My Humble Opinion

Auckland Star, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 172, 20 July 1907, Page 12

My Humble Opinion

— \ "■ I PIERROT. I

BOYHOOD YESTERDAY AND

TO-DAY.

Boys have always been faulty pieces of nature's handiwork, no better than, if different from their elders. In every age they have shown a thoughtlessness that, if it were not thoughtlessness, often might pass for cruelty; they have agreed in preferring play to work (a point in which, most of us are secretly inclined to agree with them), in hating a sermon, in despising smugness beyond even the just measure of contempt. They have waged relentless warfare for victory oVer their seniors, they have mocked and set at naught a thousand efforts for •their improvement. But yesterday there was something left. Whatever else they were, they had a strict code of their own—a code of honour, and all that honour implies. A boy could forgive everything but dishonesty, sneaking, and meanness; but those were crimes, not faults—crimes punished with that ostracism and banishment from their fellows, which is boyhood's uttermost cup of bitterness.

Is this so to-day? If I say I think not, it will not be carelessly, not flippantly, hut with a sense of foreboding and dismay. A few hours ago a hoy confessed in my hearing, and to a roomful of men, that by dint of climbing the fence at Saturday's football match he had evaded the payment of the shilling for admission. It was told triumphantly, joyously, with all the air of a conquest at the expense of the authorities. And I am ashamed to say that the men laughed, and that one made the outrageous remark, "BOYS WILL BE BOYS!" Yes, sir, I hope they will. I hope they will be mischievous, excessively frank, bubbling over with ill-placed mirth, boys in every sense ot the word. But let mc tell you that to be a cheat is not to be a boy, and if there is one atom of real boyhood left in New Zealand, I hope that boys will give such an infamous view the lie by attacking in-force any.man, young or old, who so insults their pride at what should be its most sensitive point, l was no saint as a boy—and I have hated moral priggishness since I could take in its meaning. But I do know that with the average code of my boyhood, I should have spent a. sleepless night if I had come by a penny, not only by dishonesty (which neither I nor my schoolfellows ever conceived as a possibility), but by any sort of unfairness. I do, indeed, remember a boy who stole from an automatic machine by means of a leaden penny, but I also remember that his triump"h was greeted with such contempt that I dont think he was likely ever to attempt it again.

The shallow personage who spends his time in writing to the paper letters about education will hot see the inner seriousness of such seemingly trivial lapses. It wants more imagination -than he possesses to see that the moral nature of a boy is sensitive to the lightest symbols of good and evil, and that a trick to obtain an ounce of swe. ts to-day is veryapt to mean a trick to achieve "an illicit dividend from an employer in the future. The fellow develops a moral obliquity to which an unpunished crime is no crime at all. The gentleman who said, "Boys will he boys" may then improve his saying by adding the more fitting truth that, ''Rogues will be rogues"—at least, if they are caught young enough, which he seems to recommend they should'he. Of course, boys who are guilty of these little jugglings with an elastic, and, I think, unboylike, conscience are not wholly, or even mostly, to blame. A high boyish standard of honour is made by collective boyhood, and not hy the individual boy; and if parents and schoolmasters have not taught the young idea to recognize theft under new appearances, the thief can hardly be held accountable for his actions. I blame those who have failed in their plain duty in the matter of this teaching, and ask them at least to realize the pity of it, and to consider whether it is not nearly as important a matter as shorthand, or even the rule of three.

I am often surprised that manly sports have done so little where they are so much pursued, to instil in the rising generation what we may call moral manliness. The -sneak is never a man, and a man, or a manly boy hates a sneak far more than any desperado, far more even than the horned prince himself. And then I remember that sport itself is being poisoned by this very unmanliness ' that leads a "boy to help himself when nobody is looking. There are low beasts of the- football field, at least—and probably the boys find their own editions of them—whose prowess is measured better by their power to injure an opponent for life than to score an honest point in the game. There are the cowardly if biglimbed milksops who make up in treachery and animal brutality all that they lack in skill and method and respect for the rules of the contest. So perhaps it is asking too much that sport should revive anything of the lost honour of true boyhood. Possibly a vigorous treatment with new century football would make a hoy more tricky and unhoylike than even the efforts of some of our educational experts.

Of course a commercial age tends to make sneaks. And the greatest pride of some of our commercial men, having translated "sneak" into some nicesounding word, is to place the reality as an ideal before their sons. In business there is often neither shame nor that self-criticism which should make a man wish to see his son less revoltingly unmanly than he is 'himself. Few people know themselves, but the meaner type of business-man is blind in his stupid self-complacency. His very expression of countenance must often make a rogue of a son by a subtle sort of suggestion, but his surprise on finding that his boy has emerged from an atmosphere of sordid self-seeking to a new phase of deliberate self-helping is to mc at once amusing'and pathetic. To expect honesty—at least of the positive order —from a boy who has been taught to be canny and calculating is a sad excess of optimism. Boys will be, ought to be, must be, boys, if they are going to be men in anything better than the modern business sense. And a boy is not a boy if he does not want to punch the head of every sneak, and if he would not rather have his own head punched than play the sneak. That is a boy's own language, and I think it Shauli repteseflfc-a.-fopx's code, M honour.