The Daily News MONDAY, APRIL 28, 1913. CAMP OUTRAGES.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 288, 28 April 1913, Page 4

The Daily News MONDAY, APRIL 28, 1913. CAMP OUTRAGES.

The Territorial camps are apparently not the happy homes they might reasonably be expected to he. At the Dunedin camp an unfortunate journalist who I happened to incur the displeasure of a section of the men, who, naturally, are l mentally equipped much better than he was to judge of the quality of his work, was incontinently ducked in the nearest river. According to our Dunedin contemporaries, this outrage, if not inspired by the officers, was at least winked at by them, and no steps were taken by those in charge to prevent it. A some what similar incident, with a less un- ' fortuitous ending, however, is reported from the Oringi camp. Our own representative, who, with others of the staff, was cheerfully spared at considerable inconvenience to ourselves, to attend to his duty to his country, was made the victim, of a singularly similar attack. Possessing the. proper journalistic instinct, he naturally conceived that after his country his duty lay to his paper, and he! reported fully the details of the unseemly attempt to break camp in which a number of tlie Territorials took part. He ventured no opinions, but simply recorded facts, and that he was quite within his province in doing so must be evident to everybody, even to those who are not blessed with the brains and the intelligence of the mob of irresponsible youths who sought.to sit in judgment upon one of their comrades. Had it not been for the loyalty of the members of his company, the young man concerned would have been subjected to physical violence, and, as it was, the camp was in a disorderly uproar over the incident, which threatened to assume ugly proportions for some considerable time. We are not so much concerned with the incident as wc are with the principle, for, coming on top of the Dunedin outrage, it suggests that the camps are not efficiently administered, If the officers were attending properly to their duties there should have been, no chance of an outrage of this sort occurring. It would have been promptly nipped in the bud, I instead of being allowed to extend over ! a considerable period. If the Territorials i —or at least an unruly of. them —are to be allowed to take the law into their own hands, all discipline vanishes at once. If the men had a grievance they had a remedy, but the remedy lay in the hands of their superior officers. As a matter oMact, the report to which they took objection, and which has since been fully substantiated, was not written by the man whom they sought to castigate, noivw'as it sent by him to the Wellington Post. It was sent from this office, and we make the admission in the confident anticipation that they will seek to sack our premises next and hang the whole of the.'staff on the summit of Marsland Hill I as a lesson to all other journalists that .they must never tell the truth. So far as we are personally concerned, we do I not care the proverbial "tinker's curse" ! what these wretched hoodlums may j think, but we are concerned at the incident, and the Dunedin incident, as af- ! footing the Territorial movement as a whole. If the camps are threatened by mob law they must be newly officered, and put in charge of men who have n sufficient realisation of their military responsibilities to firmly repress demonstrations of this sort. It is significant that there should have been reports of maladministration from the Dunedin, Wellington and Auckland camps, and the public will not be satisfied unless a comprehensive and searching enquiry is made into thfe circumstances attaching to each case, and the offenders are properly punished. Our boys are not playing at soldiering; they are being made soldiers in the most serious acceptance of the word. If they are to be subjected to hazing of this sort, while their officers look calmly on, we cannot bo expected to object if there is a large increase in the army of passive resisters, and if parents decline, in the face of th 3 law, to allow their sons to attend the camps. These incidents have got to be officially enquired into, and enquired into at once, in the fullest possible manner.