“A RUDE SHOCK.”

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 1653, 21 December 1916, Page 4

“A RUDE SHOCK.”

WHEN SOLDIERS RETURN,

WHAT WILL THEY THINK?

“It will come with something of a shock to those of us who had imagined that, the supply of food and clothing Avas a question of some importance to a people at Avar to learn that at this A'ery moment the insatiable demands of private luxury are actually extending their encroachments on the soil of the nation,” saA’s the Nation.

“If the announcement which appeared in a Scottish neAvspapor the other day, that 10,000 sheep Avere being driven off an estate in Scotland in order to add to the deer forests, which already cover 20 per cent, of the soil of that country, had appeared in September, 1914, everybody avlio avus not absolutely incredulous would have been fiercely indignant. Not a voice would have been raised in defence oi conduct Avbich would haA'e seemed to everybody a flagrant act of treason to a nation fighting for its life. Such an action would indeed have been incredible.

“Everybody was thinking of (he needs of the nation, of its devotion to the great (muses of freedom and justice in Europe, of the stern demands that an ideal of duty imposed on every citizen, of the terrible and desolating strokes that Avar Avould inflict on every village and everA’ home.

“It is significant that The Times, commenting on a sentence in an article by Lord Northcliffe; which says truly enough that the soldiers will return in a revolutionary temper, determined to claim their share in the country for which they have suffered such unspeakable hardships, refers us to the sale and irrelevant remedies of the sale of large estates to comfortable and prosperous farmers. This soulmoving process was at work, we are reminded, before the war. II hat kind of promise it holds out to the men in the trenches we cannot imagine.

“If the mind of the ruling class cannot travel beyond this elementary conception by means of its own unaided energy, it will receive a rude and helpful shock when the Army comes home, and some hundreds of thousands of men, set once more on their native soil, are invited to applaud the spectacle 'of the Duke of Bedford selling farms of five hundred aci’os to stout tenants who refuse a living wage to their labourers as a noble set-off' to the spectacle of Scottish landlords evicting shepherds and labourers to minister to the wants of millionaires who have been defended and enriched bv the sacrifices of (he trenches.”