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294 ECONOMIC INQUIRIES AND STUDIES

many years ago, shortly after the war itself, about
£700,000,000 sterling. This includes every kind of
'
loss, direct and indirect, as far as I could calflate,
which France sustained. But the whole of this amount
was not a loss of capital to France, the net loss on that
head being about £600,000,000 sterling, including the
payment of the indemnity and the cession of territory,
about £264,000,000 altogether, which were the result
of the war. The case of France, however, was a very
special case of loss of capital. The experience of Ger-
many was quite different, the calculation being that
Germany, instead of losing by the war, gained about
£ 150,000,000 sterling, and gained in capital even more
than that, about £ I 74,000,000 sterling. If we state the
gain of Germany against the loss by France, the total
loss of capital even by the Franco-German War to
the two nations concerned was probably not over
£400,000,000 sterling, or about £ 200,000,000 apiece.
Much of the burden of the expenditure was, in fact,
borne at the time out of the income, and the loss of
cFtpital, in whatever way it may be calculated, was not
nearly so great.
We may say, perhaps, that the loss of capital in the
great Franco-German War amounted to no more than
a few years' ordinary accumulation of capital in the
countries concerned, and it was in fact made good
more quickly than was commonly anticipated in 1872.
The recovery in France, especially, was prodigiously
quick. '
When we get such figures in connection with great
wars it is, perhaps, unnecessary to refer to the kind of
loss which occurs in the little wars which this country
has had to carryon at different times. Wars in India,
apart from the fact that they have mostly been paid for
out of the Indian Exchequer, a war like the Abyssinian
War, or West African Expeditions, or Chinese en-
tanglements, have, obviously, occasioned the expendi-

1 See supra, vol. i., "The Cost of the Franco-German War."