Timely Topics

Northern Advocate, 16 August 1940, Page 4

Timely Topics

Here in England we have Winston Churchill surrounded by men who, like him, will stick at nothing to

SPIRIT OF BRITAIN.

check the German push, to defeat it and, in Mr Churchills words, “to rescue not

only Europe but mankind from the foulest and most soul-destroying tyranny that has ever darkened and stained the pages cf history," writes Wickham Steed. They know that this phase of the war is a race against time. They know that upon Britain depends the chance to shorten the whole struggle by winning this race or. at the very least, by preventing Hitler from winning it. The war itself we shall win in any •event; but Europe and the world will wear another aspect if we win it swiftly. Many of us who, like Winston Churchill, strove for more than six years to warn Britain of the danger that was afoot, have cast out bitterness and are giving every thought and effort to the work in hand. We know that our country must now pay the price of the years it suffered the locusts to eat. It has to work out its own salvation. Through this purifying ordeal it will pass. Human freedom. whose mortal peril it was slow to see, will trot perish.

Discussing a proposal -to issue badges to seven classes of the citizens, the “Sydnev Sunday Sun" savs:

GUNS BEFORE BADGES.

Vul ga r ornaments or aesthetic gems, the

badges will still tin'll Australians into a badge-be-spattered community, in which every man with nothing in his buttonhole wiil be surrounded with a faint aura of shirking.

He may be of military age. yet have a young family dependent on him: he may be over military age. and so “unfortunate” as to look much younger. In either case, his badgelessness will certainly invite misunderstanding. The badge for the rejected on medical grounds appears tactless and superfluous. Men who have volunteered and been turned down will often regretfully choose to forget, rather than to commemorate their frustration by means of a token on the lapel.

Some will leave it off. Others will wear it. The uncomfortable alternatives will be either to run the risk of being misjudged, or to advertise a bitter disappointment. Features of the “white feather" pest are not entirely absent from this Government plan, inspired though it is by the best of motives.

No badge plan is required to spur our men and women to help their country. Witness the excessive response of volunteers for the A.I.F. Witness the number of men waiting impatiently at the present moment in the hope that they will be called up. If we must have badges, let us grant them to returned men and nurses.

Tire rest of the community will be quite happy to know that metal, which otherwise would have been turned into badges, is being used to make munitions.