less costly than the other material of war and not necessarily
replaced. All this is piled on top of "the endless caravan of
ciphers" ($30,000,000,000), which represents the accumulated
and unpaid war debt of the nineteenth century.
War is indeed the sport for kings, but it is no sport for the
people who pay and die, and in the long run the workers of the
world must pay the cost of it. As Benjamin Franklin observed:
'War is not paid for in war time) the bill comes later.'
And what a bill!
Yves Guyot, the French economist, estimates that the first six
months of war cost western Europe in cash $5,400,000,000, to
which should be added further destruction estimated at
$11,600,000,000, making a total of $17,000,000,000. The entire
amount of coin in the world is less than $12,000,000,000. Edgar
Crammond, secretary of the Liverpool Stock Exchange, another
high authority, estimates the cash cost of a year of war, to
August 1, 1915, at $17,000,000,000, while other losses will
mount up to make a grand total of $46,000,000,000. Mr. Crammond
estimates that the cost to Great Britain for a year of war will
reach $3,500,000,000. This sum is about equivalent to the
accumulated war debt of Great Britain for a hundred years
before the war. The war debt of Germany (including Prussia) is
now about the same.
No one can have any conception of what $46,000,000,000 may be.
It is four times all the gold and silver in the world. It
represents, it is stated, about 100,000 tons of gold, and would
probably outweigh the Washington monument. We have no data as
to what monuments weigh, but we may try a few other
calculations. If this sum were measured out in $20 gold pieces
and they were placed side by side on the railway track, on each
rail, they would line with gold every line from New York to the
Pacific Ocean, and there would be enough left to cover each
rail of the Siberian railway from Vladivostock to Petrograd.
There would still be enough left to rehabilitate Belgium and to
buy the whole of Turkey, at her own valuation, wiping her
finally from the map.
Or we may figure in some other fashion. The average working man
in America earns $518 per year. It would take ninety million
years' work to pay the cost of the war; or ninety million
American laborers might pay it off in one year, if all their
living expenses were paid. The working men of Europe receive
from half to a third the wages in America. They are the ones
who have this bill to pay.
The cost of a year of the great war is a little greater than
the estimated value of all the property of the United States
west of Chicago. It is nearly equal to the total value of all
the property in Germany ($48,000,000,000) as figured in 1906.
The whole Russian Empire ($35,000,000,000) could have been
bought for a less sum before the war began. It could be had on
a cash sale for half that now. It would have paid for all the
property in Italy ($13,000,000,000); Japan ($10,000,000,000);
Holland ($5,000,000,000); Belgium ($7,000,000,000); Spain
($6,000,000,000) and Portugal ($2,500,000,000). It is three
times the entire yearly earnings in wages and salaries of the
people of the United States ($15,500,000,000).
We could go on indefinitely with this, playing with figures
which nobody can understand, for the greatest fortune ever
accumulated by man, in whatever fashion, would not pay for
three days of this war.
The cost of this war would pay the national debts of all the
nations in the world at the time the war broke out, and this
aggregate sum of $45,000,000,000 for the world was all
accumulated in the criminal stupidity of the wars of the
nineteenth century. If all the farms, farming lands, and
factories of the United States were wiped out of existence, the
cost of this war would more than replace them. If all the
personal and real property of half our nation were destroyed,
or if an earthquake of incredible dimensions should shake down
every house from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the waste would
be less than that involved in this war. And an elemental
catastrophe leaves behind it no costly legacy of hate; even the
financial troubles are not ended with the treaty of peace. The
credit of Europe is gone for one does not know how long. Before
the war, it is said, there were $200,000,000,000 in bonds and
stocks in circulation in Europe. Much of this has been sold for
whatever it would bring. Some of the rest is worth its face
value Some of it is worth nothing. In the final adjustment who
can know whether he is a banker or a beggar?
The American Ambassador was quite within bounds when he said:
"There isn't so much money in the world; you can't even think
it!"
