KIPLING'S ADVICE.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXVII, Issue 63, 14 November 1913, Page 4

KIPLING'S ADVICE.

Mr Rudyard Kipling, presiding at a national service meeting in Sussex. ; said:—“lt is almost as impossible to make people who have never known invasion realise what invasion is as ! it is to make a man realise the fact | of his own death. The nearest that! a people who have never known con- < quest or invasion can come to the idea of conquest and invasion is a hazy notion of going about their usual work and paying their taxes to tax collectors who will perhaps talk with a slightly foreign ascent. Even attempted invasion does not mean that, lit means riot and arson and disorder and bloodshed and starvation on a scale that a man can scarcely imagine to himself; it means disorganisation of every relation of life and every walk of business, from the highest to the lowest, and the more elaborate the civilisation the more awful will he the disorganisation—in other words, what the Balkan States can stand for twelve months and still breathe would knock ns out of time in six weeks. The responsibility is ours, and the punishment, if we persist in our folly, in our fraud, and in our make-believe. The punishment will fall not only upon ns, but upon the third and fourth generation of those that betraved the country.”