Essays 6 to 10
Essay No. 6.
Duty and Discipline in the Training of Children
BY
The Right Hon. the Earl of Meath, P.C., K.P.
(An Address delivered before the Mothers' Union.)
I HAVE had the honour to be invited to address you on the subject of the value of developing a sense of duty in children and of maintaining a reasonable discipline in the home and in the school. I am quite certain that there are many in this hall far better fitted than I am to speak upon such a very important subject. It is, however, a subject which has occupied my thoughts for many years, and I am strongly of the opinion that it is one which, in this present age of luxury and pleasure, calls for immediate and earnest consideration.
Some of you may have read appeals which from time to time I have made through the Press to British women and to British mothers, in which I ventured to express my fear that in some homes neither a sense of duty nor the importance of discipline seems to be impressed sufficiently, if at all, upon the minds of the children.
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There exists a modern phase of thought, often engendered by the best of motives, which neglects the future happiness of the child in a vain effort to afford it the fleeting pleasure of the moment. This dislike of discipline, and this fear of coerci
children for their ultimate good, owe their origin several causes. First, to a commendable reacti against the excessive severities of former year secondly, to the growth of a sentimentalism and ol dread of inflicting discomfort or physical pain anyone, but more especially on children, even f their highest good ; thirdly, from a certain decaden in religious feeling, and with it a falling off in t moral fibre of men and women and a weakening the sense of the overwhelming importance of t responsibilities and duties attaching to parenthood
This school of thought, principally to be met wi
in portions of the Continent, but followed by son at home, trusts entirely to moral suasion in the trai ing of children and deprecates all punishment f evil-doing.
This is a very attractive doctrine, and one whiwhich
appeals strongly to the kindly instincts of men ar women ; but is it founded on common sense, and the teaching of Nature and of Revelation ? The effor of all good and thoughtful parents will, of tours be directed towards training their children throug a loving moral suasion from their earliest years I
follow the right and to avoid the evil path.
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Here all are agreed.
But do not Nature, Revelation, and the experience of ages show us that, in the loving interest of the souls, minds, and bodies of the little ones committed to our care, we must not sit with folded arms and sad hearts whilst we see them deliberately ignore the advice which we give them from the plenitude of our experience, often gained by us through bitter suffering ? Nor can we dare, for fear of inflicting on them a slight temporary inconvenience or pain, permit them to lay up for themselves the miseries inseparable from lives which are in conflict with the laws of God and of man, and which are not directed by a sense of duty, of self-control and of self-discipline.
Without consciously accepting the doctrines of this school, there are many parents, otherwise excellent men and women, in whose homes the practical evils resulting from this doctrine may be seen in the children who are permitted to be a law unto themselves, who are never required to subdue self, and are the cause of unhappiness to themselves, of constant worry to their parents, and of annoyance to their neighbours. Had obedience been insisted on in early years all this trouble could have been avoided.
It is during the early years of life, before the child reaches the age of seven, that self-control should be taught. The Japanese, from whom we may learn
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much, find it possible to obtain the most rigid discipline in the schools without resort to physical punishment. Why ? Because the children are not sent to school until they are six years of age, but are trusted until that age to parents who are not afraid to discipline them. They consequently arrive at school thoroughly trained by their parents, so that obedience, by the age of six, has become a second nature. The Japanese have a saying, "Good parents are strict parents."
Nature is a strict parent. She never overlooks a breach of her laws; punishment, often of the severest character, invariably follows. There is no reprieve, though it be sought with bitter tears. She requires unhesitating obedience; carelessness, and even ignorance, are no excuse. Mother Nature recognises no sex distinction in the nature of her punishments; indeed, if she makes any difference between the sexes, it would seem as if she were more lenient towards her sons than towards her daughters. She gives her children intelligence, but does not otherwise assist them to discover her laws. She leaves it to them to find them out for themselves, as if she considered the labour of search a wholesome discipline, and only when they have learnt them by heart, and have framed their lives in obedience to them, does she smile upon her children. We, at all events, who are here believe that Nature is but the handmaid of a loving God, Who has directed all
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things for the ultimate and highest happiness of His creatures. If so, we cannot seriously err if we
learn some lessons at least from the operations of
His handiwork. But let us never forget that Nature through her punishments teaches self-control and
self-discipline, and that she never punishes if these lessons are learnt without them. And you who hear me, your influence is immense with those working-class mothers who attend your meetings. Cannot you, by example and by precept, show them wherein lies the truest kindness towards the children with the training of which God has entrusted them ?
What is needed is government by love, supplemented, if need be, and only if there be genuine need, by government by fear ; but, unfortunately, indulgence in some minds seems to be mistaken for love, and laxity for kindness.
Let us but open our eyes to facts, and we shall soon perceive that the unhappiest child is the spoilt one, and that it is only through a loving discipline in the home that true happiness can be obtained either by child or parent.
The Archbishop of Melbourne, in addressing you last May in Gloucester Cathedral, said : "Give us homes in a country where the Divine ideals of obedience, duty, and love exist, and all is well with that country "; and your own revered President, Mrs. Sumner, has lately expressed herself in the Press in the following impressive words : "The modern wide-
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spread neglect of home duties in all classes is an imperative call for the reformation of parents. Duty and discipline are needed for them as well as for their children, and both religion and patriotism demand from them the brave and self-sacrificing lives which are the glory of a nation's character."
" We are pressing," she wrote on another occasion, "the vital importance of duty and discipline in the nursery and the home as essential to true character training, and the school should follow suit. The modern over-indulgence of parents has already proved fatal to many a child, who under such training has become idle and self-indulgent and uncontrolled and irresponsible. Body, soul, and spirit are injured by such weak and neglected home training. One great object of this Mothers' Union is to get parents, mothers especially, to realise that our English boys and girls should be brought up in habits of obedience, truth, purity, self-control, and unselfishness, and duty to God and man ; and the result should be a glorious reformation in the character of the coming race."
These are noble words, and, coming from your President, I know that they will not fall on unheeding ears and minds.
Indeed, I am told that already the Mothers' Union, with its quarter of a million Associates and Members, has set itself the task of recalling British parents to the imperative necessity of acquiring, both
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for themselves and their children, a closer acquaintance with the meaning of the words Duty and Discipline than is common or popular in many British homes of the present day.
And it is indeed time that such a reform should take place in home discipline, for the spoilt child is, alas, too prominent a feature of the twentieth century. The spoilt child is not an agreeable product of civilisation, or one in which a lover of his country can take special pride ; never in the history of the world has an Empire or State arisen the citizens of which have had imposed upon them such overwhelming responsibilities as must inevitably be borne a few years hence by the white British children of to-day.
In former ages the burdens of Empire or of the State fell on the shoulders of a few ; now the humblest child to be found on the benches of a primary school will in a few years be called on to influence the destinies not only of fifty-four millions of white, but of three hundred and fifty millions of coloured men and women, his fellow subjects, scattered throughout the five continents of the world. Such overwhelming responsibilities have never before in the history of this world fallen upon any people. If the white men and women of the British Empire are idle, soft, selfish, hysterical, and undisciplined, are they likely to rule well ? If their sense of duty be weak, if they know not how to obey or how to endure, are they likely to rule efficiently seven times their own number,
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or to retain the affection or the respect of the governed ?
The survival of the fittest is a doctrine which holds as good in the political and social as in the natural world. If the British race ceases to be worthy of dominion it will cease to rule. It is absurd to imagine that the laws of the universe are going to be reversed for the special benefit of the British race. Britons have ruled in the past because they were a virile race, brought up to obey, to suffer hardships cheerfully, and to struggle victoriously. There exists no royal road to success in national any more than in private life.
