music.'

We can see that Luxury Tax Committee jotting down items: 'White elephants, silk pajamas, diamond tiaras, pure mathematics, jazz teas, a sense of humor, conscientious objections and Victorian ballad Luxuries all! It would, of course, be objected that you could not tax things of the mind. Yet not to do so would be obviously unfair. One man possesses an old master, and another the power of appreciating it. The first has the joy of possessing it, the second the joy of rejoicing in it; and as it is easier to be the first than the last, why should the mere possession be taxed, and the appreciation go free? If a finger-bowl is a luxury, shall a bath be a necessity? If a fur coat be taxed, ought any coat to escape? Surely, as the committee no doubt discovered, the luxury tax would have been but an addition to the income tax, and dishonest at that.

Luxuries are all the things which separate us from the beasts that perish. They are the heirlooms of innumerable generations. They are the things we cannot possibly do without. They are the things of which we can never have too much, and we must go on producing them until we have enough to go round. The greatest of all luxuries is education, an education that helps us to live rather than that which only helps us to obtain a living. It is fashionable to decry the 'idle' rich, yet it may be that they are our shield against barbarism, a social luxury without which nothing superlatively worth having would ever have been produced. Luxuries come from above, not from below, and without taste and the leisure to cultivate it, and the wealth to satisfy it, Art would never have risen above its lowliest forms.

It will be an ill world to live in when all men are drudges, and most ill for the lowliest drudges, for they will then

The Outlook

be without hope of salvation. It is a hard saying, but without a leisured class to teach us how to live, life would probably not be worth living. It is the task of the immediate future not to tax luxuries or to condemn them, but to spread their enjoyment, if not their possession, far and wide. What the people want, said the late Lord Salisbury in one of his splendid indiscretions, is not District Councils, but circuses. Well, they were given the councils, and they still ask for circusses. We all want circuses, though we call them by many and other names. The necessaries of life are narrow and limited. We must have them, but only that we may live to ask for more; and 'more' is a luxury, though it be but a loin-cloth and a string of beads.

Manners and customs and fashions, what are they but luxuries, disguise the fact how we may? Possibly the wildest extravagance at which the judicious frown is but the necessary pushing on into the unknown, and seeking for new treasure. That the search is often a failure, and the treasure but dead-sea fruit, is of no consequence; it is the seeking that matters. The amazement of to-day is the commonplace of tomorrow, and there is no end, let us hope, to the great adventure.

To decry luxury is to deny civilization, which is but luxury's accumulation. To dream of taxing luxury is a vain imagining. It cannot be done, unless you tax everything, when we shall be smugglers all. But we cannot go forward by giving up, or achieve by negation. Life is not to be governed by mean little proverbs. We must look after the pounds, and let the pence go hang, and seize with both hands all the joys of life, and joy, as everybody knows, is the thing that you can always go without - at your peril and at the peril of the society in which you live.

ESTIMATING THE COST OF THE WAR

From a Correspondent

VARIOUS estimates have been made of the cost of the war, but, so far, none has dealt with the whole of the bill for the whole of the period. Any estimate outside the official figures of the direct cost — that is, the cost as disclosed in votes of credit, subscriptions to loans, and new taxation must, of course, be largely conjectural; but it is, nevertheless, possible to obtain a fairly approximate idea with regard to the vaguer items of material damage and economic disturbance. There is disThere is disagreement even about the direct costs, due partly to the absence of figures from some of the belligerent States, and partly to variations of estimate for the armistice period. There is, how ever, enough accord to justify a general judgment, and a few millions of difference in the reckoning of expenditure, or a difference in the standards of the economic value of men's lives, will not vitiate the essential quality of that judgment.

What is it we mean by 'the cost of the war?' Obviously, we mean much more than the amount represented by taxes and loans. What may properly be included are the direct cost to belligerents and neutrals, the value of the property destroyed, the loss in production by the diversion of men from industry to warfare, and the economic value of the lives that have been lost or rendered incapable of any useful work. Some writers appear to think that the question of cost is complicated by the possibilities of indem

nity and reparation, but these have really little to do with it. No act of compensation can lessen the bill; it simply shifts, or partly shifts, the burden from the wronged to those who have done the wrong. Any indemnity paid by Germany to France, for instance, would lessen France's own liability, but it would not decrease the cost of the war.

For arriving at the direct cost of the war there are a number of data, more or less useful, but they do not all relate to the same periods, nor do they cover the whole of the field. M. Augustin Hamon, in his Lessons of the World War, said a couple of years ago that if the war did not cease before the close of 1918 the total expenditure might grow to as much as £29,600,000,000. That calculation was published before the United States came in, and, moreover, it did not make sufficient allowance for expansion in the subsequent rate of expenditure. Mr. Joseph Kitchin has prepared an estimate of the costs 'based on what they would have been if actual hostilities had lasted until the end of July next.' For eight months of that period, the expenditure in armistice conditions will be considerably less than it would have been if fighting had continued, and for this reason Mr. Kitchin's estimate of £38,915,000,000 for all the belligerents may be a little too high. On the other hand, it has to be remembered that neutrals have been obliged, in view of possibilities, to spend large sums of money in defensive preparations, and we shall probably not exaggerate if we put down the total direct cost up to the signing of peace at not less than £40,000,000,000. This total

is also arrived at by the Federal Reserve Board of Washington. It cannot, of course, be vouched for, but it is believed to be substantially correct. We have at least this indisputable fact to go upon, that the public debts of the Entente and Allied countries have grown since August, 1914, from £4,565,000,000 to £25,350,000,000; and those of the Central Powers from £1,210,000,000 to £14,650,000,000; the increase for all the belligerents, but not including neutrals, being £34,225,000,000. From this sum, however, should be deducted the British loans to Allies and Dominions, and to it there ought to be added the war debts of the German States; but these adjustments do not by a jot affect the relation of national debts to the question of war costs. It may be fairly assumed that the figure of £40,000,000,000 of direct cost, with its consequent and inevitable burden on the next two generations, is approximately

accurate.

