July 2b, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
13 
after t\)t (JSaar 
Past and Future : The Waste of Youth 
By Jason 
NOBODY who has compared a squad of town 
recruits and a squad of officers at drill, can fail 
to remark the contract. He sees at once what a 
difierence it makes to builfd, physique, tone and 
xt^'arriage, whether a youth has been brought up in fresh air, 
with healthy games, and good food, or whether it has been 
his fate to work during the years of adolescence in bad air, 
with little recreation, deficient food, under conditions that 
arrest development. 
When we read of the exploits of our new armies in the 
Sorpme Valley or on the Vimy Ridge, we ought to form a 
picture in our minds not only of the heroism of the hour, but 
of the long and painful process by which thousands upon 
thousands of our soldiers have overcome this cruel consequence 
of their boyhood. For in the early days of training nothing 
is more striking to those who have had a healthy boyhood 
and youth than the difficulty that recruits from the counter 
or the mill find in standing the strain of a long route march 
or a hard da/s work in the field. These were men who had 
lived habitually on their nervous energy, for whom some 
artificial stimulus of excitement was almost essential to 
prolonged exertion. They have made themselves soldiers 
by a moral discipline of which few besides themselves knew 
the cost, hardening muscles, limbs, an(f will, till they have 
the tenacity of iron. 
Instruments of Industry 
What 'is it that explains the difference between these two 
classes, a difference that shows itself most dramatically on 
the parade ground, but not less significantly throughout 
life ? It is, fundamentally, that we think of the children 
of the comfortable classes as naturally entitled to education 
from the possession of minds and bodies which can be trained 
and developed, whereas we still tend to think of the children 
of the working classes as the instruments of industry, merely 
to be considered in relation to its needs and uses. The most 
important question that awaits our answer in reconstructing 
our society is the question whether or not we mean to release 
the life and prospects of our society from this, the most 
terrible of the legacies of the Industrial Revolution. 
A century ago there was a good deal of discussion of the 
question of popular education. The hght in which politicians 
regarded it is well illustrated by a speech made by William 
Windham, himself one of the best scholars in the House of 
Commons. " It was said, look at the state of the savages 
when compared with ours. A savage among savages was very 
well, and the difference was only perceived when he came 
to be introduced into civilised society." The President of the 
Royal Society, Davies Giddy, put the objection directly 
and with emphasis : 
However specious in theory the project might be, of giving 
education to the labouring classes of the poor, it would in 
effect be found to be prejudicial to their morals and happi- 
ness : it would teach them .to despise their lot in life, instead 
of making them good servants in agriculture, and other 
laborious employments to which their rank in society had 
destined them. Instead of teaching them subordination, 
it woufd render them' factious and refractory, as was evident 
in ■'the manufacturing counties. It would enable them to 
read sedUious pamphlets, vicious books, and publications 
against Christianitv ; it would render them insoknt to their 
superiors : and in a few years the result would be that the 
legislature would find it necessary to direct the strong arm 
of power towards them, 'and to furnish the executive magis- 
trate with much more vigorous laws than were now in force. 
Most of those who were in favour of education were careful 
to explain that they only wanted the children of the poor to 
receive just so much education as would make them more 
useful to the rich. Mrs. Trimmer, regarded by many as rather 
advanced, defended herself on this ground : " It is not 
intended that the children of the poor should be instructed in 
language, geography, history, and other branches of a liberal 
education, but merely in such a knowledge of their native 
tongue as shall enable them to read the Scriptures : in the 
plain doctrines and duties of Christianity : and in those 
modes of conduct which may engage the favour of their 
suDcrlors." 
Put in this naive form this doctrine of the servile State, 
to borrow a term which Mr. Belloc has made classical, 
strikes the modern mind as a little too crude for a society of 
free men and women. But in greater or less degree this 
spirit has haunted our ideas about education ever since. 
This is apparent not only in the indifference with which we. 
have left van boys, errand boys, bobbin boys, and' all this 
world of youthful labour to the inexorable mercies of the 
market, but also in the grounds on which the extension of 
education was urged before the war. