BENEFITS OF UNIVERSAL TRAINING.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXXIV, Issue 9464, 5 June 1909, Page 6

BENEFITS OF UNIVERSAL TRAINING.

Morally ; Univeisal defensive training will instil habits of self-reliance and of natural understanding. It will teach lads and ''young men that • there is something better than idling or t sporting; that the strong should protect the weak; that to obey lawful commands is as honorable as to give lawful commands; and that strength should be held as a sacred trust for [the protection of human rights and happiness. Physically: Universal defensive training will develop the stamina of our people as nothing else can. For all lads will train and none will look on. It will harden the muscles, straighten the body, brighten the eyes, and blear the brain. It will take the stoop out .of stooping shonlders [apd add inches to chest measurements. It will make our lads into young men who can walk all day witbont'tiring, and who 'can handle a ride at the butts with keen eyes and steady hands. It will not only make them fit to defend their country and its homes, but fit to have wives and children of their own.

Industrially: Universal defensive training will ‘make better employers and better workmen, better clerks, better mechanics, better farmers, and better professional men. For it will restore the physical energy and vim which so many -lose in merely sordid pursuits, and will help to make everybody understand that everything we do shonld be done with a sense of duty, and not for the nnrely selfish reason of profit to ourselves alone.

Socially: Universal defence training will farther that good feeling which is the sonide of all social good. Every class will stand shoulder to shoulder in the ranks, thus realising the meaning of comradeship. Daring training the citizensoldiery will be in the common uniform and be released from the superficial distinctions of ordinary life ; which under diaopline, is asserted by the Swiss pastors and priests, Protestant and Oatbolio, to he wholly beneficial. Colonel Fermand, the Y.M.O.A. world’s secretary, declares the moral and social results of universal training, as he knows it in Switzerland, to be wholly good. Nationally: Universal defensive training is the first thing necessary to our national salvation. It will make our unorganised, undisciplined, unarmed, defenceless people into an organised, disciplined, armed, and defensive nation. It will secure our land and our laws from foreign domination, our homes from violation, our prosperity from destruction, our progress from interference. It will save us from assaults that sooner or later are bound to be made upon all defenceless states. It will ensure to us the liberties that we enjoy, the privileges that belong only to the independent, and the rights that are always torn away from those who cannot keep them. Imperially: Universal defensive training will help to remove from us the stigma that we only hide behind the skirts of the Mother Country and do practically nothing towards upholding the Empire, within whose frontiers we find peace. At least* we ought to so train and arm our ' youth that in the need we shall not become panic-stricken if the navy is sent to some strategic point far away.