To the Editor of the Norra-Cursa Datty News."
Sm,—I feel sure that many of your readers have waited impatiently for a reply to G.W.P.R's. letter in your issue of the 16th, and, failing one by an abler pen, I take up mine in an endeavour to combat views which would appear, on the one hand, as pernicious and extreme, as those of Nieteche on the other.
G.W.P.K. attempts to prove that Scotsmen of to-day are less physically fit than their forbears, and H.A.T. asserts that "the history of the Greeks and the Romans likewise furnishes an answer to the question, an awful answer in the negative.", Can it be that G.W.P.K. has forgotten the recent correspondence between Mr. Lloyd George and the Duke of Sutherland in which the real reason appears for the loss to Scotland of many of her fine men? Has Dr. Macdonald never heard of the famous—Scottish-Canadian Lumberment Let him enquire of the farmers of New Zealand if they be undersized and unable to produce a corporals' guard; let him hail the bridge, and telephone the room of the mercantile marine of half the world, and he will call out an army of physically fit Scotemen.
What killed Greece but wealth, physical comfort, luxury, the worship of the aesthetic and indolencer And what killed Rome but the lure of Grecian immorality?
Most amazing of all—both your correspondents seem to assume that soldiers are all sterile, or that their wives are barren! They also seem to assume that war wipes out the physically fit of a nation engaged in it, Will not your bloodthirsty correspondents allow a few survivers to return to their homes? I do not know the actual percentage of loss to an army in the field, but I think, Sir, that it is not so great a one as G.W.P.K. and H.A.T. imply, nor do they seem to remember that many of those who are killed leave physically fit children behind them to continue the stock.
Training for war produces physical fitness, and, ever bearing in mind the fate of Goliath who miéus-his strength, is the best moral training aleo. Mens sane in corpora sano. The defence of children, wife and\homo, and the care of the weak,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.