THE OBSTINATE STREAK.

Taranaki Daily News, 16 October 1915, Page 6

THE OBSTINATE STREAK.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH OTAGO? Auckland, October 13. People who remember that in the early provincial day 3 certain southern characteristics resulted in "obstinate Otago" toeing quite a current and accepted epithet up north, will probably find a clue to the real cause of the recruiting trouble in Otago in an experience narrated by the Rev. R. S. Gray last night at the Baptist Union patriotic meeting. Mr. Gray stated that he had had no difficulty whatever in Dunedin in getting money for the patriotic funds, but when he had a recruiting meeting at the Hillside railway workshops there, not a man held up his hand. He asked them if they were afraid to go, and was told that they were not afraid! Then one man said: "Bring in a law that makes it compulsory for all to go who should go, and we shall then enlist." Mr. Gray asked if they really wanted compulsion, and the man replied that they did. They explained that there were men in the workshops who were waiting for the billets of those who went to the war, and the latter were not prepared to go under a voluntary system, and those conditions, only to make room for other single men who were waiting to jump into their billets. If it were made compulsory for all single men to go they would enlist at once.

"There is something to be said for that point of view," remarked Mr. Gray, and lie added something on the same lines that carried the principle philosophically deeper than the man in the workshops could have expressed it. "I have 110 sympathy," he said, "with a theoretic voluntary system which breaks down after the chivalrous men have gone and offered their lives, and leaves the unchivalrous and unpatriotic men at home to become the fathers of our race. I would register every man, and if the registration did not have the effect required, I would compel the men to go, but would allow no married man to go until the single men who had no claims on them had done their duty; too many married men have already gone."