It would be easy forme to fill a dozen columns of your paper with other instances of the lamentable results of our present demoralising system of volunteering, but I have already sai.l enough to convince the most prejudiced and obstinate supporter of the present system that it is doomed and must go. We must insist upon sweeping it away at once; the longer we put up with it now, the more the more the danger to the country and the greater the disgrace to us as a common sense, business like community. Every shilling of our slender resources now spent under it is worse than wasted ; every man that honestly tries to serve under it is fooled ; and all reliance placed upon its protection can only be betrayed. Just another word or two in conclusion. Lest anyone should despise this eager advocacy or put the writer down to be a cantankerous grumbler writing out of a contemptible i love of " nagging" at everything, I take leave, Sir, to say — and you can warrant it—that the necessary ?iom <h plmne of " Discipline" hides no cavilling cynic, but a man -wh-j hates to see wa<=te of good stuff, and who deeply sympathises with thosehundredsof his fellow colonists who are undoubtedly doing their utmost to serve faithfully as volunteers from I the noble motives of public spirit and stern duty, but whose honourable endeavours are 1 foiled and stultified—yes, actually stultified— in the most exasperating way by dis graceful and unchecked insubordination of unworthy comrades, and by feeble incom petence of dilettanti elected officers who pretend to command, but fail even'to persuade their _Tn«m;—«ioh._comrades ami such, ouluers being only admitted arid tolerated under a system : such as ours.—l am, &c,

Discipline,

Dunedin, April 28.