Or we may calculate (with Dr. Edward T. Devine) in a totally
different way. The cost of this war would have covered every
moral social, economic and sanitary reform ever asked for in
the civilized world, in so far as money properly expended can
compass such results. It could eliminate infectious disease,
feeble-mindedness, the slums and the centers of vice. It could
provide adequate housing, continuity of labor, insurance
against accident; in other words it could abolish almost every
kind of suffering due to outside influences and not inherent in
the character of the person concerned.
A Russian writer, quoted by Dr. John H. Finley, puts this idea
in a different form:
'Our most awful enemies, the elements and germs and insect
destroyers, attack us every minute without cease, yet we murder
one another as if we were out of our senses. Death is ever on
the watch for us, and we think of nothing but to snatch a few
patches of land! About 5,000,000,000 days of work go every year
to the displacement of boundary lines. Think of what humanity
could obtain if that prodigious effort were devoted to fighting
our real enemies, the noxious species and our hostile
environment. We should conquer them in a few years. The entire
globe would turn into a model farm. Every plant would grow for
our use. The savage animals would disappear, and the infinitely
tiny animals would be reduced to impotence by hygiene and
cleanliness. The earth would be conducted according to our
convenience. In short, the day men realize who their worst
enemies are, they will form an alliance against them, they will
cease to murder one another like wild beasts from sheer folly.
Then they will be the true rulers of the planet, the lords of
creation.'
Says Robert L. Duffus:
'Money spent in warfare is not like spending money in other
industries. It will bring far more beastliness, far more
injustice, far more tyranny, far more danger to all that is
honorable, generous and noble in the world, far more grief and
rage than money spent in any other way. Not one per cent. of
the amount devoted to these purposes, is, for the end aimed at,
wasted.'
It is said that the main cause of the war lay in the envy of
German commerce by British rivals. This is assuredly not true.
But if it were, let us look at the business side of it. Taking
the net profits of over-seas trade as stated two years ago by
the Hamburg-American Company, the strongest in the world, and
estimating the rest, we have something like this:
During the "Dry War" the net earnings of the German Mercantile
fleet was about one third the cost of the navy supposed to
protect it. It would take seventy years of trade, on the scale
of the last year before the war, to repay Germany's expenses
for a year of war. To make good all the losses of Europe would
require more than one hundred years of the over-seas trading
profits of all the world. War is therefore death to trade, as
it is to every other agency of civilization.
At the beginning of the war the value of stocks and bonds in
circulation in Europe amounted to about $200,000,000,000. What
is the present value of all these certificates of ownership?
What is the present value of any particular industrial plant or
commercial venture?
A friend in London had inherited through his German wife a
large aniline dye plant on the Rhine. He told me recently that
he had not heard one word from it for six months. What will be
its value when he hears from it? And what certainty has he as
to its ownership?
Is it true that this war is the outcome of commercial jealousy?
Let us look at this for a moment. The two greatest shipping
companies in the world before the war were the Hamburg-American
Company and the Nord-Deutscher Lloyd of Bremen. These companies
had grown strong because they deserved to grow. They had
attended to their affairs both in shipment of freight and
transportation of passengers with that minute attention to
details which is so large an element in German success. The
growth of these companies arose through American trade and
especially through trade with Great Britain and the British
possessions. Did they clamor for war--a war, whatever else
might result, sure to cripple their trade for a generation. It
is said that Ballin, of the Hamburg Company, unable to prevent
Great Britain from rising to the defense of Belgium "went home
broken-hearted." Did Ballin build the great Imperator, costing
nine million--six million of it borrowed money--with a view of
laying her off after a few trips for an indefinite period in
Hamburg? Did the Nord-Deutscher Lloyd contemplate leaving the
Vaterland and the George Washington to lie in Hoboken till they
were sold for harbor dues?
