The Daily News. MONDAY, JUNE 10, 1912. DEFENCE EXPENDITURE.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 295, 10 June 1912, Page 4

The Daily News. MONDAY, JUNE 10, 1912. DEFENCE EXPENDITURE.

At Opunake recently the Prime Minister referred to the need of keeping defence . expenditure to within something like the original estimates, whilst safeguarding the system. It is understood that the pruning knife is now being applied. The system is supposed to have cost over £'412,000 for the past year, with only five months' training. Yet the liabilities are not revealed, and these probably reached another £200,000 to carry forward to this year, while this year there will be 12 months' training to account for, instead of Ave, and the figures are jumping up week by week. A year ago, for instance, it was laid dow» that 88 non-commissioned officers would be sufficient to carry out the system. Now there are 200, and another 200 are needed. So on with other figures. It is obvious to the best friends of the system that something must be done (comments the Manawatu Times). It should be quite possible to give us the universal training we want for a half million a year, instead of the much more expensive partial training we have. To do this there will have to be very considerable reform. The General Staff at Wellington, for instance, is costing over £20,060 a year. It ought to be reduced by £IO,OOO. The various military districts are self-contained, and all that is required is a co-ordination and inspecting staff, at the Wellington headquarters and for this the General and half a dozen officers would be ample. Then such expensive excrescences as the mountain battery, which will be of very little use in New Zealand, and which will cost, by the time it is gunned and muled, ammunitioned and equipped, a very big sum, are unnecessary. No guns cost under £IB,OOO. Its mules will cost £3OOO, and it will take £SOOO a year to run it. Cui bono ? Similarly, £IOO,OOO might have been saved in the field artillery by giving existing batteries new guns and letting sew batteries practice with their old ones. The cadet system wants revision (continues our contemporary). The whole junior cadet system should he replaced by a scout system, in which the useful features and the principles of the Boy Scouts should be retained and some of the foolishness of the Baden-Powell textbooks eliminated. The boys would get their own uniforms. The scout training should be compulsory, and up to 14 is better than the cadet training for the boy. From 14 to 18 is really the crucial period of the system, and this should be the senior cadet training with musketry instruction specialised. So far very little attention has been paid to the senior cadets simply because the instructors' hands have been full, but it ought to be. And the senior cadets in the hackblocks will have to give way to camp training, for they are not practicable as at present.