THE COST OF UNPREPAREDNESS
January 6, 1918
Senator Chamberlain, in order to minimize the chance of future war and to insure us against disaster, if in future war should unhappily come, has introduced a bill for universal military training ofour young men under the age of twenty-one. The Administration declares against universal training and therefore for a continuance of the policy of unpreparedness, the fruits of which we are enjoying. Some of these fruits are as follows:
According to the statement ofMr.Fitzgerald, the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations of the House, Congress appropriated during the last year $18,880,000,000 and provided authorization for which cash must be supplied before next July of $2,510,000,000, making our year’s war expenses a grand total of $21,390,000,000. This equals the entire sum Great Britain expended during the first three years of the war. It is over twenty times as great as for any previous year in our history, except the year that saw the close of the Civil War, and it is seventeen times as great as that. The appropriations for the year are twenty-two times as great as the total interest-bearing debt of the United States one year ago. They come within four billion dollars of the total expenditures of the United States Government from 1776 to 1917. They equal the expenditure of twenty dollars a minute for every minute since the birth of Christ.
Had we started to prepare in time, one half of this cost would have been saved. The tremendous pressure coming suddenly caused an immense increase in expenditures, even aside from the futile waste, extravagance, and misdirection. Had we gone into the war when the Lusitania was sunk, we would have saved a third of the sum, for we have providedto loan our allies about seven billions. Our delay in going to war and, above all, delay in preparing, have resulted in a huge increase in the money chest and in the length of the war and in the terrible total of avoidable human suffering.
The lack of preparedness is responsible for the sickness among our soldiers. Take as an example the ravages of pneumonia in the training camps. The men in the training camps are physically of exceptional type and are in the prime of life. Their death-rate ought not normally to be more than a small fraction of that in New York City, where the total population includes the very young, the very old, the weak and sick, the badly nurtured. The population of New York City is 4,800,000. The population of the thirty camps is about six hundred thousand. In the two weeks of last December the death-rate in the city from pneumonia was one to every 16,500 people. In the camps it was one to 2800. Therefore, the specially selected men of the camps suffered from a death-rate six times as great as in the heterogeneous city population. And of every three men attacked, one died.
Doubtless administrative blundering during the last year is largely responsible for this showing. But the prime cause is the failure to prepare in advance. Our first duty at the moment is to speed up the war. Our second duty is to secure real preparedness as outlined in Senator Chamberlain’s bill.