The Best Way To Stop War

A Retired Major-General Suggests Conscription of Capital as a Practical Remedy

Review of Reviews

DENOUNCING war as a vicious international racket, Major-General Smedley D. Butler of the United States Marine Corps, retired, suggests in the Forum the conscription of capital as a way to stop it.

For long years I have known that war is a racket but I never faced it until I saw the clouds gathering again, as they are today. They are choosing sides now. France and Russia meet and agree to stand side by side. Germany and Italy hurry to make a similar agreement.

In the Orient, the manoeuvring is more adroit. Back in 1904, when Japan and Russia fought, we kicked out our old friends the Russians, and backed Japan, whom we were then financing. Now the trend is to poison us against the Japanese. What does China’s Open Door policy mean to us? Or the Philippine Islands? Our trade with China is atout $90,000,000 a year. We have spent about $600,000,000 in the Philippines in thirty-five years and we have private investments there of less than $200,000,000.

To save that China trade of about $90,000,000 or to protect the private investments of less than $200,000,000 in the Philippines, we may be roused to hate Japan and to go to war— to a war that may cost us tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of the lives of Americans, and many more hundreds of thousands of physically maimed and mentally unbalanced young men.

It would be far cheaper (not to say safer) for tire average American, who pays the bills, to stay out of foreign entanglements.

The soldiers, of course, pay the biggest part of the bill.

Until we arrive at a stage where public officeholders, those who govern us, have more consideration for the safety and welfare and happiness of the people as a whole than for the success of any political party or small group, we will have wars and other rackets of all kinds.

But there is a way to stop this racket. It cannot be smashed by disarmament conferences, by peace parleys at Geneva, by resolutions of well-meaning but impractical groups. It can be effectively smashed only by taking the profit out of war.

The only way to stop it is by conscription of capital before conscription of the nation’s manhood. One month before the government may order the young men of the nation to be killed, it must serve notice of conscription on the country’s capital.

Let the officers and directors of our armament factories, our gun builders and munitions makers and shipbuilders all be conscripted—to get $30 a month, the same wage paid to the lads in the trenches.

Let the workers in these plants get the same wage. All workers, all executives, all presidents, all directors, all managers— everyone in the nation be restricted to a total monthly income not to exceed that paid to the soldier in the trenches.

Let all these kings and tycoons and masters of industry and all these workers in industry pay half of their monthly $30 wage to their families and pay insurance and buy government bonds.

Why shouldn’t they? They aren’t running the risk of being killed or having their bodies mangled or their minds shattered. The soldiers run that risk.

Give capital thirty days to think it over and you will learn by that time that there will be no war. That will stop the racket— that and nothing else.