COMPULSORY MILITARY TRAINING.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLI, Issue 9608, 6 September 1911, Page 7

COMPULSORY MILITARY TRAINING.

(To the Editob.) Sir,—Will you kindly allow me to reply to "Ono_ Who Thinks." In the first place tho printer altered tho sense of tho paragraph. I wroto: "Surely boys can bo taught to walk erect without boing trained to lull" (not drill) With regard to gaoling the boys ho begs the wholo question, I again ask, who is it going to benefit and how. Do you imagine it will popularise military training? Do you imagine, it will generate respect for tho law, and I reiterate tho schemo was foisted, on the people without their being consulted in tho matter, Only three years ago the Premier himself was against compulsion. Again, there is not another civilised nation on earth that trains oompulsorily youths under 21 without their parents' consent, Surely you cannot justify tho act of supplying our Gnomios with ships and arms by saying others would do it if they had the chanoo? Why not send them men to work tho ships and tho guns? .Stipposo for a moment thero was a syndicate in England supplying trained men to a foroign Power at no much per hundred. Would you justify them by saying others would do it if they had tho chance? Don't you see what all this implies? It means that capitalism is so rotten that for profit it will supply tho enemy with tho wherewithal to defeat its own country. Again, I ask, whoro is its patriotism, and I answer it is in its pocket. Capitalism knows no country; it is international; it is the enemy of tho workers of every country, You tell us you aro "Ono Who Thinks." Well wo should never have known it if you had not told us; your thinking is so muddy, Before you deal with our borrowing policy, get to know something about it. Get the Year Book and see what we are paying for our public and private debts, and study tho State note issuo of Australia, and then I will discuss the matter with you if the editor will allow it. Wo are not discussing Socialism; that is another subject, and ono whoro a little knowledge is dangerous. In conclusion I will quoto Edward Carpenter's "Empire":

Blind, fooled and staggering from her throne. I saw her fall Clutching at the ground of empire; And wondering, round her, sons and daughter nations stood— What madness had possessed her? But when they lifted her, the heart wae dead, Withered within the body, and all the voin s Wero choked with yellow dirt Oh England, fooled and blind, Come look if but a moment on yoursclfSee, through your streets—what should Be living sap of your free blood — These brutish, squalid, joyless, drinksodden population flowing; And in your mills and factories the weary faces, sad monotonous lives. Or miles of cottage tenements with weakly, red eyed children, worn out mothers. See, from your offices and shops of closing hours, the morbid stream—as from unhealthy ' glands within tho bodyCrowds issuing of anaemic youth and girls Palo, prematurely sexual. With flabby minds and bodies (held together chiefly by their clothes) and perky pick-megilp manners; See on the land, where at, least there should be courage and grit and sinew A thin legged, slouching, apathetic population, ignorant even of agriculture. And in the mines and coa( pits, instead of lusty power, poor rickety limbs and ill-built bodies; And ask yourself tho searching question straight, How out of such roots shall a strong nation grow? —I am, etc, J. WHITTLE.