So many young men in America understand the working class soldier’s disloyalty to his own class that the Department of Murder now has much difficulty in keeping the ranks full. The Government now has to tease and coax young men to join the army and the navy. In the autumn of 1907, the capitalist press began to discuss boldly the necessity of _conscription_ for filling the ranks of our standing army, the European plan of forcing young men to assume the rôle of armed flunkies. But just as the capitalist papers began to discuss and commend compulsory military service, the panic, the hard times, broke upon the country; hundreds of thousands were suddenly thrown out of employment. Instantly the Government and the capitalist papers ceased discussion of conscription, knowing well that thousands of jobless men could easily be recruited to save themselves from rags and hunger. At the same time Congress _advanced the pay of regular soldiers_—while millions of toilers were out of work, millions were reduced to “part time,” millions had their wages cut: the destroyers’ wages were advanced, but the producers’ wages were cut down. These facts made millions think. Thinking whets the edge of the working class mind. This sharpened mind cuts through the noisy mockery and the glittering sham of capitalist patriotism. The workers wake. They see the trick. Volunteers? “The British volunteer army is in reality recruited to the extent of 80 per cent. by the peril of starvation. The yearly average of desertions from the British Regular Army is 7,000.”[177] The writer of the present volume has heard of young men volunteering for the American Regular Army who enlisted in the fall and deserted in the spring, some of them doing this even three times.[178] The capitalists would not hire them and they were too proud to beg. They “wintered” in the army. But they despised the whole thing. They see the trap. A WORKINGMAN’S MEDITATIONS: “WE APPRECIATE IT.”