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right, enough illegitimate children
will be born in Great Britain in the
next few months to offset all 'the
lives the country has lost so far at
least on the battlefield.
If you will allow me a little frank
speaking on this subject, I know a
certain element of men not uncon
nected with public affairs that, in
spite of the moralists and the iron
bound code, view this fact with
boundless content; and good and re
spectable men at that. What they
had hoped for from the hasty mar
riage, the hedge priests and the offi
cial playing of Sir Pandarus, has
come about in another way. It is not
conventional, it is shocking to the
national ideal which is Mrs. Grundy;
but the children will.be born, never
theless, and that is the great thing In
the minds of these men.
For however revolting all these
things may be, and however sordid
and shameful, there is not a think
ing statesman in Europe 'but is
weigred down by the appalling pros-
pest of depopulated and ruined coun
tries that plainly opens before us.
The question thrust with primitive
bluntness upon these statesmen Is
whether, when this war madness
shall subside, there may be left
enough able-bodied men to carry on
the business of the nations.
What are the losses so far
In the opinion of the best judges,
the total losses in killed, wounded
and missing, on all sides up .to May
1, including all the fighting areas
from South Africa to the Hebrides,
was more than 4,000,000 men.
Of these more than 700,000 had
been killed. France alone mourns
300,000 of her sons slain on the bat
tle line.
More than 700,000! This is at the
rate of about 77,000 a month in killed.
If the war shall continue until the
end of the year, as the cooler proph
ets generally agree it will, and the
present rate of slaughter shall con
tinue, the death lists by that time will
amount to about lrOO.OOQ. '
Probably 1,000,000 others will have1
been so crippled or disabled that they
will henceforth have little or no partj
In productive history. ,
It is not only amputated limbs.
Thousands will have been blinded and
tens of thousands rendered insane.
We may believe then that In round J
numbers' by Jan. 1, 1916, 2,200,000
will have been blotted by death or
disabling from the productive forces
of Europe. J
And I take here no account of
those that will escape with unmaimedi
bodies, but with wrecked and ruined
nerves. This is another terrible toll "
that no one speaks of now, but,
scarcely a man comes back from the,
nightmare of these hellish trenches
without the mark of them. The deaf
ening din of thunders incessant, the
horror, the shock of conflict, the,
hardships and the drag upon the
nerves are more than human beings
can endure. No man is the same
afterward. It is all very well for the
purposes of enlistment to talk about
men that get used to these things. I
know better. No one gets used to
them. The coolest and the hardiest
man is never afterward the same.
In a vague way we can guess what
all this will mean by reflecting -on the
records of other wars.
In two generations Europe had not
recovered from the Napoleonic wars
and they have already been surpassed
here. A century was required to Te
cover from the Thirty Years' War and
it seems like a skirmish compared to
this.
After the Thirty Years' War Cen
tral Europe was obliged to suspend
its laws against illegitimacy that the
populations might be replenished.
After the Napoleonic wars almost the
only men left in France were imma
ture or senile, the growth of popula
tion was checked, and to this day has
never recovered. The situation was
so critical that learned authorities
were driven to consider agamogene
sls, or the perpetuation of the human. 4
race without the union of , the sexeg
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