Nor was the jealousy on the other side. The growth of German
commerce concerned mainly Great Britain. Presumably it was
profitable on both sides, for all trade is barter. In any
event, Great Britain has never raised a tariff wall against it,
never protected her traders by a single differential duty. She
has risen above the idea that by tariff exactions the
foreigners can be made to pay the sages. As for envy of German
commerce, who ever heard of an Englishman who envied anybody
anything?
Again, did the Cunard Company build her three great steamships,
the Mauretania, the Lusitania, the Aquitania for the fate which
has come to them? In 1914 I saw the great Aquitania, finest of
all floating palaces, tied by the nose to the wharf at
Liverpool, the most sheepish-looking steamship I ever saw
anywhere. Out of her had been taken $1,250,000 worth of plate
glass and plush velvet, elevators and lounging rooms, the
requirements of the tender rich in their six days upon the sea.
The whole ship was painted black, filled with coal--to be sent
out to help the warships at sea. And for this humble service I
am told she proved unfitted.
No, commercial envy is not a reason, rivalry in business is not
a reason, need of expansion is not a reason. These are excuses
only, not causes of war. There is no money in war. There is no
chance of highway robbery in the byways of history which can
repay anything tangible of the expense of the expedition. The
gray old strategists do not care for this. It is fair to them
to say they are not sordid. They care no more for the financial
exhaustion of a nation than for the slaughter of its young men.
"An old soldier like me," said Napoleon, "does not care a
tinker's damn for the death of a million men." Neither does he
care for the collapse of a million industrial corporations.
Of the many forms of business and financial relation among men,
none is more important than those included under the name of
insurance. Insurance is a form of mutual help. By its influence
the effects of calamity are spread so widely that they cease to
be felt as calamity. The fact of death can not be set aside,
but through insurance it need not appear as economic disaster,
only as personal loss. Its essential nature is that of social
cooperation and it furnishes some of the most effective of
bonds which knit society together. As insurance has become
already an international function, its influence should be felt
continuously on the side of peace. That it is so felt is the
justification of our meeting together to-day, as underwriters
of insurance and as workers for peace. The essence of
insurance, as Professor Royce observes, is that
'it is a principle at once peace-making in its general tendency
and business-like in its practicable special application.... As
a result of insurance, men gradually find themselves involved
in a social network of complicated but beneficent relations of
which individuals are usually very imperfectly aware but by
means of which modern society has been profoundly transformed.'
For life insurance, in general, is not personally selfish in
its motive. It is essentially altruistic, the effort of the
benefit of some person beloved who is designated as the
beneficiary. For the benefit of this surviving person, the
efforts involved in the payment of premiums are put forth, and
the insurance companies and their underwriters constitute the
machinery by which this unification is given to society.
To all the interests of insurance, the lawlessness of war is
wholly adverse and destructive. Insurance involves mutual trust
and trust thrives under security of person and property.
Insurance demands steadiness of purpose and continuity of law.
In war, all laws are silent. War is the brutish, blind, denial
of law, only admissible when all other honorable alternatives
have been withdrawn--the last resort of "murdered, mangled
liberty."
In its direct relation, war destroys those who to the
underwriter represent the "best risks," the men most valuable
to themselves and thus most valuable to the community. Those
whom war leaves behind, to slip along the lines of least
resistance into the city slums, are the people insurance rarely
reaches. War confuses administration of insurance. Policies, in
war time, can be written only on a sliding scale. This greatly
increases the premium by reducing the final payments. Increase
of rate of premium must decrease business. War means financial
anarchy, inflated currency and depreciation of bonds. A
currency which fluctuates demoralizes all business and war
leaves no alternative. The slogan "business as usual" in war
time deceives nobody. If it did, nobody would gain by the
deception. Enforced loans from the reserve fund of insurance
companies to the state mean the depreciation of reserves. The
substitution of unstable government bonds means robbery of the
bond holders. The yielding to the state, by enforced "voluntary
action," of reserves of savings banks and insurance companies
represents a form of state robbery. This is now in practice on
the continent of Europe. Such funds are probably never actually
confiscated but held in abeyance until the close of the war.
