COLONIAL BOYS.

Lyttelton Times, Volume XXXI, Issue 2497, 4 January 1869, Page 3

COLONIAL BOYS.

(From the Argus, Nov. 16.) “ What are we to do with our boys “Flog them,” somebody suggested. It is a good while now since that important question was first and anxiously asked througli the medium of the press; and among the various recommendations it called forth, the delicate hint that the rod might prove a magic wand, was perhaps not the least practical and apposite. It excited at the time the objurgation of many a fond parent; but all who were no longer boys themselves, and who had no blind enthusiasm for boys, were also to contemplate with philosophical calmness the merits of the proposal. It was that writer’s settled belief that the boy of the period was not sufficiently flogged; and we fear that the years which have elapsed since have not impugned the wisdom of his conviction. Even the dispassionate who do not write to the papers about “the boy nuisance”—who have no favourite corns to be trod on or peculiarly tender fastidiousness in matters of sight or sound—more and more perceive that “ the colonial boy ” as so described, is an objectionable element in animated nature at this end of the world. And the affliction is aggravated in the hobbledehoy stage. The Australian stripling of a particular and unpromising type becomes more numerous. His characteristics are not pleasing. He wants the diffidence and the reverence which are natural to youth. He is bumptious. Notoriety is his ruling passion. He loves to occupy the public gaze, and he loves to occupy it behind a pipe or a bad cigar. He is prone to “shout” for nobbiers, and to shout without any aid from beverages which cheer and inebriate. He likes to listen to himself, and jealously strives against the music of the opera that you too shall hear his voice. He will have you witness his antics as well as the performance of “ Hamlet.” But he is often worse than noisy, demonstrative, and troublesome, in all places of public resort, for he too frequently clutches with energy the gravest vices of maturer life. This sort of flash and fast youth is a plentiful crop in New bouth Wales, and it also begins to abound in the rising generation here. The papers a few days ago described the fast performances of a young person named Parr, only, fifteen years of age. He had been engaged in “knocking down” a sum of money which he had stolen, and he was arrested in the dress circle of the theatre, where he seemed desirous to attract notice in company with some “ elegantly dressed ladies.” He was sent to a juvenile reformatory for twelve months, which, in his zeal to figure as a fast man, must have seemed to him very ignominious treatment. At the same time we hear of something more extraordinary, in the commission of a capital offence near Geelong, by a boy hardly more than fourteen years old, and who from his appearance was at first supposed to’ be still younger. As this young hopeful is a few months over fourteen, lie is about to be put upon his trial. In another provincial locality, a lad of seventeen has just been tried for and convicted of a similar crime. It is when things like these occur that we appreciate the wisdom of the sentence passed on the juvenile who, a couple of years ago, attempted to enact the part of a highwayman near Nunawading. A judicious course of whipping was included in the prescribed punishment. The wails of the criminal excited so much commiseration, that after the first dose the castigation was not repeated; but to correct him as a boy and. not as a man was precisely the kind of punishment most likely to have a salutary effect on an’ambitious youngster. One of the chief causes of the precocity of the rising generation, so frequent and so much complained of, is that the proper and natural distinction between youtlvand maturity is not sufficiently attended to in social relations and daily life at the present time. Boys are not “kept in their places” as in past generations in the old country. They are suffered to be too familiar, and are admitted over much into the conversation and the amusements of grown people. Thus placed on something too like an equality,treated in a manner which would have astonished everybody fifty years ago, it is no wonder that they forget that tliey lire children as we appear to forget it, andlendily fancy themselves already men. In reading books whicli illustrate family life in bygone centuries, people are amused to see the extraordinary distance which was then preserved by parents towards their children, and the profound respect which they exacted from them, not only towards themselves, but all oilier grown persons, The principle was a most necessary and wholesome one. The thing was then carried out too rigidly, perhaps, and may have needed relaxation, which it subsequently underwent. But ,in the present day that relaxation has become so extreme, that a return, more or less, to the old system in the management of youtli will soon bo found inevitable. There are still people wise enough to rear their offspring

in the natural and old-fashioned way, who require ' from them that respect for their senior! as such which youth, when not’ spoiled, is Instinctively inclined to pay; who keep them, in a word, in their proper places—not introducing their little girls to the amusements of adults, or suffering their boys to dress like men, or to ape their manners, But this, unfortunately, is no longer the general rule—not even in England, and in “good society” there. Hence, all that youthful fastness, which, if we are to believe the Saturday Fevieto, is now fashionable as well as popular. When children are permitted the gaieties which they should only enjoy when they are grown up, there is little wholesome novelty left for them when they do grow up, and then they have a sensational craving for something more. In America and in these colonies the mischievous results are much more general, because of local circumstances, which, while they render the duo discipline of youth more necessary, also render it less easy, for while the climate favours precocity, in a new country there are earlier opportunities of money-earning and of escaping parental control. In some of the United States cities boys between fifteen and eighteen are described as composing the dangerous classes of the native-born. There, as here, the stripling too often becomes a man before his time, and so exhibits neither the freshness, the reticence, nor the reverence of youth. And the circumstance accounts for that decline, after a few generations, of the transplanted European populations, which is so much commented on in America, and has been apprehended on this continent likewise. The real remedy will never come until there is something like a general return to the good old system in the bringing up of children* The ancient discipline of youth may have been too rigid, but the contemporary practice on the subject is more fatally in the opposite extreme.