our standing army was to European militarists a joke. At one period between the Spanish War and the Great War we had only twenty-five thousand regulars under arms, whereas in several European countries of smaller population than ours the standing army consisted of more than three quarters of a million soldiers; and every able-bodied man had been trained and equipped.
Yet in the year 1920, with the war over and done, with our great army demobilized and our fleets back to the business of manœuvres and visiting, we were spending the greater part of our national revenues on wars, old and new. In 1920, the proportion was ninety-three per cent.
What could our government do with this money? What could it not do!
A little before the Great War, I was talking to an expert, nationally famous, on good roads. He spoke of the highways so vitally important in our great and wide-spreading country and of the staggering costs of road improvement. “We could of course pave every country road in the United States,” he said, “and the economies it would introduce into transportation would make it a paying proposition in the end. But the initial cost and the upkeep—you can’t possibly raise enough money. It would take, I estimate, seventy-five per cent of our Federal revenues.” There you are. This “impossible” but paying proposition would take seventy-five per cent of our revenues; war in 1920 took
