COMPULSORY TRAINING AND NOISE.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 3192, 18 May 1909, Page 4

COMPULSORY TRAINING AND NOISE.

Happily for the good r.ame of Mew Zealand, the noisy gangs of hooligans and Socialists (so-called) who have been bringing the right of public

meeting into contempt in Christchurch and Wellington are as small numerically as they are great vociferously, says the Dunedin "Star." What possible good or service these people imagine can be done on behalf of the cause they dishonour by their conduct passes comprehension. The liberties and freedom, oivil and religious, that Britons enjoy were not gained by vulgar protests of this stamp, nor will any worthy cause ever be achieved or maintanied by them. Compulsory military training is regarded by what are erroneously termed Socialists as something foreign to the ideals of a free-born Englishman—" the boys of the bulldog breed," as the Wellington "redraggers" vauntingly proclaimed themselves to be. But, like every other question, it has two sides. Some of us are ape snaeringly to refer to German or French or Russian conscripts, and unfavourably to contrast them with British volunteers. It Is assumed that the willing recruit must be the superior man. But is he? The foreigner dubs him a hired soldier, and claims that a compulsory service, under which peer and peasant, rich and poor, must alike do duty for their common country,' is the highest, the worthiest, and the only possible one. We mention this simple truth not as an argument for or against the desirability of compulsory military service in this Dominion, but by way of emphasising our contention that the "men of the bulldog breed," who believe they are shewing their virtue and superiority to everybody else by protesting against any form of compulsion, are lamentably mistaken.