The Daily News. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 21, 1912. SOME MORAL LESSONS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 184, 21 December 1912, Page 4

The Daily News. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 21, 1912. SOME MORAL LESSONS.

It is not too early to draw the moral lesson involved in the, uprising of the Balkan peoples and to acknowledge the martial efficiency so surprisingly manifested by each of the four little States. This- is a fact which older and greater nations dare not overlook; it touches their-.own future too nearly. "In war," said Napoleon, '"the moral is to the material as three to one." In what particular, then, does the moral of ' the Turks differ from that of their, enemies? Not in the valor of the common soldier.The Osmanli, so far as wc can tell, is fighting with all his old stubborn ten-

acity and contempt of death —at least in the main theatre of war; but so did the Russians in Manchuria. Not in faith or in zeal for his cause. Nizam and Redif are willing as ever to go hungry and ill-clad, so long as they have boots to march in and cartridges to' slay the Giaour withal, "tt is in their mental attitude towards the foes that they are proving themselves inferior to the peasant soldiery they despise," says the London Pall Mall Gazette. "It is the disastrous over-confldence manifesting itself in 'frantic boast and foolish word' which lias forbidden them to make, adequate provision for victory, and has laid them open to humiliation at the hands of those whom they have for centuries trampled under foot. It is the pride which has always in military history gone before a fall, the consequence of which a military aristocracy will, it seems, never learn to estimate. It is the fault of the Prussians before Jena; of the Parisians who shouted 'a Berlin'; of the Russians in their contempt for the 'yellow dwarfs'; to come nearer home, of ourselves before we were chastened by ' Nicholson's Nek/Colerrso and Magersfontcin. Contrast with the.se melancholy omens of a falling State the evidences of capacity for future greatness shown by Bulgar and Serb and Greek. Since the memorable December when the first-named, at a moment when their army was in chaos owing to the withdrawal of its Russian officers, routed their present allies at Slivnitza and drove them headlong back to Pirot, there has been no tendency to underrate the military worth of the Bulgarian soldier, who has now proved himself the equal, man for man, of any troops in the world. But the Servians were discredited by that disastrous campaign and by a later atrocious incident in their history, while the Greek Army wa s considered to be wiped out of account by the fiasco of the frivolous and feather-headed adventure of 1897. The stains have been washed from the banners of Servia and Greece at Elassona and Kumanovo, and Kirk Kilisse has gilded that of Bulgaria with fresh glory. AVhatever the future may bring, the opinion of those who held that, once united, the Balkan peoples would prove themselves worthy of their distant past has been justified to the hilt. The progress of the campaign is another strong rebuke to those who preach that wealth controls war. Wealth cannot buy moral qualities; rather it is a destruction of them. A little people and poor, which is willing for sacrifice, can stand in arras against the might of a great Empire. Sacrifice, we mean, not on the field of battle, but in the long-drawn preparation which makes a nation fit to win. The Germans before 1870 were a poor people; the Boers and Japanese were both poor people. The curse of wealth uncontrolled by a national spirit of sacrifice is that it divides a nation against itself. For wealth, in its visible expression, is the wealth of individuals. The nations which rise are the nations in which distinctions of class and wealth are sunk in a common effort for the country's good, in which every man is ready to give what he has to the country's cause, and in which it is recognised that of him to whom much is given, much is required. The darkness of night is yet over the ultimate issues of the struggle in the Balkans, but the warning to the nations is blazoned across the sky as by a lightning flash: 'Be ready, be modest, be one!' No nation needs to take the warning to heart more than the British." "Are we to be shamed by the people of the Balkans as we were shamed by the Germans and the Japanese!" asks the Pall Mall. "A century ago the German States, crushed under the heel of Napoleon, sent their youth in dumb obedience to perish in the snows of Russia. Sirty years later, the German Empire gave the law to,the Continent, the victor of Koniggratz and Sedan. Fifty years ago, Japan was in the darkness of mediaeval feudalism; forty years later she hurled back the power of Russia, and is to-day the leader of Asia and the mistress of the Pacific. But tie last instance is the most striking of all. It is but five-and-thirty years since the

Bulgars and the Serbs were slaves, crushed beneath an age-long tyranny, trembling at the sight of a fez, stretching appealing hands to Europe to deliver them. To-day their armies are pouring through the passes to achieve the deliverance, as every peasant soldier believes, of their brethren still in chains. We have to acknowledge the bitter truth that the whole of the white soldiery of our Empire would be unequal, as far as numbers go, to meet them. What is the underlying meaning of the uprising of the German Empire, of Japan, of Bulgaria, Servia, Greece and Montenegro? Just this. That they have become free men, and the first use to which they luve put,their freedom is to offer their lives willingly on the altar of their country's service. Willingly; hut not stupidly, as sheep led to the slaughter. Gorman, Japanese, Bulgar and Serb have fitted themselves by training to carry the banner of their country to victory."