Ernest Crosby, Garrison the non-resistant

[92] than the cost of any European standing army, is, I believe, actually increasing, and which seems to have transformed the brave hosts of the North into an army of mendicants! And into that mendicancy who shall say how much fraud has entered? Indeed, the moral effects of the war were its worst effects. Is there a tavern at any cross-roads, North or South, without its venerable toper whose habits were corrupted by the war? And where one has survived, how many have died of intemperance of all kinds, and of loathsome diseases which the war generated, fostered and spread down to this very day? All the flags with which we decorate their graves on Memorial Day cannot conceal the truth. I have seen it stated that discharged soldiers founded our army of tramps, a name which has come into use in my time. Do not think that these are the imaginations of a fanatic who sees in history only that which he looks for. In the Century Magazine for November, 1903, is an article on “The present Epidemic of crime,” by the Rev. Dr. James M. Buckley, one of the best-known clergymen in the country. At the very head of the causes of this “epidemic” he places the great war. “Among the influences which have powerfully affected the primary causes of crime, and are sources of this present epidemic, is the effect of the Civil War . . ”