CHAPTER VII.

THE EXPENDITURES OF THE WAR.

"I said one day in Venice, in a company which was very clamorous for a war, I wish that each of the great men and great women present was ordered by the emperor to contribute, at the rate of four thousand ducats a head, to the charges of the war; and that the other fine gentlemen among us were made to take the field forthwith, in person.” PRINCE EUgene.

We devote this chapter to "the waste of treasure," produced by the Mexican War, to both the nations concerned. There are men of reputed wisdom and high standing, who scorn the consideration of the cost of a war. They deem it a sordid act to put money into one scale, to weigh against national glory in the other. We confess that money is not the chief good of life, and that wasting it by millions is not the chief evil of war. We confess that there are things which a nation should hold infinitely dearer than an overflowing exchequer, and for which it should pour out its gold and silver with the bountifulness of the rains of heaven. Such are the maintenance of its just rights by Christian means, the diffusion of education and religion among its people, and the contribution of food and clothing for the famished and naked abroad, as well as to build up every good institution, asylum, and public work, that will insure the physical, domestic, and moral improvement of its masses. But we do not recognize this war as among these objects; it belongs to a very different category.

When we look, too, on one hand, at the horrid destitution and consequent degradation and wretchedness of extensive

strata of society in the old world, and then witness, on the other, the fruitful cause, direct or indirect, of this incalculable woe, in the war-debts which hang like Alps and Andes around the necks of the European powers, we would utter a cry that should pierce the hearts of our countrymen, and warn them from the ambition of copying into their unwritten history so dark a chapter. Vice and misery need be no riddle or wonder in England or France, after we have read the history of their battles. Doubtless, many other causes besides war have contributed to dry up the sources of public prosperity, to make the rich richer, and the poor poorer, and multiply pauperism and crime to an almost boundless extent. We, as citizens of a republican government, think we can identify these causes in some measure with the old feudal, monarchical, and ecclesiastical institutions that yet have a footing beyond the Atlantic. But it is still our conviction that these causes, bad as they may be in themselves, have derived tenfold virulence of evil from the omnipresent and overshadowing institutions and customs of War. For war, not only in a time of war, with its ruinous drain, near or remote, upon every branch of production and industry in the state; but war, contradictory as the terms may be, in a time of peace, has swallowed up many millions more than the civil list. The treasury of the richest country on the earth, thus becomes, like the sieve of the Danaides, always filling and always empty. And the fortune of the state is repeated in miniature in the fortune of the humblest citizen. For the waste of war is not half enumerated when we have summed up the huge public expenditures, which are as much beyond our imagination adequately to conceive, as the distance to one of the fixed stars, but we must gather up a countless heap of items, each minute in itself, but constituting a mountain of aggregate loss, - - the poor man's garden trampled by the hoofs of the war-troop, the corn-fields cut up for forage, the little improvements on his acre ravaged, the one "ewe lamb" ta

ken, the widow's cow driven away, or the widow's son wrested from her side to bleed and languish in foreign parts. These, and the catalogue might be run to any length, constitute " a waste of treasure" and of human comfort in their lowlier aspects, which are never registered in the national legers of the contending powers, but which are all recorded with a pen of iron in the book of human life and of God, where every leaf is a broken heart. There need be some great cause, "known and read of all men," to justify the infliction at home and abroad of such manifold woes, else they accumulate and darken into a crime, before which all ordinary guilt is but a breath of air.

But the expenses of this war, great as they are, will not be too great a price to pay, if they shall serve to awaken any considerable portion of the people to the wrongs and barbarities of this old-world institution. We may rejoice, in one sense, in the heavy burdens men bring upon themselves for their sins. It is of a piece with the great retributive Providence of God, as good as it is just. Fearful indeed would it be, if we could carry on such a contest with a powerful nation, and not have a mete recompense of reward following after it, to the pecuniary, as well as other interests of the country. We cannot act in this world under an exhausted receiver, in which we are cut off from the great vital atmosphere of humanity, nor disconnect ourselves from the compound system of life, in which mutual action and reaction throughout are reigning principles. Thus viewed, the cost of our Wars, our Slaveries, our Intemperance and other vices and vicious customs, is a wise and kind punishment, inflicted upon us to remind us how far we have strayed from the ways of our God, and how hard and harder, the farther he walks in it, becomes the way of the transgressor.

