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ADDRESS 
 
 Delivered by 
 
 LIEUTENANT-COLONEL HOMER FOLKS 
 
 
 " THE HUMAN COSTS 
 OF THE WAR " 
 
 Under the auspices of the 
 MUNICIPAL COURT EDUCATIONAL DEP'T 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
 -vgCElVED 
 
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 DOCUMENT.-* uiV.tilOi 
 

 Homer Folks was Lieutenant- Colonel in the American 
 Red Cross and Director of the Department of Civil Affairs of 
 the American Red Cross in France, Chief of the Red Cross 
 Survey Mission in Italy, Greece, Serbia, Belgium and France. 
 "The Human Costs of the War," an address delivered Friday, 
 October 10, 1919, in Room 676, City Hall, is based on his book 
 published by Harper Brothers. 
 
 Mr. Folks is a leader in the field of public service ; former 
 President of the New York State Probation Commission; 
 former Commissioner of Public Charities in New York City; 
 organizer of Public Relief in Cuba under General Wood, etc. ; 
 and Author of "The Care of Destitute, Neglected and Delin- 
 quent Children." 
 
In introducing Lieutenant-Colonel Folks, Honorable 
 Charles L. Brown, President Judge of the Municipal Court, 
 said: 
 
 We are gathered here today to hear an inspiring message 
 from a great leader in public service, and we are fortunate, 
 indeed, to have Colonel Folks here to inaugurate for us the 
 series of addresses which we purpose to give on matters con- 
 cerning the public service and the public welfare. These 
 addresses we thought should be for the benefit of our staff 
 alone, and that is a very large one. I feel, however, that we 
 should let the community have the benefit of the inspiration 
 that the talks of the men and women who are leading authori- 
 ties in the field of public service will bring us. Therefore, we 
 have extended the invitations to men and women of this com- 
 munity whose co-operation make such real work as the big 
 work of our Municipal Court possible. We are going to bring 
 here to these meetings to address you, people who will help you, 
 who are in the social service of the Court, and you who are in 
 other fields of public and private social service. They will 
 bring new vision, new hope and new suggestions and guidance 
 for our work. 
 
 I wish to say a word on other plans we have for our own 
 workers. Through the co-operation of public-spirited citizens, 
 it has become possible for us to provide certain of you who are 
 in the service of our Court, with the opportunity for work at 
 the Pennsylvania School for Social Service, so that you may 
 increase our potentiality for service to the public. I say you 
 have the privilege of taking these courses, but I also want to 
 say that I appreciate your helpfulness and willingness to under- 
 take this effort, which means extra time and extra labor. I 
 desire to thank you for responding so wholeheartedly to my 
 plans for training for public service. I am only sorry that cir- 
 cumstances prevent more than ten of you from undertaking this 
 work. I know those of you who are going will not be dis- 
 appointed in the trouble your efforts will give you. 
 
 We will try to have these public meetings once or twice a 
 month. On November 7th, Miss Maude E. Miner, Director of 
 
the Girls' Protective Leagues and Chairman of the Board of 
 Directors of the National Probation Association, will speak on 
 Probation Work with Women and Girls. On November 14th, 
 Doctor Charles A. Beard, Director of the Bureau of Municipal 
 Research, New York City, under whose direction is conducted 
 the Training School for Public Service, will speak on "Train- 
 ing for Public Service." Mr. Burdette G. Lewis, Commissioner 
 of Correction of the State of New Jersey, will address us on 
 December 12th. 
 
 These meetings are open to all who may be interested. I 
 hope that through them we, of the Municipal Court, will be able 
 to make our contribution to a better understanding of the prob- 
 lems of the public aspects of social service. These are, indeed, 
 the times that try men's souls; and it is only by the constant 
 effort to arrive at a better and a deeper understanding of our 
 tasks that we can be helpful to each other. 
 
