TROOPS FOR THE COLONY VERSUS "SELF-RELIANCE."

Colonist, Volume XII, Issue 1172, 18 December 1868, Page 2

TROOPS FOR THE COLONY VERSUS "SELF-RELIANCE."

Some people, whose enthusiasm we cannot but respect, are prepared to send " every man to the Front," and to " spend the last, shilling" we possess in the stamping out of the native war. We make every allowance for the fervor which produces the expression of such sentiments, which spring from the warm impulses of generous minds. But still, when we find such expressions, not spoken in the presence of an audience, before whom it is not always easy to adopt a quiet deliberate tone—but committed to calculated writing, and then transferred to the still colder printing, we are induced to npplv the dissecting knife with less tender hand, and examine as to the real meaning of the words. Of course it is pure hyperbole, because, whsn it comes to that pass, there is the. plain practical fact, that, if the last man, and the last shilling are to be sent and spent, people will see that it is time to reserve a few shillings, in order to transfer themselves to other latitudes ; for it seems to us that those who . loft the Old Country to hotter thamfelves, and to find room under strange stars for their children, in a clime where they were told taxation was Ipss, and work more plentiful and more remunerative than at. home, —such persons will not care to shy in a country where not only the present hut future generations will be crushed by a terrible legacy of debt. If people nre taken from productive labor to do fighting, while England has tens of thousands of men trained to perform it. far cheaper man for man than.the productive settler can be, then there is a gross .waste of men and means ; of men not only for the present, but for the future, because, in addition to the loss of time and paralysing of business which follows the removal of the citizen from civil work, there is the fact, all too frequently experienced, that men, once accustomed to camp life, rarely settle down again to sober employ* ment and the monotous pursuits of peßce. It is true that America has shown an example never before witnessed, of a vast army dispersing, nnd its members going beck to the farm, the warehouse, and the shop after fighting one of the grandest and noblest; wars that, modern times have seen. But there is a great difference between the position of this small Colony and that of one of the widest empires in Christendom j and our experience has been that the camp in most enses (there are of course not a few exceptions) unfits its occupant for the steady labor of life. The cost of a Colonial soldier is at least four time 3 that of a regular, and experience does not prove that the more costly article is the more serviceable. It may be a very charming thing to contemplate^ as the Ministry apparently have for months been contemplating, the glory they would achieve by doing their own work with their own hands. But week after week saw the vision of glory fade into grievous gloom, and at last conviction has forced itself on the minds of the mass of the people of the Colony that the men in power are not the men for the emergency. Province after Province has pronoupced against them, and they still adhere to the policy of refusing to accept aid by means of the Imperial troops. A large amount of patronage is opened to a Ministry which has a kind of sniaS stancing army into which it can send a variety of men who may be " somebody's friends," but who belong to that class to which we have before referred as the educated men who do nothing to make the country yield its pro. duoe j men who have no trade or profession by thr hand, who cannot work, who oumber the rails of everyday life, and to whom, in military m in civil• a^artmeats, c, paternal m t kjn.djy awwamwrt