The Rangitikei Advocate. TWO EDITIONS DAILY. WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 1918. THE THACKER CHARGES.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XLII, Issue 11473, 27 February 1918, Page 4

The Rangitikei Advocate. TWO EDITIONS DAILY. WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 1918. THE THACKER CHARGES.

THE inquiry into the charges of Dr. Thacker against members of the Medical Boards operating in Canterbury lias resulted in the finding that every reasonable man had come to in long anticipation of the more ponderous methods of the Commission. The latter was too courteous, perhaps, to characterise thorn as mere twaddle, though that would have been a proper judicial finding. The Commission contents itself with saying that the charges had not been proven and with administering a very light rebuke to Lieut.-Colonel Fitzgerald, and this was probably done with its tongue in its cheek. The report states "that; ing the antagonistic attitude of mind that medical examiners often have to deal witii, and considering the largo number of men they have examined without any complaint being lodged, the court considers that as a whole they have acted with judgment and forbearance.” .The cha-ges were not, it will be remembered, that tiio medical officers whoso duty it was to examine Canterbury recruits had attacked any of them ivith their deadly scalpels with a view to satisfying themselves by post mortem examination whether their mere surface examinations had been correct or not. It was something that cut. more deeply than that. The doctors HAD INSULTED THEM. One could imagine the meek and lowly recruit coming into those dens of sawbones, keyed to the utmost intensity of desire to do everything they were ssked to do, only to go forth broken-hearted, to bleat to Dr. Thacker of their wrongs, and

start the machinery of a nation to investigate their case. Where have the wicked doctors laid them? For how could they possibly have survived this latest type of atrocity, to be insulted thus?

It is ;i thousand pities that the Government and the country are obliged to demonstrate in so ponderous and expensive a manner as by Commission of Inquiry the non-ex-istence of nullity. It would probably have been more befitting the actual conditions if the inquiry had turned on the insults to which doctors are exposed from unwilling recruits. In any case it must be quite patent to everybody that in the putting through of more than a hundred thousand recruits, willing and unwilling, the doctors have bad under their hands every variety of human beings up the gamut of militant psychology or stubbornness from the baa lamb to the pig and the lion. Considering, therefore, as the Commission report says, “the antagonistic attitude of mind that medical examiners often have to deal with’’ either they must have dealt with them in the way of being all things to all men — with an adroitness end craft and an absence of bad language really remarkable or else the supply of Thackers has not been 'onything like the demand which existed in other parts of the Dominion , For lack of Thackers, indeed, what atrocities in the way of insult to lamb-like recruits in the Wellington, Auckland and Hawke’s Bay districts are now only rumbling in the consciousness of the victims.

It seems to us high time that some legal or other restriction was placed on political sensation-mongers. One who takes up that role must be over-credulous, soft of head and jelly-like of heart, or one who utilises imaginary or trumped up grievances for the purpose of damaging and discrediting his political opponents. But whether fool or political conspirator he ought not to be allowed the absolute license in besmirching people that he possesses under the present state of political law and usage. It would not be advisable, even if it were possible, to repress him altogether, because probably once in a century he justifies his existence by discovering and publishing an actual wrong. But where, as in this Canterbury case, it was plain to every reasonable man from the first that there was nothing in it, the man who asks for a commission of Inquiry should be compelled to pay the cost. For the matter amounted to this: that if it was proved that the medical examiners had not used rather strong language to a few obstructive recruits they certainly ought to have done, and if, on the other hand, the charge had’been clearly and in-

disputably sheeted home to them it mattered not a scrap. It is the difference between tweedledeo and tweedledum, which is so small that all science has hitherto been unable to define it.