Love of hard work, thrift, self-denial, endurance, and indomitable pluck, these are some of the hallmarks of an imperial race. Do we possess these hall-marks in as great a measure as our forefathers I shall give no answer to this question, but shall leave the reply to the knowledge, experience, and conscience of each man and woman who hears me I shall only say that if the verdict be not one of complete acquittal, the results to society and to the State will be so momentous that no thoughtful, not to say patriotic, man or woman can afford to neglect the most serious consideration of the matter.
"There are two disturbing elements in our modern life," said Canon Lyttelton at your last annual Conference, "which tell prejudicially in our training of children, self-consciousness and softness, not ordin-
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arily physical, but moral. It proceeds from the principle, which asserts itself far and wide, that what young people want they ought to have. I think you will find," he added, "that most of our great men in their early years have not been allowed to shirk discomfort merely because it is discomfort, and in all classes of society we need to work for robustness of fibre, which cannot be produced without the kind of discipline which makes endurance a matter of course, not a matter of discussion." These words were corroborated on the same occasion by the Bishop of Auckland when he said : "One looks back with thankfulness to the very fact of having to overcome hardship, and one is perfectly satisfied that if it were not for the fact of having to overcome hardship one could not be occupying, at any rate, the position to-day that God has called one to.
"You are turning out," he said, "young fellows to come out to us in the Colonies who have had too easy lives to live at home, who have had too much money, too much food, who are not to blame themselves, but who will inevitably blame their parents in the years to come because they did not give them enough hardship in their younger days. My whole heart goes out in sympathy to the young of to-day because their lives are so easy."
Lack of discipline in youth tends to self-indulgence in later years, creating idle, selfish, pleasure-seekers among the rich, and tramps,
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loafers, corner boys, and hooligans amongst the poorer classes. Let us bear in mind that no nation can be permanently strong which is founded on the quicksands of indiscipline.
Let us also remember a fine sentence of Robertson : "He is not free because he does what he likes, but he is free because he does what he ought." "The first element in all noble characters," says Bishop Welldon, "and therefore in the character of an English gentleman, is obedience. A good schoolmaster, like a wise parent, expects absolute, unhesitating obedience from the child. He issues his orders; he does not, and in the nature of the case he cannot, explain his reasons. If he argues with his pupil he is lost." If obedience be the first element in all noble characters—and I do not think many can doubt the truth of the above statement—I fear that there are many homes and, alas ! not a few schools where noble characters have little chance of being formed.
The discipline which leads to obedience, and to the formation of noble character, is lamentably absent in many British homes, and, not content with undermining the moral qualities of their children at home, some parents, by declining to permit their children to be disciplined at school, make it impossible for the teachers in those schools to develop the moral and mental capacities of the other children committed to their charge. Thus teachers are handicapped, and
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the evils of indiscipline spread far beyond these
homes in which it originated. An united effort
should be made to stem this serious evil which [dangers the future of society and, indeed, the ability of our Empire.
I am glad to think so powerful a body as the others' Union is endeavouring to encourage a asonable discipline in the home and in the school, and to check the growth of the sentimental hysteria which is threatening to undermine the moral fibre of the nation.
There are other organisations labouring in the me direction, and amongst them I might mention the Ministering Children's League, founded by Lady eath, which teaches obedience, self-discipline, and [selfishness in the home. Many of the ladies longing to the Mothers' Union must have heard mething concerning the Ministering Children's !ague, but perhaps few have had opportunities of alising the great importance of this work in helping children to acquire that best kind of discipline,
self-discipline. The daily prayer that the members who belong to the Ministering Children's !ague are invited to use, the rule of kindness for nstant observance (for kind deeds are not merely be occasionally, but constantly performed), assist child to be on the outlook for opportunities of ing good. Few of us would be prepared to deny that this latter attitude of mind, when combined with
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the prayerful spirit, which looks above for the power of doing right, is calculated to bring about a most happy result. Self-discipline is unconsciously learnt by the little one because self must be denied if the child is to be really helpful to others; and the habit of self-denial once learnt in childhood is never likely to be wholly lost in after years.
Parents, teachers, and others have repeatedly borne testimony to the excellent results, as regards the formation of character, which have been noticeable in children who have joined the League, and the Archbishop of Sydney lately expressed his admiration for the good and lasting work which the League has been the means of effecting in Australia.
Perhaps I may be pardoned if I mention also in this connection the "Empire Movement," which preaches the gospel of Good Citizenship and lays special stress on the maintenance of a reasonable discipline in the training of youth as being indispensable in the building up of virile character and in the formation of an Imperial race worthy of responsibility, alive to duty, filled with sympathy towards mankind, and, not afraid of self-sacrifice in the promotion of lofty ideals.
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Essay No. 7.
The Value of a Certain " Hardness " in Education
BY
Mrs. Arthur Philip
(Reprinted by leave of the Editor of "Mothers in Council.")
I WANT to begin my paper to-day with one or two incidental remarks. First, I want to say that I feel sure the word "hardness" will provoke controversy, however clearly I may be able to put my meaning ; and, indeed, I hope that it will, since, if we are to get all the good we may do out of these meetings of "Mothers in Council," we want to get different and opposing ways of looking at the great truths which underlie all educational problems and methods, plainly stated and argued out.
Secondly, I want all who hear me to understand that the necessary "hardness" of a good education is more hard for the mother than the child. It is far pleasanter and easier to make pets and playthings of our children than to train them to be good and useful men and women. Then, too, I find it is necessary to guard against being misunderstood as to the absolute need of happiness in a child's life for healthy development. Plants cannot grow and fruits cannot
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ripen without warmth and sunshine any more than they can without wind and rain ; and, although perpetual tropical heat produces a showy but unstable growth, out of which little of permanent use can be made, in contrast to the "hearts of oak," which are the product of a climate of mingled cloud and shine, the oak itself would grow dwarfed and stunted without its share of genial warmth. And I have always felt and known that one cannot make one's children too happy, provided the happiness is consistent with order, discipline, and unselfishness, and is real genuine happiness found in the shelter of home, or in those healthy country pursuits which are the very breath of a happy childhood; and not in outside excitements and indulgences, which can early destroy a taste for pure pleasures and create cravings and wants fatal to all true future happiness. I believe, although I stand here to-day as the advocate of a "certain hardness," that it is every mother's duty, as far as lies in her power, to let her children start in the world with the memory of a happy childhood, with a great fund of joy in their memory to which they can go back in darker, less fortunate days; and which shall give them, whatever their lot in life may be, so sure a hold on the truth that God wishes us to be happy, that the belief in a future which will be all happiness is not very difficult to them on the dreariest and gloomiest days. Make a child really happy and you have gone a long way towards making
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him good. I found this thought so beautifully expressed by a popular author the other day that I will venture to quote it. "The evil days, the troubles and the disappointments, the doubts and the fears, come soon enough ; keep them out of child life as long as possible ! Let the lives of the children be such that, however deep be the troubles when they come, however bitter the disappointments, however grave the doubts, however crushing the fears, they may always be lightened and cheered by the radiance of the past. Let the children's faith in father's justice and patience, in mother's tenderness and truth, be so strong that they may stand as bright beacons to guide them from one end of life to the other."
I first began consciously to realise the value of hardness, or, may I put it negatively and say the "evil of softness," in education when I heard a wise old lady, herself a grandmother, who was gifted with a rhetorical style of speaking which, had she been a man, would have made her famous in the pulpit or at the bar, startle a room full of mothers, to whom she was speaking of their duties, by saying, "Don't be fond of your children ! " and, after an effective pause, go on to explain that fondness and foolishness were etymologically identical, that the mother who was "fond"of her children spoiled them by foolish indulgence, thought of their present enjoyment and not of their future happiness, and in her selfish delight in giving them pleasure and sparing them
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trouble, too often laid the foundation of undisciplined, unsatisfactory lives; while the mother who truly "loved " her children had strength to deny them and herself pleasures, and helps, and enjoyments which she knew must sow the seeds of future self-indulgence and form habits which were fatal to future strength of character.
