The Manawatu Herald. Tuesday, March 16, 1915. NOTES AND COMMENTS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXVII, Issue 1374, 16 March 1915, Page 2

The Manawatu Herald. Tuesday, March 16, 1915. NOTES AND COMMENTS.

Vkrv few people realise, except in a vague way, the part New Zealand is taking in tbe great war. According to the Prime Minister, New Zealand’s war expenditure is ,£IO,OOO per day, or ,£300,000 per month. Speaking at Waiuku a few days ago, the Prime Minister said his feeling was that in the present crisis every man in New Zealand of the proper age, who was physically fit, was at the disposal of the Imperial authorities ; every sovereign we possess and every sovereign’s worth of property was available lor the use of the Empire. He scarcely thought that people realised all that was being done in the Dominion. He was not supposed to mention the actual number of New Zealanders who had gone to the front, but he would say that they had over 4,000 men in camp now, ready to go when the command came along, and thousands more ready to take their turn when the opportunity offers, lie took pride in the fact that in proportion to our population we had sent more men to tbe front than any other Dominion.

“The German advance on Paris was an astonishing feat,” writes Mr Austin Harrison in the English Review. “That the German war machine is terribly efficient we can admit all the more confidently that we realise not only how imperative for civilisation it is to crush it, but how absolutely sure we are of being able to bring about this consummation. This result can only be effected by prodigious sacrifice and endeavour. The war that has broken out is in its primitive instincts a racial movement, as in all its moral and philosophic motives it is a nation’s struggle for supremacy, for historic life and being. It is thus a civil war, in the sense of a civilisation which, as the result of decades of careful preparation, has deliberately set out to beat down and impose itself upon another civilisation according to the laws which govern the fittest. Such a contest must be iought out with the desperation and ferocity peculiar to all civil war. If there is any Englishman to-day who expects that ou the termination of the war Briton and German will shake hands and forget, he must be indeed a pretty simpleton. The Germans will not forget, We, on our side, must remember that to render powerless a nation of sixty eight millions, not to speak of the Austrians, is a task never before attempted in war. That is the situation. To refuse to face it is folly. From now onwards the Germans aud the British face one another as implacable foes fighting for their respective existences. In the struggle either we go down or the Germans. There will be no golden mean. We are the enemy the Germans seek to destroy. Either they succeed or we as ruthlessly destroy them. We are fighting the largest aud most redoubtable foe in all history, aud every Englishman ought to know it. We are fighting the applied military brains of five decades. Ail the more honour to us when we beat them.”