NOTES OF THE DAY

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2438, 17 April 1915, Page 6

NOTES OF THE DAY

The painfully impressive spectacle witnessed by tie troops in camp at Trentham on Thursday is a reminder that war is a grim and earnest business. Four men of the Third lleinforccments who had failed to rejoin their ship at- a port of call on the voyage, after conviction by courtmartial, were publicly degraded and sentenced to six months' imprisonment. We have previously had to express our disagreement with the findings of a New Zealand courtmartial, but tho sentence in the present case will commend itself to all reasonable people as eminently jußt. The obligations undertaken by tho man who enlists are serious, and must be strictly regarded unless a useless rabble is to be sent to the front. The public can have little sympathy for the. man who voluntarily offers his services, and then when he has been trained and equipped is so careless of his own and his country's honour as to wantonly desert.

The vexed question of the Gorge Road is once again before the local bodies of tho Manawatu. The Public Works Department is about to expend a sum of £600 in taking off some of the worst corners on the road, and the Palmerston Chamber of Commerce has put forward a suggestion that this amount should be subsidised by the local authorities of the district. The proposal has found little favour. The general feeling, as might be expected, is that the work of improving and maintaining.this important arterial highway should be.taken over by the State .Mr, Massey told a Kaikoura deputation last week that he thought they had made out a good case lor maintenance by the State of the main road to Kaikoura. Every argument that applies to Kaikoura applies with redoubled force to the Manawatu Gorge Road, But in- . deed motor traffic has so revolutionised conditions throughout the country that it is becoming impossible to resist the demand for State control of the main highways. The present local government system was designed for conditions of rural traffic that have ceased to exist.

An occasional fine in the Magistrate's Court is of small import to any dairyman whose elastic conscience permits him to make an illicit profit of £2 a day by the sale of water as milk. But when the City Council puts its foot down, as it did on Thursday night, matters wear a vastly different aspect, both from the point of view of the dairyj man and the public. If the milkman who robs his customers is liable to lose his business he will think long and deeply beforo ho carries the milk-pail to the water-tap. Tho reports of the Dominion Analyst show that this systematic plundering of the public has gone on in a barefaced manner for years past. The crime, as Councillors declared, is an atrocious one. Events have shown plainly enough that the Courts need power to treat the offenders very differently from in the pa6t. In the meantime the Council has made the welcome discovery that if it cannot protect the public by sending the' dishonest milk-vendor to gaol it can at least prevent him from continuing in the business. Drastic action in such cases would be of benefit alike to the consumer and the honest milk-vendor.

An extraordinary sidelight, on modorn warfare is the daily routine of Generals Joffre and French. Imagine the Generalissimo of allied armies, fighting the greatest war in history, spending his afternoons .in walks or drives in the woods adjacent to his quarters, far from the sound of the cannon; a man who rises early in _ tho morning, passes through a daily routine which reminds one of the life of an English country squire, and goes to bed at nine o'clock I But if Joffre spent his days careering up and down the firing line, he would be like the commercial failure who misses the broad principles of his business because he keeps his nose too close to the table.