What she said that day set me and many others thinking whether, for our children, WE were "fond and foolish," whether we were choosing present joys at the expense of future happiness, possibly of their eternal welfare; and the more one thinks of the great, the everlasting responsibility of one's motherhood, the more will the truth of that warning, "Don't be fond of your children," strike home to each one of us. We all need it, for the temptation comes in such attractive guise, the desire to sacrifice our own comfort and happiness to our little ones seems so right, so meritorious, that it needs perpetual watching, deep - nd earnest thought, and the strength and wisdom which alone come from above, to meet this, perhaps the greatest temptation of our motherhood.
Surely, with mothers of all classes, the "evil that is wrought with young lives " is wrought mainly "by want of thought and not by want of heart." Most mothers, as far as they see it, desire their children's good, and if they knew, if they saw clearly that they were constantly setting their child's pleasure of the
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moment before its happiness through life and the long ages of eternity, they would not hesitate a moment in putting the true before the seeming "good." It is our fatal habit of living in the present, of not realising how our every act helps to irrevocably shape the future, that makes us choose present ease and indulgence at so heavy a cost, not only for ourselves, but, alas ! for our children also. Like Guinevere, we recognise the beauty of the spiritual too late, and if we do not wake to the truth ere our opportunities are over and past, we may have to say of ourselves as mothers—
"It was my duty to have loved the Highest !
It surely was my profit had I known !
It would have been my pleasure had I seen."
It is this fact that if we only knew, nothing would weigh with us against our children's real good that makes our failure to secure it so infinitely pathetic. For is not our desire for their good, as far as we realise it, the ruling passion of our lives ? Think for a moment how any one of us here would unhesitatingly, gladly put ourselves in the place of one of our children to shield them from death, or danger, or even physical pain. We know how we would give all we possess, all we hope for for ourselves of future happiness, to secure their welfare and think it lightly bought; but with all our love—all our yearn-ing-our passionate desire for their well-being, there is so little we can do ! They so soon cease to be our
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nest-birds : our little ones over whom we fancy, in our self-satisfaction, that we can watch so as to avert all evil. And then comes the unknown future ; that future of which we can tell nothing certainly, but of which we can surely say : Be our child's lot the most fortunate that earth can give, that it will contain much physical pain, much mental trouble, and that if he is to rise to any height of goodness or heroism, such as we surely desire for him, then struggle, effort, self-denial, and self-sacrifice are inevitable.
And when those hard and dark days come to our children, which we dare not, if we truly love them, even wish to avert ; when in distant parts of the earth, or in far-away days, when our hands have long been folded in eternal rest and our active work for them is long done for good or ill ; when the golden locks have turned to grey, and those bright little faces, now the light of our homes and hearts, have become the careworn, weary, saddened faces of the men and women who have taken our places in the "Battle of Life "; who are for themselves or others bearing it heavy burdens, trying to stem its torrents of evil an following the calls of duty into earth's darkest places ; which will have been best trained and fitted to fight fierce temptations, to conquer sin, to bear and vanquish trouble and sorrow, pain and death (those inevitable heritages of humanity !) the boys and girls who have been shielded from every wind that blows; sheltered, cared for and tended like hothouse plants;
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accustomed to an atmosphere of pleasure and excitement; taught by inference to make happiness and not duty their aim in life; those from whom the consequences of their own foolish actions have been so warded off that they have failed to realise God's law —taught alike by nature and revelation—that as we sow we shall surely reap; or those to whom wise early training has given endurance, courage, self-reliance, self-control, and wisdom ? Surely for our children, as for ourselves, "the path of duty is the road to glory."
" He that walks it, only thirsting
For the right, and learns to deaden
Love of self, before his journey closes,
He shall find the stubborn thistle bursting
Into glossy purples, which outredden
All voluptuous garden roses.
Not once or twice in our fair island story,
The path of duty was the way to glory :
He, that ever following her commands
On with toil of heart and knees and hands,
Thro' the long gorge to the far light, has won
His path upward, and prevail'd,
Shall find the toppling crags of Duty scaled
Are close upon the shining table-lands
To which our God Himself is moon and sun."
And if we ever wish to see our children attain to those "shining table-lands " we must teach the little feet early to tread the upward path, and not plant habits which will hide those "toppling crags" and quicken instead of "deaden " that "love of self "
And may I stay here to go back for a moment to
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that averting of consequences which so distorts a child's true view of life, that perpetual making of excuses for ourselves and others which is partly "the defect of the virtue " of toleration that so distinguishes our end of the century that it is in danger of becoming its bane. Like " unselfishness " in a mother, it is a temptation that comes in charming guise, that appeals to our better nature. We all despise the person who makes excuses for himself ; who, instead of confessing and repenting a fault, tries to justify himself ! Yet we admire the one who is always trying to excuse his neighbour, who can find a dozen reasons, in heredity or environment, which caused his folly or his crime. And so, alas ! we lower the standard of virtue ; we make wickedness seem excusable, sometimes even attractive ; we make it appear an impossible thing to scale the height of righteousness; and too often, alas ! we take away the belief of some feeble one that faults can be mended, temptations resisted, and sin conquered ! We cloud the clear sight, we lower the moral atmosphere, and if we countenance such a lowered standard in our homes our children start in life without that clear perception of good and evil which is one of the most essential equipments for treading its difficult paths in safety
We little think when we excuse fretfulness on the score of fatigue, untruthfulness on that of imagination, or roughness on that of " high spirits "—I mean excuse it in words before the children—how much
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more difficult we are making it to control the temper which all life long will have to battle with fatigue and weariness, to curb the imagination which runs away with its owner and makes it so easy and tempting to tell a graphic story at the expense of strict veracity, or to check the reckless disregard of the feelings of others, and habit of enjoying himself at the expense of another, which are among a young man's greatest temptations.
Such making of excuses and averting consequences is not God's way of educating us, and to be true parents should we not strive to imitate the ways of our Father in Heaven, which we know to be those of infinite Wisdom as well as infinite Love ? Although we long ago learned that no passionate remorse, no plea of extenuating circumstances can avert the consequences of evil done in thoughtlessness or even in ignorance; that the man who takes poison by accident dies just as surely as he who takes it by design, and that the girl who is betrayed and deceived by falsehoods is ruined equally with the one who recklessly throws away her virtue. We have learnt our own lesson, we should in all fairness let our children learn it early. Let your little girl know from the first that temper must he held down and conquered, however tried she may be; and your boy that he must not indulge his animal spirits and nature at the cost of discomfort and suffering to others ; and do not listen to or make excuses for deviation from
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truth, however amusing or trivial. It may seem and feel "hard " to ignore such excuses and keep to such a standard, but such hardness is only another name for truth and gentleness and self-control in preference to falsehood and weakness and selfishness.
This brings us back to our word "hardness." And here I should like to say a few words in defence of it; I know it is not usually considered a "nice" or pleasant word, and so, in face of the fact that "qui s'excuse s'accuse," I want to say something in its favour. It is not well that good should be evil spoken of because it is at first sight lacking in the attractiveness which attaches to many worthless things, and I maintain that at the right place and time "hardness" is an invaluable quality. Let me ask you first to put away all associations connected with it which damage it and credit it with evil not inherent in itself. "Hard-hearted," "hard-headed." They are not lovable epithets; and they distort the word from its original meaning and bring unmerited contempt on it, just as the word strong is damaged by association in the epithet used in contempt of a "strong-minded " woman. Look for a moment at the reverse, and the unfairness is obvious, for surely the most indignant repudiator of the term would not dub herself "weak-minded " I It seems to me unfair to pervert words from their original meaning, and then reproach them for what we ourselves have thrust on them.
