AUSTRALIAN DRAFTS

Evening Post, Volume XCIII, Issue 46, 22 February 1917, Page 7

AUSTRALIAN DRAFTS

FIFTY PER CENT. SHORT

SOME EXCUSES ANSWERED.

"Let me impress upon you/ declared Professor Macintyre, chairman of the State Recruiting Committee, speaking-at the Glebe Town Hall last week, " the urgency of the fact that our reinforcements in Australia to-day are about 50 per cent, under what is needful. I give you that officially, and I want it to'be realised by men who are wondering whether the time has come. I believe that we are in the last chapter of the war; we have done magnificently .in Australia —are we going to do so well and make a, bad finish? I ask those who are fit and who are still here to join now to be ready for the last great push which will send the Germans out of France and Belgium, and at last put down this Power so that in its present aspect of brutal militarism it shall .never again show its head in Europe." Professor Macintyre dealt with some of the causes, which were- operating against recruiting. "I hear it said in various quarters," he stated, "that all our young men have gone. Well, they have. not. There are close, on 90,000 unmarried hien in New South Wales who responded to the summons. under the Home Defence Act. The number of fit men amongst these is probably a very large proportion, and the urgency of the call, the demand of the situation, is far more even than it was when thousands of married men went away—and many of them have made the supreme sacrifice. If wo fail to send the men who are needed it will, indeed, be a black mark not against Australia, but against every man who is physically fit but is prepared to say in act, if not in word, ' I am going to let another man fight the battle that I could fight, and I am going to take advantage of the protection and privileges secured to me by the sacrifices of. another man perhaps even less fit than I am." ..•;...■.

"I have also heard," continued the speaker, "that there is no such urgent need to-day as there was. The need was never greater than to-day, for this reason : Intensification of the fighting is near at hand. Within the next few months there will be intensification of fighting at the front such as we have never yet seen. We want-not only to win the war; we want to shorten the war.. Every day that this war goes on there; are at least 1000 casualties in the British troops alone. One day taken off the war. means 1000 Britons saved, and I submit that men's lives are more precious than any, millions of, money." '.^