Jailing the Boys.

Maoriland Worker, Volume 2, Issue 19, 14 July 1911, Page 8

Jailing the Boys.

Will the People Stand It?

The hoys aro being jailed ! If thero is a spark of manhood left in the country, if our womanhood is not completely cowed, if as a people we aro not wickedly callous in o-ai apathetic contentment, then tho fact that lads are being sent to prison for conscience sake will surely shake righteousness into action. Nothing in history is more certain than where men and women excuse and allow official persecution of Principles held to be dearer than life by liberty-loving minorities those men and women in their turn come to be also persecuted. • » And this also ia certain—that a peo-

pie which remains unmoved in the face jof a gravo wounding of a section of a people sooner or later realises the folly of its sin as it in turn shares the fate of its section and suffers and is wounded by the forces it earlier encouraged or whoso acts it acquiesced .in. No people can ~ afford to condone governmental tyranny and outrage without itself strengthening tyranny and outrage for its own back—nor without, indeed; generating a coercive and corrupt influence operating for the destruction of social harmony and

the -decay of the nation. And if men and women believe in compulsory military training to the point of enforcing their belief with tho policeman's baton, rest assured they thus enthrone the Baton thereby to feel some day its brutal power excited against their own disbelief in another direction. We submit that however keen this country be for compulsory military training, if its compulsory military training requires to be buttressed by

judge and jail at the instigation and by th-o intimidation of tho police department then the country is establishing a comiudsory military training carrying within it the elements of its own rottenness and disintegration. Wo oppose compulsory military training—but there is now at stake greater things than compulsory military training, and they are youth, freedom of conscience and nationhood. If we. belieA'od in compulsory military training we should fool the sacrifice of youth, conscience and nationhood too heavy a price- to pay for tliat training. And we the further submit to tho supportei-s of compulsory training that they cannot allow lads in the flower of adolescence- to be

tainted by the foulness of prison in the interests of such training. If wo are to have conscription— and it is that, call it by names ever so superfine —let us in Heaven's name impose a conscription which does not violate and endanger our toiled-for twentieth-century Constitution (heritage of divine struggle!) nor our

democrat so ' traditions and i>rotesta-tions-—nor soil our freedom-prizing youth with the slime and shame of the criminal's doom. 13,000 boys and youths a,re to be summoned to appear before magistrates and by them fined or jailed because 13,000 boys and youths will not sign away their nascent manhood by registering for training in arms and the bloody war t*> follow. These boys and youths, minors as they are, are to ho additionally punished by a denial of the franchise for the rest of life and by a perpetual refusal of employment in the ever-widening sphere of Public Ownership. What shall be said of a compulsory training which so despises tho democratic spirit and humaneness of New Zealand as to re-sort to this sliameful and brutalising bludgeoning ?

It is an axiom in law that the punishment should fit tho. crime; yet tho "crime" of non-registration by lads in their teens (who in most matters are held to be irresponsible agents) is to be punished with the degradation of the darkened cell, and all its evil associations, likely to scar the soul, injure the mind and damage the physique until the grave ends- a blighted career—and one blighted by the nation. And by what astounding irony—for snrely.it is such? —we revere the rights of citizenship by robbing in advance those, held to be born to them, yet also considered unready for them until they reach 21 years of age, passes comprehension. .Consider: we say the boys are not fit to vote and at the

same time declare them frt to understand what the loss of the vote means. At .14 "unfit" to vote but "fit" to be deprived of it 1 They are to come into an inheritance at 21 because earlier they could not properly ' appreciate and guard it— but at 14 are also expected to realise the greatness, of the loss- of the inheritance. What superb contradiction,. O sapient law-makers 1 Furthermore, the "crime"' of Ii is to be visited , vuxui . the "criminal" When ho has reached 21 up to 71 or longer—and never is he to be classed as Citizen, or if the Government can provent it, be allowed to work. If the business was ■ not s.i it would be laughable. A c::nsci ipi:-:>n sneh a« ouv;-. may only be

