The majority of our men were clean-living and clean--hearted fellows
who struggled to come unscathed in soul from most of the horrors of
war. They resisted the education of brutality and were not envenomed
by the gospel of hate. Out of the dark depths of their experience they
looked up to the light, and had visions of some better law of life
than that which led to the world-tragedy. It would be a foul libel on
many of them to besmirch their honor by a general accusation of
lowered morality and brutal tendencies. Something in the spirit of our
race and in the quality of our home life kept great numbers of them
sound, chivalrous, generous-hearted, in spite of the frightful
influences of degradation bearing down upon them out of the conditions
of modern warfare. But the weak men, the vicious, the murderous, the
primitive, were overwhelmed by these influences, and all that was base
in them was intensified, and their passions were unleashed, with what
result we have seen, and shall see, to our sorrow and the nation's
peril.
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