unassimilated and treacherous foreigners. There was some spy work in that time on both sides, as in any war; but for the most part, clean, straightaway fighting was the main concern of both sides; and that war was so fought that such a thing as honor did exist and could survive for both combatants.
The Civil War had as one of its worst results the fact that the rich new West and Northwest, then opening up with the early railroads, came to be largely settled soon after the war by a heavy foreign population, instead of by young Americans who must otherwise have marched out at the head of the rails, and not at the head of armies from which so many of them never returned. Had there been no Civil War, there would have been less of loose immigration. Without that war, there would be no Non-Partisan League in the Northwest, no German Alliance in the Middle West, no Bolshevism in the cities of the East. Nevertheless, even in that day of honorable warfare, when men met foemen worthy of their steel and not cowardly assassins, there existed men who had the craven heart. There were deserters then as there always are in war,—and sometimes they were sought out by men who molded bullets of a Sunday morning, and who, having started out after their men, did not come back until they had found them.
To-day also we have deserters and slackers—let us say, perhaps, with better color of excuse than in the old days, because in some of the more remote districts of the United States, far from the confusion of the crowded city life, in sections where the world runs smoothly and quietly and men are content, there existed no definite and concrete local reasons for a man to go to war with a foe across the sea of whom he knew little or nothing. Secure in the only American part of America, sometimes the Southern mountaineers, for instance, resented the draft because they did not understand it. The bravest of the brave, ready to fight at the drop of the hat, and natural soldiers, there were among them many whose fathers joined the Federal Army in the Civil War. They volunteered for that—but they would not be drafted for this foreign war. They made a brand of conscientious objectors—rather, say,
