NATIONAL TRAINING—WANTED, A MAGNA CHARTA FOR BRITISH BOYS.
[To THE EDITOR OP THE "SPECTATOR."J SIE,—In your last issue you printed a letter signed "Major
• (Retired pay)," upon which, with your permission, I should like to make a few comments. "Major" writes :—" The utility of Cadet corps lies chiefly in the discipline and alertness
which drill, with or without arms, engenders it is education, not military training." Now, Sir, the Cadet corps system, if it were properly carried out in this country and made universal, would produce the greatest national asset we could possibly own,—namely, a Young England of splendid physique and intelligence and unselfish in character. "Military training" is surely "education," and appropriate for the masculine sex, as opposed to skipping and games for the feminine sex. Whatever calling a lad may • eventually pursue, elementary military training in his early youth will make him a disciplined and efficient member of society. "Major" writes :—" To attempt to make rifle-shots of immature youths is futile." Why futile? If the attempt succeeds, it cannot be futile. It does succeed, and I have not met with any instance in a lad of distaste for marksmanship after he has once mastered "the fourth R." I think the keenness and fine shooting of our Astor County Cup Team (City Primary Schools) is an instance to the contrary. Here, the light-rifle boy-marksmen have in a graduated and scientific way gone on to full-range work, the natural reward and outcome of steady practice at the "miniature" ranges. And yet they are four years younger than "Major's" " armigerous" age. " Major " will find that when our boys reach the age of seventeen years they "will be capable of bearing arms " ; they will, in point of fact, be as keen to shoot their class or match as are their confreres in the Colonies during schooldays and later. " Major " recommends us to "wait for the physical maturity of our boys before we give them any military; training, in order that we may copy the system in vogue on the Continent." This is to put back the hands of the clock with a vengeance. How can our lads ever reach proper physical maturity unless there be a universal Cadet system of physical training in early youth ? The present efforts of the Boys' (and other)* Brigades only affect a small proportion of the total number of English boys in a badly co-ordinated, wasteful, and inefficient way so far as squadding and instruction are concerned. Let us consider the physical state of our lads at seventeen years of age if we wait until that time for the State to lead and guide them. "Major" knows very well, but be has not told us, how deplorable is the physique of the greater number of recruits of this age who present themselves for enlistment and whom be for this reason has had to reject. Again (and is there any British father or mother who is not utterly ashamed when pondering upon it P), could the terrible condition of invalidism in our Indian Army exist if our boys had been properly guided and instructed at the receptive age in a proper Cadet system ? We must build up a first-rate civil population with "general education" in school, elementary drill and rifle-shooting in Cadet corps, cricket, football, and the rest, then at the age of seventeen we shall have a healthy, and therefore happy, set of lads from whom Mr. Haldane will easily obtain the handful for which he asks, each lad already seven-eighths of a soldier, each possessing a sense of good- comradeship, self-denial, and true sportsmanship, inculcated alone by a sound national Cadet system.—I am, Sir, Stc.,
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