THE JUNIOR CADETS.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1493, 16 July 1912, Page 4

THE JUNIOR CADETS.

■ Major-General Godley, Commandant of the New Zealand Military Forces, is to be complimented upon his frank denunciation of our .quasi-military junior cadet «ystom when giving evidence, before the .Education. Commission yesterday. Many people will; wonder "why such criticism of an .anomalous organisation which for years'has been the laughing-stock of military officers has, been so long deferred. MajorGeneral Godley arrived here in December of 1910, and his/first'glancc at the farcical regulations which conferred upon Major T; W. M'Donald—the then "Commandant" of the Junior Cadets—the authority of a general officer commanding so far as the Junior Cadets were concerned, must surely have convinced him of their absurdity. We are quite ready to believe that the' protest which' was obviously diie from him then against-this "separate, bogus and anomalous military orgauisa tion," as he called it yesterday, was not deferred; that it was promptly made, and as promptly cist into a pigeon-hole. There is also ground, tor the suspicion that . Major M'Donald's extraordinary influence with Sin Joseph Ward 'was sufficient to overshadow the opinion of n newly-arrived "imported officer." However that may. be, we are indebted to General Godley fur his endorsement of our oft-repeated (ioulention that the. Junior Cadet Department should be very radically remodelled, and the. grotesque parody of military rank conferred bv its regulations upon the officers, of juniqr cadet comoanies awl bat-

talions abolished. The case for reorganisation was very lucidly pre sen led to the public by our' contributor "Senior Sub/' in .two articles which appeared in The Dominion in January last. The arguments then .submitted were so oh viously consistent with tile dictates oi'_ common sense that there is nothing strange in the apparent reiteration of these points by the General at the Education Commission .yesterday. As a soldier and the administrative head of the Defence Department, lie could hardly have said anything else. We are in agreement with Geneiul Godley with regard to his suggestion that the framing of the Junior Cadet—as well as the Senior Cadet—might with advantage partake of certain 1 feature:; of the Boy Scout syllabus. As far back as 1909, we published the general outline of a scheme of organisation which, while establishing'in the interests of discipline a chain of command as far as the officer commanding the patrol of "Scout Cadets'"' as they were termed, abolished battalions, decentralised the governing authority—vesting the administrative authority in the icspective schools—and "scrapped" the wooden "dummy" rifle and other "military impedimenta," Also, a suggestive syllabus of training on the lines indicated in BadenPowell's Seoul intj for Hw/s, war. presented. It is something' of this kind, no doubt, that General Godley has at the back of his -mind. The Hon. James Allen is the last man in New Zealand who is likely to be led by the nose by men of the type of Majok M'Donald, and the country has now a reasonable expectation of witnessing the demolition of'a Department whose, continued existence was an offence to the common sense of the public.