Father and Son.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLVIII, Issue 17, 23 October 1912, Page 60

Father and Son.

A Modern Problem—What to Do With the Young Men.

By

COSMO HAMILTON,

riry 15 have all just been reading what ■fl r ' e l ls 11 n '* M r - Galsworthy y I i, many others think about the vital and difficult problems that affect the working class. Everyone who writes, indeed, turns his attention either earnestly and with a sort of awe to the working man, or satirically and with a touch of venom to the much-en-vied person who is born in the purple. To the overwhelming, far-spreading, unthinking middle-elass no attention is paid. It is certainly a eurious, and as it seems to me an unexplainable, thing that the men who go up to their offices in their hundreds of thousand daily and work honestly, quietly, and conventionally for sometimes many more hours than eight a day should bo left utterly alone. One is almost led to believe that the stockbroker, the solicitor, the barrister, the civil servant, the merchant, the accountant, et hoe genus omne, who go to form the very backbone of the nation, are unassailed by care, parental anxiety, or the ever present problem of how to make both ends meet. It would seem that the privilege of having a problem is exclusive to the so-ealled working man, who is now being prevented from working, and the so-called aristocrat, who works very hard. One has merely to make the most cursory examination, for instance, of the present state of the younger generation, the sons of the overwhelming middle-elass, to see how entirely and unfortunately erroneous is any such idea. Altogether outside the carking problems of increasing competition, increasing taxation, and increasing expenditure, the middle-class father is daily brought closer face to face with the eon problem. It is with the almost unanswerable problem of what he is to do with his sons th'at these fathers wake every morning. Unemployed and Unemployable Young Men. And very well they may! Increasing competition they cannot prevent, increasing taxation they cannot evade, and increasing expenditure is due to men and causes that are apparently outside their reach. The son problem, on the contrary, is, in the great majority of cases, one of their own making. It is not duo to the sins of the fathers that there is to-day a huge and ever-growing army of young men in this country who are unemployed and unemployable. It is due too often to their snobbishness, thoughtlessness, selfishness, (temperamental inability to deal with new conditions, and lack of sympathetic understanding. Tho mon who go to make up the vast and indispensable middle-class know how to work, how to be honest, and how to face the world squarely and fairly, but as a body - there are, of course, exceptions—they do not know how to be fathers.

Some of them call it a gift, and hide ■behind that vague excuse. But the fact is that the knowledge of how to deal with a son is not a gift, like writing poetry, like composing music, but, like them both, is the outcome of a long apprenticeship, deep study, and perhaps several failures. To these men generally a son is either a necessary evil, a regrettable accident, or a delightful toy. He is not, at any rate, regarded as an entity that must, sooner or later, stand eye to eye with them as a bitter reproach of a proud possession. Tn the same way that they catch their (train every morning or motor to the city, these men bring up their sons. They do not think it necessary, or they have not got the time, to take the boy into their friendship. Tliey give him as little thought as possible—their lives are hard and arduous, and their home time limited—and remain simply father. It is the mother who endeavours to lie. the friend. But the mother is a woman. It is not the same thing. The Boy and the Public Schools. Then comes the day when tho boy begins to be "too much” for the hoine -tho boy who is as great a stranger to the man who has seen him every day as