tolerated by an unintelligent and supine people absolutely whipped into craven and ignorant humility and servility. Meanwhile, "the boys are being jailedT O nation cursed. Jail, jail, jail —-this our enlightened remedy for the sin of being 14 with a reluctance to shooting down a fellowman. "Peace hath its victories" it is hypocritically said, but War hath ever its Way, and may at will either dragoon or besmirch boyhcod where once it satisfied itself with grown men. Jail, with its miasmic filth, for the "free-born" lads of New Zealand, and with the concurrence and by the consent of New Zealand's parentage! What sort of magistrates'can they bo who are willing to execute a Law which grabs the young and innocent and brands them felons P What sort of T>oliticians can they be whose wis-

dow shows in accepting a measure which hunts the young and innocent and tortures and trains them per jail? Ever read "A Ballad of Reading Gaol," Messrs. Members P. Aye, and what sort of a people which stands idly by and sees its youth and innocence maimed and seared because of its very courage? . , But a few short years ago had New Zealand been told that it would suffer gladly this monstrous infamy it would have laughed the idea to scorn. New Zealand has been drugged into the acceptance of conscription. Fairseeming lies and wanton credulity, these together have laid New Zealand low under the iron heel of militarism. Already, on all sides is evidence of.the exaltation of .military caste: the civilians who pay are lorded over by parasitic Uniform.

We wish our English-speaking theor-... ists of a citizen army could see the thing in practice. Mrs Dora. B. Montefiore ef the "citizen army" Social Democratic Party has come, ;to these lands to grip realities and consequently to eloquently jilead with an. Australian democracy to crush the viper named Compulsory Military Training. Someday there will be a terrible reckoning for the Labor Party —the Labor, Party I—which fastened . compulsory -training upon .Australia. The saddening feature of it is that Australia and NeAv Zealand's adoption of conscription is being paraded and boomed in Great Britain so that Lords Roberts and Kitchener (who said in. Wostralia that ho should like "another scrap") may get their way with _British boyhood and keep the mad game of war everlastingly going. As for .the working-class, for what does it require an army:' For its country, right or wrong. Bah!—

what pitiable ethic; meaning Ward the Baronet right or wrong, and in the final analysis Capitalism right or wrong. The world is the worker's country—to end war his need and his mission. They have in France even a -more "democratic" system of defence than in Australasia—but it hasn't, so far, justified the Utopian ideas of those Australasian advocates of compulsory military service who say that, ■when all tho workers have guns, they'll fight ior their own class, and not for the ruling class* French Premier Briand's calling out of all the railway strikers in the army reserve to military duty killed that icele-brated strike. The strikers dare not mutiny. Li the following pregnant editorial comment by Stead in the January "Review of Reviews," there appear to us to obtrude several vital lessons: — "MILITARISM AS A MEANS OF PEACE.—Hero we have the extraordinary spectacle of the so-called pacific Labor Party recalled to the paths of conciliation and peace by the use of the power conferred upon the executive by the system of compulsory military "service. Nothing is more curious than the way in which the manhood of Europe contrives to live under two diametrically opposite regimes. Everything depends upon what coat and trousers a man w«#.rs. If he dresses as ho pleases, ho acts as lie pleases, ho votes as he pleases, he strikes as he pleases, no Government daring to make him obey its command. But the .Government has the power to compel him to wear its uniform, and then the moment he changes his clothes he ceases to be a free citizen. - He can do nothing that he pleases. " He sinks at once into the position of a mere cog in the military machine. If he disobeys- he is promptly shot. In the recent French strike the revolt against established law and order was quelled by compelling a large number of men who were free to strike when they wore their working clothes to wear military uniform, •when they were bound to obey order** .on penalty of death. The rights of man disappear when he dons the uni form of a soldier. The odd thing is that peace was secured in the French strike by superseding the liberty of the laborer as citizen by the compulsory obedience exacted by military law." Thus we see how one who may remain a Man in his working-clothes must be a Scab in his soldier-clothes. But as we have said, the boys are getting driven to jail by a country which ho» no bettor use for its sons than pressing upon them the dread alternative of Conscripts or Jailbirds. Let us rise !

War is in itself a deplorable contrivance for settling international differences.—Mazzmi.