Entered as Second Class Mail Matter at Boston, Mass. PRINTED BY THE ATLANTIC PRINTING CO

In a far larger sense than Shakespeare ever dreamed of, we are looking out on the horrific spectacle of the four corners of the world in arms. Now that the United States of America have become active participants in the great struggle, countries containing two-thirds of the population of the whole world are at war. The direct and personal interests of more than a thousand million souls are involved. Nor does this calculation include the four hundred million inhabitants of China, whose diplomatic relations with Germany have been broken off. Great and Greater Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Japan, Roumania, Portugal, the United States, Belgium, Serbia and Egypt on the one hand, and Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Bulgaria on the other, are at deadly grips. Only the South and Central American Republics, Spain, and some of the smaller European States, including, as has been officially announced, the microscopic Republic of San Marino, remain outside the fray, cultivating a neutrality advantageous alike to the skin and the pocket. It is a world-war in an almost complete sense of the term-a clash of interests and principles almost as tremendous and devastating as the collision of two worlds. If it be a platitude to say that nothing like it has been known in the course of mundane history, it is, nevertheless, a platitude of amazing significance. There have been costly wars and sanguinary wars and prolonged wars, but never has there been a war covering such enormous areas, involving so colossal an outlay, and darkened by such a wholesale sacrifice of human life. No words can describe, and no calculation can determine, the sum total of the grief, the misery, and the individual suffering

of the civil populations of those parts where the tide of battle has most furiously rolled. Nor is it possible to decide at this stage, since we do not know what the duration of the war will be, how much it will ultimately cost in military and naval expenditure, in the destruction of property, and in the economic value of the lives prematurely cut short. There are, however, data from which one can deduce more or less nearly the probable cost up to the completion of the third year of the conflict; and an examination of these particulars and of the conclusions to which they point reveals a story of which the arithmetic is more surprising in its tragic import every time it is looked at.

It may seem a hazardous enterprise to attempt the figuring out of this cost where so much is bound to be indefinite. In some ways it may be likened to the dubious labor of the schoolboy who is put to do "invisible sums on an imperceptible slate." But the task is not really as hopeless as it may appear at first sight. Nor is it as difficult now as it would have been in the earlier part of the war. "I do not think," said Mr. McKenna more than two years ago, "it is within the power of man to estimate what the cost would be if the war lasted thirty-six months." It has so far lasted thirty-four months, and the cost has exceeded by many thousands of millions the first crude estimates of departmental officials and club quidnunes. When and how will this terrible expenditure cease? Armageddon expressed in the terms of millions sterling has only to go on long enough and it will threaten universal financial collapse. Already it has brought more than one small State to the verge of bankruptcy. Already the great Central Powers themselves are menaced with