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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