This is another form of the everpresent "military necessity,"
which seizes men's property with little more compunction than
it shows in seizing men's bodies. War conditions mean
insecurity of investment. In war, all bonds are liable to
become "scraps of paper," and no fund can be made safe. The
insurance investments in Europe have been enormously depleted
in worth, a reduction in market value estimated at 50 per cent.
Experts in insurance tell me that in war time certain policies
are written so as to be scaled down automatically when the
holder goes under the colors. Some are invalid in time of war,
and some have the clause of free travel greatly abridged. A few
are written to apply to all conditions, but on these the rates
of premiums would naturally increase. Companies generally
refuse to pay under conditions not nominated in the bond, and
in general all policies are automatically reduced to level of
war policies when war begins.
I am told that some American companies issue group policies as
for any or all of a thousand men, these not subject to a
physical examination. The war claims in Great Britain have been
very heavy, because such a large proportion of clerks,
artisans, students and other insurable or well-paid men have
been first to volunteer. Some insurance companies have been
much embarrassed by the general enlistment of their employees.
In fire insurance, conditions are much the same. All contracts
in foreign nations are held in abeyance until the close of war.
Such companies doing business in America are now mostly
incorporated as American.
In every regard, the business of insurance is naturally allied
with the forces that make for peace. War brings ruin, through
increase of loans, through the exhaustion of reserves and the
precarious nature of investment. The same remark applies in
some degree to every honorable or constructive business. If any
other form of danger threatened a great industry, its leaders
would be on the alert. They would spare no money and leave no
stone unturned for their own protection.
Towards war, business has always shown a stupid fatalism. War
has been thought "inevitable," coming of itself at intervals
with nobody responsible.
There could not be a greater error. War does not come of
itself, nor without great and persistent preparation. A few
hundred resolute men, bent on war, led by unscrupulous leaders
brought on this war. The military group of one nation plays
into the hands of like groups in other nations. To keep up war
agitation long enough, whether the cause be real or imaginary,
seems to hypnotize the public mind. The horrors of war
fascinate rather than repel, and thousands of men in this land
of peace are ready to fight in Europe to one who dreamed of
such a line of action a year or two ago.
"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." The interests
involved should put honest business on its guard. The insurance
men could afford to maintain a thousand observers, men wise in
business as well as in International Law, and in the manners
and customs of the people of the world. A few dozen skilful
politico-military detectives--men like W. J. Burns for example
employed in the interest of finance might save finance a
billion dollars. These should watch the standing incentives to
war. Such men should stand guard against the influences that
work toward conflict. Those who work for peace should be not
"firemen to be called in to put out the fire" already started
through the negligence of business men but agents for
"fireproof building material" in our national edifice, to stand
at all times for the security of business, the sanctity of law,
order and peace. This kind of "preparedness for war" would
involve no risks of conflict, of victory or defeat.
THE EVOLUTION OF THE STARS AND THE FORMATION OF THE EARTH. II
BY WILLIAM WALLACE CAMPBELL
DIRECTOR OF THE LICK OBSERVATORY, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
EVIDENCE IN SUPPORT OF SEQUENCE PROPOSED
THERE are several lines of evidence in support of the order of
evolution which we have outlined.
1. The close relationship of the bright-line nebular spectrum,
the bright-line stellar spectrum and the spectra of the
simplest helium stars; the practically continuous sequence of
spectra from the helium stars to the red stars.