 Colonel Folks is our speaker today. He came to our city 
 to preside at the National Tuberculosis Conference and we are 
 especially privileged to have him address us. To our Municipal 
 Court he stands as a symbol. He is a pioneer in probation 
 work. I believe he outlined the organization of the first State 
 Probation Commission, that of New York, of which he is now 
 President. His interest, among his many interests, has always 
 been in children. He is the author of a book which is a 
 standard for workers with children, "The Care of Destitute, 
 Neglected and Delinquent Children." I think that our staff, 
 and all those interested in children, should read that book. 
 Colonel Folks has had an experience in France which is bound 
 — by the greatness of his duties in a great world crisis — to 
 carry inspiration to all working in social service or to those 
 interested in it. It was his duty to help relieve the distress of 
 the suffering civilians in France. He was Director of the 
 Department of Civil Affairs of the American Red Cross in 
 France, Chief of the Red Cross Survey Mission in Italy, Greece, 
 Serbia, Belgium and France. He is embodying his experience 
 in a book, which Harper Brothers will publish and which will 
 appear serially in Harper's Magazine. It is the highest privilege 
 to have Colonel Folks address us upon "Human Costs of the 
 War," an address based upon that book. 
 
 Allow me to present Colonel Folks. 
 
ADDRESS 
 
 Judge Brown, Probation Officers and Social Workers of 
 Philadelphia: 
 
 Before entering upon my real subject, I must delay a 
 moment to express my gratification at the fact that this oppor- 
 tunity for training and this series of talks on matters of social 
 welfare are being made available for the probation officers of 
 the Municipal Court. I am not sure that my acceptance was 
 not due to my sense of the unusual character of the occasion. 
 
 It is a very exceptional thing that Judge Brown and his 
 colleagues have done. I have known of courses of training for 
 probation officers arranged by themselves, or arranged by a 
 State Commission, but in no previous instance have I known 
 the court itself to foresee the need and actually plan for such 
 opportunities for those important arms of the court, the 
 probation officers. 
 
 In doing this Judge Brown has done a service to the cause 
 of probation throughout the entire country, and I am sure that 
 his example will be followed in other cities. 
 
 I confess that I consented to appear in court with a great 
 nervousness, perhaps apprehension, but since I have had a 
 good look at the jury, I feel reassured and I feel reasonably 
 confident that I shall, at least, secure disagreement if not an 
 actual acquittal at the end of the proceedings. 
 
 I shall speak to you for a time on substantially the question 
 of human welfare in Europe as affected by the war. I speak 
 of Europe for two reasons : in the first place, because I must, 
 I have to. Anyone who has seen and participated in the work 
 of relief from the sufferings caused by the war in Europe, and 
 who has caught even a glimpse of the true condition of the 
 peoples of Europe today, must inevitably feel that the most 
 useful thing that he can do is to try to give some expression to 
 those facts which are so little understood, and perhaps can be 
 so little understood, by those who have not actually seen them at 
 first hand. Secondly, I speak of Europe, and of the opposite of 
 
human welfare in Europe, because I am disposed to think that 
 we, as social workers or probation officers, or persons interested 
 in human welfare in America, can do nothing to steady our 
 perspective and give us a point of view of what the world is 
 and needs, more properly than to become a bit more informed 
 and to think a little bit more about the actual, present conditions 
 of the people of Europe. 
 
 Social work involves a sort of an ideal on our part. As 
 social workers we are all doing what we can to see that men, 
 women and children all have a chance to live happy and useful 
 lives, not cut short by sickness and death, and not deprived of 
 fruition by causes beyond their control. There has never been 
 anything in the history of the world which has in such a whole- 
 sale way had an opposite effect on so many people as the war. 
 
