"KNOWS ITS DUTY."

Taranaki Daily News, 15 November 1915, Page 6

"KNOWS ITS DUTY."

GOVERNMENT AND COMPULSORY SERVICE. SHIRKERS. (From Our Own Correspondent.) Wellington, Nov. 12. The Prime Minister's latest pronouncement on the subject of compulsory service is not particularly illuminating. Mr. Massey says in effect that the time for the discussion of conscription has not arrived, that the Defence Department will want 35,000 men during the next twelve months, and that the recruits must be found. The Government, he adds, "knows its duty." The really significant thing about the statement is that the Prime Minister should have thought it necessary'to refer again to the subject at this juncture. Obviously the question is occupying the attention of Ministers. By the end of next year, if the war continues so long. New Zealand will have sent away .about 75,000 trained .men. That will represent an enormous achievement for a producing country containing little more than a million people, and it is not strange that the Ministers are wondering if the present method of recruiting can bear the strain.

The Defence Department, by the way, is still declining to issue figures showing how many recruits are on the books and I what contributions have been made by | the various districts. Tables of percentages have been made public, but they show merely what proportion of an unknown total has been provided by each of the military districts. The Defence authorities have been urged that they are hampering recruiting by keeping the public in ignorance of the actual position. The recruiting organisations in Otago, where enlistment seems to lag, have been particularly loud in their demand for exact information concerning the number of men provided by their district and the number required to bo furnished month by month. But the Department neither yields nor explains. Presumably someone in authority believes that the cause of recruiting will be furthered by the withholding of figures showing the rate of enlistment for the whole Dominion. The departure of a particularly large batch of "shirkers" by the San Francisco mail steamer yesterday lias drawn the attention of the Government to a movement which has caused some indignation locally. The average patriotic citizen is apt to become angry when he sees able-bodied young men leaving the Dominion for foreign parts in order to avoid the possibility of their being called upon to fight for the Emprc, and wants to know what the National Government is going to do about it. One gathers that available legislative machinery has been set in motion already with the intention of preventing the flight of the shirkers. Probably during the next few days it will be announced that men of military age who wish to leave the Dominion must procure passports through the Department of Internal Affaira. am] state their business abroad-