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Otago Daily Times, Issue 17088, 21 August 1917, Page 4

It surely requires a mind of some intrepidity to face the question of the world's war bill. In an article in the Fortnightly Review, however, Mr H. J. Jennings has tackled courageously an arithmetical problom, the tragic import of which has yet to be fully realised. In a sense the cost of the war cannot be estimated. It is not possible to put a price on the value of the lives lost, to say nothing of the towns and countries devastated, any more than it is possible to express in any adequate terms the sum total of the grief and suffering and misery alike of individuals and populations that follow in the train of this terrible conflict. It is a mere platitude to say that this war has broken all records. The estimate formed by Mr Jennings, based on suoh figures as are available from various sources, is that in three years the war has caused either the death - or the permanent incapacity of 6,500,000 men in the prime of life. In comparison with this awful sacrifice the actual financial cost of the war may involve a somewhat sordid calculation, but it is a reckoning which the nations will havo to face in bitter earnest when the struggle is over. Great Britain alone is spending over seven millions a day, this including loans to her allies, and it is estimated that the rest of the belligerents are responsible for at ieast twelve millions a day. In an attempt to arrive at the cost of the war in hard cash during three years Mr Jennings takes into consideration the actual expenditure of the naval and military departments, the prospective interest liability on borrowed money, the capitalised value to their respective States of the killed and permanently disabled, and the material damage by bombardment, mines, torpedoes, and. other wilful or incidental destruction. /