Could any fact be more amazing than that over a
million men in a country so distant from the seat of war, a very large proportion of them men of military age, should vote in favour of a form of oom- pulsion which means that all the young men in some far-away Bush town must throw up their work on the land, first to train in some camp in Australia, it may be a thousand miles from their homes, then to be carried literally to the other end of the world for more training, and lastly to bury themselves in the subsoil of Picardy or Flanders, fighting enemies whose very names were unknown to them two years ago. Truly, as Sir Thomas Browne said, "man is a noble animal," and moved by noble impulses—anything but a materialist, or a creature selfish, mean, or cowardly. "Oh brave new world that has such men and women in it I "is a Shakespearean motto which we can apply to every one of the Dominions.
