COMPULSORY TRAINING

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 May 1939, Page 5

COMPULSORY TRAINING

ORGANISED STEPS ESSENTIAL. Every other European democracy has some form of universal training for defence, wrote the Marquess of Lothian in “The Times,” prior to the recent measures adopted in Britain. No other nation in Europe will move unless we British are organised and equipped to play our part. Nor will the United States. Already totalitarian propaganda is saying that we are not prepared to make the sacrifices for freedom that others are willing to make and that we are preparing to leave others to do the front-line fighting while we make munitions for them at home. Moreover, the most certain way of preventing world war is to make sure that an attack on France cannot succeed. The exact form of national service jve need depends not on theory but on the facts. Surely it is time for the Government, as was so frequently done in the last war, to tell the country the whole truth about the consequences of the rape of Prague, which in a single night has given w Germany something like the equivalent of the whole non-naval rearmament of both Britain and the United States in the last year. For once Britain is told the facts about the strategic position she will do what is necessary to meet them.