Let us take our word "hardness," then, pure and
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simple, and look at its origin and derivation and true meaning, as Mrs. Haycroft did with "fondness." It comes from another Anglo-Saxon word, very slightly modified, and it means the quality of being hard; and hard (Anglo-Saxon heard) means " firm ; solid ; not easily pressed, penetrated, or broken " ; and so on to appropriate meanings, some good, some bad —as " exacting " and " severe " on one side, " diligently " and " earnestly " on the other, the simple meaning remaining as above, " firm; solid ; not easily pressed, penetrated, or broken." Consulting our dictionary once more, and finding that education means " the bringing up of a child; instruction ; the training that goes to cultivate the powers and form the character " (that education is emphatically not cramming the mind with undigested facts), who can deny that there is, indeed, a certain value or worth of " hardness in education " ? Was ever any " training " or " bringing up " good that was not " firm " ?—any " instruction " worth having that was not "solid "?—any forming of character of value unless founded on a system "not easily pressed, penetrated, or broken " ? It is impossible to have a training worth the name without strength, consistency, and firmness, and of all these hardness is an essential part. We know full well that the type of national character which is our ideal, the stuff of which our heroes and prophets have been made, is the outcome of such a training—the
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product of struggle with difficulties and character inured to hardship. It is the spirit which has given us our great men, and of which Kingsley sang, when, in praise of the north-east wind, he said :
"Let the luscious south wind
Breathe in lovers' sighs, While the lazy gallants
Bask in the ladies' eyes. What does he but soften
Heart alike and pen ?
'Tis the hard grey weather
Breeds hard Englishmen.
"Come and strong within us Stir the Viking's blood, Bracing brain and sinew; Blow, thou wind of God "
Kingsley realised that there was no strength of muscle or soul without a certain hardness, and uses it as a term of approbation, and if we value permanency, and justice, and strength, so must we.
There is no time to-day to go into special appli cations of the principle as affecting moral training, beyond the little I said about excuses and averted consequences, and the contrast between true love and fondness, especially as I am sure anyone who will think it quietly over will admit the value of "firmness " and of a thing "not easily broken "—in theory, at least. It is only in practice that we fail. What we see clearly for ourselves we cannot, in our tenderness for our children, accept and act on for them. Who among us will deny the good she has gained
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from conquering difficulties—the strength that has come to her from struggles ? And who does not know that what is best in her intellectually, morally, and spiritually has come to her hardest ? Who would dare to ask for herself a future all ease, and pleasure, and amusement ? And yet, consciously or unconsciously, too many of us try to do so for our children.
We must avoid creating a false idea in the minds of children that pleasure and happiness are the ultimate end of life, the one thing to seek and pursue, in distinct contradiction to our Lord's doctrine that they who seek their life shall lose it ; and to the teaching of all experience, that they who pursue happiness choose a fleeting shadow which ever eludes their grasp; while to those who forget it, and are guided by duty and right, it comes unasked, walking ever with them, a welcome and blessed, though unsought, companion.
Such false ideas are even formulated by parents, whom one cannot but feel are something worse than "fond and foolish." Not long ago I heard of a cultivated, educated woman who dared to say openly that she made and intended to make her only child's life utterly happy—that it was to be one long, unclouded summer's day, undimmed by sorrow, untouched by difficulty ; and who, before twelve months had passed, was called away from this world, to leave her little one motherless and alone. I only mention
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this to show it is no phantom danger I am pointing out, for though few would boldly put into words what that poor, misguided mother did, hundreds act as if it were their guiding principle. Do we not talk of Spartan mothers half in derision, as if their spirit were something unnatural and wrong ? And yet, what did they do but bid their sons "come back with honour or never come back at all," and refuse them a welcome if they returned shamed and disgraced through cowardice and sloth. And if we want our sons to do the best for themselves, to realise the high ideal of their manhood, should we not teach them the same, and teach ourselves to feel it, that we would rather see them dead than dishonoured ? That, whatever calling they choose, they must, as Ruskin says in "Unto this Last," live by it and for it nobly and straightforwardly, and, if need be, die for it, rather than not serve its utmost claim in absolute truth and honesty.
There is a story in the Apocrypha of a mother who stood by and saw her seven sons, from her firstborn down to her youngest darling, cruelly tortured and martyred one by one, knowing that apostasy would have saved them, yet encouraging them through all the ghastly, terrible ordeal not to deny their God and their faith. Think of such a mother of heroes, whose eye could pierce beyond the clouds, and know that for her boys future happiness and glory were well bought at the price of present
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tribulation, who could nerve her loving heart tc endure the awful agony of seeing their sufferings; and think how little, in contrast, is asked of us ! Only that we will remember that, " as gold must be tried by fire, so a heart must be tried by pain " ; that the diamond can only be polished by hardness; and that, if the spirit is to trample on the brute in our children's double nature, we must not teach them by example and precept to choose sloth and luxury, and enervate them by overmuch ease and pleasure.
I must stay to suggest one special side of this question, the value of hardness and of overcoming difficulties in intellectual work, Now that the system of competitive examinations rules our children's lives, this is a truth that we specially need to remember. There is a supposed imperative necessity that, by a given age, their minds shall be crammed with certain facts, and their attainments brought up to a given point, and, to make this possible, a fashion of making things easy has come up, and we are but too familiar with the words "crib " and "cram " and "coach," and the processes they imply and suggest. I do not want to deny the excellence of many modern methods, but I do emphatically say that knowledge to which you are helped and guided at every point along a royal road to learning, will never train your intellect or store your mind like knowledge you have puzzled over and struggled and laboured for; that so well-developed and strong an intellect cannot be
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produced by cramming with ready digested food, a by a healthy and natural process of feeding and assimilation. Look at modern translation books-- every idiom explained in a footnote, every hard passage made easy, and a glossary at the end to save the trouble of reaching down a dictionary I And remember the amount of personal explanation the average child of to-day claims in its home preparation, so that the mother (or, in many cases, a paid teacher) devotes hours in the evening to helping the preparation of school lessons. We are often told that the value of classics and mathematics as studies lies in the mental discipline and exact training they give. How can this be realised by scrambling through as much as possible with all sorts of props and helps ? And if all these easy methods of learning do not strengthen, but rather force and finally enfeeble the intellect, what is the effect on the moral nature ? Self-reliance and the grand old spirit of dogged determination to conquer hard tasks is done away with entirely. Children feel they have a right to be helped, and that, if they fail, they can lay the blame on the parents, or elder brothers and sisters, or governess, who failed to make smooth their path. If the time of education is really a preparation for the work of life, a time to learn how to learn, to develop every faculty to its utmost, this system of annotated books, and perpetual explanation, and coaches and cramming, must be fatal.
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It is a wide and difficult subject, but well worth our careful thought and consideration, since it is only too evident that our present educational system is not perfect, that young minds are being forced into premature attainments, and the originality, which would often come with slower and more personal development, lost. The chance of thorough mental training we should like for our children is injured by the fact that they cannot, except in rare instances, do what is required of them without spe-
cial help. It would be far better t0 let them do
much less, but do it perfectly and without artificial aids.
May I conclude by recurring to what I said in beginning, that the "hardness " of a good training is as much—nay, more for the mother than the child. I am pleading for what I know is a mother's most difficult work. It is so hard to seem "hard," to deny our children what appears in itself a harmless pleasure at the time. But here the very strength of our love, when once our eyes are open, should help us—help us to bear being even misunderstood by our children. Is it not often the penalty of the highest, most clear-sighted love to be so misjudged? Does not the true lover often plead in vain to a lower nature, "I could not love thee, dear, so well, loved I not honour
more ? "
Such hardship, such misunderstanding is, indeed, sooner or later the inevitable price of motherhood.
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In one of her marvellous intuitions of an experience she had never tasted, George Eliot says : *
"The mother's love is at first an absorbing delight, blunting all other sensibilities; it is an expansion of the animal existence; it enlarges the imagined sphere for self to move in; but in after years it can only continue to be joy on the same terms as other long-lived love—that is, by much suppression of self, and power of living in the experience of another."
