COMPULSORY SERVICE

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXII, 19 April 1939, Page 11

COMPULSORY SERVICE

■To The Eil I tori Sir,—One of the important matters on which we need to know the mind of the Government without delay is the question. ‘ls the voluntary system, or conscription, to be the order of the day if the menace of Japan becomes actual fact?” We have already had an Ambulance broadcasting by the St. John Ambulance Society, of what to do if attacks of mustard gas are to be the evening’s “order of the day.” Surely it is time to know whether our own “order of the day” is to be volunteers or compulsory service.

I am whole-heartedly for compulsory service Nothing less would ‘‘fill the bill” in our defence needs. Nothing less would so safeguard the country and all its different needs. It would bring, so needful in times of crisis, a lightening of a load of anxiety. Briefly, it would fulfil the meaning in that old saying (changing “England” into “New Zealand" in its sentence) : “New Zealand expects every man to do his duty’ if “called up”!

In Dunedin in 1914-16 1 watched the recruiting meetings under voluntary service. 1 wrote a series of letters about it. As time went on one noted that recruiting meetings were attended by the physically unfit and the over-age men, while the younger men were lis-

tening to a first-class Salvation Army band at the other end of the city! If people woula read “The Menace of Japan,” written by an Englishman who lived many years in Japan (it is in most libraries, including the Wakefield one) tney would unaersiand the absolute necessity to “be prepared,” in view of such a menace, and the futility of voluntary efforts to cope with it.—l am, etc., GRACE FOX. Wakefield, 17th April.