After the Battle of Waterloo, leaving tens of thousands of their comrades on the skull-strewn plains of the Continent, the hypnotized veterans—scarred, ragged and proud—returned home—home from hell—returned to England with glad hearts ignorantly and gullibly expecting a joyous “welcome home” by the masters who had flattered, brutalized, ruled, and used them. Welcome home! The cruel mockery of it! The hideous irony of the masters’ prompt treatment of them! Promptly these brave and ignorant men from the battlefields were openly scorned and threatened by the industrial masters of England. Never were masters more cruel toward deluded veteran patriots. Never were masters more heartless toward millions of half-starved toilers—than were the British masters toward the half-starved ragged British workers whose labor had supported the army in the field for twenty years. Promptly at the close of the Napoleonic wars a movement was made in the British Parliament to relieve the _leisure class_ of one-half the income tax, but none was made to ease the burdens of the starving working class. There was biting irony in the fact that “One of the first parliamentary struggles [following the war] was the proposal of the government to reduce the income tax from 10 to 5 per cent., and to apply this half [the unremitted half] of it, producing about $37,500,000, toward the expense of maintaining a standing army of 150,000 men.”[122] Of course _the purpose_ of this to-be-increased army was to have an _armed guard ready to crush the “hobo” heroes home from the war and unemployed, ready also to hold down the great multitude of poorly paid or unemployed toilers_—_all_ now loudly complaining against the increasing misery thrust into their lives. The landlords at once advanced the land rents and the house rents so outrageously that many thousands of feeble working class veterans were forced into trampdom, and were then brutally abused for vagrancy. The huge and hungry army of the unemployed actually found that in some ways peace was, at that time, even worse than war—for the working class. This outrageous treatment, this brutal contempt for the workers from their pretentiously patriotic rulers may seem to the reader impossible. The case, however, is so typical as to be worth space for evidence. And here is some testimony from witnesses not prejudiced, perhaps, in favor of the workers. Professor J. E. Thorold Rogers writes thus of the matter:[123]