THE BETTER WAY.

Dominion, Volume 9, Issue 2778, 24 May 1916, Page 4

THE BETTER WAY.

This country, relying as it does upon voluntary enlistment for the recruitment of its oversea forccs, is already beginning to suffer internally from the defects of that system, and cases in point are multiplying. On Saturday, during the course of an interview between the representatives of the Secondary Schools Conference and the Minister of Education, two of the speakers (responsible headmasters) drew (the Minister's attention to the fact that the willing response of teachers to the call for military service was seriously affecting the business of educating the younger generation, and insisted, that the interests of the country demanded that the steady depletion of the school staffs should be arrested. Now, what is threatening the business of education is also threatening other branches of our economic life from which the drain of men has been disproportionately large. The people of this country 'are, justifi-; ably, very proud o£ the magnificent response which their young men have voluntarily made to the call of the Empire, but the time has arrived for a change of system, in our own interests, and incidentally, of course, the interests of the Empire. Wo will not bo in a position to help the Empire much if we suffer our economic organisation to be thrown out of gear, and this clanger threatens us unless we adopt without delay a' systein of general compulsion which will give the Government the right of free and proportionate. selection from the country's professional and industrial man-power. A good many people base their support of general compulsion for military service upon the ground that it is the only practical meanß of rounding up the shirker. Some of these people, in fact, believe that that is what compulsion is really for. Compulsory national-service certainly does accomplish this very desirable object, but that is merely an incident in its operation. This erroneous conception of the function of compulsion is also, unfortunately, responsible for a very large part of the opposition to it, the opponents of the system describing it, in effect, as a wholesale reversion to the pressgang. The major function of compulsory enlistment is to recruit a sufficient number of men for service in war time, with a minimum disturbance of the general economic balance of the country, because it accomplishes this, it is a better business proposition for the country than the. voluntary system of recruiting, which raises men without regard to occupation, and ultimately tends to throw, this, that, or the other department of national economy out of goar.