Property is one of the trusts of God to man, and though it is, of and by itself, one of the inferior blessings of life, yet the spirit in which the trust is discharged, and the uses to

which money is applied, are matters of the first importance. As we use or abuse its magic power, we can kill or make alive, raise or sink, bless or curse, ourselves, our family, our town, our state. Property is one of the momentous trusts of government, and it may be transformed into camps or schools, bullets or books, destructive armies, or pacific exploring expeditions. It may be cast into the scale of civilization or barbarism. It may be employed to convert the goodly earth into a Pandemonium, or to hasten the Millennial ages.

When, accordingly, the revenues of a people are expended in war, and a debt of fearful magnitude is saddled upon posterity, it is right to demand that a strong and sufficient reason be made out to justify such extraordinary measures. Much as men may be enamored of military glory, and passionately as they may resent any infringement upon their rights, yet war is a ruinous game to the winner as well as the loser. Every battle is as truly the destruction, by its immediate and its ramified influences and effects, of millions of the earnings of the laboring and producing classes, as if the balls were of silver, and the wadding Treasury notes. And somewhere and upon somebody the loss will fall, and fall with the certainty of gravitation. Far away it may be; and mixed up and mystified with endless details of currency, and tariffs and income-taxes, it probably will be; but upon the rich man's property, upon the poor man's sinews even more surely, the reckoning will come, and the money, the mines and mints of money that were absorbed into mighty fleets and armies, and that went down at Trafalgar, or were blown into the canopy of smoke that shrouded Cerro Gordo, must all be paid, cent for cent, and dollar for dollar. Such is the waste and profligacy of war. Such is the tremendous responsibility of those who set in motion its destroying agencies of fire and sword, famine and pestilence.

The figures used in calculating the expenses of wars in general, are so vast that they are blunted in their force by

their very magnitude. For when we say, as is said on good authority, that the American Revolution cost Great Britain $680,000,000, that the French Revolutionary war of nine years from 1793, cost $2,320,000,000; that the contest with Napoleon, from 1803 to 1815, cost $5,795,000,000, or an average of $1,323,082 every day, or more than a million of it for war-purposes alone every day; that Europe spent $15,000,000,000 for the wars that raged from 1793 to 1815; and that we of the United States expended in a period of forty-one years, from 1791 to 1832, during which time we had only two years and a half of actual war, the sum of $842,250,891, of which sum only $37,158,047 belonged to the civil list, the rest used for war purposes; when we have read a few statistics of this appalling kind, we seem to lose in the indefiniteness of such inconceivable sums of money the vivid impression which even the loss visibly of a single dollar out of our own pocket would occasion. And it is perhaps somewhat to this intellectual incapacity of comprehending the billions of the war-tax, as well as to moral apathy, that we may fairly attribute the ease with which every government satisfies the mass of its subjects in its outrageous expenditures for forts, and ships, and armies. And the marvel is, after we have surveyed the devastations of war upon man's prosperity, not that he starves, rebels, or speculates wildly about his condition on earth, not that multitudes suffer and perish in pauperism, famine, ignorance, and sin, but that society has any life left at all, that every vein of circulation is not stagnant, and every nerve of motion palsied.

Though much of the property thus expended by a nation is not actually annihilated, but only passes from one hand to another in purchasing the articles of war, yet when we have added to the qualified public account the innumerable private losses that go unrecorded, the sum total would exceed rather than fall short of the above statements. And here observe, that nothing of all that man does under