YOUTH AT ITS BEST!

Sun (Christchurch), Volume IV, Issue 963, 13 March 1917, Page 6

YOUTH AT ITS BEST!

MOST BEAUTIFUL THING ON EARTH. "Youth is perhaps the finest as it is certainly the most beautiful thing on earth—youth at its highest and its best," writes Harold Begbie in the "Daily Chronicle." "At its highest and its best youth has such a splendour for middle-age that it appears to be the only inspiration of life. We look upon a youth as we look upon an angel, lie does not belong to this troublesome world which has made us cynical, which has smirched us. which is so small and trivial under its cloak of pretentiousness. He is perfectly clean of sold, perfectly strong in body, and he has that expression in his clear eyes which is the glory of innocence. In his beauty, his freshness, and his goodness he is unconsch us. He is Youth. "Such boys, fresh from our public schools have gone in their thousands to the battlefields. The earth is filled with their graves. They have perished in great waves. Each year of war flings up a new wave of this beauty and innocence, and every year the war lasts another wave will rise and follow to the shores of death. We who have hated and envied, who have tolerated secret diplomacy, who call the enemy Hun and Boche, who cry at one moment 'To hell with Serbia,' and at the next drag the great name of God into our screaming leading articles, who sit at home saying how sad it all is, and wondering what the income lax will be next year, we in England, ant! our like-minded vulgarians in Germany, Reventlow and the rest, we middle-aged men are hurling the youth of Europe into the furnace of death to settle our quarrels and to get what we have coveted. "They have never hated. They have been happy with life in their homes, wanting nothing else. The hutches where they kept their rabbits are still standing beside the wall of the toolshed; their first huntingsaddle is still in the harness-room; their fishing-rods, cricket-bats, and tennis rackets are still in the old schoolroom. Ask the coachman and the gardener to tell you stories of these boys, and you will see those eyes kindle with admiration and affection. Ah, youth at its best!—who can help loving it? "There is nothing so beautiful as

yonlh, and I feci that it is not insularity which makes me think English youth to be the finest and most beautiful of all. "There is only one thing more moving than the death of these glorious children. It is the courage of their mothers. And that courage for us who remain should sound an eternal, a resistless Reveille in our souls.''