LANCINGS FRIDAY, JANUARY 25. 1918. "GO ON OR GO UNDER "

Free Lance, Volume XVII, Issue 915, 25 January 1918, Page 6

LANCINGS

FRIDAY, JANUARY 25. 1918. "GO ON OR GO UNDER "

Here ehal the Press the People's right maintain Unawed by principle and unbribed by gain ; Here patriot Truth her glorious precepts draw Pledged to Religion, Liberty.and La^? ,

The Case in a Nutshell. "IT LOYD George has the happy knack of being able to state an actual position in a. crisp, brief, epigrammatic phrase which appeals at once, to the popular mind and sticks in the popular memory. No better counterblast to the pernicious and dangerously mischievous madness of the English "Red Feds., 5 ' in lending a sympathetic ear to the insane theories of the Russian Bolsheviks, could well have been imagined than the British Prime Minister's latest ' deliverance on the duty which lies before the British trades unionist and the duty of the British nation as a whole. To display the slightest inclination to meet the enemy in any negotiations for peace is only regarded by the Huns as a sign of Britain's war weariness and military weakness. Everybody is sick, nigh unto death, of the war and of all its horrors. But to back down now would be to betray the gallant men who are fighting at the Front, to be guilty, also, of an act of most abominable treachery to the scores of thousands of heroic fellows who have cheerfully laid down their lives for the sacred cause of Truth, .Liberty, and Justice, the cause of civilisation against a thinly veneered savagery, the cause, we would go so: far as to say, of true Christianity against the powers of Hell-inspired cruelty and all imaginable evil." * * * * Shall we now slacken our efforts, shall we go back one iota from the decision that the wrongs of Belgium and of Serbia shall be righted, that the robbers of 1870 shall be made to disgorge their foully acquired booty; that an end, once and for all, shall be put to an aggressive militant autocracy, which has threatened the whole world with the loss of national liberties and rights? "No, a thousand times no," says in effect the British Prime Minis- • ter. We must "Go On or Go Under!" There is the present situation in a nutshell.. He who prates of peace whilst yet the Hun power is unbroken, whilst Hun devilry still afflicts and horrifies the world, is a. traitor to his country, a traitor to his wife and children, a traitor to his fellow countrymen one and all. He is only fit to become a helot, a serf, under Hun tyranny. * * ■» •* As to the mercy a defeated Britain —and with Britain her oversea States —can expect from a victorious Germany, let the workers of Britain —aye, and those, too, of Australia- and New 'Zealand—read of the fate of the hapless Serb, shot down without mercy, driven into exile by the whips of a merciless Hun soldiery. Let them read the official reports as to the treatment of the unfortunate Belgians. Let them —especially if they are fathers—ponder over the unspeakable villanies of the Huns in regard to the young girls of Lille. Let them—but

no," the list of proofs of Hun scoimdrelism might be prolonged indefinitely—just grip the one fact that the Huns hate us British with a-hatred tenfold more malignant than that with which they have hated the Serbs, the Belgians, the French. It is a thousand pities that the trades union agitators in England, the Irish Sinn Feiners, the Australian. "No" contemptibles, and our own New Zealand Bolsheviks of the "Red Fed." • type could not find themselves under Hun rule for just one week. But of that, worse luck though, through no action of theirs there is but little chance. "Go On or Go Under." It is the only war cry that the Allies can think of listening to. The more strenuously we "go on" the greater the sacrifices we make, the sterner our spirit of determination, the more substantial the concrete practical results of that determination, the less the possibilities of our "going under" with its necessary corollary of the- utter ruin of the British Empire and the enslavement of our nation under a Prussian tyranny.