Then the other class--those who had never intended to go at all--those who had no heart in the cause, from the first, and who had merely assumed the regulation uniform to feed _vanity_ or the _pocket_. The former, to strut Broadway in unimpeachable blue-and-gold, be called by military titles, lounge at the theatres or create sensations at the watering-places, confident of being able to escape, on some pretext, before their commands (if they had any) should leave for the seat of war. The latter, to find profitable employment in raising companies, regiments or brigades, for Staten Island, East New York or the Red House, drawing pay and subsistence for twice or three times the number ever in camp, and coolly pocketing the difference! It is idle to talk, as exaggerating sensation-paragraphists sometimes do, of stealing the pennies off the eyes of a dead grandmother to play at pitch-and-toss, or forging the name of a buried father to a note and then allowing it to go to protest,--it is idle to talk of these as the extreme of criminal heartlessness: the men who could thus trade--the men who _have_ thus traded, during the whole war--on the public patriotism and the public necessity, would deserve the lowest deep in the pit of perdition, following upon leprosy in life and deaths on dunghills--if there was not a still deeper guilt on the souls of those who first plunged the country into war and then murdered it by treason or inefficiency.[7] [Footnote 7: January 17th, 1863.] The public disgust at these "shoulder-straps" of both classes culminated during the first week of July. It might be unpatriotic and even cowardly to make no movement towards joining the Army of the Union: it was base and utterly contemptible to make such a movement merely as an injurious sham. So thought the people--seeing in this _desire of military reputation and profit without service or sacrifice_, the worm gnawing at the very heart of the republic. "If they are not soldiers, why do they wear these trappings of the battle-field?" asked the public. "If they are soldiers, why are they loitering here when their comrades are being overpowered and slaughtered?" Alas! the question has been continually asked and never answered. "Leipsic was lost, and I not there!" cried the soldier of the old French Eleventh, bursting into tears. But: "All the great battles of this war have been fought, and I have managed to keep out of them!" might the shoulder-strapped, belted, fatigue-capped, strutting mock-soldier of our own time say with a corresponding chuckle. God help us!--Rome had but one Nero fiddling when it burned, if history tells us true: we have had ten thousand military fiddlers playing away to admiring audiences during _our_ conflagration!