THE EMPIRE AND THE WAR.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXIX, Issue LXIX, 18 March 1915, Page 2

THE EMPIRE AND THE WAR.

STIRRING SPEECH BY MR HARCOURT.

Under the auspices of the Victoria i League, a huge meeting was held at : the Central V.M.C.A., when the Co;- >. onial Secretary delivered a stirring ; speech on "The Empire and the War" \ (says the London correspondent of tlie i Christchurch Press). After a special tri- j bute to the work of the Victoria , League, Mr Harcourt spoke of the kin- i ship of the Empire, which was to-day : welded into an impregnable whole by blood and iron. There were some ill- i informed, misguided fools who thought '. that when England was at war India \ Avould be in mutiny. They were wrong, j But they might have been right if we j had mistrusted our. Indian fellow-sub- i jects, for he was told there would have been a mutiny if we had not permitted j our Indian troops to fight with us' m', the trenches. To-day our Indian troops j were making for themselves an iiiper- j isfiable record on the battlefields oi France and Flanders. Look at the great effor.ts of our se7fgoverning Dominions, Mr Harcourt continued. Two days before war was declared Canada offered an Expedition- ! ary Force, and two days after the de- j claration of war he accepted it on be- j half of the Government and the nation. It was with us to-day, manned, I equipped, paid by the Dominion it- ; self, and with reinforcements ready to j follow, as and when they were required, j It was an open secret that some of the ! Canadian troops were already at the >■ front; it was no secret that the rest j of them were straining at the leash to get there—and^ if he might venture a prophecy, their period of probation would not be much further prolonged. I They had not had a comfor.table time; j the transition had not been pleasant ' from "Our Lady of the Snows" to j "Our Mother of the Mud," but coming j events had cast their quagmires before. • Not even an English winter—almost : the wettest on record—had broken j their spirit, and no one who knew them , could doubt that they' would do credit to the name and the fame of the Maple Leaf. They were accompanied by a military contingent from Newfoundland, which had supplied, also, a large number of Naval Reservists and volounteers drawn from their intrepid and enduring fishermen. From the Antipodes had come to our aid equally great forces. The day before the war he received a telegram putting the Australian Navy at our disposal, and under our orders, and at the same time offering a contingent of 20,003 men for European service,, with equipment and constant reinforcements, which he accepted three days later. The New Zealand (battleship) was already with the Fleet —-(cheers) —and ' tho rest of thp Fleet was under our. control before war was declared. A New Zealand military force was at once offered, accepted, and mobilised — i and even the Maoris insisted on shar- ] ing the white man's burden. A Ceylon contingent was also in Egypt, and a Fiji force was now on its way Home There remained one other Dominion —South Africa. Mr Harcourt said he had seen some ill-conditioned and ignorant comments on the fart that South Africa had sent no troops to Europe. These things were the carpings of fools —(cheers) —who had not read history, and were not fit to write history. He would never make comparisons of the value of Dominion services, but this he would say, that none had been or could be greater than that rendered by the Union of South Africa. (Loud cheers). General 'Botha had undertaken, for reasons of Imperial importance, to attack, to capture, and to occupy German South-^est Africa. The Imperial Government knew then and knew now that he could do so, but they knew also that it was no light task. The Africander was proud of the unstinted trust which had been reposed in him by the British people since their war; they knew what freedom and self-government meant, and from whom it had sprung. The minority of rebels were shaming their fellows and defaming their honor. They were dealt with by their own leaders, and by men of their own race and the sordid chapter of sorry treachery closed, he hoped, with the capture or surrender of its deluged dupes. (Cheers). The British people would trust the Government of the Union of South Africa to exercise in their own discretion such punishment or clemency as seemed fit to them with their knowledge of the local situation, and we and they might turn now with hope and confidence to fhe larger undertaking of the reduction of the neighboring German colony. After referring to the •Crown Colonies, the Colonial Secretary went on to say he wished they could see his daily and nightly sheaves of telegrams, the despatches, the letters from the trpnical firing line. They avouH live, as he had done for six months, in the thrills and the- romance of thinly defended frontiers, of gallantly captured posts, of conquest and reverse of strategy and organisation. And from what did all this unity of purpose, of action, arid of sentiment spring? From the genius of the British race for self-government and good government. . W had given freely, proudly, the most complete autonomy to our great White Dominions, and we had reaped a rich harvest. Canada in tho past, South Africa in tho present, were witnesses to the fact that confidence was its own reward. But in those great tropical territories where autonomy was not yet advisable or possible, we had endeavored—and wit> success —to govern by and through and I with the sentiments and customs of the I inhabitants. A wide tolerance, with i no too emphatic insistence on "culture" bad created a cosmopolitan confidence \ which -had proved in action a" good substitute for the subservience of militarism, i