"Of living in the experience of another ! " so that when the experience of our child's soul is that which welcomes toil, and labour, and hardship, and even death, for the Master's sake, we may not stretch out a weak hand to hold him back, nor utter a wailing word to make his difficult choice harder ; for can we ever forget that the cost of the highest, most blessed motherhood the world has ever known was foretold in that prophecy fulfilled to the uttermost at the foot of the Cross, "Yea, a sword shall pierce thine own soul also " ?
* Felix Holt, Chap. L
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Essay No. 8.
Wanted—a Fair Start in Life
SOME THOUGHTS FOR WORKING MOTHERS
BY
Isabel D. Marris
MAY I be allowed to say a few words to mothers about the training of their children from the teacher's point of view ? A child is what a mother makes it during the first years of its life, not what the teacher makes it. Have you not sometimes heard parents say, "Oh, all that nonsense will be knocked out of Tommy as soon as he goes to school, so I need not mind spoiling him a little bit now," or, "Teacher will see to that all in good time, and better than I can—I needn't bother about it " ? Such remarks are only partly true; but it is wholly true that a child who is spoilt at home stands a poor chance at school, and that school will do him, or her, very little good in the long run. Let me show you what I mean.
Two children come fresh to school. Tommy Jones and Mary Brown.
Tommy's mother thinks all the world of him, and means to take great care of him and make him a very happy child. So she has waited on him all his little
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life—she dresses him herself, he never goes out alone his meals are always ready for him, and, no matter how busy or tired she is, Mrs. Jones runs and fetches for him, clears up his toys and messes, and never lets him cry for anything- She has hardly ever said "No" to him in her life.
Mary's mother is very fond of her, but there are seven of the Browns, so Mrs. Brown is very busy• moreover, she is a sensible woman. So Mary as baby was taught to lie quiet and not cry, and as she grew older she had to look after herself, and the baby too, sometimes. Since she was quite tiny she has always dressed herself, and sometimes helped in the house by lighting the fire, or by setting the table, or washing up ; indeed, Mrs. Brown does not forget to make all the children help. She has no time to say things twice over, and doesn't believe in doing so, either. If she says, "Mary, be quiet while I get the baby to sleep, and don't you go in the street while I'm upstairs," Mary knows quite well it means slapping—not on the head, but in the proper place—if she goes out, and a scolding if she makes a noise; but mother is never cross, although she is very strict.
Well, when Tommy and Mary come to school they start unfairly from the beginning. In the cloakroom Tommy stands and stares, and expects someone to come and take off his coat for him. Mary, on the other hand, whips off her things and hangs them up, and watches to see what happens next. In the school
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room it is just the same. Mary, who is used to looking after herself, slips into a desk and finds a slate and pencil like the other children do, and watches the teacher ready to start work. Tommy sees some plants and birds' eggs on the window sill, so he strolls across the room to look at them, and wants to play with them. At last, when he has been put into a desk, he is all behind the others, and his thoughts still wander round the plants and eggs instead of being busy with the lesson going on. He has never been taught to obey, or to fix his thoughts on what he is doing, and so it is not long before he gets into trouble with the teacher. A few days more, and he finds himself punished for the first time in his life, and goes home crying to his mother. She, silly woman, instead of telling him how foolish he was to get into trouble, as Mary's mother would have done, pities him and blames the teacher in his hearing. However, after this Tommy takes care to be good at school, though not at home. He is as good as gold as long as he is at school, for he is kept busy and is expected to be good, and is punished if he is not. When he goes home, however, he is cross at once, and sulks if he does not get his own way, and grumbles at everything. He does not like it at all if his mother asks him to go and buy some wood or oil, or to wash up the tea-things while she goes out.
Mary rarely gets into trouble, she makes good progress in her lessons, and is liked by her teachers
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and schoolfellows. At home, as she grows older, s becomes more and more helpful to her mother, and i quite a sunbeam in the house.
As the years go on and Tommy gets a big lad he becomes more and more selfish and a torment at home. He never watches his mother's face to see if she is tired, but always expects his clothes and his meals to be ready for him. He never offers to scrub; the floor for her on Saturday afternoons, or to fill the coal-boxes, and he even grumbles if he is asked; to clean his father's boots as well as his own. His mother sighs over it all sometimes, and finds it is-not such a joy to have a son as once she thought it was ; but she supposes it is only what one must expect, and, above all, having never managed Tommy when he was young, she now fears that if she suddenly became strict she might drive the boy from home, and that he might go with bad companions or get larking with the girls.
Then Tommy goes to business. Still it is the same tale. He doesn't like hard work. He has never been taught to bear pain well, so if his work leaves him stiff and sore, or with aching head or back, he either throws the job up to look for something easier, or he does as little as he can, shirks every time the foreman's back is turned, and watches the clock till it is time to leave off work. He may save his money or spend it, but, whichever, he does, it is for his own good, not for anyone else's,
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All the love and care and money his parents spent on him till he was fifteen or sixteen years old he takes as a matter of course.
Then he grows to be a man, and thinks he would like a wife, and you can well imagine the kind of girl he will choose. They will not wait till he has earned enough to make a home properly, so they take a house or a couple of rooms and furnish on the "hire purchase system."
Then trouble comes; he loses his work, things go wrong at home, and he gets into debt. What chance has he got, the poor lad, to pull things straight again ? He has never been taught from the day he was born to do a single thing he did not like, or to go without what he fancied (except during the short hours of his school-days); nor, indeed, to think of anything or of anybody but himself. So there he is, with no power to do anything but sulk and growl, and think what a poor, ill-used, miserable chap he is, who might have done really well if only "he'd had the luck some folks seemed to have." Luck ! It is pluck he is lacking in
Now, the point is this. Nearly all the trouble in Tommy's life was the mother's fault, not his nor his teachers'. She did not mean it in the least, but she was downright selfish to her child, and even cruel, too. These words sound very hard indeed, but they are quite true, and they are equally true of the father. If Mrs. Jones had given herself the trouble (for
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trouble it is) to teach Tommy to dress himself, to do what he was told at once and without arguing
about it; if she had taught him to wait on her and
his father and to help in the house ; and if she had been brave enough (for it hurts the mother most) to
whip him when he was a tiny child for low and dirty
tricks, or for stealing the sugar when she was away, or for using bad words just because he thought it
grand, there would not have been all this trouble. If
only his father had tried to train him when he was a little chap, and had said to the lad as he was growing
up, " Look here, Tommy my lad, you behave yourself and wait on your mother, not she on you," things would have been very different.
There is no cruelty so hard and so bitter in its results as the cruelty of spoiling a child.
" Well," you say, "how are we to prevent it? What are we to do? " I can only give you one or two hints, there is no time for more.
1. Never give an order unless you mean to see it obeyed.—Do not say, "If you do that again I'll
punish you," and then never punish the child, or "Don't you touch that," and then, after the little one's coaxing, say, "Well, perhaps you may this time." Whatever you say you must stick to it, or the children will never learn that "No ! " means "No!
2. Do not always save the children from the consequences of their faults.—If they deserve a whipping, do not keep their father from knowing it. Let
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them have it, and have done with it. For you to "keep things from father" is shocking, and leads to all kinds of wrong. It is the very way to teach the children to be deceitful. If they can't get ready for school in time, or leave their books behind, let them be late a time or two and take the consequences —it will save them trouble in later years, many and many a time. Children must be taught that, though they will be forgiven for being naughty, they must bear the results of their naughtiness. Nature and life teach this lesson, so it is only fair to let the children understand it when they are young.
3. Always say " Do," and seldom say " Don't."—It is no good nagging at a child. If it is really naughty, punish it without talking about it. Whenever you can, say, "Please do this to help mother," or "You would like to help grannie, wouldn't you ? " or "Do stir the porridge, will you ? " This is called the power of suggesting good, and it crowds out the wish to do naughty things, while if you are always saying, "Don't do this ! " and "You are not to do that ! " it makes the child want to do it all the more. Also, it makes you feel always cross and the child feel always naughty.
