BONDAGE FOR FREEDOM

Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 August 1939, Page 11

BONDAGE FOR FREEDOM

POSITION OF THE INDIVIDUAL. An interesting, although obviously not an original, question is raised by an American reader of this column, notes “Janus” in the "Spectator.’' Just as captive Greece took her fierce captor captive by imparting to Rome Greek culture, is there not, he asks, a real danger that Germany, by driving Great Britain to conscription, authoritarianism and other typical characteristics of German militarism, may be gradually robbing Englishmen of the freedom which Germans have long since had to surrender? Few of us can have failed to ask that ourselves. The reality of the danger is incontestable. But so far, I think, the answer to the question is reassuring. There has been very little encroachment on individual freedom—too little, perhaps, for full efficiency. Conscription has been accepted by the country, and by the men it immediately concerns, not as an invasion of liberty, but as an organisation of the service which a citizen is ready ungrudgingly to render. A selfdisciplined democracy docs not sacrifice its liberty when it decides to do voluntarily what it might otherwise be compelled to do.