By no
means. Numbers of them were to be found in that great host of
"loyals" who put their dividends into government bonds and gave
their services unpaid as auxiliaries of the Commissary Department
or the Hospital Service of the Army. What is meant is that the
abnormal conditions of industry, uncorrected by the Government,
afforded a glaring opportunity for unscrupulous men of business
who, whatever their professions, cared a hundred times more for
themselves than for their country. To these was due the pitiless
hampering of the army in the interest of the wool-trade. For
example, many uniforms paid for at outrageous prices, turned out
to be made of a miserable cheap fabric, called "shoddy," which
resisted weather scarcely better than paper. This fraud gave the
word "shoddy" its present significance in our American speech and
produced the phrase--applied to manufacturers newly become
rich--"shoddy aristocracy." An even more shameful result of the
selfishness of the manufacturers and of the weakness of the
Government was the use of cloth for uniforms not of the
regulation colors, with the result that soldiers sometimes fired
upon their comrades by mistake.
The prosperity of the capitalists who financed the woolen
business did not extend to the labor employed in it.
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