THE REFERENDUM

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 530, 19 August 1949, Page 5

THE REFERENDUM

Sir,-Your leader\of July 29 demonstrates an editorial middle-class morality. You purport to advance the argument of the plain man. I feel you do just that. I am less concerned with your assumptions than with the tenuous manner in which you reach your conclusions, for you cling to the shadow of an argument which has demonstrably failed in the past 150 years of western civilisation. To go further, you would have little difficulty in agreeing with

the fountain-head discourse on the subject, the discussion of Socrates and Glaucon which in practical terms has given us Hitler, Stalin and of course the "bomb." War, as Randolph Bourne has so succinctly put it, is the health of the State. You will oppose this view, yet your editorial leads inevitably to it, for submit what you will it is imcontestable that conscription ig preparation for war at the bidding and for the good of the ‘State, Your world view claims realism as its -virtue, it seefms to me a static one, the impact of forces, their action and reaction. Is this the real world, the dy-. namic evolving organism, both microcosm and macrocosm? Yet you wish to impose. a rigid conscription system on. the vortex of change that surrounds us. Your argument relegates the creative impulse of the individual, the criterion of culture and progress to the normalcy of the slave herd. "May I plead the claim of the free man, the man who chooses freedom and

lives it, fights and will die for it? If, sir, you had attended small country meetings where groups were putting their case against conscription and had seen the throwing of rotten eggs and flour; had heard the jeers and catcalls é6f organised groups claiming the pre-’ rogative of ex-servicemen, you would be compelled to ponder the efficacy of military training, and wonder about the

future.

A. B.

WILLIAMSON

(Christchurch).