£200 a Minute for Armaments—2½d. for Peace

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 175, 20 April 1929, Page 17

£200 a Minute for Armaments—2½d. for Peace

MR J. L. GARVIN, in the London “Observer,” thus contrasts the cost of the fighting services and the League of Nations: — “Let us try to suggest in a familiar way,” he writes, “what is meant by the present annual charge of £114,000,000 for the three warlike services. It means over £2OO a minute spent on armaments. Over £13,000 an hour. Well over £300,000 a day. Well, indeed, over two millions a week. Nearly ten millions a month. Does the nature of the fact begin to come home to you, whatever you may feel when the thoughs of this article are brought to a conclusion? If half this wide volume and continuous flow of money could be diverted by the success of a greater statesmanship to other purposes, the whole unemployment question could be solved, the national equipment perfected, and the Empire largely developed. “We have had this remarkable contrast (including all estimates for the present year) : — 1925—1929 '“Total charge for the British fighting services £582,000,000 “Total cost of the League of Nations to Great Britain only' .. .. £360,000

“We are doing as much as any nation for the support of the League. But we are spending far over a thousand times as much in supposed insurance against the contingeny of War. This is a pretty picture of reality by contrast with the ideals that we, all profess. “Granted that the world is not yet safe for democracy or anything else. Granted again that the British expenditure is more or less normal in the light of American as well as European comparisons. None the less, the figures just given bring out the full magnitude of a tremendous problem, economic, moral, social, ... “Ladies and Gentlemen of 21 and over, constituting'after centuries of political development, our final regime of universal suffrage!—You are sometimes warned to beware of the amount you subscribe in the tight times to the League of Nations; that is, to the world-effort for perpetual peace.— You. do in fact 'contribute twopence-halfpenny a minute to the League of Nations. —But you spend £2OO a minute on armaments.”