ARMED PEACE

One hundred and five million dollars from the United States Treasury will be spent in the erection of ten light cruisers, if a bill presented to Congress by Representative Butler and approved by President Coolidge is passed. These cruisers will serve supposedly to "guarantee peace" between the nations in the four-power naval pact.

So it has always been and so it will be until the millenium. Soldiers have said that war was hell, and have awaited eagerly the wars that brought promotions. Statesmen have declared that their particular war was a war to end war, and have returned from signing treaties of peace to sing appropriations for bigger and better armament.

Secretary Wilbur of the navy seems to regard was as a great big game to keep the boys out of mischief. He says, "We feel that we can build ships that are worthy of the young men from all parts of the country who man them, and to enable them to compete on at least equal terms with the best equipment furnished to any other service. 105,000,000 dollars is a great deal though, to pay for ten floating gymnasia; it completely beggars the paltry thousands it costs to take the Harvard football team to New Haven.

War create interesting problems of comparative values. The Harvard Business School, for instance, is the monetary equivalent of one half a light cruiser, or one quarter of a dreadnought. The monetary value of the whole University, which has taken 300 years to build and which has produced such leaders of thought and action as Emerson and Roosevelt, is less than that of sever warships of the third class, which may never fire a shot against an enemy, and which will be scrapped as obsolete within fifteen years.

Is this dance of death to go on until the whole world is bankrupt, or until man's machinery of warfare becomes so effective that like Dunderbeck he will be ground to sausage meat in his own invention?