2. In the long run, we must expect the stars to grow colder, at
least as to the surface strata. What the average interior
temperatures are is another question; the highest interior
temperatures are thought to be reached at an intermediate or
quite late stage in the process, in accordance with principles
investigated by Lane and others; but the temperatures existing
in the deep interiors seem to have little direct influence in
defining the spectral characters of the stars, which are
concerned more directly with the surface strata.[1] We should
therefore expect the simpler types of spectra, such as we find
in the helium and hydrogen stars, in the early stages of the
evolutionary process. The complicated spectra of the metals,
and particularly the oxides of the metals, should be in
evidence late in stellar life, when the atmospheres of the
stars have become denser and colder.
[1] This important point seems not to have been realized by all
theorists.
3. The velocities of the Orion nebula, the Trifid nebula, the
Carina nebula, and of several other irregular nebulae, have
been measured with the spectroscope. These bodies seem to be
nearly at rest with reference to the stellar system. The helium
stars have the lowest-known stellar velocities, and the average
velocities of the stars are higher and higher as we pass from
the helium stars, through the hydrogen and solar stars, up to
the red stars. The average velocities of the brighter stars of
the different spectral classes, as determined with the D. O.
Mills spectrographs at Mount Hamilton and in Chile, are as in
the following table:
Spectral No. of Class Stars Average Velocity in Space
B 225 12.9 km. per Sec.
A 177 21.9
F 185 28.7
G 128 29.9
E 382 33.6
M 73 34.3
We can not place the irregular nebulae after the red stars:
their velocities are too small, and their spectra have no
resemblances to the red-star spectra.
4. Wherever we find large irregular gaseous nebulae we find
stars in the early subdivisions of the helium group. They are
closely related in position. This is true of the Orion and
other similar regions. The irregular, gaseous nebulae are in
general found in and near the Milky Way, and so are the helium
stars. The yellow and red stars, at least the brighter ones, do
not cluster in nebulous regions.
5. The stars are more and more uniformly distributed over the
sphere as one goes from the helium stars through the hydrogen
and solar stars, to the red stars. The Class M stars show
little or no preference for the Milky Way. Of course, I am
speaking here of the brighter and nearer stars which we have
been able to study by means of the spectroscope, and not at all
of the faint stars which form the unstudied distant parts of
the Milky Way structure. The helium stars are young, their
motions are slow, and they have not wandered far from the place
of their birth. Not so with the older stars.
6. The visual double stars afford strong evidence that the
order of evolution described is correct. The 36-inch refractor
has shown that one star in 18, on the average, brighter than
the ninth visual magnitude, consists of two or more suns which
we can not doubt are in slow revolution around each other. The
number of double stars observable would be very much greater
than this if they were not so far away. Of the 20 stars which
we say are our nearest neighbors, 8 are well known double
stars; one double in each two and one half, on the average.
Aitken has made a specialty of observing the double stars whose
components in each case are very close together and are in
comparatively rapid revolution. His program includes 164 such
systems whose types of spectra are known, as in the following
table:
Spectrum Number of Double Stars
Bright-line 0
Class B 4
Class A-F 131
Class G-N 28
Class M-N? 1
The message which this table brings is clear. The double stars
whose spectra are of the Bright-Line and Class B varieties have
their components so close together that only 4, of Class B, are
visible. The great majority fall in Classes A to K; 159 out of
164. The component stars in these classes are far enough apart
to be visible in the telescopes, and yet are close enough to be
revolving in periods reasonably short. In the Class M double
stars, this program contains not more than one star, and I
believe the explanation is this: double stars of Class M are in
general so far apart, and therefore their periods of revolution
are so long, that they do not get upon programs of rapidly
revolving stars. Also, the fainter components in many red stars
must have cooled off so far that they are invisible. The
distances between the components of visual double stars are in
general the greater as we proceed from the helium stars through
the various spectral classes up to Class M. There are reasons
for believing that two stars revolving around their center of
mass have gradually increased their distance apart, and
therefore their revolution period. If this is true, the Classes
G and K; double stars are effectively older than Classes A and
F double stars, and these in turn are effectively older than
Class B double stars.