THE BOY SCOUTS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19695, 23 January 1926, Page 10

THE BOY SCOUTS.

Dunedin will miss the visiting Boy Scouts when they have taken their departure to-morrow. Whether in serried columns, marching through the streets, or in small groups mingling with the other strangers whose presence in the city has been so agreeably contributing to its gaiety, they have been a welcome spectacle and have, Wherever they have gone, created a most favourable impression. It is understood that the jamboree in which they have been engaged has been a pronounced success. That is entirely satisfactory. The credit for the success of it may be diversely apportioned, but' all who participated in the jamboree, from the camp commandant down to the youngest and rawest scout,, must share in it. The arrangements for the gathering seem to have been made with far-seeing thoroughness, and the excellence of the organisation at Tahuna Park is effectively attested in the regrets that have been expressed with obvious sincerity by scouts of all grades that the camp is drawing to a close. It may readily be believed that the experience which the scouts have been enjoying is one that will be imprinted impcrishably in the memories of all of them. Apart from other considerations, the assembhng at the camp of scouts from all parts of New Zealand, from as far north as Whangarei, to the number of more than a thousand, their joint participation in the exercises and games that have constituted their programme, the establishment of friendships that will in many cases—probably, in most eases—bo of lasting duration, cannot fail to have important results. And the ultimate effects in the contribution they make to the building-up of a clean, healthy, resourceful citizenship must be inestimably valuable. For, in the last analysis, the object of the f Boy Scouts’ organisation is to promote good citizenship. The movement has been subjected to a certain amount of criticism to some of which the GovernorGeneral referred at the Rotary Club’s luncheon this week—criticism apparently based upon ignorance or misconception of the principles that lie at the

root of the Boy Scout institution —but we hope that the jamboree will lead to a wider knowledge of the objects of the organisation and to a fuller realisation of the benefits which it is calculated to bring to the scouts themselves and in the long run to the nation.