 I will begin with the point which we appreciate perhaps 
 more readily, because we have seen something of them, — the 
 effects of the mobilization of the armies. Probation officers, 
 relief workers and Red Cross members, have some appreciation 
 of the problems of human need and changed human circum- 
 stances that are involved in the mobilization of an army. The 
 tremendous home service of the Red Cross is just one of the 
 things that had to be done to carry relief and aid and assistance 
 to families from which the men had been called to serve their 
 country. We mobilized in America something like four million 
 men, and that mobilization disarranged our entire industrial 
 life, upset a great many things that we had thought were 
 permanently arranged, and made an extraordinary demand 
 upon all our relief and social agencies and workers. 
 
 Let me call your attention to the extreme degree to which 
 those problems existed in the European countries, our allies and 
 our friends. In the first place, the mobilization of the men of 
 those countries was several times greater than ours was at its 
 greatest. France had a population a little more than a third of 
 that of the United States. She mobilized somewhere between 
 six and seven millions of men. If we had mobilized a corre- 
 sponding number in proportion to our population we should 
 have called together an army, not of four million, but of some- 
 thing like twenty millions of men, and the interference with the 
 normal life of the community and of families would have been 
 more than five times as great, because we selected the younger 
 
men, and preferably the men without families or dependents, 
 whereas in France every man between eighteen and fifty, who 
 was physically fit, unless he was the father of five children 
 living, was mobilized. Some of them were, of course, retained 
 to work in the necessary industries, to run the transportation, 
 work the mines, keep the munition factories going, but practi- 
 cally every man fit to be a soldier was enrolled in the army in 
 France; so that the interference with the productive life of 
 the country and with the relations between fathers and children 
 was a good deal more than five times as great as was that of 
 the United States. 
 
 The second striking fact is that it is the custom in Euro- 
 pean countries to pay their soldiers a very nominal sum. They 
 serve their country as a matter of duty, not as a matter of 
 employment. A soldier in France — and this is practically true 
 of the European countries outside of England — was paid the 
 equivalent in our money of five cents a day when at the front, 
 and two or three cents a day when assigned to service in the 
 rear. There is no question of allotments and allowances from 
 soldiers' wages for the assistance of their families in the Euro- 
 pean countries. As a matter of fact, the support afforded their 
 families by these men was simply dropped, with nothing to take 
 its place, for an appreciable period of time. Afterward an 
 allowance was made by the Government to families of soldiers, 
 an allowance which amounted to about the equivalent of 25 
 cents per day for an adult and less than that for children, an 
 allowance which, when made, would cover the cost of food, 
 leaving practically nothing else for other expenditures, but 
 which, with the rise of prices, would hardly even buy the neces- 
 sary food for those who were compelled to buy their food. 
 
 The third difference between ourselves and European 
 countries as to mobilization, is that while our men were 
 mobilized for a year or a year and a half, or varying periods 
 of about that length, the soldiers of France and of those other 
 countries were mobilized for a period of four years and a half. 
 Europe was a continent of manless homes during that time. The 
 Judge of your Juvenile Court knows what it means to have the 
 men all away and away for some time. We all know that delin- 
 quency is apt to arise. The father of the household is more 
 than the support. He is the steadying factor. His place in 
 
10 
 
 the household is always supreme and nothing takes his place, 
 even if there were an allowance that made up the actual 
 financial deficit. The absence of practically all the men for a 
 period of four years and a half was bound to be followed by 
 social results of the most far-reaching and most disastrous 
 character, as they were. 
 