4. Don't talk about the children in front of them. —It is very bad for Tommy to hear, when he is stand-in by, "Oh, Tommy ! He's such a naughty boy; I can't take my eyes off him—he's that disobedient, he takes no notice of me." All this makes Tommy think
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one of two things—either that it is no use ever trying to be good, or else that his mother is really rather proud of his naughtiness. "He's that high-spirited, you know," he often hears her say, and he feels that she likes to tell the neighbours all about it, and that he is rather a wonderful little person after all.
It is just the same with praise. When a child is praised to her face, and hears it often said that she is so good and kind, and so pretty, too, and taller than Mrs. Somebody's girl, and so on—she soon becomes a horrid, conceited little thing, who thinks she can do nothing wrong ; she will not stand a word from anyone, but tosses her head and goes her own way.
5. Let the children have plenty of wholesome pleasure, but see that they give pleasure and help to others in their turn.—We hear a great deal about giving children "a good time," and about the value of a happy childhood. This is true and right, but it will only lead to unhappy selfishness if we heap pleasures and treats on the bairns, and do not make them give pleasure and loving help to mother and father and others in their turn.
Indeed, it is perfectly true that no teacher and no school in the world can do what a mother and father can do, and they can rarely, if ever, undo the harm the parents may do.
Therefore, to give the children a fair chance in life, there is nothing for it but to sacrifice your own
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feelings, your strength, your patience, your time in teaching even the little baby to wait for what it wants, food or play, without crying for it. In spite of all the trouble it means, make the young child wait upon itself, and upon you too, and do not give it " sweeties " or pleasures every time it cries or whines for them. Say what you mean and stick to it, punish when it is necessary (but never when you have lost your own temper, or by boxing the ears or head), then by six or seven years old the child will have a fair start in life, and every chance of doing well.
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Essay No. 9.
" Save the Boys "
BY
T. H. Manners Howe
(printed by kind permission of the Editor of "The Graphic.")
ALMOST all the deplorable phenomena of poverty and unemployment by which the national vitality of Great Britain is to-day being disintegrated, even more ominous in its future menace than the accumulation of adult wreckage in our streets, is the universal spectacle of the dingy juvenile weaklings and shifty youths—the future man-power of our nation—drifting helplessly towards the same disastrous bourne.
There is too much reason to fear that a vast proportion of our great army of unemployed must be written off as representing an irredeemable loss of capital in national vitality ; but the boy is still a potential national asset, and we should no longer permit any deleterious sentiment against compulsion to delay measures for the enforcement of his development into a useful citizen. It has been well said that like arrows in the hand of the giant so are the young children ; happy is the man—and no less the nation—that hath his quiver full of them. They shall not be ashamed when they speak with their enemies in the gate. But can Great Britain hope to encounter suc-
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cessfully either her enemies or her commercial rivals with the untrained human weeds and degenerates whom her careless parentage is suffering to grow up from the flotsam and jetsam of her gutters ?
Lords Roberts and Meath, the National Service League, the Boys' Brigades, and kindred institutions are doing the utmost that lies within their circumscribed powers to check this demoralisation. But hampering, restricting, and even vetoing their patriotic endeavours is that ingrained aversion from discipline and control, unfettered licence in the specious cloak of Individual Liberty, which is fast rotting the heart out of the nation and drifting it towards a roaring Niagara of final disaster.
So it comes about that unless a boy falls under the influence of the drill organisations, which are but as tiny islands of refuge in an ocean of evil, he grows up without disciplinary control of any kind except what he experiences for a brief period at school, or at the hands of poor and overworked parents. Then, at the age of twelve or fourteen, according to his intelligence, he is turned loose into a remorseless social system, in which everything resembling wholesome compulsion is anathema, to sink or swim as he may. From this point, too often, his devolution into the loafer and the degenerate is rapid, and in our glorious land of liberty and licence there is no one to say him nay.
The successive pictures in the Loafer's Progress
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are as clear and unmistakable as though from the grim brush of Hogarth. The primal necessity before
the boy is to find a job of some sort in his world of
the streets. So, for a time, perhaps, he carries a tradesman's basket, an occupation which, on account of the little prospect it offers, its opportunity for slack-
ness and general hanging about, is often an initiatory source of degeneration. Or, what is an even less controlled and more potentially harmful means of livelihood, he shouts the halfpenny papers or betting sheets. For I have generally found that boys who take to this speedily become, as it were, the small jungle life of our thoroughfares, drawing more readily than others into their untamed little natures the masterless, shifty, insubordinate spirit in the atmosphere around them, and not infrequently mark their onward progress by becoming, through the contamination of their wares, reckless little copper plungers on race-horses, or ultimately betting touts.
But whether the boy we are considering runs errands for a tradesman or sells papers, he drifts more and more into the companionship of that mysterious loafing class of defiant, masterless youths, the future pabulum of our gaols and workhouses, who, while doing no visible work of any kind, yet seem to possess sufficient means to supply themselves with the cheap cigarette and the gate-money to football matches, which, with racing topics, appear to form their staple of interest and conversation.
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The boy is now fairly launched on the down grade. He has dropped the tradesman's basket, and, with it, the last shadow of subordination. In the grip of the drone habit, and with deteriorating energies, he rapidly becomes a dishevelled, defiant, street loafer for whose growing predatory instincts even the casual job is almost a resented necessity. Offer him regular, work and he will sneak out of it. He will respond to your suggestion of the Army as a career with a regretful assurance that only some unfortunate physical defect has barred him out. For he has had that said to him before, and is ready for it. So his flabby hands continue to bleach in his pockets, the usual prelude to their insertion in someone else's, and in due time he finds himself in the grip of the law.
At this stage, at last, he may have reached a turning point in his career. If he has not exceeded the age-limit of twenty-three years—after which he is treated as an ordinary criminal—he will, under the recent State Reformatories Bill, be subjected to the moral and physical discipline of the Borstal system, a wholesome form of compulsion which his country denied him at an earlier stage, but which, now that he has become one of the criminal class, may yet prove his salvation. He is carefully kept apart from contaminating association with older prisoners, and receives an education that the sons of the honest poor might envy. Instruction in manual trades, mental and physical development, the discipline of the gym-
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nasium are applied to him for the first time. The puny waste product begins to assume a new value, the street-corner degenerate to fill out and hold up his head. Physical efficiency brings moral tone, and the youth gains in alertness and self-respect.
Surely, if the moral and physical regeneration of the actual criminal and degenerate is possible by a system of wholesome compulsion, the nation itself is acting a criminal part in refusing similar means of salvation to its future man-power at an earlier stage. Prevention is always better than cure, and yet we complacently suffer our boys, at that critical period of life when they leave school, to go forth unarmed amidst dangers and temptations which are manufacturing them into hooligans, degenerates, and criminals by the thousand.
Let anyone, however, who cares for the future of his race go out on to one of our large open spaces, and he will there find perhaps the most startling picture of this ominous process of man-ruin. On any working day of the week—I do not refer to legitimate holidays—gangs of idle youths and young men, of fifteen years and upwards, may be seen in all directions. Some are casually kicking balls about from one to another, others are merely loafing, and repeated observation in the same locality has often brought me face to face with the same listless figures leaning against some fence, or slumbering heavily on seats as though they had never left them.
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One of the Heath-keepers, to whom I referred the subject, was very emphatic. "Oh, that lot, sir," he said with a grim twinkle in his eye, "we call 'em the ' Never, Never,' the ' Band o' Rest.' Never did a stroke of work since they left school, and never will if they can help it. God bless you, sir, there's thousands like 'em, proper young wasters, no manner o' good to themselves nor to anyone. It galls me to see 'em. I often wish I'd a few mounted men to round 'em up and clap 'em into a pound. If I'd seen a boy o' mine herding with those gangs, I'd have got a gun and shot him."
