NATIONAL SERVICE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 24 May 1938, Page 8

NATIONAL SERVICE

MOST APPROPRIATE MOVE TO CONVINCE FOREIGNERS We British shall do far more to convince Germany and Italy that the time has come for negotiations for a final settlement, which will include a limitation of armaments and economic appeasement, by adopting some form of national service appropriate to the modern air warfare age than by adding to the numerous pledges by treaty or under Article 16 we have already signed, writes the Marquess of Lothian in a letter to “The Times.” For what all foreigners doubt is whether our will to submit to sacrifice and discipline is sufficient to make really effectual the armaments we are paying for partly out of loan. I would go further. I believe that democracy itself will only recover its health and confidence if the democratic people are ready to place universal national service alongside universal individual liberty as the basis of society, and if national service includes compulsory service for capital—e.g., the registration of houses for hospitals, the limitation of war profits, and so on, as well as the organisation of universal fitness and th? allocation to every individual of his or her duty of service to the community whether in peace or emergency. To demand such national service for a purely national purpose would not, I believe, really rally this nation or the nations of the Commonwealth. To demand it now that substantial international (though not internal) justice at last exists in Europe, in order to try to find the means of making operative the principles which underlie the League of Nations, in proportion as other nations are willing effectively to co-operate, would lay the foundations of the new world we all dreamt of in 1919.