 The next result of war, of course, after mobilization is 
 fighting. We all think of that when we think of war. We see 
 the clash of the armies on the field and we hear the shrieks of 
 the wounded, and in our imagination we see the men who died 
 on the field of battle. We have felt it in our own localities. I 
 said to a neighbor of mine, a few days after my return, whom 
 I happened to meet on the street, "I hope your boys are back 
 from France by this time ?" He turned away and he said, "All 
 that are coming back. One is not coming back." I had two 
 other friends in my little home town who lost their boys in 
 France. It seemed to me quite a number in my little circle of 
 acquaintances. I picked up the graduating class publication of 
 the High School of Yonkers, and on the first page, in a black 
 border, there were the pictures of the boys who would have 
 graduated that year, but did not and never will. They graduated 
 to another world. There were seventeen of them out of that 
 small group. It seemed to me we had an extraordinary number 
 of deaths in our little town. I read in the evening paper 
 shortly afterwards the proceedings of a memorial meeting, with 
 a list of the Yonkers boys that died, and it filled about three- 
 fourths of a column. I was perfectly astounded at the number. 
 It never occurred to me that out of a total of 50,000 deaths of 
 American boys there would be so many in a town of 100,000 
 people. I made a little calculation to see what would be the 
 average quota, so to speak, for a place of 100,000 people, and 
 one mathematical operation showed that it would be about 45. 
 It dawned on me for the first time after my absence that from 
 a community in America of the size of 100,000 people the 
 average was some 45 of their boys who would not return, a 
 number which would really cast a shadow of gloom and of 
 mourning and of sorrow over all American communities. Then 
 I thought, what would it be if we had been in the war as long 
 and as deeply as those European countries? Specifically, I 
 thought of France, where on every street in every city, and 
 
11 
 
 every day, one of the most conspicuous things you see is the 
 widow's black veil. France, with about a third of our popula- 
 tion, lost about a million and three-quarters of men, including 
 actual deaths known and registered, and most of the nearly 
 300,000 of the missing will never return, to say nothing of the 
 deaths among the prisoners. A little mathematical calculation 
 showed me that if we had lost as many in proportion, we would 
 have lost about seven and a half millions of men, — something 
 like that, speaking from memory. At any rate, it was ninety- 
 five times the number in proportion to population so that our 
 little town of Yonkers, if it had lost its boys and its men — 
 because they were of ages up to 50 — in the same proportion 
 that France lost her boys and her men, would not be mourning 
 forty-five or fifty boys, it would be mourning 4,300 in that 
 community of 100,000 people. 
 
 That, perhaps, gives us a little better impression of France, 
 of Serbia, largely of Italy, and, to some extent, of Belgium. 
 We simply cannot understand the extent to which those coun- 
 tries are permeated and soaked through and through with the 
 strain of sorrow and loss and suffering and grief for the men 
 and boys that have gone. The actual number of deaths among 
 the Allied soldiers is over seven and a half millions, to say 
 nothing of the missing, and the number of men killed by the 
 war in Europe is certainly in excess of ten millions. That 
 creates a problem of social hardship, in widowhood, in orphan- 
 age, the proportions of which stagger our imagination, the 
 effects of which will last for decades. Not probably until the 
 opening of the next century will there be no one who can look 
 back and say, "How different life might have been for me if I 
 had not lost my father in the great war." 
 
 But that question of loss, of widowhood, of the orphans, 
 of the soldiers who died, and the million — or whatever the num- 
 ber is, for it is more than a million — of permanent cripples, are 
 things we all know about in a way, the first things we think 
 about when we think about war. There are other phases that 
 are less well known, but perhaps are even more significant and 
 distressful for the future of the peoples of Europe. When an 
 army comes into a country, a foreign army — and it was with a 
 wonderfully deep understanding of the nature of war that Ger- 
 many planned to carry on war in the other countries' territory — 
 
12 
 
 when an army rolls in, there are civilians there of course. The 
 army comes there unexpected and very rapidly, and you have to 
 do one of two things, to run and leave, or to go down in the 
 cellar and wait until it goes by. There were four million and 
 a half of people in the part of France that Germany overran. A 
 million and a half of them ran, and three millions went down to 
 the cellars. I want to trace just a little further just what 
 happened to those people and the people similarly placed all 
 through the other countries, from the North Sea all the way up 
 through and around into Russia. You have all read of the 
 people who went away, the refugees. I know that you have all 
 seen the pictures of them streaming down the roads of France, 
 taking up one or two or three things that they thought most of 
 or thought most valuable, tying them up in a package and just 
 walking away as fast and as far as they could walk, to keep 
 ahead of the incoming army, and finally reaching a railway, 
 being packed like animals in cattle cars, crowded in as closely 
 as they could possibly be crowded, and taken into the interior 
 for one, two, three or four days ; stopped at sidings to let other 
 trains go by, with no protection from the cold weather to speak 
 of, and then arriving. That is the part we have all read about, 
 the people driven from their homes with a few moments' 
 notice in that way. 
 
