it represents in thirteen years. This is $1,500,000,000 yearly.

If, by greater industry or concentration, 50,000,000 men working 300 days a year can increase their production by the equivalent of ten cents a day for thirteen years, the resulting increment at the end of that period will offset the assumed loss, interest and principal.

Is this impossible? By a little speeding up or intensified application, practically any one can increase the value of his services or production ten cents a day, and many more than 50,000,000 persons are now peacefully at work in Europe, to say nothing of the unnumbered millions of Asia, Africa, and America whose energies will be quickened by the demands of postbellum reconstruction.

DISASTER SOMETIMES BENEFICIAL

Through fires which almost wiped them out, the economic renascence of Chicago, Baltimore, Boston, and San Francisco was accomplished, and these cities are to-day greater and richer than ever mainly because disaster put everybody energetically at work. The war is likely to have the same result. If it does and all those who can work become producers to the extent of only half their capacity, the recovery will be amazingly rapid.

This is, of course, too much to hope for. A world in which all those who can work shall be found working up to even half their capacity will be an economic Utopia. impossible so long as men continue to be as lazy and as self-indulgent as they are.

It is, however, entirely possible that national pride, spurred by need, will in

crease the aggregate of productive energy by at least 10 per cent., and if it does there will be no cataclysm, for the immediate addition to the world's wealth will be prodigious.

WAR A STIMULATOR OF INDUSTRY

In France, England, and Germany the war has already put most idlers at work and made men willing to labor longer and more efficiently, and the fact that war always has this effect probably explains the paradox of the prosperity by which it is nearly always followed.

It comes to this: The increase of wealth is in proportion to the intensity and efficiency of human industry, for which war is the greatest stimulus thus far known.

War is, in fact, stimulating to mankind both physically and mentally.

It not only makes men willing to labor longer hours but it leads them to devise ways of making their labor more efficient.

With every great war there is an increase in the use and invention of labor-saving machinery.

Whether, like the alleged increase in the proportion of male babies born in war times, it is a case of cause and effect, we cannot definitely tell.

In a previous article, I have referred to the quickened interest in economic and technical literature as one of the intellectual reflexes of the war.

Probably the fact that war compels economy predisposes men to the use of machines that economize human energy, but whatever the reason for the coincidence, the consequences are amazing.

In Europe, the era of railroad building that succeeded the Napoleonic Wars increased the world's wealth by many times the sum the wars had cost. In our own country, industrial coördination and the use of automatic machinery was so rapidly extended after the War of the Confederacy that our national wealth, estimated at 7 billion dollars in 1850, had grown to 187 billion in 1912.

Instances of this coincidence between war and the subsequent increase of wealth through increased mechanical efficiency might be multiplied, but it is unnecessary. Who knows what effect in cheapening and

facilitating transportation may follow the military use of the aeroplane and the submarine? In this country, as a result of the war, we are developing our own supplies of dye stuffs and potash and seem likely to increase our national wealth accordingly. Carlyle said that "without tools man is nothing; with tools he is everything."

In the manufacture of pins by hand, it takes 140 hours to manufacture twelve packages of one pound each, while the machine does the same amount of work in one hour and a half.

To make 100 pairs of shoes of a certain grade takes 1,800 hours by hand and 200 hours by machine, and the cost of the machine-made shoes is one-fifth of the hand-made.

When gingham cloth was made by hand it took 5,800 hours to make 500 yards. It takes 72 hours by machine.

In agriculture the same thing is true. A good man with a scythe could formerly reap one acre a day. A good reaper and binder can do it in twenty minutes.

The increased effectiveness, according to United States reports of man labor when aided by the use of machinery, as indicated

by these figures, varies from 150 per cent. in some cases to 2,244 per cent. in others.

If it be true that war leads to the increased use and invention of labor-saving machinery, as well as greater individual industry, then there need be no fear of its economic effect. Economic readjustments may, indeed, be necessary, and as soon as they are completed there will be increased prosperity but no cataclysm. It is a law of physics that "action and reaction are always equal in opposite directions." The same rule applies in economics. Were it otherwise, the world would retrograde in time of war, and it doesn't.