though he were a Somali—the man who has not taken the trouble or possessed the inclination or the leisure to discover which way the boy’s tendencies run, whether he is a dreamer, a mechanist, a mathematician, or what. It is at this stage of the sons’ lives that I must divide fathers into two sets. The first set, to which belong the men with small and perhaps uncertain incomes, and the men to whom the great gift of fatherhood and its immense responsibilities mean nothing, send their boys off to any cheap and nasty school that comes first. They must be little clerks, as they argue. There is nothing else for them. They waste hard-come-by money on unnecessary education? The second set, the one to which I am now going to devote all my attention, is made up of the men who are equally middle-class and equally without the sense of responsibility, but who are most successful or in more lucrative positions or professions. It is at this stage that the snob in this set of fathers often begins to assert itself, and the most pitiful and dangerous middle-class germ becomes active. They do not say to themselves, with all the seriousness of which they are capable outside business, “My son will have to earn his living in an overcrowded country. Shall ho follow me into my office, and, if so, how best can he be trained ? Is he to be an indoor or an outdoor man? How does he shape? What is his ambition? Has he a gift for, or a leaning towards, any particular thing.” They say, “Something must be done with Harry. The school question has cropped up. Well, Jones thinks he’s the only man in the neighbourhood who can send his boy to a public school, does he? Well, I’ll show him!” So, without any sort of consideration for this son or his future these men deliberately send them to one or other of the great public schools, and thereby unfit them almost at once for the common or garden office work that must inevitably be their future lot. Microbes of Discontent. In this way these middle-class, well-to-do fathers place their sons among the microbes of discontent and pretence, irresponsibility and shirk, and shirk, and there are not many boys who ean resist them. In this way also they give their unfortunate sons the opportunity of acquiring the habit of dodging, or not facing, hard facts, of believing that efficiency in sport is the be-all and end-all. These boys “must” now have this, that, and the other in order to hold their owu and compete with their fellows. They “must” do things that are altogether beyond their ultimate office future. They are literally pushed out of their welldefined territory into one that is nothing • —a mere chaotic No-Man’s Land, neither field nor lawn.

How very quickly the public school system stamps itself upon these hoys! They are hardly to be recognised when they come home for the holidays—the far too long holidays. They find everything, including their parents, “frightfully suburban.” They slack about full of desires to do those things that are beyond the means of their family, envying the rich set whose people run big ears and yachts and own shooting and fishing. The little, infrequent word “office” makes them shudder. They begin to talk glibly of the ’Varsity, the Army, the Diplomatic, the Bar, Flying. They never think of reading or putting in any work, nor does the amazingly myopic father ever suggest such a thing. They condescend to play golf— a halfcrown ball is the only one that is good enough—they discover an aptitude for billiards. They do not see, in a word, even at this age, why they should not begin where their father has only just managed to arrive, and the father is the last man to bring the absurdity of thia view home to them.

The Army and the Diplomatic are diseuMed. These children "chuck” them both generally when they find that to enter there ia a sort of examination. They are the less sorry to do so when

they are told that there will be no allowance in the future. Times are too bad. No allowance —think of that! So they put forward—they may as well put in a good time somehow —the suggestion as to a University career, and again the father’s snobbishness overcomes common sense. "My son at Oxford, or Cambridge, you know.” The next definite step towards absolute unfitment for office work, or the slow, upward, competitive grind of a profession, is then deliberately taken, without any goal or object in view excepting to be a Blue, "if it isn’t too much fag.”

“My Son at Oxford.” These boys go to Oxford or Cambridge. They take with them generally the bare, necessary allowance. They are, however, "men,” independent men. Without any hesitation, they aeeept the invitation of University tradesmen to run into debt. There is no University decree to prevent it, although there is one to enforce the wearing of gowns in the street after nine o’clock. Debt is inevitable, unless a. man is made of strong stuff or enters Ruskin Hall. If they excel in sport they emerge from the ruck as a Blue, and scramble, as a last resource, into a small scnoolmastership, knowing nothing and caring less. If they suddenly take themselves in hand and are inspired to work (many of them are) they may go down with honours, and spend a grumbling, ill-paid, insalubrious life in the Civil Service, or—become schoolmasters.

Finally the majority of them return home, aged perhaps 22 or 23—hungry, bored, supercilious, useless, and unambitious—decorative persons, knowing only what collars to wear and the exact shade of soeks that are right for the hour. And when their impressed but suddenly anxious father ventures to ask what they are going to do for a living, echo answers “What?” To be a "rotten clerk”—think of it! To be obliged to get up early every morning and catch a certain train—what a life! To have to begin at the beginning instead of the middle 1 So they hang about at home—look at them all on every side —• to the inexpressible misery of the mother, the constant irritation and rage of the father—without one single qualification for earning a living and a hundred extravagant and wild ideas. When finally these outraged fathers are forced up against hard and unpleasant facts, and find that they are feeding and clothing and paying the debts of lofty young men who are not only unemployable but unemployed, they deserve, yes, deserve, to have it flung in their teeth that theirs, and theirs alone, is tho blame.