 But the real claim on our sympathy arises from what 
 happened to them after that. That is the real thing. We could 
 travel three or four days, if we had to, under uncomfortable 
 circumstances and get along. We don't expect to sleep very 
 well when we travel, ordinarily, and our meals are interrupted 
 and we do not have a very comfortable time as a rule. But 
 when this million and a half of people got to where they were 
 going, that was when the real trouble began, because nobody 
 was expecting them there excepting for a day or two or even 
 an hour or two before they came. There was nowhere for 
 them to go. People were already living in all the houses. There 
 was nothing for them to do, no extra work to be done. Every- 
 thing was disorganized by the war. There was no comfortable 
 place to go to live. There was no additional furniture to buy, 
 there was no additional wood and hardly enough food to go 
 around. It was five or ten per cent, of the original population 
 of those communities just thrown upon them. Suppose you 
 
13 
 
 had in Philadelphia here another ten per cent, of people 
 dumped down upon you without any notice, or not, perhaps, 
 more than twenty hours' notice, what would you do with them? 
 Suppose it was winter time? Well, they went into churches, 
 they slept on the floors in the aisles, they went into the stables, 
 from which the horses had been taken for the army. They 
 would go into an empty factory that had been closed because 
 of the war— any old place at all, and hardly anybody thought 
 of having more than one room for a family. These were 
 people who had lived comfortably, mind you. They were not 
 unsuccessful people, they were all the people— educated and 
 uneducated, workers and professionals, and they all had to 
 crowd up and they were all lucky if they did not have more 
 than one family in a room. A large room like this would 
 probably be used by hanging some burlap on strings or wires, 
 and dividing the room into little squares about ten feet square. 
 Each of those little squares was a home for a family,— the 
 mother and grandmother, an old grandfather, perhaps, and 
 some young boys and girls of all ages and a baby or two. Each 
 little square was a home for a family. There was not much, 
 if any, coal to be had. You could not dream of getting enough 
 to keep warm. You might get enough to cook with if you were 
 clever. There was almost no kerosene or oil to be had and 
 they lived in darkness and damp, cold and gloom, in unem- 
 ployment and insufficient income. They had no money to buy 
 clothes if their clothes wore out. They did not have hardly 
 any bedding with them, and there was hardly any more to buy. 
 They had a wretched time. They got sick, but the doctors were 
 all called to the army. They never had any trained nurses any- 
 where in France. There were no doctors to look after them. 
 Then was the real trouble. People helped, of course, and the 
 Government gave them an allowance to buy food with after a 
 little while, and the Red Cross set up a distributing agency bye 
 and bye towards the very end of the war, when they got around 
 to it. But there, a million and a half of people who had been 
 refugees and exiles from home, crowded into any old place. 
 They lived that way for four years. There is the hard part — 
 for four years. There is a test of your vitality to stand up 
 against all those things that break down your health and 
 
14 
 
 resourcefulness. For four years, not four days, — four years 
 of exile under those conditions. 
 
 How many were there of them? A million and a half I 
 said was the number in France in 1914 and half a million 
 more came along in the spring of 1918. That is two million 
 people in France. That is only a beginning of refugees. There 
 were refugees from Belgium to the number of about a million ; 
 in Italy half a million; in Greece several hundred thousands; 
 in Serbia I don't know how many, but there were thousands 
 and thousands and thousands of them. All through Rumania, 
 Russia and Austria there were refugees from the front. When 
 the Russians invaded it, half a million Germans were driven 
 out of east Prussia. There were ten or twelve million people, 
 at least, living in the way I have just described, all the standards 
 simply knocked to pieces, all the ways they had learned how to 
 live through these centuries, to be cleanly, to be decent and 
 educate their children, all their standards were knocked into 
 smithereens, and they were living in any way they could to get 
 along for a period of four and a half years. 
 
