Arcata High School - Advance Yearbook (Arcata, CA)

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Fourteen

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was negotiated without their know- ledge or consent, we could give our citizenship generally a twelfth grade education. In 1889, 65 million dollars was appropriated by Congress for the army and navy. In 1914, twenty-five years later, the appropriation is 235 million dollars. In 1889 we did not have a battleship, and now we have thirty-eight. For the Spanish-Ameri- can War we were fitted out with five battleships that cost 3 million dollars apiece, which are now obsolete. At present we are paying 7M million dol lars apiece. In fifteen years they will be 12 million dollars apiece, and the battleships of today will be obsolete as those of the Spanish-America War are now. Thomas Jefferson, one of the greatest statesmen this country has ever produced, favored the limi- tation of war expenditure to tangible needs, as he saw the evils contingent on a large national debt, and if he were living today he would surely view with horror our mad rush to pile up an obligation we can never repay. Every man, woman, and child in the United States must pay 34.70 this year to make up the appropria- tion for wars, past and future. David Starr Jordan of Stanford' University, a writer and thinker whose statements cannot be passed over lightly, said: The waste of all governments on war and the system of national defense is worldwide. Through militarism the world is living beyond its means. So long as we keep war imple- ments on hand, contends Mr. Ben- son, the increasing temptation is to use them. When we were practically unarmed thirty-five years ago, we were in no danger. Nobody tried to T attack us. Nobody dared to attack us. Everybody knew that, if attacked, we could overwhelm any nation that should attempt to land an army upon our shores. We could do the same today. VVe need no navy. We need no more than the skeleton of an army. With such land fortifications as we have, or could easily provide, nobody could capture a city, and certainly no nation would be so foolish as to try to land an army among us. Even though we should not con- cede as much as as Mr. Benson, we would be forced to admit the utter folly of present war expenditure or that contemplated for the future. In- vention has brought forth a frailer looking, inexpensive but 'vastly more powerful instrument of destruction. The evolution of the airship would make modern warfare ineffective. A single one of these aerial sailing ships would destroy a whole fleet of bat- tleships or endanger an army. The money that we are wasting upon military expenditure let us de- vote to the ends of education. And finally, if from a reversion of policy from destruction to education, the expenditure should still prove insuffi- cient, I should be in favor of a direct tax upon those who acquire the great- est amount of wealth under our gov- ernment, merely one of whom, with his prodigious fortune, accumulated in this glorious land of opportunity, has scattered public libraries through- out the country, California alone pos- sessing over 95 of these costly insti- tutions. A single generation educated thus would be sufficient to refine and en- noble the world. Thirteen

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Q1 i 'W w W Fifteen