Repudiation or Liquidation, Anarchy or Civilization-Which?

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FIRST SUPPLEMENT TO UNIVERSITY BULLETIN FOR JANUARY 1^6 '     ./
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REPUDIATION or LIQUIDATIONV"  '
ANARCHY or CIVILIZATION-WHICH?
By HENRY AUGUSTUS BUCHTEL
"All the world's output of gold and more
will be required to render sound the enormous
mass of fiat currency which has been issued/'
—Wall Street Journal, Dec. 2, 1915.
THE ECONOMIST estimates that ninety million dollars a day
are expended in the titanic struggle in Europe. The war has been
raging now for nearly eighteen months. So the cost to date approaches the gigantic sum of fifty billions. All the gold produced in
the world for all the decades since the discovery of America is less
than one-third of the cost of the war to date. The debt of the
United States at the close of the four years war for the preservation
of the Union was exactly the cost of the war in Europe for one
month. The war to date has therefore cost eighteen times more
than the cost of our civil war for four years. But our losses to individuals and to States were as great as the cost to the United States.
Can any one imagine what the individual losses are in Europe over
vast sections of country which have been so utterly devastated that
nothing of value remains except the bare ground? No words can
characterize the gigantic size and the unspeakable wickedness of
this whirlpool of insanity. We are struck dumb by the awful
spectacle. Evidently the war has now passed beyond the control
of the belligerent leaders. The whole world is now suffering irreparable loss in this pentecost of calamity. No one can predict
when it will come to an end.
Men of thought and action can see that there is now one universal need throughout the world. That need is the preaching of
the eternal verities. This is a bugle call to Catholic and Protestant,
to Jew and Christian. Here is a common ground for all men of
every variety of religious opinion. God is not mocked. Nations
reap whatsoever they sow. The supreme fact of the universe is
GOD. When a man begins to say with candor and sincerity "I believe in God," he has made the most fundamental declaration for
the moral life of the world.