Exceptions existed, of course, to every generalization in this chapter, as they do to any generalization of any kind. But the exceptions speedily lifted themselves out of the ranks by promotion, and were therefore covered by the different influences on the officers and the higher ranks of non-commissioned officers. And I feel that even these exceptional men who retained their respect for law and property, their habits of regular industry, did so only in comparison with the general break-down, that even they felt a certain loosening of the standards which they had possessed in civilian life. Army life developed a new series of moral values and moral reactions. It brought out virtues which were latent or non-existent in civil life; it reduced others to impotence. It produced love of country, of home, and of God; it brought forth courage, loyalty, self-sacrifice, the extreme of heroism, in such numbers and such variety that they seemed commonplace. It did not brutalize any who were not very ready for such a process. But at the same time, it destroyed the citizen's respect for law and order, his respect for property, his habit of hard and persistent work. It made him, for the time being, a lazy hero; a jovial, careless, and lovable lawbreaker. It brought out exactly the qualities which are least necessary in civil life, and injured those most necessary; it took the student, the workingman, the farmer, and made of him the doughboy. Army life was opposed directly to the whole tenor of democracy, the regime where men control themselves, where they work through ambition and desire for success, and where they strive to accumulate property of their own, at the same time respecting the law and the property of others. Army life meant a break in the lives of millions of young Americans, an interruption of the steady development of their characters and habits, a reversal of their tendencies and a postponement of their ambitions.