CURRENT TOPICS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVII, Issue 264, 17 April 1915, Page 4

CURRENT TOPICS.

THE EMPIRE'S DESTINY. A writer in a recent issue of the Round table discusses tho moral basis for the continuance of the Empire. He concludes: "If, in resisting the expansion of Germany, we are fighting for tho ideas realised in our own Empire we can learn one lesson from her. We may well admire the ardor and self-sacrilie'e of her people for t% cause, they believe in. The temptation of the disciplined State may be to pride and cruelty. The danger to the free State is that its inhabitants will cease to make the efforts by which alone their freedom is ensured. Yet the price of liberty no less than of empire is sacrifice and suffering. Indolence and unreadiness to mako sacrifices undermined the strength both of Greece and Rome. It has gone some wiv to endanger the British Empire. For twenty years we have known the danger that threatened us. Yet, we have taken no step to remodel our institutions, nor to consider how best the Empire earn create and concentrate in the decisive spot the forces on which its existence depends. In resolving to fight the g:'eat struggle against autocracy and militarism to the bitter finish, whatever it may cost in men or money, let lis also iesolve to face, more thoroughly than we have in the past, what our stupendous responsibilities as guardians of a system which gives peace and the opportunity of self-development to one-d carter of the human race entail."