WHY NOT AN " OLD SCOUTS" MOVEMENT ?
AlUrE do not think that Lord. Rosebery went in the V V least too far when he declared that " he honestly believed that the Boy Scout movement was the best and most hopeful movement that had been started in his life- time, because it aimed at training lads to be good citizens and to be good men." Unquestionably Lord Rosebery was justified. We say with the fullest sense of conviction that it is impossible to make good citizens unless you get hold of the boyhood of the nation and inspire it with the true ideals of manly virtue. That is just what the Boy Scout movement does. But to seek to inspire boys with high ideals is one thing, to accomplish it is another. Plenty of good men and the ministers of all the Churches have tried from time immemorial to reach the boys, and undoubtedly a very great deal has been accomplished by them. It is, however, the peculiar merit of the Scout movement—due to its founder, Sir Robert Baden-Powell—that it has managed to get hold of the boys without giving them the sense that they are being "got at" or deprived of that liberty of action of thought and of feeling which the young so naturally and so rightly prize and guard as their most precious possession. Boys and lads resent "goody-ness," not because they dislike goodness in the abstract, but because they are afraid of losing their freedom. They have an instinctive dread that those who speak to them in the name of religion or of morality are trying to unman them and make them girls in knickerbockers or Sunday-school teachers —"rott,ers" who turn up, the whites of their eyes and are shocked by "swear-words." It is the glory of the Boy Scout .movement that no scout feels that he is being entrapped into any loss of freedom or being made " a good boy." Rather, he feels he is being made more of a man. And that is the truth. He is given that sense of honour which is the badge of manhood and the greatest anti- septic in life. He learns that a wound to his honour is the deepest wound he can receive, and that nothing can outweigh the contempt of his fellows when it is justly incurred through some ignoble act. Without flum- mery, -without rhetoric, without tall talk, and yet with a sufficient amount of ceremony and organization to make it interesting, General Baden-Powell has contrived to trans- late the essence of Wordsworth's " Happy Warrior " into the terms of boyhood. His was a great inspiration, and if it is not spoilt by some untoward fate, it must have a deep effect on the next generation, and give us better men as well as better boys. When the movement began it was natural that its pro- moters should think only of the work in hand and of the raw material straight in front of them. Now, however, that the first generation of Boy Scouts is passing out of boyhood many of their best friends are beginning to ask such questions as the following : " Ought we not to keep up the Boy Scout spirit in later life ? " " Is it not a pity that, having made so good a beginning and inspired so sound a. tone, it should be left to chance whether the young plants shall go on growing or get entangled in and choked by the tares of life ? " " Cannot there be some plan by which young men and middle-aged men and old men shall still be inspired by the ideals of honour, patriotism, and common-sense chivalry which they learnt in their patrols ? " It is most natural and most right that these questions should be asked, and in our opinion a great opportunity will be missed if they are not answered in the right way and some means discovered for keeping up the Scout spirit. The Scouts have graduated in good citizenship ; but a post-graduate course which can last them all their lives is assuredly required. We want some simple and easy organization, some " frank pledge," so strong that none will be able to break it, which shall bind and keep together the men who as boys took the Scout's promise. We want, in fact, an " Old Scouts " movement reared upon the splendid foundations which General Baden-Powell and his fellow workers have so well and truly laid. Tho " Old Scouts " might well establish a new freemasonry (though not necessarily with the freemason's secrecy) which should unite them in sound citizenship. For example, might it not be possible for the founders of the Boy Scout movement to turn the " Old. Scouts " into " approved societies " under the Insurance Act, or, rather, into a federation of such societies, which should maintain and keep alive the old. ideals of brotherhood towards those within and friendship and helpfulness towards those without? In forming such societies of " Old Scouts " the tie should be very simple and very unexacting. No attempt should. be made to put upon the members any burden too hard for them to bear, to tie them down too rigidly, or to impose too exacting a standard. We mean by this that it would not in all probability be wise to copy the system of " Courts of Honour," which has worked so admirably among the boys, and which has taught them so much.
Grown men could not be expected to consent to having their private actions brought before a tribunal of their fellows. But though this portion of the Scouts' code might have to be left out, there is no reason why the " Old Scout " should not renew the essentials of his obligation of sound citizenship, or why he should refrain from undertaking to do deeds of kindliness and goodwill, if not daily yet whenever the need arose. The fact that he was pledged to the service of his fellow men, and that the " Old Scouts " movement was a league of public duty, could not fail to be an inspiration, though it would be one which need not infringe on a man's freedom or take from him the right to be sole master of himself and of his own actions. The feeling that a boy must not disgrace the Scouts' honour has proved of extraordinary potency. Why should. not the feeling that a man must not disgrace the honour of the " Old Scouts " be equally potent ? We feel confident that General Baden-Powell, who was so happily inspired in drawing up a standard of conduct for the boys which was not too much, and yet enough, to hold them, could set forth ideals similar in spirit, but modified for the new con- ditions, for " Old Scouts " societies and for their troops and patrols. The suggestion of these ideals and of the very simple rules—the simpler, the shorter, and the less detailed the better—is, we feel, far beyond us, but we are convinced that it is in no sense beyond the originator of the Boy Scouts.
If, as we hope and believe, an " Old Scout " movement can be organized by those who have the Boy Scouts in hand, one of the first questions which will face them will be whether to admit men who have not been Boy Scouts, but who would like to join the new organization. Though it is a matter on which we should be very sorry to dogmatize, we are inclined to think that it would be better only to admit those who have passed through Boy Scout patrols, or who have been regular members of the Boy Scout organization as Scout-masters or other officers, or organizers of the movement. The mother-thought of the movement, as we see it, is to carry on into maturer life the Boy Scout ideals. But those ideals will not, as a rule, b3 properly grasped and held unless they were learnt young. The branch must have been bent in the proper
direction from the beginning. Unless such bending has taken place there will be a danger of misunderstanding.
If once an " Old Scout " organization were created and strongly supported, consider not only what an instru- ment for general good it would be, but how potent and how useful would be the organization to its members. To begin with, it would be world-wide, and the member of an " Old Scout " troop, wherever he went in the British Empire or in the United States, would find friends and colleagues ready to receive him. The same hand of fellowship would be extended in almost all Continental countries. Only the other day the present writer saw Boy Scouts on the piazza of St. Mark at Venice standing by the side of a group of old men wearing the red shirt of Garibaldi, while in France, as is well ]nown, the movement has already taken firm hold.
Before we leave the subject of "Old Scouts " we must not forget to say that all we have urged in regard to building upon the Boy Scout movement, a movement for grown men, applies equally well to the Girl Guides move- ment, with its high and also practical ideals of woman- hood. There might be a little difficulty in the matter of nomenclature, but no doubt a good name for the movement could easily be discovered.
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