THE SCOUT FAITH

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXI, Issue 18784, 18 May 1923, Page 4

THE SCOUT FAITH

All that Brigadier-General Andrew said in Wanganui this week in eulogy of the Boy Scouts is endorsed by Mr Geo. B. Smith, of Sydney, who is an ardent enthusiast of the scout movement. During the last three years that gentleman has closely studied the organisation by working on the N.S.W. executive council, also working with the troops, and then spending several months in England, and visiting and becoming familiar with the troops and scout organisation at numerous centres, inclusive of the scout officers’ training camp at Gillwell Park, with the result that he declares in a published interview that he is fully assured that the movement is one of great national value. Similar testimony comes from the Motherland. Last year that great health officer of the London County Council (Dr Kimmins), who is responsible for the health conditions of six millions of people, went up to Hull to address the British Association, and he told them that the boy had a soul, and that it mattered as much what went into that soul as it did anything that attacked the physical portions of his body. The boy, scout movement cares for the boy just as the susceptible iyears of his life, and inculcates habits of obedience, self-reliance, observation, and efficiency, whereby he may render service to others as well as to himself. Through these scouts laws is produced the structure of a brotherhood and faith which is the very backbone of its activities. ’The organisation confers upon the boy an initiative and responsibility making for a true ability to control and develop an initiative of a remarkable nature. As a movement that is non-class it now extends in England throughout all classes of the community. At the universities and some of the big public schools there are many hundreds of scouts, and today there are Rhodes scouts acting as scouts at Oxford. To the work of the commissioners and scout masters have come surgeons, doctors, lawyers, influential business men, and many hundreds of ’varsity graduates. An instance of this is that of the late Roland Phillips, a Winchester school boy, and a graduate at New College, Oxford, who went and worked for five years as Commissioner in East London with its teeming millions. He summed the scout movement up by proclaiming that a new power had arisen in our midst. It is the power of the boy’s ideal, and he added thereto. * The scout faith is such a very real thing. We are all trying for the best we know, and none of us can therefore be far apart. It is only the best that is worth trying for, and it is the repeated act of trying that raises a man’s sou] on pure wings towards Heaven.’ Shortly before his death bn the battlefields of France he wrote, ‘I have always considered there to be two activities for a Scout Master and a Scout Commissioner, the first to live with and for the boys, and the second to live scoutlike every day, and each hour of every day.’ “The boy scout movement has existed for a period of less than two decades, but to-day its numbers are over two millions of active scouts. At Gillwell Park, in England, the centre for training scout officers, foreign nations, are continuously sending men to be trained in the work and principles of boy scout life, for the movement is international, 91 per cent of the civilised wcrld having adopted it. With the British Empire it is most assuredly a national movement, caring for the the boy who is to carry on for us in the years to come, and will assuredly, if his natural ability is sustained, make for the future greatness of our country.