 You cannot do that without breaking down for a long 
 time to come the standard of living, of welfare, of that enor- 
 mous number of people. The war ended and they began to go 
 back, ten million people, to their homes. I wish I had time to 
 describe to you what they found when they got back, and what 
 they did. They went back to the devastated areas, as we say. 
 You have seen pictures of that until you are sick and tired of 
 "devastated areas." But these people had to see the devastated 
 areas from the inside, not from the outside. They went there 
 to live. That was where they came from. Those were their 
 homes. They went back and had to dig in the cellar to see 
 whether there was an archway still standing; if there was, they 
 would get a few bits of furniture and make their home in the 
 cellar. I recall on my last visit to the city of Lens, the coal 
 mining city, there were only a few streets you could go on at 
 all. You would think there was nobody there at all, but if 
 your automobile happened to blow its horn, they would begin 
 to come up out of the ground here and there among these ruins, 
 from places you could not see were occupied by anybody. It 
 was very pathetic, but it was very curious. You could not help 
 thinking of the way woodchucks pop up out of their holes in 
 
15 
 
 the fields of clover. Think what it means. Those ten million 
 people are living under conditions that are as much worse now 
 than when they were in exile, as those conditions were worse 
 'than those they originally came from. They were darker 
 colder and gloomier, damp and underground, and it will be 
 twenty year! before they are rebuilt. All the statements y0 u 
 read Jbout this, that and the other place being rebuilt this year 
 or next year,-put them down as absolutely not so. ■ Abou all 
 that has been accomplished really in all that area is to clear 
 away barbed wire and clear up some of the Greets get some 
 of the railroads running, get the canal opened up-a few things 
 like that There has been no beginning at actually rebuilding 
 the peoples' houses. There are a few wooden barracks A 
 barracks is a thing you and I would not think good enough for 
 a cow stable, because it is just an affair of boards roughly put 
 together. But a barracks is the ideal of a house. It is the best 
 even for the Mayor, the head of the town. A few barracks m 
 a city of ten thousand people, for the very select people of the 
 town, that is the very best you find; otherwise you find bits of 
 old building paper and a few stakes, and so on, stuck up 
 together in any kind of shape for a shelter. The people will 
 live there through the winter to come and nobody knows how 
 long after that. 
 
 I want to go back a moment to another phase. You have 
 heard much less about it even than the refugees. The three 
 million people who went down cellar when the storm passed 
 bv when the tornado of war swept overhead, of course did not 
 stay down cellar very long. It was maybe for a day or two, 
 and then they came up. They were the conservatives. I sup- 
 pose the radicals that were willing to try anything went away, 
 but the conservatives stayed down in the cellar and came up 
 They came up in a changed world. They were under the control 
 of an army of an enemy country. They hadn't any rights any 
 more They couldn't be sure of keeping anything they had. 
 Whatever the other fellow wanted he took. If he wanted to 
 live in a house he moved in, and made the people in the house 
 take care of him. He was likely to take the products of their 
 work They were subject to all the shortages that the blockade 
 placed upon the Central Powers (which finally brought them 
 to terms), only it was worse. They suffered all the blockade 
 
16 
 
 effects plus the fact that their things were taken away from 
 them by the enemy to send back to the people at home when they 
 began to be short. As the smoke clears away a little bit and 
 we look over the situation, they seem to have suffered most of 
 all. The people who went away got away from the war. The 
 people who stayed, stayed under the control of this army of 
 the enemy, and when you come to look over what happened 
 you see that after all the effects of the shortage of food were 
 more serious upon them than upon the people who went off 
 into the interior. 
 
