COMPULSORY MILITARY TRAINING.

Auckland Star, Volume XLII, Issue 191, 12 August 1911, Page 9

COMPULSORY MILITARY TRAINING.

(To the Editor.) Sir,—lt appears to me that your contributor "Zamiel," writing in Saturday's "Star" on the subject of conscription, misses the point in replying to the objections raised. I do not think the subject was ever definitely before the electors. Of course, there was a lot of talk, as there is on every subject, but as has been pointed out, it was never made a vital issue, and Sir Joseph Ward pronounced against it. Then suddenly Parliament passed a bill enforcing it. So momentous a change in the constitution of a British State should hardly have been made so hurriedly. It was done in a panic—the same panic which led to the offer of a Dreadnought, and which now turns out, on the statement of an ex-Cabinet Minister, to have been due to a lying and misleading Tory cablegram. Thus the Jingo-ImpenaUstie swashbucklers play on our legislators. The whale thing needs reconsidering, and one can only wish the Anti-Militarist Councils success in their efforts to regain what, in the eyes of conscriptionridden continentals is the foundation of British freedom, the absence of compulsion to military training.—l am, etc, BEN DAVID. Other letters are to hand on this subject:— G. Langley thinks that: "All who arc rational, in my opinion, must be against one man ordering another man to kill a third man. FurtheT that military organisation is championed by the classes, because it enables them to coerce the masses."

"N.W." says: "The Government were wise in making 21 the age limit, so that those who have to serve do not get a vote, and those who have a vote do not have to serve, and, therefore, care little what happens to the others. But wait a little, men, the Government is only feeling its way, and if allowed to go on uninterrupted, $t will presently be after the men who have got a vote, and then I suppose you will wake up and howL" "Ben David" thinks the more ready acceptance of the military service in Che country than in town is due to the fact that objectors are more easily identified, and made the subject of "boycott" or "Coventry." [