Te Aroha AND Ohinemuri News. THURSDAY, JUNE 11, 1908. COMPULSORY MILITARY TRAINING.

Te Aroha News, Volume XXVII, Issue 43336, 11 June 1908, Page 2

Te Aroha AND Ohinemuri News.

THURSDAY, JUNE 11, 1908. COMPULSORY MILITARY TRAINING.

This above all—to thine own self be true, 4nd it must follow as the night the day Thou canst not then be false to any man Shakespeare.

When the great Duke of Wellington was asked by a frivolous society girl if it were not glorious to win a battle his reply must have surprised her, “It is only less terrible than losing one,” answered the Iron Duke. We are fain to ask “ Why all the present talk about compulsory military training ?" That there is an Eastern Question we are well a rare. That the solution of that question involves many considerations of the gravest import no one save a fool will deny. But that compulsory military training, either for the Dominion or the Empire, affords any part of that solution we frankly question. Example as well as alarm is contageous it is true. Yet just why the British, who naturally consider themselves in advance of Germany, should be caught by the contagion of Germany’s grinding militarism is not quite clear, and just why we should conclude that the various perils of which from time to time we hear so much are going to be disposed of by compulsory military training is equally obscure. , For after all, is the world, we would ask. still to continue fighting over all grievances as though the Divine principle of arbitration had never been enunciated. Is law still to be limited in its application to the individual, whilst states and gigantic empires may freely thrust their sons upon each other’s bayonet points without compunction ? Surely not !

Halil not God rnada of one blood all nations for to dwell upon the face of 'he earth, not to be shot down and thrust underground. We a-e not sentimentalists, this is a question hot of mere sentiment, but rather of active and irreversible principle that we arc called upon to decide, when we ask “ Is Compulsory Military Trainingany part of the solution of our relations or prospective relations with the rest of the world We do not lay claim to the wisdom of Solomon, yet, to us it, seems so obvious that, to commence a system of compulsory militarism, is a step backward toward the ancient reign of the sword that we can only ask, “ Is there no better, no more permanent way of averting invasion ?” Is the Hague Peace Conference a mere sham after all ? The time may not have come to disarm, for that must be a general thing when it arrives, but surely it is not for us British to go back upon our traditions, to retrogress so grieviously as to take up the attitude of believing that of war there shall be no end.