Jasper County Democrat, Volume 21, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 April 1918 — COST TO CRUSH THE KAISER [ARTICLE]

COST TO CRUSH THE KAISER

Boersianer, Financial Expert, Gives Figures as Boost to Liberty Loan. By BOERSIANER, [Financial Editor, Chicago Examiner.] Not many years before Abraham Lincoln became president Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln were fed and sheltered in the Globe tavern, Springfield, 111., at four dollars a week. In other terms, they, each paid two dollars a week for room and board at what then was one of the best family hotels in the state capital. Incredibly cheap? To us today, yes, but not to the Americans of the 50’s and GO’S. The purchasing power of a dollar in those days was tremendous. When the Civil war broke out the wealth of the United States was appraised at $17,000,000,000. Let us be liberal and make it $20,000,000,000 at the end that internecine strife, the total cost of which was $4,000,000,000. At that time the national debt was $2,625,000,000. Put in another way, the country had spent in the Civil war onefifth of her entire wealth. What happened? Within eighteen years the whole of the national debt was paid oft; extinguished by a com-

monwealth with only one-third of th* present population; with little or no prestige ns a world power; with all her railways, half of her city real estate and GO per cent of her farms mortgaged to European capitalists; with bank resources of only $4,000,000,000 and with not a dollar’s worth of investments abroad. There are estimates that ere kaiserIsm shall be crushed our national obligation will stand at $20,000,000,000. That would mean about 8 per cent of the wealth of the nation (which Is not less than $250,000,000,000) or 4 per cent less than the percentage in 1865. America today is the leading power, the wealthiest country in the world. It is a creditor nation. Its railways, real estate and farms are owned by her own people and her bank resources total $49,389,000,000. After this, is it necessary to ask if a United States government bond is a safe investment? There is nothing safer in the world; -nothing which promises so rapid and so high an appreciation once the war is ended. These are the cold facts of the proposition. There is another side: the iove-of-country, the love-of-Liberty, the great-humanity-cause side. '£*’?■*-