First look at the Russian matter, then at the American.
Look at the Amount of Evil in that Russian war.
It did not last two years; yet see what vast sums of money it has cost! Here are the figures: they are partly conjectural, but wholly moderate; they are the estimates of some of the great European journals. France and England have paid four hundred and eighty millions of dollars, Turkey a hundred and forty millions, Austria a hundred millions, Russia three hundred millions. Here, then, ten hundred and twenty millions of dollars have been eaten up in a war not twenty-four months long. Now, that sum of money is more than seven times as great as the entire property, real and personal, of "the great State of South Carolina." That is the direct cost to the governments of the Five Nations: it does not include the damage done to their forts and ships (and, in a single night, Russia destroyed a larger navy of her own vessels than the United States owns,—burnt and sunk it in the harbour of Sebastopol); it does not embrace the diminution of military and naval supplies, or the pensions hereafter to be paid; it makes no account of the injury to individuals whose property has been consumed, or the great cost to the other powers of Europe. When all the bills are in, as they will be a hundred and fifty years hence, then I think it will appear that that two years' fight cost Europe two thousand millions of dollars. That is the amount of the personal and real estate of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.
Here are the figures representing the deaths of soldiers. England has lost fifty thousand soldiers, France a hundred and seventy thousand, Turkey eighty thousand, and Russia four hundred thousand; making seven hundred thousand men, who have perished in the prime of life. This does not include those who will yet die of their wounds, nor such as perish by the worst of deaths, — the slow heart-break of orphans and widows, or those who meant to be wives, but are widows, though never married. Put it all together, and the two years' war has cost at least a million of lives. Such a spendthrift is war, both of money and men.