 The largest city in France that was occupied was Lille. 
 The population of Lille was reduced to one-half of what it 
 had been during the war. That was partly because the soldiers 
 went away. It was considerably because people died. They 
 died because they did not have enough to eat. That was the 
 long and short of it. They always had, of course, something to 
 eat. They did not starve to death, as we would say, in a 
 famine, but they starved to death virtually, they died of some- 
 thing else first. They died of tuberculosis, they died of dis- 
 eases of childhood, if they were children, and so on. There 
 were half as many people in Lille when the war ended as when 
 it began. The tuberculosis death rate was multiplied by two. 
 The number of children born was one-eighth of what it had 
 been before for the same period of time, and the proportion of 
 deaths among those that were born was substantially greater 
 than it was before. That is a pretty black picture of the 
 occupied territory and the occupied territory was a great deal 
 bigger in terms of numbers than the number of the refugees. 
 Just run your mind over that. There were six million Bel- 
 gians in occupied territory. There were three million French, 
 there were four and a half millions of Serbians, there were a 
 million Italians, there were five and three-quarter millions of 
 Rumanians, there were twenty-two million Russians in terri- 
 tory occupied by Germans, a total of forty-two million people 
 who lived under occupation by an enemy army and suffered all 
 those hardships of oppression and repression and lack of food 
 in the taking away of their supplies and clothing and fuel and 
 all. Their mode of living was reduced to about the lowest 
 consistent with living at all. 
 
17 
 
 That is only a start, really, of the hardships that the war 
 brought to the peoples of Europe, because the shortage of food 
 during the latter part of the war applied not only to the 
 blockaded territory, but it applied to many of the Allied coun- 
 tries, Italy and Greece, and those countries in the south of 
 Europe, though they were not behind the blockade, actually 
 experienced a shortage of food. That increased sickness and 
 death among them and they came actually in sight of hunger. 
 That is, the whole people, the whole 33,000,000 of Italy actually 
 suffered a lack of sufficient food. You only have to look at 
 them to recognize that fact, but it is indisputable when you look 
 at the figures of what happened. I must speak for a minute or 
 two more to show that all through that part of the world the 
 diseases that have been slowly brought under some degree of 
 control absolutely broke loose. All that has been done in the 
 way of prevention of disease practically disappeared. People 
 could not afford health work and they were too busy to think 
 about it. Tuberculosis, which had been reduced about forty 
 per cent, in Italy, shot up twenty-five per cent, in two years. 
 Malaria, which was on the way to disappearance, jumped back 
 to where it was twenty-two years ago. Typhoid fever increased 
 all over the country, because of the people camping out of doors. 
 The typhus epidemic of Serbia was a direct result of the 
 crowding of those people in houses and lack of opportunity for 
 cleanliness. A peculiar fact is that the louse always seems to 
 enlist with the soldier. The talk and jokes and slang of the 
 soldier were about the cootie, to a very considerable degree, 
 but it is no joke because if there is typhus fever, the cootie 
 carries it from one man to the next. The epidemic that cost 
 150,000 Serbian lives was a war epidemic of typhus. The 
 "flu" itself we don't know all about, but we know that it came 
 at the same time as the greatest strain of all. We know that it 
 had been hibernating, as it were, in some area back in eastern 
 Europe, where Russia joins Asia, and that after being quiescent 
 there for a good while, it broke loose. Then this going back 
 and forth of soldiers and refugees and everybody in every 
 direction all the time spread it all over the world with a rapidity 
 that has never been known before. The deaths from the "flu" 
 which we know a great deal about in this country must be put 
 down as due, in a very considerable degree, not wholly very 
 
18 
 
 likely, but as being chargeable, to a substantial extent, to the 
 fact of war. Italy lost about three times as many people from 
 the "flu" as we did, in proportion to our population. Take 
 Serbia, which, before the war, had a population of 5,000,000 
 people. It was growing at the rate of about 90,000 a year. 
 They cannot bother to keep vital statistics in wartime, but the 
 general agreement of a good many people who have studied the 
 subject, by the Austrians while they were there and by the 
 Serbians, and by the English, and by the Americans who 
 worked there, is that, as a net result of all these things, Serbia 
 not only lost all her normal growth, but actually lost a fifth of 
 her entire population as it stood at the beginning of the war, 
 coming to the end of the war with 4,000,000 people instead of 
 5,000,000 as she began it. 
 