When we come to the subject of material damage, any satisfactory assessment is much more difficult. In the absence of official surveys, it must be purely conjectural. What we do know, however, of the havoc wrought in France and Belgium warrants conjecture on the big scale. Other countries- Poland, Lithuania, Eastern Prussia, the Bukovina, Galicia, Serbia, Rumania, Macedonia, the Trentino, and our own East Coast - have also suffered severely. M. Hamon put this devastation down at 2,000,000,000, but that was before the last great drive of Marshal Foch, in the course of which the enemy burned or blew up every town and village through which he retreated. Fifty per cent might perhaps be now added to M. Hamon's figure, without exposing it to the charge of exaggeration. Then there is the incalculable loss caused by the

removal of productive plant, the forced suspension of industry, the interference with the world's overseas commerce, the disorganization of the world's industry and finance, and the unproductiveness, for the time being, of the 50,000,000 men engaged in military and other duties connected with the war or held in readiness for warfare.

Take the last of these items, and let it be supposed that only half the number were taken from industrial occupations. Let it be further supposed, in the interests of moderation, that their average productive power over and above the costs of material, labor, etc., was not more than £25 a year, also that their average period of purely military duties was limited to two years, this would give us a loss of £50 per man, or 1,250,000,000 in all. Then there is the capital value of the killed and permanently disabled. Without counting Belgium, Serbia, Japan, and Portugal, the losses in killed were over 5,500,000, and the number of wounded incapable of returning to any occupation from 2,000,000 to 3,000,000 more. Altogether it seems fair to reckon that not fewer than 9,000,000 men between the ages of 18 and 48 have been sacrificed. If we put their average earnings down at no more than 20s. a week, and their average probability of life at only ten years, we get an economic loss of 4,680,000,000. This is to value each man, taking one with another, at £520, whereas, some economists put it as high as £1,000. There is the further consideration that the great majority of these victims, if not all of them, were potential taxpayers, and that their removal puts a heavier burden on those who are left. We may now sum up these classifications of cost. We have 40,000,000 for direct cost, 3,000,000,000 for material damage, 1,250,000,000 for loss of production, and

4,680,000,000 as the economic value of the lost and disabled lives, making altogether nearly 50,000,000,000. As a set-off against the possibility of some overlapping, we may put the indirect costs of diminished trade and financial disturbance. £50,000,000,000, as

and happier world, then the billions that have been spent will not all have been spent in vain. Without such a dénouement the world will be bankrupt of hope as well as of money.

The Telegraph

AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN

From the point of view of ordinary accountancy, the scale kicks the beam. It is a balance sheet with nothing on the credit side. The material costs are enormous, the material assets are nil. At the very best the result is a poor halfpennyworth of bread to an intolerable deal of sack. Vast sums have been used for sheer destruction; vast public debts have been incurred for which there is no corresponding property. Throughout two thirds of the world the work of useful production has been suspended during four years, and its place has been taken by production for the slaughter of human lives and the annihilation of accumulated wealth. Millions of men have been killed, thousands of millions of pounds have been wasted in order to kill them, towns and villages and smiling homesteads have been swept out of existence, great vessels laden with precious cargoes have been sent to the bottom of the sea, and against all this there is nothing to be set that can be reckoned in economic values. But there is a moral asset to be taken into account. We may, at least, hope that we have put an end forever to the danger of Prussian militarism; but precious though such a consummation may be, it is an insufficient return for such huge and almost intolerable sacrifices. If out of the ruins and hecatombs of the last four years there arises a new, brighter,

VOL. 14-NO. 692

WE, workers, peasants, and soldiers of Russia, in preparing to celebrate the first anniversary of our victory over landowners, capitalists, generals, and officials, send to you, comrade workers, peasants, and soldiers of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire, our brotherly greetings on the occasion of your triumph over your oppressors. We rejoice to hear that you have taken the matter of peace into your own hands, that you are on the way to destroy the old imperial bureaucracy, together with its leader, Karl of Hapsburg; that you are proclaiming a Socialist Republic and Councils of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. We greet these Councils, in whose hands the power will be to-morrow! We greet you who have thrown off the yoke of national oppression! We greet the liberation of the people of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire, from the yoke of Austrian Royal and imperial bureaucracy! We are fully convinced that the workers, soldiers, and peasants of Hungary have not freed themselves from Hungarian bureaucracy and capitalism in order to allow themselves to be exploited by Hungarian landowners, bankers, and capitalists. We are quite convinced that the Hungarian workingman will put an end to Hungarian capitalists, and that the Hungarian Government will be a government comprised of Hungarian workers, soldiers, and peasants. We are fully convinced that the brave and honest workers did not