CADET CORPS.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 19941, 30 May 1930, Page 13

CADET CORPS.

STATE RECOGNITION WITHDRAWN.

SOCIALIST GOVERNMENT'S ACTION. (KROlt OUX OWN COBEESPOKDZNI.) LONDON, April 24. Lord Derby, writing in "The Times" concerning the Socialists' withdrawal of State recognition from Cadet Corps, says that the action of the Government is anti-miltarism run mad. "The value of the Cadet Corps," he says, "is not the number of recruits they eventually supply to the Begular Army or to the Territorial Army. The corps are a means of giving a certain amount of discipline and a great deal of healthy exercise to boys who would otherwise obtain neither. This blow from the Government is a loss to thousands of such boys of physical training, which to a very limited extent is of a military character,, and of healthy periods of camp life, which must ■ be better for them than loafing about in the streets of our great towns." Sir John Fortescue also contributes his protest. In a letter to "The Times" ho says:— "What, after all, are the duties inculcated by British military training! Obedience, service, sacrifice. Are. they so very ignoble, so hopelessly inimical to good citizenship? And what is . the supreme quality of the British soldier! As I read history it is not ferocity but endurance; patient .endurance, in war, of hardship, privation, fatigue, and suffering; in peaco, of insult and violence from mobs at home and,abroad, and of two centuries of contumely from his own countrymen. Is there no virtue in such endurance? It is conspicuous also in payers of income tax, and. I have not observed that the Government has yet visited it with condemnation. "Let us clear our minds of cant. A community undersells another community, thereby threatening to bereave it of its livelihood and drive it to starvation. That is called peace. The undersold attack fche undersellers with firearms and shoot them down. That _ is called war. I perceive no great diversity betwixt the twain."

The Prompted Pacificism. "After this year," the "Morning Post" points out, "Cadet Corps may. not wear the King's uniform, with its military badges and regimental facings, and they must return their rifles and surrender their commissions. "Nothing could be better calculated as a discouragement. Such a measure is much more formidable than the withdrawal of financial support. It deprives the boyish imagination of the pride of being, as a soldier of the King, affiliated to his Majesty's Forces; and, by substituting a dummy rifle for a real one, it kills the exhilarating sense, dear to every boyish heart, of being really under arms. It is possible, we hope, that the public spirit which brought the Cadet Corps into being, and made them so popular in the schools, will survive even the hostility of a Socialist Government, whose favours are ostentatiously reserved for conscientious objectors. Certainly the pacifism, in the name of which Mr Thomas Shaw's edict has been framed, is 111-prompted by such mean and spiteful measures, which can only leave a feeling of deep resentment."

Mr Shaw's Explanation.

In the debate in the House of. Commons Mr Shaw (Secretary for War) said:— •

' "I have an unconquerable' aversion against - children of tender age being, drafted into semi-military formations. It was with' the greatest reluctance that I accepted the advice with regard to the Officers'" Training Corps, but there the boys are generally old, enough to form an opinion for them-, solves, I could not, however, utand here and defend a semi-military formation for children of tender age. "If'there is one thing above" all others in which a mature judgment is required, it is as to whether one will or will not embark on a military career. If there is a gulf between ideas on this subject between the two sides of the House, the Government must adopt, not the policy of its opponents, but* its own. ...«'■•

No Aggressive Spirit; "The real truth-ia* that there is no. vestige of aggressive or warlike spirit throughout' the Empirej" : writes Ad-; miral of the Fleet Sir Arthur D. Fanshawo, "and full and most generous forgiveness has long ago been rendered, to our former enemies. "Surely the right and proper teaching for our young children is to be ready to follow as they-grow up the noble and patriotic example shown them by the great majority of the manhood and womanhood of the Empire, whe offered their lives to defend .the sanctity of. treaties inj the Great War, and' to fight whenever. called upon against military domination. threatening our liberties, and against all oppression. and wrong." '''.'.