LORD CROMER'S ADVICE TO BOYS.
THE best advice is generally the oldest. And the oldest things in the world are always the simplest. It follows that good advice is always simple. Can any one doubt that ? Did conscience ever propose an elaborate and subtle scheme for the rectification of a wrong ? What induces people to reject the undeniably sound advice of conscience is indeed its uncompromising simplicity. It tells them to do such a very simple thing as confessing, or apologising, or giving back, and they prefer a roundabout course, a misty circumlocution, or a back-handed or half-hearted method which is a less severe tax on their pride or on their pocket. It has been said that there are only seven stories in the world ; that is to say, there are only seven root-stories, and all the other stories have drawn their significance, their distinguishing characteristic, from one of those seven roots. Similarly it might be laid down that there cannot be more than—shall we say ?—three or four pieces of good advice. But just as it is the custom of men to try to tell an old story in a new way (far be it from us to discourage them !) so (and this is much less admirable) it is the custom to try to give fresh advice to meet every con- ceivable occasion. Sir Benjamin Draper, or Sir Samuel Mercer, or Sir John Banker comes to the scene of his school- days for "Speech Day," where he is expected to deal out sensible and manly advice to the boys. He does so in an address on the surface of which may be discerned the principles which have helped him to the giddy heights upon which magnates sit. So far, so good. Autobiography is the most fascinating form of biography. But the advice is generally manifold enough, and original enough, to satisfy Sir Benjamin, Sir Samuel, or Sir John that it has met the dignity of the occasion, and that means that it is much too intricate. Having sat under the oratory of such shining examples, the present writer can affirm that in his experience —he hopes it is peculiar—the portentousness of the advice has varied in inverse ratio to the importance of the speaker. The simplest advice he ever heard given at a school "Speech Day " came from one of the most distinguished soldiers in England. We are drawn to these reflections by the extraordinary simplicity of the advice which Lord Cromer gave to the boys of Leys School, Cambridge, last week. Here was a man who had successfully tackled and solved one of the most difficult problems ever put before a British administrator abroad. No one could have been surprised if the singularity of his experi- ence had put him in the mind to attribute his success to singular principles of thought and conduct. But he did nothing of the kind. He recommended the three plainest rules of life that have ever been offered as a compendium of wisdom to boys : "Love your country, tell the truth, and do not dawdle."
To love one's country is scarcely an otiose recommendation in days when it is no longer a universal axiom that men must perforce gather together in groups, or nationalities, for con- venience of administration, or in the interests of commerce, or for self-protection, if not for sheer sentiment. For if cosmo- politanism as a creed is not professed by any but Socialists of the Continental type, it is still a principle which is at least revolved in the minds of thoughtful youth as a possible ideal before it is rejected as unworkable. Lord Cromer, who has administered justice indifferently to men of various races, simply tells an audience without recourse to explanation or argument that they must love their country. He has learned that conscious nationality alone inspires a personal devotion, and if generosity• and justice and love of liberty spread in the world, it must be as an extension of that primary and indispensable motive. He knows that if all the dividing administrative lines were blotted out from Europe, they would almost instantly reappear, in a slightly different form perhaps, but probably very much as they are now. Men under the pressure of geographical condition, and all the exigencies of commerce and government, would regroup themselves as swarms of gnats close together again after one has beaten them asunder with a wave of the arm. At the end of his career Lord Cromer confesses as an article of faith that that, so far from being a law of social gravity which is to be avoided, is a fundamental fact which must be enthusiastically accepted before progress can even be begun.
The advice not to dawdle is the most homely of the three rules, and though obvious enough, it is a fine working principle which embraces a good deal more than appears at first sight. Given the importance which Lord Cromer attaches to it, the familiar phrase is promoted to a new prominence. One guesses that Lord Cromer must have seen much dawdling to induce him to utter so distinct a warning against it. What exactly does he mean by dawdling ? We suppose that he referred to that state of mind in which a man does not indeed refuse the labours of the world altogether, but works only half in earnest at what he has undertaken. The idler is in this sense different from the dawdler, or the dawdle, as the old noun used to be There may be an engaging air of resolution about the idler. He is a rebel, possibly even an Ishmaelite. He defies convention and necessity, and takes some pains about putting himself outside the pale. He may not idle gracefully—few men can do that—but he has a definite and debonair, if unfruitful, creed. R. L. Stevenson, half seriously, offered an apology for him, and showed what =designedly useful offices he performs in the routine of the world. But the dawdler is always at half-cock when the crisis comes, and he wastes an unconscion- able amount of time which is not even useful as relaxation. He lives continually under the shadow of his work, which oppresses his brain and his conscience, but never gets itself properly done. He is neither labouring nor playing ; be is neither spending his strength valiantly nor keeping it fallow for future use. It is said that "dawdle" is akin to 'dowdy." If so, we may see a real point in the derivation. What is dowdy is slatternly. A dowdy costume is not no costume, but a costume which is ineffective, and conspicuous by its ineffective- ness; and, similarly, dawdling is not an absence of work, but an inefficient kind of work, intermittent, with the attention only half fixed on it. Dawdling softens the mind, and does not even refresh the body. "Every man is, or hopes to be, an idler," said Dr. Johnson ; but he would have been too sagacious to say that every man hoped to be a dawdler. The best excuse a man ever makes for dawdling is that he cannot help it, that he is physically unfit to work as hard as other men, and must therefore content himself with the low-pressure labour which is the moat his constitution will bear. The answer to this is that dawdling is in the vast majority of cases an infirmity not of body, but of mind. It is neither congenital nor imposed by congenital disadvantages. It is amenable to discipline.
If dawdling is a prevalent vice to-day, it undoubtedly has its counterpart in a protesting and completely opposed habit. But even " hustling " may fall, and often does, into a corre- sponding unfruitfulness. "Affected dispatch," says Bacon, "is one of the most dangerous things to business that can be." That is the observation of a master-commentator. How often one notices that a great deal of fuss and scurrying hither and thither yields incommensurate and vulgar results, while the quiet, competent person who has made no noise and has seemed indifferent to the terrible severities of the com- petition with which he is threatened produces at the end of the same period work which is tasteful, thoughtful, scholarly, or workmanlike, as the case may be, and wins in the open market on its merits. "Order and distribution and singling
out of parts," says the same master, "is the life of dispatch." Yet no saying must be pressed too far, and the mere arrange- ment of time may be a framework for hopeless dawdling. "Measure not dispatch by the times of sitting, but by the advancement of business." There is a habit at Oxford and Cambridge of talking of reading so many hours a day, and it is dangerous for this reason, that it takes the "times of sitting" as a criterion of progress rather than the quality of the reading. Nothing we have said is intended foolishly to ignore the great differences which exist in men. One seems to have a worm working in his brain which compels him to unceasing industry ; we all know him ; he is not a hero, because it seems that he can hardly do otherwise than obey his imperious cacoethes for labour ; he puts us all to shame by his long hours of application, and le does not even give us the gratification of fulfilling our complacent prophecy that he will break down. Another has to fight with himself and conquer every time before he can induce himself to settle down to work. But these are the primary and integral differences in men's natures ; idleness and energy have nothing to do with ability ; discipline may be as necessary for the one to refine his work as for the other to work at all. The chief point we seize on in Lord Cromer's speech is that in public service amid the increasing complications of modern problems the simplest motives and rules are still the best. Fortunate indeed that it should be so for schoolboys, for they will remember that they have been told to "play the game," and "follow up," and "swing together," and, let us add, not to dawdle, when more fine-sounding exhortations have fallen away and are quite lost in the moments of real stress!
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