VOLUNTARY ENLISTMENT

New Zealand Times, Volume XLI, Issue 9257, 26 January 1916, Page 6

VOLUNTARY ENLISTMENT

To the Editor “NZ. Times.”

Sfr, —Your report in (to-day’s issue (January Mth) of the Wellington Racing Carnival awakens strange tnoaglits. Are we really in the midst of a mortal struggle for our national existence '{ Sureiy it ca»not be. We others, who find life more dithcult every day, witn continually rising prices and leas purchasing power of our incomes, read that iiS-IoH more than last year passed through the totalisator on Saturday alone. That shows to what class the £7,000,000 of last year's war profits were consigned, and also the kind of hands into which it is now being distributed. I suppose that even racegoers would acknowledge that a large class of disreputable persons travel round the country from one race meeting to another. If anyone in Wellington on Saturday morning saw the hundreds of young men (and such young men 1) proceeding by car and train to the races, he would well ask, “Is it for such as these that our best and noblest died at Gallipoli and elsewhere?" Sir, I have been an anti-oonscriptionist; I am now an enemy of voluntary enlistment, because it is evidently a national danger of the gravest kind. What? Shall wa by a system of anti-evolution cull out our bravest, most ardent, most generous youths to die or rot with disease on foreign shores while thousands of men, callous to all manly feeling, hold orgiea of gambling and dissipation, careless of the blood which cries aloud to Heaven? If, after a year and a half of ghastly war, such is the spirit of New Zealand, then I say, concerning our dead and wounded heroes, that voluntary enlistment is a mistake, and that the phrase, "Butchered to make a'Eoman holiday," takes on a now and terrible significance. —I am, etc., . ■'•~ v