ready to execute laws in the interest of the ruling class,
ready to cunningly cajole and beguile the toil-cursed working class,
ready to cunningly teach meekness, humility and contentment—to the working class,
ready to cunningly teach servility and obedience—to the working class,
ready with grand words to cunningly dupe and chloroform—the working class,
ready to bellow about “Law and Order” when the unemployed call loudly for work or bread and when hungry strikers open their lips in self-defense,
ready “for Jesus’ sake” (and a salary) to glorify war and scream to the “God of Battles” (also the “God of Peace”) for victory; ready to baptize wholesale murder and flatter the blood-stained conquerors; ready to whine and mumble over the shell-torn corpses of the victims and hypocritically sniffle and mouth consolatory congratulations to the war-cursed widows and orphans—ready thus to mock their own ruined victims—for a price; ready to preach—to the workers—that they must fight like hell to “get a home in heaven.”
Many of my brothers—my betrayed younger brothers—are soldiers: they have been seduced to serve as Armed Guard. They have been deceived. And they are abused. Many of them are even driven insane. Insanity ranks third in the long list of disablements for which our betrayed brothers are dismissed from the service. (Report of the Department of War, 1908, p. 21.) A whole carload of insane soldiers were shipped through Pittsburgh—home from the Philippines—December 11, 1909.
These men are indeed betrayed and abused—and ashamed. They even destroy themselves to hide their shame and escape abuse. Twenty-six times as many enlisted men committed suicide in 1908 as in 1907; AND THIRTY-NINE TIMES AS MANY of them committed suicide in 1909 as in 1907.[[1]]
More and more the boys in the Army are disgusted with the whole vile business, but as the boys become increasingly sick of the service and would like to run away, the War Department more and more prepares to hold them like rats in a trap—just as the Secretary of War boasted in his Report for 1908 (p. 19) that he now finally had “an elaborate system ... almost perfected well calculated to secure swift and certain apprehension and punishment of deserters, and will ... have a marked effect in reducing the crime to a minimum.” Thus the boys are trapped and stung,—and some of them kill themselves.