“Every day of our time is taken up with helping to equip ’hospital units,’ private bodies of doctors and nurses with equipment, to go to France and help the French Red Cross work among the French wounded.  The situation in France at present is more horrible than one can imagine.  Our English soldiers have medical and surgical help enough with them for first aid.  Then they are sent back to England, and here all our hospitals are ready and private houses everywhere have been given to the War Office for the wounded.  But the battlefield is in France; many of the French doctors have been shot; the battle-line is 200 miles long, and the carnage is frightful.

“Last week we sent off one hospital unit, and a messenger came back from it yesterday to tell us awful facts—­16,000 wounded in Limoges for one place, and equal numbers in several other little places south of Paris—­just trains full of them—­with so little ready for them in the way of doctors or nurses.  One hears of doctors performing operations without chloroform, and the suffering of the poor fellows is awful.”

COMPARATIVE WEALTH OF NATIONS AT WAR

The wealth of the principal belligerent nations, in terms of property, goods and appraisable resources of all kinds, is estimated as follows: 

National           National      Percent
Wealth               Debt

United States.............$260,000,000,000    $18,000,000,000    6.

Great Britain.............. 90,000,000,000     36,675,000,000   40.

France..................... 65,000,000,000     23,000,000,000   35.

Russia..................... 40,000,000,000     25,400,000,000   63.

Italy...................... 25,000,000,000      7,000,000,000   28.

Japan...................... 28,000,000,000      1,300,000,000    4.

Germany.................... 80,000,000,000     33,000,000,000   38.

Austria-Hungary............ 25,000,000,000     20,000,000,000   80.

It is worth noting in this connection that the fourth liberty bond issue of six billions was oversubscribed to extent $866,416,300—­almost an extra billion.  There were over 21,000,000 individual subscribers.

The war bills of the United States between April 6, 1917, and October 31st, 1918, as officially reported at Washington November 2, 1918, amounted to twenty billions, five hundred and sixty-one million dollars ($20,561,000,000).  Of this sum, seven billions and seventeen millions ($7,017,000,000) have been loaned to the allies and will be repaid.

Only a little more than one-fourth of the expense had up to the date of the report been raised by taxation.  Most of the remainder had been raised by bond issues practically all of which were subscribed by our own people, so that the debt is owing not to foreign creditors, but to ourselves.

The same report shows that on November 1st, 1918, the treasury’s working balance stood at one billion, eight hundred and forty-five millions, seven hundred and thirty-nine thousand dollars ($1,845,739,000) the largest sum ever available at any one time in the history of the nation—­with continuing receipts of instalment payments on the fourth liberty loan coming in at the rate of two billions per month, and preparations for the fifth loan well under way.