 I must speak just a second of one other thing, one of the 
 strange things you must think about a little while before you 
 get the full bearing of it, and that is the tremendous reduction 
 of the birth rate in those countries. It is not necessarily a good 
 thing to have too many people in the world, so far as I know, 
 but a differential reduction in the birth rate may be a very bad 
 thing. It was a very bad thing that France's population stood 
 stationary for the last forty years at about forty million, while 
 Germany's went on from thirty-eight or thirty-nine to sixty- 
 four millions. That was a very bad thing for the peace and 
 future of the world. With extraordinary uniformity, with 
 extraordinary evenness, the birth rate of those countries in 
 which the war occurred fell until it was fifty per cent., or in 
 Serbia apparently much less than fifty per cent, of what it had 
 been. So that in the number of people who will enter the 
 schools of the future, there will be a great hiatus when you 
 come to the ages that would have been born in the years 1915 
 to 1919. A very curious thing is that it was true of Belgium, as 
 well as of France and Italy, and in Belgium it was not because 
 the men were in the army or out of the country. It was some- 
 thing about these bad standards of living and depression, being 
 under the enemy army; the lack of food, of clothing and of 
 shelter. The babies would just simply not be born. The actual 
 shortage of births already in Europe among the white peoples 
 in the world who are to carry the white man's burden, is about 
 ten million in number, and to the extent that it is due to the 
 
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 lower standards of living, shortage of income, bad housing and 
 the like, it will go on in some degree for we don't know how 
 long. Looking backward years from now, in the great contest 
 that may arise between the peoples of the world, it may well be 
 that that reduction in the number of effective members of the 
 white race, already ten millions in number, besides the deaths 
 in the war itself, may prove to have been the most serious 
 result of the many serious results of the great war. 
 
 That is a terrible picture, but it is a true picture. It is a 
 picture which, perhaps, only those who have been accustomed 
 to work in the various fields of human welfare would 
 thoroughly understand. You could travel all over Europe and 
 not see it. You would have to study it. You would have to 
 examine into the underlying facts. The people of Europe do 
 not know it. The people of Italy, with few exceptions, do not 
 know it, do not know to what extent they lost. They just know 
 they are in a bad way. Only those accustomed to deal with the 
 statistics of lives and births and deaths and disease, of poverty 
 and sickness, see the extent to which this terrible calamity rests 
 upon the people of Europe. 
 
 We can do a little about it. I wish we could do more. We 
 can, at least, look facts in the face. We can be patient and 
 sympathetic with people who have gone through such stress and 
 suffering as we have not come in sight of. We can make allow- 
 ances for the bitternesses and skepticisms and pessimisms that 
 are bound to exist all through Europe. We can refrain from 
 doing anything that in any way would lead them to feel that 
 America is not interested in Europe, that when our soldiers 
 said good-bye to France we, as a nation, said good-bye to 
 Europe. We cannot do that, we cannot be onlookers, specta- 
 tors. We have got to stand by our Allies in Europe in spirit, in 
 sympathy, in understanding, until the wounds of the war are 
 healed. ( Applause. ) 
 
 Judge Brown : On behalf of this gathering, and for my- 
 self, I want to thank Colonel Folks for this intelligent presen- 
 tation of the results of the war on the human race. It has been 
 inspiring and it ought to make us sympathetic with those people 
 who suffered so very much more than we have. I thank him 
 in your behalf and for myself for this wonderful address. 
 
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