Conscription and- Training

Press, Volume LV, Issue 16472, 15 March 1919, Page 8

Conscription and- Training

The cable message in which Mr Fraser, the correspondent of the Australian Press Association, discusses the decision of the Paris Conference to reduce Germany's military forces to a volunteer army of insignificant size, may be taken as reflecting the colour of the situation at the Conference. Perhaps his facts are on the whole correct, but we, are doubtful concerning Lis declaration that "the decision may bo regarded as opposed to all compulsory "military training." Indeed, we shall be much surprised if we hear that in opposing conscription as it existed in Europe before the war, either the British or American (government took up any stand regarding compulsory training at all. The two things have no essential connexion with each other. Compulsory military ' training . on the New Zealand model may be in force in any country for a generation without providing it with anything like an army, or encouraging the spirit of militarism. The conscription that Mr Lloyd George desires to kill as the enemy of peace is the system under which the nation's manhood is forced to undergo prolonged military service at home with the object of furnishing a strong army in Being at any moment, with an enormous reserve. By the abolition of conscription, Mr Lloyd George means the abolition of this system. Its abolition by no means implies that no nation may take any steps whatever to compel its youth to undergo a moderate course of physical and military instruction. Conscription on the German model, devised and maintained with tho hardly-veiled purpose of building up ah irresistible' military machine with which to attack the world, is a different thing from the conscription | adopted by Britain to furnish an adequate army for defensive purposes. If, | despite everything that may now be 1 done in tho hope of averting it, war I were to come again, and Britain were involved, conscription would again become necessary, and wo believe that the opposition to it would be small. Its opponents will havo had time—perhaps they have already had time—to see that conscription in the event of actual war should be supported- rather by anti-militarists than by anybody else. "There is no parados in this. Let us considor tho case of the man who holds that war is an anachronism, that it has persisted through, the perpetuation of a military caste, and that its ugliness has been, or, rather, had been previous to the great war, hidden by the glamour of heroic deeds performed amid tho cheers of the nation that knew of war only as a sensational drama little affecting tho interosts of the majority. Surely it is incumbent upon such a man to do what he can to see to it that when war' becomes necessary • the whole nation shall be roused to meet the crisis, treating the war as a horrible calamity in which nobody should have any interest above

that of anybody else —that, in fact, there should be no glamour left in. the grim thing, and that war should effect no breach in tho continuity of the spirit of democracy. Further, such a man should be the first to recognise that nothing is more likely to prevent a democratic Stato from being rushed into war than the certainty that the duty of fighting will bo universal from the firing of the first shot. But thi3 is not the present issue, which is tho raising of barriers against war, or, rather, the destruction of the forces that make for war. The destruction of these forces docs not require tho abolition of a training system which does not encourage a militarist spirit, but which does make for efficiency and health in the nation's manhood.