CONSCRIPTION.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXXII, 23 October 1916, Page 2

CONSCRIPTION.

A SOCIALIST'S VIEW

Mr D. H. Newman. Melbourne, writing as a socialist and unionist, has sat out the view of conscription that'presents itself to him. Some extracts from ins argument mac given:— "Until the Germans have tasted of ths utter humiliation which alone can purge him of his uncleanliness there is no safety for women and no rest for an honest man. Until again we,can look on the German features without feeling something of that creeps: loathing that we get from looking on a snake, until the sound of. the-'German voice no longer, calls to the mind the cries of drowning "civilians, and oi: soldiers, writhing in death agonies from liquid lixc .nia t,ti>s, until oucti move wo can trade with tne German- without knowi»g that we are robbing the honoured dead of the fruits- of their sacrifice, until the retention of a single German, naturalisad or other, in government employ has ceased to be an offence against decency, and a political disgrace, our battle cry- must be the grim slogan of 1789, "It shall go on.' 'It shall go on.' We will not, indeed, give ourselves up to the" blind frenzy of the "Sariscullottes. Democracy has long since ceased -to be a howling mob, to whom liberty is but a figure of speech, or a mythical entity to raiss a statue to. We do not stand where they did in the midst of inarticulate political confusion of social instability, and mental flux, that made the old order, intolerable, yet left the new no more tangible than a dancing mirage of brilliant possibilities. We are no "longer at the edge of the Age of reason., but far advanced into it. 'We know.our course, our goals are well defined, Democracy has'developed method, its advance is steady and sure, and the besotted people who would cross its path must 'pay the pshalty to the uttermost rarthing. AVhen the outer works of privilege and monopoly heve been battered in, and the thrones are tottering everywhere to their final overthrow, twent-'

ieth century democracy is in no mood to

brook the holding up of liberty which - it has taken ceasaless struggle from "the French Revolution -until now to bring ' within its grasp, while the resuscitated Wahr-W-olf enjoys a ghastly flutter. The answer of democracy to any such insolent demand is to be found in the solid-wall of. stern, unyielding ■warriors who hold the bloody trenches from the Flemish coast to Switzerland, from Riga to Roumania, on the Alpine crests of the Tyrol) in the Egyptian desert, in the wilds of Asia Minor, "Arid this is the epic struggle from which, the anti-conscriptionists hold serenly aloof,, mouthing specious, : theoretical drivel, Vt about the .supposed„ dangers of compulsion. This is the call to which they remain stubbornly and callously deaf. A:: summons loud and prolonged enough almost to wake the dead tails to waken these deep .sleepers from their self-centred trance. The trance condition is, however, only partial, allowing the. mental apparatus to respond freely to every stimulus but that of battle. The war apart, these -.psychological freaks are .perfectly wide awake. They go about their avocations as usual, and pursue their normal lives, con-scious apparently oi everything but that the worst-war in history is raging on their very doorstep, andj they ?re expected to take a hand. Their peculiarity is that they can live apart from the war, and remain normal" in such abnormal times. That they can vend the war cables and remain in temper 'as if they had not,-. read them; tliat they can go straight from tne 7 •.riii^l of a casuality list, containing the names of some of. their fellow-unionists, to the racecourse or the football field; that with the very air -charged with the fury of Lonesome Pine, or Pozieres, .they-twill" crowd nightly to the picture . shows, or stuff the Stadium to suffocation to see a couple of pugilists punching one another. "For a. long While we regarded these men charitably, as only extroarliairily thick in the head. We* took the lenWt' view that they» failed to realise the full, significance of the issues that ore at stake. We can do this' no longer. As r time goes on the matter assumes an-ore serious aspect; as it becomes only too plain, that the anti-conscriptionists do realise the issues, but they don't core. Citizens, who, in-, these days, together in Melbourne and Sydney, unions, to discuss the abstract merits of conscription, a? men- might do on some Antarctic icefield on which they had had the'/ ill fortune to become entombed since before the beginning of the war with only penguins and seals for company, are dangerous."