The Northern Advocate Daily “NORTHLAND FIRST” FRIDAY, APRIL 28, 1939. Conscription Britain

Northern Advocate, 28 April 1939, Page 6

The Northern Advocate Daily “NORTHLAND FIRST”

FRIDAY, APRIL 28, 1939. Conscription Britain

Registered for transmission through the post as a Newspaper

THE form of conscription to be introduced in Britain is not, as yet, of a very drastic character. It applies only to young men between the ages of 20 and 21, giving the comparatively small intake of 200,000 men. These will be trained for six months, and then drafted to a reserve. Except that men in the conscripted group will be liable for immediate service if war breaks out, the measure is in a sense rather a form of compulsory training than straight out conscription on a national scale. Nevertheless the British move in a country hitherto traditionally opposed to such methods except in such a national crisis as the Great War, must have a profound effect on international opinion. It has been hailed with delight in Paris, under such headings as “Bravo, England,” and with derision in Italy, where one of the newspaper makes the gibe that Britain has departed from her traditional policy of making wars with the soldiers of other nations. Such a gibe, levelled when there are graves of thousands of British soldiers in Italy alone, to say nothing of Gallipoli, Flanders, Mesopotamia, Palestine and other fields where Britons died in the last war, shows the type of calumny to which the Italian controlled press is ever ready to resort. It is tragic, certainly, that thousands of youths, on the verge of manhood, should have to serve in the army, and it is inevitable that the interference with private pursuits will be very serious. This sacrifice, however, has to be accepted lest a greater tragedy overwhelms the nation, and it is strangely inconsistent that Socialist opinion in England, which has long clamoured for a firm line to be taken against the dictators, now opposes one of the fundamental steps incidental to such a policy. There can, however, be no half-heartedness in the situation that exifets to-day. Britain has realised this, and the Dominions may yet be compelled to follow her lead in adopting some form of compulsory service, so that adequately trained forces will be available for any emergency.