NEW DEFENCE SCHEME.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 14853, 2 December 1911, Page 7

NEW DEFENCE SCHEME.

PROGRESS IN. CANTERBURY. [B r ,*• Chbistchxtbch, Friday. : fr the course of a long report on the working of- the new defence scheme in S the | Canterbury district Od«-l Burnett Stuart refers to expressions of pnbbc to appointment because the scheme has not been developed more rapidly. .- Colonel Stuart says he. has been unceasingly at work on the scheme for a year, and does not share the disappointment. The public had no appreciation of-the amount of preliminary work invelved. ■ — . - / , • The Department had to evolve an entirely new organisation, draw up regulations and instructions, lay down establishments, and create machinery which ■ would work smoothly, select and train .permanent officers and distribute them, rewrite the army list, provide arms, uniform, equipment, and stores, arrange for the issuing, maintaining, and accounting 1 of stores, take stock of existing defence properties, and adjust terms of owner-

ship or lease. The work of compiling the regulations alone, the Colonel points out, took six months, for it had to be done with extreme care. Such work was essential to the foundation of the system, but it made no show in the public eye. Colonel Stuart says a mistake was made in commencing the training of troops before organisation, and other preliminaries were complete, and parades were hold before the Department was ready. # Yet the scheme was not a failure, and it had not yet been tried. ■".In conclusion, the Colonel added : "We ,are working men, with our way to make, and could not spare time to devote ourselves to a failuro or a dead Act. 1 ■ know;of no intention to modify the Act. I.only know we are not quite ready to give the ship the final push and send it down to the ' water. In a month or so 4 >'e shall be ready."