"SHIRKERS & WASTERS!"

Evening Post, Volume XCI, Issue 78, 1 April 1916, Page 5

"SHIRKERS & WASTERS!"

SCATHING REMARKS BY A

CHAPLAIN

MEN'S WORK.

" Men at the front, lying in hospital, used often to say to me,1' said ChaplainCapt. Mac Donald, in his Town Hall address la6t night, "' I wonder if Larry or Fred will come out to help us?' And I used to say, ' I wonder.

"What do you think of the men who could fill those boys' places," added tha padre, "and yet who stay at home? What do you think of the man who is making excuses—not the man on the farm whom we want here, or the father of the little ones who would become a burden on the State—but the man we can spare? There are scores of them in the cities; some who serve people with a ya-rd of ribbon or a halfpenny worth of pins, work that a schoolchild could-do. What do you. think of them, you mothers ?" The speaker gave some stirring instances of the Gallipoli fights, in' which the men had called for help and had died because it was not there. "What about the shirker," he asked, "and the man who is -hiding behind you' women; and the waster who is allowing others to do his fighting, and who allows other men to defend his mother and sister and sweetheart?

" Do .you understand anything of the ■word ' scorn' ; do you understand what contempt is? Well, if you do, yon women, show it to the waster who should be there arid who is making foolish and unmanly excuses for staying at home. I hope there is no woman in Wellington who will allow her daughter to keep company with these men. (Applause.) If you do, the day will come when you will bear the shame of your grandchildren w.hen they learn that their daddy did not go to the war, and their schoolmates say to them : ' Your father was a shirker.' What a treasured legacy, in generations yet to come, will be the photograph on the wall of, perhaps, grandfather, who fell at Gallipoli. But what a miserable creature he is who is shirking his duty to-day when the nation and her destiny are in the balance! . , . That nation and her flag is a sacred birthright, given to us by our forefathers, and it is in danger; and yet young New. Zealanders stay at home and have three and four meals a day, and go to bed comfortable, and think they are playing the game ! Whatever you do. have no kind of use for the shirker!" (Applause.)