Recently Congressmen and Senators advanced their own salaries from $5,000 up to $7,500 per year. This is one sign of self-respect. This advance of $2,500 per year will of course be sufficient to provide a fair quality of syrup and skimmed milk for the statesmen’s dessert. Does it seem probable that cheap molasses added to the dessert of the soldier’s ration and a few ten-cent prints hung on the walls of the soldiers’ living rooms will attract Taft’s sons or Roosevelt’s sons or the sons of Senators and Congressmen and the sons of the “better class leading citizens” to the dreary, barren barracks provided for men who stand ready to slaughter for less than 50 cents a day and cheap “keep”? Says Major-General J. F. Bell, Chief of Staff:[221] “That men enlist believing they will love the life is likely, but their mental picture is oftentimes so different from the reality that disappointment is the almost inevitable consequence.” Fifty-eight per cent. of all the desertions from the military service in the year 1906 were desertions of men in their first year of service, and considerably more than half of these desertions were during the first six months of service.[222] _Twenty-six times as many_ enlisted men in our army committed suicide in 1908 as in 1907, and _thirty-nine times_ as many of the “tempted” and trapped young men in our army committed suicide in 1909 as in 1907. No suicides are reported for the years 1901 to 1906 inclusive. The record for the three years 1907, ’08, ’09 is 1, 26, 39, respectively.[223] It would seem likely that a young fellow whose loathing for the army life had become unendurable would desert rather than commit suicide to escape the hideous business. But no doubt the following line from the Report of the Secretary of War, Mr. Wright, in 1908, will help explain somewhat the increase of suicide in the army. Mr. Wright says (page 19): “An elaborate system ... now almost perfected is 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.”[224] An illustrative feature of this “highly perfected system” is to furnish the run-away soldiers’ pictures to the police of a city to which the lads can be traced, and offer the police $50 a head cash for the arrest of the soldiers. The $50 results in a human “bloodhound” search. This “highly perfected system” makes a young man’s enlistment a good deal like swallowing a barbed fish-hook. A great number of the boys go insane. In 1908 _insanity ranked third_ in the long list of causes of discharge from the army for disability.[225] Army service, even in time of peace, is not exactly a picnic dream. On this point General Frederick Funston offers some helpful information, thus:[226]