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Observer, Volume XXXVI, Issue 38, 27 May 1916, Page 3

We can attack our principal enemy in his own house. We can do this, and we must do it. We must leave no means

unneglected which are calculated to bring the end of the war nearer. This we owe to our own people, to their future, to our fieJd greys, and to their wives and children. That English wives and children happen to perish in such undertakings is matter for regret, and we do regret it; but one German field grey man is of more value in our eyes than a dozen English women and children, and a single German village must be more valuable to us than the entire City of London.—Hamburger " Rundschaw."

The reputation for incompetence, browbeating, bad faith and chicane, which is attaching itself to the local military agencies, is doubtless undeserved by the majority of officers engaged in them; but it is nevertheless based on facts, many of them very widely notorious; and what makes the facts do mischief is that the War Office only repudiates offenders in the abstract, and in the concrete seems to leave them to go on their way, unremoved, uncorrected, and apparently incorrigible. Such a contrast between profession and performance does not look well in any Department at any time; but in a War Department during war time it is bound to make a specially unfortunate impression on public opinion. — London •' Chronicle."

It is the revenue derived from tollgates that has enabled the controlling authorities to make good roads. The Mountain Koad, from Waipuku to Stratford, was getting into a very bad state when authority was given for a toll-gate to be erected for the express purpose of making a first-class road. It would be a mistake to kick away this ladder which has helped the local authorities over their difficulties.—Taranaki "Herald."

By resisting the repeated agitations for local camps, and making himself unpopular, Mr Allen has saved the country huge expense in the construction of same, and has avoided the scattering of the limited training and administrative staffs, with poorer results. Those poorer results would have been represented in the difference between the scattered instead of the concentrated efforts of a depleted staff, and must have gravely affected the efficiency and probably the strength of the New Zealand ExpeditioriHiy Force in the field. Expressed another way. New Zealand could never have done what she has done and is doing but for Mr Allen's policy of concentiated effort.—Wellington "Post."