The Longest War in

a Century

be possible to say that the European war or what might be more correctly termed the war of all the nationshas continued longer than any such conflict in a century. On July 31, 1918, four years of continuous fighting will be completed. If Lee's surrender is taken as the end of the War of Secession and the firing on Sumter as its beginning, then the duration of that struggle was slightly less than a four-year periodfrom April 12, 1861, to April 9, 1865. In the case of the Manchurian War, it was barely a year and seven months between the attack on Russia's Port Arthur fleet in February, 1904, to the Treaty of Portsmouth in September, 1905.

The Boer War, which seemed a long conflict to people of that day, began on October 11, 1899, and ended May 31, 1902-the duration, therefore, slightly exceeding two years and seven months. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877 did not outlast a twelvemonth; the FrancoPrussian War was over in seven months; the Prussian War of 1866 against Austria in a little more than a month. Two years and five months made up the term of the Crimean War which began in 1853. Not until the record is rolled back to Napoleon's day shall we find a war which lasted longer than what has already been the duration of the present conflict.

Such comparisons naturally suggest at this time another glance at the economic conditions which have been brought about by the four years of the present war, and their analogy or contrast to results in the same field on earlier occasions. Whatever form or direction is taken by the economic changes of such a period, their influence is bound to be cumulative; that is to say, the dislocation of ordinary finance and industry will increase in se

successive year of war. For this there are two obvious reasons-one, that the huge expenditure of capital on war will progressively reduce the amount of real accumulated wealth which existed before the war began; the other, that the actual demands of the government on the resources of its people will always, in a longcontinued modern war, be vastly greater with each additional year of fighting. To what extent that has been true of the present war, every one knows.

THE

What It the United States

Has Cost

"HE United States completed on June 30 the first full fiscal year of the government under war conditions. During that twelvemonth it spent for all purposes, including loans to its Allies, about $12,500,000,000. But within the period our monthly disbursements had risen progressively from $657,000,000 in July of 1917 to $1,103,o00,000 in December and to $1,508,000,ooo in May. At present, the government's plans for taxation and borrowing are based on expectation that in the twelve months following June 30, if war continues, the government will have spent twice as much as in the twelve months preceding, or something between $24,000,000,000 and $25,000,000,000.

This is entirely in line with the experience of the British Government, whose annual expenditure rose from £1,559,o00,000 in the fiscal year 1916 to £2,198,000,000 in the fiscal year 1917, and to £2,696,000,000 in the fiscal year 1918, with £2,972,000,000 estimated by the Exchequer for the twelvemonth ending with next March. It is also quite in line with our own experience during the War of Secession. From $61,400,000 spent by the United States Government in the year before that war, the outlay rose to

men.

It might be imagined, therefore, that economic conditions, four years after the beginning of the present war, would find some interesting parallel in the American war of half a century ago. But there are very few analogies; the surrounding economic circumstances being in fact entirely different from those of to-day. First among these is the fact that in the Civil War period, nobody was at war except the United States Government and the seceding States. The United States had, therefore, the rest of the world, notably the older and richer communities of Europe, on which to rely for resources either of capital or credit.

Clearly, the resultant situation could not have been analogous to that created by a war in which every great financial

and industrial country of the world, Holland alone excepted, is individually and actively involved. This is a war in which, so far as concerns the United States, the government not only cannot draw freely on the rest of the world for military supplies and food, but has had to assume the task of supplying our European Allies with war munitions, construction material, foodstuffs, and the capital with which to pay for them-this in a quantity so immense as to necessitate close restriction of our own domestic use of all these facilities for ordinary purposes.

AT

Depletion of the Ranks of Labor

T the present time a large part of the problems of our industrial markets arise from depletion of the ranks of labor for military service. There was similar depletion in 1861 and the ensuing three years; but it was greatly offset by an immigration of 703,ooo in the period. There is no such offset at the present time; on the contrary, immigration virtually ceased several years ago because of the requisitions on foreign man power for military service. Whereas in the year ending June 30, 1914, 1,218,480 immigrants arrived in the United States, in the twelvemonth ending with June, 1917, the total was only 205.403,

Perhaps our Southern States, after four years of the Civil War, present the nearest analogy, especially to the blockaded nations of Europe; and undoubtedly the depletion of the young white population through army requisitions, the shortage of all supplies except such as were raised on the Southern fields, the exclusion from foreign capital, the extraordinary inflation of the currency and the extraordinary inflation of prices, foreshadowed much that has happened in this war. But neither the United States nor western Europe is blockaded by the enemy, and, furthermore, the fact that the South of 1861 was almost exclusively an agricultural community, and had little or no reserve of accumulated capital, created a situation which no belligerent of this war, save possibly Russia, Rumania, Bulgaria, or Turkey, could reproduce.

Ε

with the

EVEN when we begin to draw comparisons with the Napoleonic conflict, we have first the fact that whereas in 1812 there were a dozen separate governments in the war, the present belligerents number twenty-three, and include, as the list of Napoleon's day Comparison did not, the participation of Napoleonic South America and Asia. In Wars only two respects did the industrial situation of that period fairly foreshadow what has happened since 1914, first in the shortage of food supplies, due partly to harvest failures at home and partly to interference with ocean trade, and second in the depreciation of the foreign exchange and the currency. But even in those directions there were no such huge urban populations to feed as there are to-day, and therefore the food problem was one of production rather than distribution; while the network of international commerce and finance, which was torn apart by this war, did not exist a century ago.

It might be added that the losses in battle during the Napoleonic wars were trifling when compared with the losses of these days; and this is true even when one allows for the estimates of an increase in the world's population from something like 700,000,000 in 1810 to something like