CONSCRIPTION

Southland Times, Issue 23991, 5 December 1939, Page 3

CONSCRIPTION

To The Editor Sir, —In these times of stress and anguish, it is pleasing to think of anything that affords consolation. Our young pilots of the Air Force are giving their lives for us. They will never, many of them, live out their lives, found families, rise to positions of honour and trust. But, on the other band, our pacifists, our Labourites, all those who oppose conscription, can hope to live on. They could hardly be spared. They will get married and their offspring will rule New Zealand and shirk as their fathers shirked. They will also have the approval of their consciences and will, of course, in the next world, have an even better time than they had in this. When this war is over, won by those who died to keep them free, they will hold forth from pulpit and platform, denouncing the wickedness of war, urging disarmament and submission to violence, just as they did between 1918 and 1939. By so doing they will make another war inevitable, but in that war which they will have caused, they and their sons will take no part. Once more the noble and the courageous will die for the ignoble and the shirkers, and New Zealand will be inhabited by the refuse of mankind. Then some other race, a race not emasculated by pacifism and disloyalty, will take possession of these islands, wiping out the democratic remnants of the race which triumphed at Waterloo and Trafalgar.—Yours, etc., J. P. DAKIN. December 2, 1939.