The Dominion. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1911. COMPULSORY TRAINING.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1045, 7 February 1911, Page 4

The Dominion. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1911. COMPULSORY TRAINING.

fa—— We do ont suppose that many New Zealandcrs will lie at all discomposed by tho current agitation in Great Britain against compulsory military training. It is true that General Sir lan Hamilton and Mr. Haldane have written a book against the principle of compulsion, and that the "International Arbitration League has issued a great manifesto declaring that the compulsory training movement "is supported by the wealthy and is an "organised conspiracy against the workers' liberties." Lord Eoderts, however, says—and with some truth, even if i his statement is far too extreme— that General Hamilton's book is mischievous, unfair, and wrong in c\cry point"; as to the League's horriblo revelation, Now Zealandcrs will laugh at it. At tho root of tho caso against compulsory training in Britain is tho theory that the British Navy is the true "homo defeneo" of 'Britain, and a defeneo so good that a great invasion need not be considered possible. "Our first and fundamental duty," Mr. Haldane wrote in his preface to General Hamilton's book, "in tho organisation of our defences is to keep the Navy at such a strength as .will maintain tho strategical position," and this, ho says, can bo done "if wo clo not in our policy stray away lrom first principles, and divert our sources into a wrong direction." An enlarged draft upon the ablebodied youth of the nation, so this argument may bo expanded, would Kstrict tho field for Navy recruiting; the cost of it all would cut into the finances of tho Navy; and finally, as Mr. Archibald Hurd puts it in an enthusiastic review of General ilamilton's book in the January nineteenth Century, "once the British people decide on the creation of a national army on a vast scale, thou- thoughts will be turned from the sea, and that national army will ■absorb, moro. and more of tho national energy and the national funds."

The War Office, however—General Hamilton's book 13 described by Mr. i Rammnf, as "a memorandum written for mo ' —tried to prove more than | that compulsory training is nnneeesI sary. It sought to show that its elfects would bo bad in almost every way. ThuHnain argument used by j General Hamilton is that if put [ into practice the proposals of the National Sorvicc League would destroy tho Regular,. Army by cutting ,down the supply, of recruits. He holds, in offect, that tho training which the youths would bo forced to undergo would give them a distaste for army life, and ho cites tho case of Go rmany, which finds, he is informed, great difficulty in securing recruits for oversea service. He also quotes the experience of the War Office when, some years ago, it enlisted men for three years' colour service, in the hope that the men would rc-cngage for further service in India. This hope was disappointed. But, as the Spectator pointed out, in reviewing the book, "if -by three years' sorvicc a man docs become 'fed up' with soldiering, it by 110 means follows that ho will be 'fed up' by four months' service." ■ General Hamilton also declares that a voluntarily-enlisted army possesses greater staying power than a "nation in arms," but the examples he citcs in support of this argument are not relevant to the real issue, since ho quotes the cases of conscripts sent abroad; whereas it is a leading principle of- ths National Service Lcague'3 proposals that service abroad shall not bo compulsory. As Loud Roberts, said, General Hamilton's bock is "unfair." That a taste of army life sickens men, for example, is notoriously incorrect. Men now enter tho Special Reserve to seo what the Army is like, and a very large percentage, after six months' trial, pass into tho Regular Army. After six months of • very hard training, thirty-five of the hundred youths who joined tho. Spectator Experimental Company left it to join the colours, and many of tho others joined the Territorials. The Morning Post has a lengthy catalogue of the General's suppressions and errors. Ho has not made the slightest reference to the systems of Norway or Switzerland. Ho did not allude to tho fact that both sides were driven to adopt conscription in tho American Civil War, tho system being first adopted by Lee and Jackson, whoso triumphs over the men raised under the voluntary system were the feature of tho war. He ignores tho fact that the real difficulty in inducing- Germans to remain on in the Army is that it is easy for a physically-fit German to get employment in tho civil world, which offers chances that the Army does not. Ho says "tho example of Spain in Cuba shows how futile, nay, how disastrous, must bo the attempt to conduct Imperial defence on the basis of compulsory service"; but Cuba fell because Spain's Navy fell. When he says that no conscript soldier could'do what our voluntaryenlisted Regulars did in South Africa he forgot that Spanish conscripts stuck to a war for ten- years iir Cuba, and that it was a voluntar-ily-enlisted Prussian Army that was defeated at Jena. The main point, however—a point that the opponents of the scheme seem unable to appreciate—is that compulsory training, while perfecting the home defences, and improving tho mental fibre of the nation, would bo providing at the same time that when a great national call for volunteers came it would be, not undisciplined patriotism, but patriotism backed up by marksmanship and order, that would respond to the call. If, in any extraordinary circumstances, there came a call for a million volunteers from the various parts of the Empire which would ho tho better—a million men trained to march and to handle a gun, or a million men trained only to walk about and to handle a shovel or a pen J