What surer guarantee can we have that with the return of peace the productive power of mankind, unleashed and quickened by need and competition, will speedily be manifest in an addition to the world's wealth incredibly beyond precedent?

America at least has no reason to doubt this conclusion, for already we are by far the richest nation in the world and rapidly growing richer while the progress of our competitors is retarded by an epidemic of war madness from which we have thus far been immune.

T

BY

HE American Newspaper is constitutionally incapable of incapable of presenting even the first elementary accurate impression of the training camps recently held at Plattsburg Barracks for the benefit of the plain armchair citizen. A peaceful student like myself, recently Number 3 in the second rank of Squad 15, Company G, second battalion of the provisional regiment, finds it quite impossible to pro

ceed with the narrative of his impressions and benefits received with the conception presented by the press as a background. I neither saw, nor heard of, nor have anything to relate about the camp I have been reading of in the Sunday editions. To my mind the attitude of the place has been totally and ignorantly distorted and misrepresented in the best of American journalistic style.

To begin with, from the papers one

might suppose this regimental drill-the incessant and thorough routine, the strenuous manœuvres and the dead level of the same uniform and the same diet and the same contempt for all precedents and authorities extant in the world not embodied in the corporal, the sergeant, and the captain of the company-was really only the masquerade of a society function.

The news of this great athletic camp, of this team composed entirely and exclusively of fighters and marchers and sharpshooters in the making, was ridiculously larded with the names of insignificant privates and amateur corporals, whose place in the scheme of things there was that of the novice. There is an obvious parallel between a football team and an army, and between the training of a fullback and a first-rate squad leader. And any graduate of Yale or Princeton, with the vaguest memory of the rigor of the early season and the discipline of the second team, would rightly receive with unmitigated disgust any attempt to report the training of his University eleven which dwelt exclusively on the abortive efforts of the heir apparent of some celebrity in the fifth scrub to drop on the ball without fracturing a rib. No one on earth is concerned with the pedigree or the floral home surroundings of the dirty urchins that charge up and down Soldiers Field in November in preparation for the annual battle with Yale, least of all the head coach. His eyes are directed exclusively to the selection of nerve and stamina, of steady eyes and strong wills and tough muscles and daring dispositions. And the sixty-yard punter is the hero of them all.

Now the most important and fundamental thing about this Plattsburg camp is that from start to finish this was exactly the attitude of the officers and of every private I saw. It is of enormous moment to the people of the United States that the men they have trained and rely upon for the making of their Army, and in the last ditch to revive the Spartan spirit and remold us into the stern stuff our soldiers are made of, should be thorough, efficient, and determined; that from the instant the roll is called the drab of superficial distinctions and the froth of histrionic interest be eliminated.

I

Now this was the case exactly. I went to Plattsburg as ignorant of military life as I am of celestial life, but with a schoolboy respect and pride in the Army. came away tired and awakened, but with a firmer and deeper respect for the West Point graduate and the enlisted man. They mean business, and it was a tremendous satisfaction to have been forced to play a real game for all it was worth.

THE DAY'S WORK AT PLATTSBURG

However, the perspective of the reporter and the camera man was probably at its worst with regard to "propaganda." Let us suppose you had been called from a dreamless sleep making careful headway toward about eleven o'clock by the clear tones of a bugle blasting at sunrise, had lined up with your neighbors like a picket fence and proceeded to exercise every limb and crick in your body with the violence of a drowning man, merely as an eyeopener-had played valet, chambermaid, bootblack, garbageman, barber, and policeman, eaten your breakfast and cleaned your gun, and like the tortoise put your house and your kitchen and your arms and your bed in a neat bundle on your back and proceeded down the big road at a lively trot by seven-thirty; had strained both your intellect and your tendon of Achilles in fantastic endeavor to obey the crisp final orders of a Czar involving every possible turn and gait, standing, kneeling, crawling, and extending over miles of territory; that you arrived back barely in time for the necessary swim before dinner and the cavalry drill; that one o'clock found your aching legs plastered to a horse with the habits of a fiddler crab, whose action for two hours you were supposed to conform to the vagaries of the commander; and let us suppose, which is the case, that you got back just in time to empty the vaseline can and mop your brow and shoulder your Springfield and tie on your belt and bayonet and march left front into line around and around and around while the band played and the divinity at the head of the column carried conviction that you were an ignoramus and a mollycoddle.

