THE SOLDIER.

Observer, Volume XL, Issue 11, 15 November 1919, Page 2

THE SOLDIER.

A judge of the Supreme Court lately said that we shall go booming along on the top of high prices until we "topple over the edge, ,, but even His Honour may be misinformed. Qne reason why ruin may* be staved off Is that this wonderful country lias been spending its OWN money, and that much of the said cash has never left it. Self-support, in fact, is going to be the mainstay of the Dominion, and we can't topple if we can induce tens of thousands of strong young British people to come over and help us, and, incidentally, to help themselves and the Empire.

Now that the war is over, and there is no prospect of another dust up for a year or two, people with large sums of war-made capital are very willing to speculate it. If the speculation turns, not to chaffering in land, but to working it, and particularly in manning the vas.t empty acres of this productive country, there is going to be no "topple." If on the other hand, money is locked up, the gentleman with the job forbids the stranger a share, and new industries are hampered by a too great canniness—then, of course, the topple era will soon arrive.

In the vital matter of finding house-TOom for our own population without arranging for a flood of immigrants, the New Zealand trust system will be a handicap. If, for instance, it should become fashionable to build permanent homes, and not the evanescent weather-board variety, it would be all to the good if the big brickmakers did not prevent the small brickmakers from burning bricks.

It would be useftil for New Zealand to remember that its own trees arc one of its. finest assets, and that to export timber that ought to be available for the Dominion,, is a crime. There is just as much need for the pioneer in 1920 as there was in 1840, and as great a work for him to do. Apparently the Government is going to be mighty careful about the selection of the ''best class." The best class of pioneer is the physically strong person. There is no reason why the strong young man, who has been brought up in the heart of London, should not make as good a pioneer as his Cockney forefathers, who percolated into every lone land in the world.

The new hand with nothing to unlearn is the best hand. The old pioneers were not molly coddled, but they easily got on to the land. Spoon-feeding will kill any country, and the old style of dumping strong men in new countries, and letting them win out by their own exertions, still has its virtues. The weak went to the wall in the old days, and the weak will go to the wall in these days, and no legislation will stop them.

If this splendid country is to be the home of a greater and stronger nation we shall hare to compete with other nations. It is said that even now large batches of British ex-service men are going to the United States in preference to the British colonies. That is to say, a country already having a very large population ie increasing at the expense of young British countries, which are comparatively empty. New Zealand has to show the British immigrant that he can do as well in New Zealand as he can in the United States or the Argentine—that it is a better thing to live under the flag of the Empire than under the flag of a Republic. That people of his

And the Girl.

ON the whole it seems very good of super-soldiers to have permitted daughters of normal foreigners to marry them. For instance, an Australian hero distributed his favours so generously in Prance that when he left he had eight French wives. They would be able to boast all the remainder of their lives that they had once had the happiness, to be beloved by a super-soldier.

A New Zealand soldier, recently writing in a newspaper, declared that English people are very "simple." His own name is unequivocally English, but it is to be observed that he has evolved from the simplicity and stupidity of his forefathers and become acute. Both British people and Colonial people during the war became preternaturally acute, and the divorce cases, which are so large a feature of present-day social life, are the result. In many cases Colonial soldiers have "pitched a tale" to the simple girl, who believed in the illimitable acres and glorious homes of the Colonial soldier ; and on the other hand the Colonial soldier, to use a new expression, (see Cassell's dictionary), has been "done in."

One has beard of the soldier coming home with a wife and a baby meeting the girl to whom he was betrothed "before the war"; of the young wife who "went wrong" while her soldier husband was away, and cases without end proving the inconstancy of human beings. What about it? Nothing I

You might preach till were black in the face against the immorality of the present age, only to remember that all other ages were precisely similar, and men and women no different. Unfaithful wives and incontinent husbands are as old as history, and modern machinery for separating them is better oiled than it used to be, the possibility being that humanity is much happier as a consequence.

It has been shown .by the war, and the many domestic disturbances it has caused, that the morals of humanity cannot be mathematised by law, or even human convention, the fact seeming to be in suitable cases that "when the cat's away the mice will play.** .

There is no cure. The Magistrate Court sits, and the Supreme Court sits, and the judges in divorce reel off homilies about the sacredness of the marriage tie without in the least affecting the statistics in domestic cases. One comes to the conclusion that the Urafs would not have gone wrong if there had been no war; that no Australian soldier would have married eight French girls if there had been no war; that no women in the old countries would have inveigled Colonial soldiers into hasty marriages if there had been no war; that the crops of divorces which are being reaped in all countries would not be reaped if there had been no war—and that, in fact, the Kaiser and his minions are responsible for the Old Adam that has been revived. • * • And what are we going to do about it? There's nothing to be done. You must, willy-nilly, allow Nature to take her course. After

all, a few thousand disagreements in a few million marriages won't count much in a hundred years' time, by which year there will have been other wars to blame for the immorality of the race.