CORRESPONDENCE

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18627, 24 July 1930, Page 13

CORRESPONDENCE

QUESTION OF CONSCIENCE. To the Editor of the “ Timaru Herald.” Sir, —Advocates of compulsory military training, whether correspondents j to your columns, or interrogators | “What did you do in the war?” or the honourable member for Clutna, directly j indirectly, are not slow to ung in j the shirker, rotter, and waster. That | it occasionally covers them with con- ! fusion, makes for the comfort of some j sadly maligned people. We have seen men go down under their packs while j expiating crime, and it makes us slow j to judge and lenient in condemnation. There is a class of shirker, waster, or . rotter, however, for whom I have as 1 little use as a mill’s with the pin out. 1 He is the chap who starts the dogs barking in the international kennels. , When they have barked to exhaustion ) point without producing desired re- j suits, this particular brand of rotter encourages them to renewed effort, i sometimes with promises, sometimes with threats. The mailed fist of Wil- ; helm was made on the shirkers, rotters and wasters’ anvil. His boast that “our future was on the seas” was coined in the same trio’s mint. Of our; ■.'lves, was it not the boast of at least a section i of the British people that “The oak leviathan whose huge ribs make her clay creator the vain title take of Lord of thee, and arbiter of war?” The builders of the first dreadnought, t through inspired channels, told the j world at large, that their latest crea- j tion scrapped the navies of France, ; and Germany, and converted strategically the Keil Canal into a mud bank! [ And if these boasts produced results in piling up armaments to the great | profit of theffer,w r , it also brought re- ! prisals of which only the North Sea j has the true record. And who pays? j The builders of the Queen Mary or j Blucher? Not one penny—propaganda i dropped by allied a’irmen in the German lines, said:—

The rich make war—the poor pay.” Move upward, working out the beast,

And let the ape and tiger die.” So wrote one of the world’s great poets. Every lover of his kind has said the same thing since the dawn of reason. Everyone of them has been looked upon as a shirker by a certain section. “Resist not evil,” said Christ, and they crucified him. The greatest blasphemy of any time is the church parade. And it was a crime to dodge it! Conscientious objectors saw it in all its hideous distortion of the great Teacher’s commands. They were clinked as shirkers. For four years the ape painted the world red. For a dozen years, he has been suffffering a bad recovery—skilfully and surreptitously supplied with pick-me-ups by pastmasters in the art of mixing and administering international dope. "Europe bristles with bayonets,” says the member for Clutha. The Italian dictator reminds the world that his nation numbers 40,000,000 souls! The shambling ape, greedy for another debauch moves here and there throughout the world. The war to end war has yet to be fought. ..." In this thing, the Lord pardon thy servant that when my master goeth into the House of Rimmon to worship there, and he leaneth on my hand and I bow myself in the House of Rimmon; when I bow down myself in the House of Rimmon the Lord pardon thy servant in this thing.” The man whose conscience will not permit him to do likewise, whose sincerity is beyond doubt, can surely be allowed to go in peace. His moral courage is greater than the captains of the hosts of Syria, for he prefers imprisonment, and deprivation of civil rights to violation of conscience. . . . And that seems good to me. But what will not be good is to allow a profit mongering Gehazi to escape. ... A prince of liars he would trade the very ashes of our fathers for a talent of silver. . . . imperil the liberty we risk all for, for a change of raiment. To the wall with him and all his tribe.—l am, etc., A TISHBITE.

WAKE UP SOUTH CANTERBURY! To the Editor of the ” Timaru Herald.” Sir,—Not long ago the public of South Canterbury awakened to the fact that the condition of our Public Hospital was a discredit to the district and to the Health Department of the Dominion. The facts of the case evoked no contradiction, and there is no need to repeat them. We felt a burden had been lifted from our civic conscience when the Hospital Board : decided for a worthy scheme of reconI struction, which would bring the Timaru Hospital into line with the other up-to-date hospitals of the Dominion. Any local Hospital Board or firm of architects doing general work would expect their plans to be submitted for the approval of the Government experts, who have superintended the building of new hospitals in other places. In this case such plans were drawn up and approved, and the ex- ; perts said if you are to carry out these plans you must begin with this block. The Board, as any men of sense would do, accepted this opinion. Dr Valintine approved, the Minister for Health gave his consent, and everything was ready for calling for tenders for the work. The local bodies, I have been informed, were to raise £IO,OOO, and the Government subsidy was to be £SOO a year for interest and sinking fund. Yesterday, at Temuka, the news is sprung on us that the Government is

withdrawing its offer, and the Hospital Board is prepared to take it lying down. You, sir, in your sub-leader of the 23rd., take up a position which is hard to understand unless it arises through ignorance of the plans. You write of the proposed building as an administrative block as though it were to provide no accommodation for work with patients. As a matter of fact, only one quarter of it be occupied by the administrative staff. It contained the out-patients ward, the dental clinic, and the dispensary for the whole hospital. But this is not your fundamental error. You write about “beginning at the wrong end.” Where else would you begin? Even a layman can see that the right site for the wards is where they are now, not facing the street on the eastward side. The hospital is always full. Would you have the Board pull one ward down and leave the patients under the pine trees while the new ward was being built? The first new ward to be built is on the site of the present administrative offices. It surprises me to read the way you are prepared to see us set aside a work so imperative and necessary for the public welfare. Surely South Canterbury has a just claim in the matter of this subsidy. Has any work a prior claim on the nation’s money than the care of the nation’s sick? Compared with other public expenditure the cost was trifling both to the Government and to the local bodies concerned. Times may be hard, but this work would have made them easier for not a few. It will be to our lasting discredit if we start economising on our sick at a time when the Rugby Unions cannot build stands fast enough to seat the public. I trust, Mr Editor, we may count on you giving those plans a close inspection, and lending your aid in seeing that this injustice is not done to South Canterbury.—l am, etc.

H. W. MONAGHAN, St. Mary’s Vicarage, Timaru. July 23.

(Some explanation will doubtless be made by the Hospital Board in view of its ready acceptance of Dr Valintine’s edict. As for the suggestion that the Board is “beginning at the wrong end,” we ought to point out that the phrase is not ours, but was used by a member of the Board when the Department modified the Board’s original proposals—Ed. of the “Timaru Herald.”)