Since England’s cost each day is heavier than any of the other countries at war, due to the fact that she is Financial First Aid to most of her Allies and is maintaining a fleet almost equal to all the others combined, let us reduce her enormous daily war bill of $25,000,000 to simpler form.  It means that participation in the greatest of all wars is costing her $1,410,666 an hour, $17,361 a minute and a little over $289 a second.  At this rate of waste John D. Rockefeller would be bankrupt in forty days; Andrew Carnegie would be in the bread line in ten.  The sum is greater than the entire net public debt of Chicago; it equals the assessed valuation of all the taxable property in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Work out this immense daily outlay from still another angle and these striking facts develop:  the war is costing at the rate of 29 cents a day for every inhabitant of the United Kingdom:  31 cents for every individual in France:  22 cents for every person in the Kaiser’s domain, and 6 cents for each human unit in the Russian Empire.

Yet this well-nigh overwhelming rush of figures only accounts for the actual cost of hostilities.  By this I mean arms and armament, food and military supplies, the construction, maintenance and renewal of fleets, the cost of transport and the pay of soldiers and sailors.

To the vast sum already recorded must be added the loss registered by the destruction of cities, towns and villages, the sinking of ships, the wiping out of factories, warehouses, bridges, roads and railways.

Then, too, you must allow for the almost incalculable productive loss due to the killing and maiming of millions of men:  the shrinkage of agricultural yields and the more or less general dislocation of the machinery of output.  All these factors pile up a total, the calculation of which would almost cause a compound fracture of the brain.  Sufficient to say it puts a terrific human and financial tax on coming generations and we in America will feel its effects when the world begins to readjust itself to the altered social and economic conditions which will come with peace.

Of course the inevitable question arises:  Who is paying the Scarlet Piper?  In seeking the answer you encounter for the first time America’s intimate and all-important part in the costly drama now being unfolded to the tune of billions.  She sits in the armoured box-office with the Treasurers of the embattled nations.

At the outset of the war all the belligerent countries believed that they could finance their needs without seeking neutral aid.  Less than a year was enough to dispel this delusion.  Although England and France immediately voted immense credits they were not long in finding out that they must back up their unprecedented mobilisation of resources with outside help.  They came to us.