These gangs of the "Never, Never" form a class by themselves, being one stage removed from the recognised unemployed, whose ranks, of course, they eventually join, but for a time they are enabled to live in idleness by sponging on poor overworked parents with some small means of livelihood. One stalwart fellow, for instance, of over six feet, who every fine day makes his way to the Heath through the Blackwall Tunnel, levies toll on a widowed mother with a small newspaper shop on the other side of the river. In the end, as these resources fail them, they swell the unemployed applications to the Distress Committees, and have recently been the cause of the enormous increase in the proportion of these applications from men under thirty years of age.
The only reason why in Germany you will never
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see the demoralised gangs of the "Never, Never" is that, apart from the flourishing condition of her protected industries, she has recognised the eternal truth that human nature is incapable of any consistent and effective self-discipline, and that in the international race for supremacy only a people subjected to the compulsion of disciplined training can hope for success. Britons are ready enough to recognise this principle in the world of sport, but shirk its application to the far higher issues of national efficiency and national defence.
Too long behind our watery ramparts we have been content to thank God that we are not as other nations are, or even as this German, whose disciplined manhood is beginning to cause us some strange qualms. The compulsory reform of our young criminals does no violence to our decadent sentimentality, but perish England rather than interfere with what Sir Robert Anderson has called "the divine right of the boy to go to the Devil ! "
As we watch the grim progress of man-ruin 0n all sides of us, we are driven in impatient wonder to ask —can nothing be done to check it ? For certain it is that our very national existence depends in an equal degree upon the technical and physical efficiency of our manhood, measuring its ability to retain our trade and defend our Empire. Both are essentially interdependent. A people technically inefficient cannot indefinitely support the increasing burden of costly
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armaments, and the growth of national vulnerability to attack unfailingly coincides with physical deterioration. When the latter is at work upon the fibre of a race the former may be taken for granted, even if less manifest than in Great Britain to-day.
Therefore, as we approach the question of remedial measures, we are confronted with the necessity of a dual effort in our endeavour to save the boys. First, we must ensure their technical training so that they may engage in the world's industrial struggle as skilled workers. Secondly, we must secure their subjection to a systematised physical and moral discipline, by which means alone we can hope to equip our future man-power with the enduring qualities of courage, self-confidence, presence of mind, and character.
We shall find that behind the ominous ubiquity of the loafer and degenerate, a very considerable amount of machinery already exists to cope with this evil. To advise and assist parents to secure the future of their sons we have the Education Department of the London County Council and a number of voluntary organisations doing excellent work. As an example of these latter we find such bodies as the Apprenticeship and Skilled Employment Association in Vauxhall Bridge Road, having sixteen affiliated local associations and eight corresponding committees in London and the provinces. The cornmittee.s work in close touch with the masters and
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mistresses of the Council schools, and every effort is made to direct the children into skilled employment upon the termination of their school life.
Further, boys are indentured to skilled trades, and in some cases even premiums are paid on the gradual repayment principle, while every effort is made to induce and encourage parents to consult the agencies on behalf of their sons and the latter to attend the technical evening schools. Five or six hundred boys are thus provided for every year, and, as far as it goes, nothing could be better or more deserving of support. But in its effect upon a great national evil it resembles an attempt to remove a mountain with a pick and shovel.
It has further been argued that because the apprenticeship system, especially in the provinces—where it has not died out as in the metropolis—still supplies the skilled trades, therefore its general and systematised revival would materially solve the problem presented by the decay of our youths into waste products, and the question of unemployment simultaneously. For it is argued that by reducing the amount of unskilled labour the volume of unemployment would be brought down to its irreducible
minimum.
Now, if this were all, we might soon banish the evils which beset us ; but, unfortunately, it is really very bad logic, for in the enthusiasm for the remedy it has been forgotten that there is a limit—and, sad to
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say, one too speedily reached—to the capacity of British industry to absorb increased supplies of
labour. It is even possible to appreciate the hostile attitude of Trade Unionism towards more than a limited extension of the apprenticeship system when thousands of skilled workers are to-day rotting in the unemployed ranks. We may tinker on if we choose, but no argument will get over the fact that there is not enough trade to go round. That is the crux of the whole question, and it needs to be borne in mind, even by those who rightly advocate the protection and expansion of British industries in the interests of British workers, and who maintain that thus alone can we secure the well-being of our people, stop the man-ruin of the nation, and give to the technical education of our lads a scope and objective which are now non-existent.
But as the boys are to be saved, and not left to save themselves, attendance at the technical continuation schools must be a compulsory one, for—as Germany has wisely recognised—human nature cannot be left to discipline itself, or the vagabond spirit would still assert itself despite increased opportunities for betterment. Moreover, we should still have to counteract the influence of selfish parents, which at the present time is a fruitful source of demoralisation.
For instance, one boy, with whom I am acquainted, is desperately anxious to escape from his
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life of the streets and enter the Royal Navy, but his
father will have none of it. "No Royal Navy for me," he says. "'E can bring us in somethin' sellin' papers. I wants 'im 'ere an' e'll jolly well stop." This, in my own personal experience, is the case of many a youngster who might escape perdition by similar means, or by the help of the apprenticeship system. Again I say, only compulsion can save the boys from such parents, and from their own undisciplined inclinations.
But if the rising generation is to be rescued there is more to be done than to increase material prosperity. Undeniable statistics are available to prove the serious physical decline in the race during the last fifty years through the migration to town from country life all over Great Britain. These statistics show that we are rapidly becoming a shorter and lighter race, but, to an even more serious extent, a narrower-chested one as well, for the decrease in chest measurement has been proportionately greater than that in stature.
How this deplorable decline in the physical power of the British people, with its many concomitant evils fallingbirth-rate, greater infant mortality owing to congenital defects and premature childbirth—directly affects the supreme question of national defence and national security must be clear enough to all. That the safety of the country is departing with our physical decay, or even faster,
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becomes startlingly plain when we examine the statistics of 0ther European States, and see how their soldiers and people compare in physique with our own. We must also bear in mind that these other nations are exposed to precisely the same deteriorating influences as prevail in our midst.
The way to physical salvation is open to us as to others who have discovered how to counteract the deleterious effects of a congested civilisation. The Borstal system has taught us how we may save our boys and our future manhood from ruin, and statistics showing the immense physical improvement of young Englishmen under the influence of military life with regular, good, and plentiful meals, regular hours, regular out-of-door exercises, and physical training are eloquent of what might be done for the nation at large. As an average, a recruit in five or six months gains 2 in. round the chest, 1 ½ in. round the upper arm, and 1 in. round the forearm, while even as the result of a three months' training, says Colonel Douglas, V.C., R.A.M.C., he gains in weight, height, girth of chest and limbs. His general physical improvement is extraordinary, while habits of order and discipline are equally developed.
Now two courses are open to us. We can, in deference to a decadent sentimentality, leave our boys during those critical early years free agents to rot as loafers in our streets, or we can compel them to
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undergo a year's training in a national school of physical culture provided by the Home Service Army. From this they would emerge far better men than they went in, inoculated with ideas of patriotism, the duty of citizenship, self-denial, and self-restraint, punctuality and discipline, ideas which build up character and conduce to the highest efficiency in the industrial world. Thus the lad's military training would act as a free national university for the finish of his moral and physical education.
But no voluntarily enlisted force will do this.
"D--n the Territorial Army ! " snarled a loafing wastrel to my suggestion of it for himself, "it ain't goin' ter git me." No, it won't get him nor thousands like him, who, minus compulsion, will go to swell the growing refuse-heap of our national manhood, whose physical salvation is considered sufficiently provided for by a training of school children up to the age of fourteen !
