To become an officer in the army the same difficulties arose. I could not become a soldier as I learned that Eurasians were not accepted. In fact I had no liking whatever for the army, even had there been an opening for me. I always had a repugnance to taking life. I could not see a chicken killed without a sense of pain and to see a gasping fish just taken from the water gave me a shock. In my life I have gone out shooting and the more birds I killed, the greater the burden of sorrow I carried home, thinking of the number of lives I had destroyed when God had created them as well as me and that they had as much right as I to live. I never could realize any pleasure in what is called sport when life is involved. For a number of men, not to mention women, to chase a fox until he is worried to death and then let him be torn to pieces by hounds was always a cruel, fiendish business to me. Suppose some bigger brutes than these ladies and gentlemen, as they style themselves, should run them down with horses and hounds as in former times slaves were hunted, and tear them to pieces, what would they think of the sport? Anent this subject one of the best English novelists makes one of his characters say: “The most blood-thirsty nation on the earth, you shed blood for mere amusement; we only shed it for some deep purpose, such as revenge, ambition and the like. You English are not happy unless you are killing something, if it is only a pigeon out of a trap; there is too much of the Saxon and the Dane about you. Again your chief outdoor amusement consists of galloping on horseback with a number of dogs, over hedges and ditches after a poor animal called a fox, and when you see the wretched, fagged-out creature torn to pieces by your dogs, you ride home satisfied to your dinner.” It is bad enough to kill birds and beasts for our food, but to kill men, who, we are taught, have immortal souls, was and always has been, horrible to me. Adam Smith, in his “Wealth of Nations,” says, “The trade of a butcher is a brutal one and an odious business.” If that can be said of a business which supplies necessary food for the people, what can be said of a trade for the destruction of human beings, to gratify the vanity or rapacity of a tyrant or people? To kill his fellowmen is the soldier’s business, for that he is trained, for that the church prays for him. The more men killed the greater the glory and the number of medals. Beautiful trophies for the judgment day—the souls of murdered men! The uncivilized, unchristian tribes show their valor by the number of human scalps hanging to their belts, and a “heap big Injun” is the one who has the greatest number of these tokens of death. Christian “big Injuns” use honors and medals instead of scalps.