NEUTRALITY!

Taranaki Daily News, 28 November 1916, Page 2

NEUTRALITY!

(To the Editor.) Sir,—-When the old lady foil in love with that beautiful word Mesopotamia, she had really struck a word with some attraction about it, for it is undeniably euphonious to the ear, ar.d is, moreover, as far as history can tell, the birthplace of man's civilisation. lint neutrality has no such attractions It can, however, claim to be the cloak of respectability for the hypocrite, the coward, the sot, and the slave. Never was the word neutrality more in use than at the present moment. Here 'and now is the time for testing both men and nations. Here and now are the nations of the earth nt war to the verv death, as nations never previously were in all the records of the past. Truth and Right and Love and Liberty are on one side; on the other are the oppofiitea of these. "Choose ye whom ye will serve!" "We do not belong to either side," says the whining neutral. Just so- You are neither one thing nor another, and vet you are something that is not cither! There is not an honest man on the Allied front who would not find a fitting place for all such in the hottest hell that ever human priest imagined. Dirty, cowardly embodiments of the lowest of the low: "Because ye are neither cold nor hot I will spue, you out of my mouth,'' said John of Patmos, and he, rightly so said. Not a hand was held up nor a protest uttered by Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, or Spain when Germany invaded and overran Belgium. The greatest liars, enslavers, rapers, and murderers that over existed on the face of the globe have been given a free hand to do as they think flt, so far as all these nations are concerned. In addition to these cowardly peoples we have the United States of America, with a population of one hundred millions, standing idly by and doing nothing beyond sending schoolboy notes asking for explanations which start and finish where t.licy began, and nothing more. Was it any wonder that the Rev. Gibson, of South Australia, compared the American eagle to a mongrel rooster crowing on the dunghill of its own droppings? "What can ennoble sots or slaves or cowards?" asks the poet, an.l wt can only answer. What? "That in such a proiul moment of life," these dastards of the human race are leaving the righting of the wrongs of the weak, the oppressed, the outraged to the nobler peoples who are draining their resources and the youth of their manhood to the very dregs in order to give safety and peaep to the world at large is a tragedy. These moral cowards are standing about in the great cloak of neutrality, waiting until the danger is past and the work of fighting done, and th'in thev will magnanimously step in to help arrange the terms of peace to suit their own selfish meanness and inordinate greed. It would be, a good thing for the world if all those dirty animals were suddenly endowed with just enough courage to force them to commit suicide, and so rid the earth of its main mass of meanness.—l am, etc., J. 0. TAYLOR. Waiongona, Nov. 25, 1016.