Rangitikei Advocate. TWO EDITIONS DAILY. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 1915.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XL, Issue 11435, 27 November 1915, Page 4

Rangitikei Advocate. TWO EDITIONS DAILY. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 1915.

THAT blessed phrase, “Liberty of the subject,’’ No Thoroughfare. seems des-

tined to soon become as obsolete as the language of Adam. Things have come to such a pass now that a man who is frantically afraid that he will he called up to go to the front is not allowed to go where he listoth in order to escape. Only recently it was decided that a passport was required hy anyone of military age desiring to leave the Dominion. But it is evident that fraud was being practised and that passports which were supplied to some men, who really did not desire to leave, had been handed to rabbit-hearted shirkers enabling them to depart. That has now been render'd impossible. The person who obtains a passport must also supply bis photo so that be may be identified as the one to whom the passport has been granted. The gate is, therefore, double barred, and there is no way of getting through or over it for the man of adult proportions but with the heart of an infinitely smaller insect. So phrases which have been coined and become crystalised with the conditions they represented are now being displaced with tbo more modern conceptions of general duty, community of interest and of fair distribution of sacrifice.

IT is probable that if,- say, five out of ten A Farmer’s Trouble. of the farm e r s of New Zealand were given their choice between a night in the trenches or the filling in of their nice new income tax papers they would choose the trenches. To the man who keeps a faithful record o f his business transactions there is nothing specially difficult in supplying the Commissioner of Taxes with the information he requires. All business men have annually to make returns that are quite as involved and intricate as those now required from the farmers. But to the man who relies entirely on his bank book, and a specially elusive memory of things, the problem of complying with the Government requirements is one requiring great turmoil of brain. Still, there is one easy and pleasant method out of the trouble, and that is to guess as nearly as possible all the items and let it go at that. The Commissioner of Taxes may rage, but if there are no books lie would be powerless to prove one in the wrong. He would scarcely be able, to estimate one’s income more exactly by examining the galls on one's hands or oy the plumbing of the depths of one’s wrinkles. As there will, no doubt, be at least twenty thousand farmers, whose sieve-like memories will be the only memorandum of their transactions, and who can only make returns according to the best of their belief, only those who make flagrantly false returns of thoir income need fear fine or incarceration. The tax, indeed, will not be without compensations it it should introduce the general keeping of books, as it certainly will. There is nothing which is such a corrective ol slopping money about as the cold record of the doing of it.

NOW that Greece has cordially and gracefully acceded What Nest? to the demands of the Allies one is, induced, to ask, “What next?” Wo have gained the one assurance that if our troops come reeling oack from Austro-German-Bulgarian attack we shall not also have to encounter a Grecian army. We also know now that there is no fear of disarmament or internment and tho relief of the Allies may he read in the tremendous preparations to carry on a long war which have already been made at Salonika in the extension of barracks and in other ways. We find, however, now that the most insistent question w© are asking ourselves is as to whether our troops are likely'to he compelled to retreat into Greece and, if so, what then. The fact that the Entente has practically compelled Greece to play the part of a benevolent neutral in the event of its army being obliged to cross the frontier need not necessarily be regarded as proving the actual existence of tho fear that it must necessarily do so. No General now takes his army into perilous positions without providing tor a possible retreat, and while the intentions of Greece were ambiguous and uncertain it would have been madness to take an army inland with the spectre of Greek hostility looming behind. Still such a thing as a temporary retreat into Greece is not an impossibility. That would evolve the crisis of the position. If the Bulgarians also crossed the frontier in pursuit it would be impossible for the Greeks to remain merely interested spectators. It would almost certainly provoke them to attack the Bulgarians and thus unreservedly throw in their lot with us.