The Manawatu Herald. Thursday, May 20, 1909. COMPULSORY TRAINING AND NOISE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXI, Issue 458, 20 May 1909, Page 2

The Manawatu Herald. Thursday, May 20, 1909. COMPULSORY TRAINING AND NOISE.

Happily for the good name of New Zealand, the noisy gangs of hooligans and Socialists (so-called) who have been bringing the right of public meeting into contempt in Christchurch and Wellington are as small numerically as they are great vociferously, says the Dunedin Star. What possible good or service these people imagine can be done on behalf of the cause they dishonour by their conduct passes comprehension. The liberties and freedom, civil and religious, that Britons enjoy were not gained by vulgar protests of this stamp, nor will any worthy cause ever be achieved or maintained by them. Compulsory military training is regarded by what are erroneously termed Socialists as something foreign to the ideals of a free-born Englishman—“the boys of the bull-dog breed,” as the Wellington “red-raggers” vauntingly proclaimed themselves to be. But, like every other ques ion, it has two sides. Some of us are apt sneeringly to refer to German or French or Russian conscripts, and unfavourably to contrast them with British volunteers. It is assumed that the willihg recruit must be the superior man.. But is he? The foreigner dubs him a hired soldesr, and claims that a compulsory service, under which peer and peasant, rich and poor, must alike do duty for their common country, is the highest, the worthiest, and the only possible one. We mention this simple truth not as an argument for or against the desirability of compulsory military service in this Dominion, but by way of emphasising our contention that the “men of the bull-dog breed,” who believe they are showing their virtue and superiority to everybody else by protesting

against any form of compulsion, are lamentably mistaken.