Te Aroha Ohinemuri News THURSDAY, MARCH 31, 1889. WHAT THE FUTURE MAY HOLD FOR US.

Te Aroha News, Volume XIV, Issue 2090, 31 March 1898, Page 2

Te Aroha Ohinemuri News THURSDAY, MARCH 31, 1889. WHAT THE FUTURE MAY HOLD FOR US.

On Tuesday and Friday evenings, after most of the shops in our long straggling ill-lighted main street have closed their doors, and the young moon in the northern sky only serves to show how deserted the place is, a bugie call goes echoing through the township summoning the men of the local company of volunteers to drill. Front various parts of the compass, by twos and threes, they arrive at the rendezvous, and may bo seen .leaning on their rifles yarning idly on every topic under the sun but that, on© would have thought, nearest their hearts—until long past the hour an nounced for the muster. They are waiting for the stragglers. When some twenty or thirty have put in an appearance, the two lieutenants in command- —two excellent types of the zealous colonial officer—after a brief consultation on the relative advantages of giving the absentees further grace or going: ahead with the material in hand—give the order to 1 Fall in.’ We stood watching the men the other evening moving like a huge shadow over the silent turf, forming and re forming in some obscure military movement beyond our comprehension, in obedience to the sharp words of command from the officers, who were just visible in the star-light, and the possibilities the future held for them all rose before ua like a spectre. Perhaps it was because we were fresh from the perusal of an article pitched in a warlikekeyina contemporary by a writer who evidently knew what he was writing ab"Ut. And talking about newspaper articles, the ephemeral vapourings of the penny-a-liners, at--the public derisively call them—some we have read deserved a better fate. We should like, for instance, to placard all the hoardings in Te Aroha with copies of the leader in Tuesday’s

FToraH. It stirred our Ir’ i't like, a draught of new wins. Wo are told | ‘hat few tif our young men care to look ! into a newspaper ; if they but would, j we are persuaded such lukewarmness ( >iß theirs in the matters affecting the | defences of the colony would speedily : be transformed .into a z'vd that would gladden the hearts of their officers, and reanimate our desponding hopes! of a splen .id destiny for New Zea- | land, which from its position amid a waste of water demauds that its inhabitants should be warlike—if they would be free. The English papers may prate as they like on the .weakness and vacillations of the noble lord upoju whose shoulders the mantle of his mighty ancestor Lord Burleigh they say has fallen unworthily ; his lordship may still have been keeping a taut hand on the reins of the empire. Our trade with China, which equals thut of all other nations together, may be in danger. Let the Lrndon merchant princes rend the air with their clamor. They can well look after themselves. Let the British dogs of war strain at their leash. Let the dock-yards ring day and night with the clangour of ship hammers from Woolwich to Hongkong. *Tn every barrack - room in England, Scotland and Ireland, to-day, groups of eager men are discussing the chances - for and against—war such a war as the .world never saw—that will sweep the seas and fill the trenches with slain; but welcome. For it has come to that, all England wants war. There is no mistaking the sullen look that is stealing over the face of her people at the failure of Lord Salisbury’s foreign policy. The colonies have nearer interests to concern' them We are, and we are proud to think it, part and parcel of that unbending race which the angurs portend, will shortly have arrayed against them the bulk of Europe, mad to wipe them and their colonies out of the world’s map. As the papers are pointing out, to deaf ears apparently, the question of supremacy in the Pacific which has to be fought out between England and Russia—sooner or later concerns us deeply. The shadow of Russian ascendancy in the East is growing from day to day. Hundreds and thousands of men are being hurried across the bleak stretches of Siberia as fast as the nearly completed transcontinental railway can carry them. British prestige is paling, day by day, before the lurid war beacon the White Czar’s generals have kindled on the borders of northern China and towards which the time-serving Asiatic is even now turning his treacherous gaze. For him a new god has arisen out of the cold north lavish of promises and gold. His English master, through long prosperity, is become fat, contented, insufferable. But we have no fear of the issue of the coming conflict. Russia has a mission to perform ; but England has a destiny to fulfil. Whatever sacrifices are demanded of these colonies in the days of storm and stress to come we are confident they will be cheerfully made. It is the knowledge of ihese things in which our young men are lacking, not in the fire and resolution to play a not ignoble part in the drama upon whose enactment the curtain will Bhortly be rung up.