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people
living on opposite sides of the street do not have to fight or prepare for
siege, if people in adjoining cities can live at peace, if adjoining
counties or states do not have to have standing armies, if Canada and the
United States have managed to exist for a hundred years without forts or
war-ships to guard their borders, the nations of the earth can live in
peace and armies and navies are no longer needed.
International law can settle all disputes, just as a nation's laws settle
all disputes within the nation.
An agreement similar to the Suez Canal compact, can be extended over all
the world. If no forts are needed to protect the Suez Canal, why are
they needed to protect any part of the world?
I ask you three monarchs, is not taxation the world over, and especially
in your countries, increasing socialism?
Is not preparation for war staggering all the nations with unjust
taxation, and making heavier the pension yoke now on the necks of the
living?
Is not the day coming when preparations for useless war may overthrow your
Government and bathe it in the blood of your own people?
This is imminent from your fatal readiness to shed the blood of
others. Why not hold your Government intact for your children and
people to inherit?
Monsieur Edmond Thery, the French economist, figures that the maintenance
of Europe's armed peace footing in the last 25 years cost one hundred and
forty-five billion francs, approximately $29,000,000,000, which involved
an increase in the public debt of the European nations of from one hundred
and five to one hundred and fifty-one billions of francs and constantly
excluded from productive industry 195,000 officers and 3,800,000 men.
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