which he confidently expects
to occur in the course of a fortnight or so."

"That is to say," Mr. Shaw continues, "in so far as he is an
ordinary gentleman he behaves sensibly and courageously; and in so
far as he is a military man he gives way without shame to the
grossest folly, cruelty, and poltroonery. If any other profession
in the world had been stained by those vices and by false witness,
forgery, swindling, torture, compulsion of men's families to attend
their executions, digging up and mutilation of dead enemies, all of
which is only added to the devastation proper to its own business,
as the military profession has been within recent memory in
England, France, and the United States of America (to mention no
other countries), it would be very difficult to induce men of
capacity and character to enter it. And in England, it is, in fact,
largely dependent for its recruits on the refuse of industrial
life, and for its officers on the aristocratic and plutocratic
refuse of political and diplomatic life, who join the army and pay
for their positions in the more or less fashionable clubs which the
regimental messes provide them with--clubs, which, by the way,
occasionally figure in ragging scandals as circles of extremely
coarse moral character."[283]

It is not surprising that those who view armies in this light preach
desertion and insubordination. A recent cable dispatch sums up some of
the results of the activity in this direction of the French Federation
of Labor with its million members, and of the Socialist Party with its
still larger following:--

"Last year there were 13,500 desertions and 53,000 who refused to
answer their call to military service. Loss to France in 1910, two
army corps. These figures are given by _La France Militaire_, a
soldiers' newspaper. In a fund called '_le sou du soldat et des
insoumis_,' the idea was to develop antimilitarism and
antipatriotism. Five per cent, on the subscriptions of the
workmen, belonging to the labor unions, was ordered to be set apart
for this fund. The conscripts before departing were requested to
leave the name of their regiment and their number so that sums of
money might be sent to them for antimilitary propaganda in the
barracks. For eight years that sort of thing has been going on, but
things ne