“... We are supposed to work eight hours a day, but we get dismissed when the officers see fit to let us go—all for fifty-two cents a day. The negroes working at Panama get more money and are better treated than the enlisted men out here. Our ‘little brown brothers’ are treated better over here. And to cap the climax, over comes a high statesman [Mr. Taft?] and makes a speech to a mob of our ‘little brown brothers’ and tells them not to judge the Americans by the enlisted men, as the enlisted men are composed of the roughest elements in the States....” President David Starr Jordan (Leland Stanford University) writes of the contemptuous treatment of the men in the ranks by the “superior” officers:[232] “One soldier [in the Philippines] says, ‘If the United States were on fire from end to end, I would never raise my hand to put it out.’ Another would ‘toss in a blanket the officials at Washington, as we toss a cheating corporal.’ Another says in print, referring to the abuse of the soldiers by their superiors in pay: ‘Yes, I knew that war would be hell before I got into it. But I did not know that war would be hell deliberately and fanatically inflicted. I expected to sleep in mud puddles with my head on a stone for a pillow, and go hungry for days on forced marches and away from a base of supplies. But I never dreamed that I would have to sleep in a leaky and exposed shed when there was plenty of good shelter elsewhere, and when thirty officers had fine apartments in which there was room for five hundred men; neither did I expect to be fed on coffee-grounds and foul canned meat for weeks when we were right next to a base of supplies, and when our officers lived on the choice of the commissary’s department.’” But the question naturally occurs to one: Why shouldn’t the working class soldiers be treated thus? Surely it is to be expected that the great majority class will _get what they permit_ from their “superiors.” Note how the soldier boys are snubbed and bull-dozed in the German army. Says Dr. Walsh:[233] “In a trial reported Dec. 17, 1903, a lieutenant of the infantry has been convicted of 618 cases of maltreatment and 57 cases of improper treatment of soldiers under him, and a sergeant in another regiment has been convicted of 1,520 cases of maltreatment and 100 cases of improper treatment.... The men deposed were so afraid, that nobody ventured to complain.” There is a yearly average of 7,000 desertions from the English regular army. Quite naturally. Frozen, starved and despised, the thirty-cent patriots make a break for bread and freedom from the “noble” snobbery of the aristocratic pets in control. The record of desertions from the American Army is, for the years 1907, 1908, and 1909, respectively, 4,534, 4,525, 5,023. (=30=) How is it possible to interest young men in the brutal business of war?