EXEMPTION FROM MILITARY SERVICE.

Otago Daily Times, Volume 17149, Issue 17149, 31 October 1917, Page 4

EXEMPTION FROM MILITARY SERVICE.

Three conferences between managers from the Legislative Council and thb House of Representatives respecting the contentious clause in the Expeditionary Forces Bill, which provided for exemptions from the obligation of military service, failed to produce any agreement. The effect of the conferences was, indeed, to make it clear that agreement on the point was impossible. Tliis was hardly surprising, since there was only a majority of three in the Lower House in favour of the clause, while there was a majority of seven opposed to it in the Upper House. As no agreement could bo arrived at, the Government decided yesterday that the whole Bill should be dropped. This seems to us to be, on the whole, a distinctly wise decision. It preserves tho principle of universality of service, subject only to the right of appeal to a Military Service Board for exemption on the ground of public interest, or undue hardship, or, in a limited sense, of conscientious religious objection to service. That prm ciple was deliberately accepted when the Military Service Act was passed last session, and it has on the whole been justified by the experience which the country has had of the operation of the Act. The moment tihe Government proposed to niake exemptions, difficulties were bound to arise. And they did arise. The original proposal in the Expeditionary Forces Bill was to exempt persons in holy orders or ministers of specified religious bodies or denominations. Even this exemption was not generally desired by the churches. One Church, indeed, the Unitarian Church, asked that its ministers should be excluded from the scope of the exemption. The Roman Catholic Clruren claimed, on the other hand, that by reason of the vows which its priests and theological -students had taken they should be exempted. It was recognised, however, that if exemption were granted to the clergymen of any one denomination it should be granted to clergymen of other denominations, even though these might have been quite content with the provisions of the Military Service Act, which enabled them to secure exemption for such of their number as were certified by their official heads to. be indispensable. The statutory exemption of clergymen as a cfcass excited, in the circumstances, no opposition. There was precedent for it and cogent arguments were to be advanced in favour of it.

The proposal to exempt schoolteachers opened up a much wider and much more controversial issue. Why should teachers be specially selected for statutory exemption to the exclusion of persons engaged in a number of essential industries? So far, however, as the proposal affected teachers, it was in reality narrowed down to a simple issue". Stripped of all confusing side issues, the real question was whether Marist Brothers should be statutorily exempted. The inclusion in the exemption clause of those public school teachers—a comparatively small proportion of the total number of public school teachers of military age—who have not yet joined the colours was an insincere device with the object of cloaking the desire to create a. special safeguard for a particular class of teachers. The public school teachers did not seek exemption and apparently' they resented the suggestion that exemption should be thrust upon them allegedly in the interests of the pupils in the btate schools. We hope that nobody is indifferent concerning the maintenance of an efficient system of instruction in the public schools. Most people will agree, however, that it would be extremely invidious, after several hundreds of public school teachers have been accepted as soldiers, that the rest of them who are of military age and possess the physical qualifications to fit thorn for military service, should have been prevented from entering the Expeditionary Force. Nor will it be credited that the educational authorities of the State will be unable to make such temporary provision for the staffing of the schools as will admit of the work of instruction being carried on with reasonable efficiency during the period of military service of the public school teachers who have yet to be called up. It was not, however, over the application of the law to the case of the public school teachers that any difficulty arose. It was over the case of the Marist Brothers that opinion in Parliament was sharply divided. It was represented in Parliament that they were so few in numbers that the exemption of them would make no difference. The fallacy of this argument has, however, been effectively exposed by the Evening Post. " If," it says, " we are to treat 35 men, or even 20 men, as a negligible quantity, a fortiori we must so treat every individual man, and he will bo entitled so to treat himself. The bottom will thus be knocked completely out of every recruiting scheme, whether voluntary or complsory, and everybody will be entitled to look to somebody else to win the war." The only other question is whether the Marist Brothers are indispensable to their Church for the maintenance of its system of education. Tit however, a question which the Mil"tar- S«r"icc Boards are competent to deci , just as they decide the question of the indispensability of all other classes of reservists. In all the circumstances there is no reason to resret the sacrifice of the Expeditionary Forces Bill in so far as it proposed to modify the essential feature f the original Military Service Act. We may add that it is satisfactory to learn that the divergence of opinion on the point in the Cahinet itself has not been pro-

ductive of any friction so serious as, in the opinion of too imaginative people, to threaten tho very existence of the National Government.