That is a long sentence. But it is not

hypothetical. It is the exact record of the eighth day until mess call. Now I wish to ask this: Suppose, having occupied your day thus, and eaten dinner, and then been lined up again and marched to listen to a lecture on ordnance as terse, accurate, definite, and instructive as a demonstration in calculus-and then some pleasant gentleman had arisen to make some ordinary remarks from the outside world about things in general and "preparedness" and such, wouldn't you be disgusted if your evening paper hailed him as the great card and listening to him as the day's work?

It was a mistake to have any "propaganda" at all. But the confusing of this month of shooting and marching and discipline with a talkfest is a crime.

THE MAKING OF AN OFFICER

The most biased observer would be compelled to admit that the provisional regiment received the most thorough and rigorous possible month's training in the school of the soldier. It is supposed that this training is to fit the men to be officers in volunteer regiments in case of necessity. To the layman engaged in this course it is very plain that the training could not conceivably make a competent officer of any civilian. First of all one must be a soldier. And then be leader of a few men. And at this point the art of war, of the tactician. and the strategist, the ordnance officer and the engineer, begins. These branches were quite beyond the possibilities of the instruction provided. But it must be of great interest to thousands of countrymen ignorant of what it is all about to know exactly what a normal recruit in this game did, and what he learned, and what good he received.

To begin with, neither you, nor I, nor the moonshiner in the mountain, nor the moose hunter on the lakes in our normal state could be called of any use whatever as a soldier. I've heard this said. But now I know it. And this is worth knowing. On the other hand, it is not such a complicated thing. In the end it comes down to these things pure and simple-to be physically fit to march any distance; to be able to shoot straight under the most

terrifying possible circumstances and to acquire by practice the habit, equal to second nature, of obeying a few fundamental commands. The rest is hardihood, courage, the will to fight, and the spirit of the team.

Now the very essence of this is physical condition. That as a nation we are individually not in such condition was very strikingly shown at the manœuvres. This Plattsburg regiment was recruited largely from athletes-polo and football players, militiamen, big game hunters, and such people, probably far above the average of our citizens. They had a month's very vigorous training. And yet ten miles was the utmost limit they could cover as a body in march in one day. Yet the 30th United States Infantry two days before the amateur war began arrived at camp about 4.30 in the afternoon, the band playing "What the hell do we care, having covered thirty-two miles to a man. since reveille.

TEACHING THE ART OF SOLDIERING

Here is the way they set about making soldiers of us: We rolled into camp in a string of automobiles and trucks, with one armored car, heralded far and wide as the only armored car in America, Captain Reynal Bollings, provisional captain, in charge of Captain Smedburg, United States Army expert in the matter of machine guns. We were equipped with nothing but an olive drab uniform, a tin can, called a mess kit, a blanket and a poncho, an automatic and a bolo. We were provided a dozen tents and a box of pegs, and proceeded to combine these into an orderly row of habitations.

We slept soundly, six in a tent. The trumpet called us forth at 5:30, and at 6 o'clock we were lined up in full regalia, and no time wasted in teaching the manual of arms, squad formations, and those details of the parade ground familiar to all. We proceeded at the double quick to the main camp half a mile away for breakfast. This breakfast was excellent and wholesome and quite plain and satisfactory. Then at 7:30 the assembly call brought the infantry companies to attention. Every man belonged to one of these eight