To individuals and nations on the downward course Heaven ever sends some voice of warning, and Lord Roberts, like one of the prophets of unrepentant Israel, has told the nation in plain terms of its danger, but, hitherto, the reply has been a rabbit-hearted scream of protest against that compulsion, without which no remedial measures can be of any avail. Shall we awake in time, or, as a keen German said to me recently, decay like the withered kernel of a nut behind the protecting shell of our navy ? Mean-
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while under Lord Roberts's lead a great patriotic effort is being made to save our national boyhood by its training in discipline and the use of the rifle. Admirable progress has been made by the various organisations associated under the name of Lord Roberts's boys, and I should be glad to advise anyone who is anxious to assist by personal service or contributions this gallant advance guard along the path of national duty.
We are a lost people, however, if we deem ourselves free from those laws of self-defence which have driven other nations to find in the compulsion of their youth an escape from the decadent effects of our modern civilisation. They have adopted the only antidote to the poison, and are reaping their reward. The same course of salvation is open to us if we will take it. But let us realise betimes that there is no other, or, as sure as the sun is in the heavens, a day will come when a narrow-chested race of degenerate wastrels, unorganised, undisciplined, untrained, will be called upon to surrender an Empire to a more imperial race.
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Essay No. 10.
An International Lesson
An Article on
LAWLESSNESS IN AMERICA
(Reprinted by kind permission of the "Japan Daily Mail.")
THE States of Tennessee and Kentucky—and, to a lesser extent, almost all the Southern States of the American Union—have for some time past been seething with that particular form of lawlessness exemplified in the doings of the "nightriders." Kentucky seems to be the original home of this murderous movement, but the burden of notoriety was shifted to the adjoining State in consequence of a peculiarly atrocious crime. "On the night of Oct. 19th," as recorded by an American journal, "Capt. Quentin Rankin and Col. R. Z. Taylor, officers of the locally hated West Tennessee Land Company, were summoned from their beds in a little backwoods hotel on the shore of Reelfoot Lake by a band of masked and cloaked nightriders. Captain Rankin was hanged to a tree and shot, while Colonel Taylor broke away and escaped in the darkness amid a storm of bullets."
The offence of the murdered man, and of his companion who narrowly escaped with his life, was that they occupied official positions in the West Tennessee
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Land Company, which had acquired possession of Reelfoot Lake and had set restrictions upon fishing privileges long enjoyed by the fisherfolk of the district. While, therefore, as a Union City correspondent points out, the primary object of the band may have been to combat a real or imaginary injustice in the community, it soon became an instrument of tyranny and personal vengeance, with a record of crimes of constantly increasing magnitude and brutality. Thus, from the burning of docks and other private property they progressed to midnight whipping—their victims being women as well as men —and finally to murder.
At last the brutal assassination of Captain Rankin compelled action on the part of the civil authorities. The trial which resulted was among the most remarkable in the legislative history of the Southern States. "Every witness against the nightriders," says the correspondent from whom we have already quoted, "spoke with the knowledge that he was endangering not only his own life, but the lives of those dear to him. Many of these witnesses had to be guaranteed free transportation out of the State, so sure were they of assassination at the hands of the prisoners' friends and sympathisers. The same danger lurked for each member of the jury. Two shots were fired at Attorney-General Caldwell in the streets of Union City during the trial, and it was known that Judge Jones was among those sentenced to death by the
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band. Throughout the trial a guard of armed soldiers was in constant attendance in the courtroom."
In the district, in view of the local sympathy with the prisoners, a disagreement among the jury was fully expected. The most sanguine of the friends of law and order dared not hope for a verdict of " guilty," and the Atlanta Journal shuddered to think what the effect of a mistrial or an acquittal might be. Fortunately for the reputation of the Southern States, and fortunately for the interests of public safety and morality, the authority of the law was upheld. A verdict of "guilty " was returned. Six of the ringleaders were sentenced to death and two others to twenty years' imprisonment. All praise is due to those who, at considerable risk to themselves, conducted the trial without fear or favour, for the condemned men represent but a small fraction of the whole gang. Twenty of the "Reelfoot Lake Nightriders " are still in prison awaiting trial, and some two hundred are yet at large.
In the neighbouring State of Kentucky, the situation is hardly as favourable, as the Louisville Courier Journal regretfully admits :—
" The law has not yet avenged the assassination of Hiram
Hedges. The pathetic picture of that husband and father
shot down in his own front door, for no other reason than
that a band of ruffians considered it good tactics to commit a murder to put intimidation upon a firmer footing and make more clearly understood their utter contempt for the law and its representatives, remains fixed in the mind's eye of every-
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one in Kentucky who is above the endorsement of assassination as a business policy. The spectacle of a widow and orphans without redress cannot be blotted from the imagination.
"A short time before the Reelfoot Lake murder a negro family was slaughtered near Hickman by a mob of Kentucky ruffians—an offshoot of nightriderism enjoying a frolic under the protecting wing of the organisation. What has been done about it ? What is to be done about it ? In Southern Kentucky an unoffending negro was called from his bed, marched into the high road, commanded to run, and shot in the back. The crime was surely not less worthy of punishment than the murder of Captain Rankin ! It is as unnecessary as it is humiliating to recite the list of unpunished nightrider crimes in this State."
The lynching of negroes is an evil so closely identified with the United States as to be recognised as almost an American institution. It has been the custom to explain it away as a consequence of the particular vices of the negro, and to some extent an outgrowth of racial prejudice in the Southern States. But the North can claim no immunity from this fiendish trait, and the bloody hands of lynchers have taken the lives of white men too frequently for any explanation to meet the case other than the inherent lawlessness of the American character, as shown in certain classes and parts of the country. It is perhaps not too much to say that the American people, as a whole, have an exaggerated, and somewhat distorted, conception of liberty, which they have set up as a golden image without discovering that it has feet of clay.
Now those observers who are other than superficial, who believe in going to the beginnings of
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things, are led to inquire : "The boy is father to the man—what of the American youth ? " Here, in the opinion of many, lies the explanation of the matter—in the American home and school. When such principles of home education pass current as that once expressed by an American woman of distinction—" I never correct or check my child, whatever he does . . . . restraint of any kind is bad for a growing nature," and when the whole system of academical discipline is sicklied o'er with similar views, is it any ground for surprise that the American child is too often precocious and wilful, the youth loud, self-assertive to the point of offensiveness, headstrong and heedless ? Can any thinking man deny that there is some connection between these methods of erudition and such a disagreeable fact as that America is preeminently the land of juvenile crime ? From time to time the world is shocked by a murder committed deliberately by a stripling who has not yet attained to years of discretion. Yet the system which can produce such a youthful ogre stands unchallenged However, signs are not wanting that, in recognising that all is not for the best in their much-lauded educational system, our American friends are "getting there." Public opinion is beginning to be exercised on the score of the teachers in American schools, who are nearly all women. The New York Educational Review, after declaring that " Women are the teachers of the American youth," opines that, while this may
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not he a bad thing for young children, "for boys of eighteen to be taught by women not much older than themselves is an altogether different matter," and men seem to have confided to the writer that having been at that period of their lives under women teachers has wrought them serious injury. Similarly, the efficiency of co-education in higher elementary and secondary schools is called in question, as tending to give the majority of boys in later life "a certain moral slackness which makes it easy for a corrupt minority to ride roughshod over them." As an attempt to explain the alleged widespread corruption in the public services of the United States this may pass muster, but to account for the recklessness, the tendency to violence, the absence of consideration culminating in cruelty, which go to make the nightrider, the train-wrecker, the lyncher, one must go deeper. The seeds of such a character are sown at a very much earlier age, and the true remedy would be for American parents and teachers of the young to pay more regard to the homely principles of erudition laid down by that wise king and profound student of humanity who said, "Train up a child in the way he should go, and, when he is old, he will not depart from it."
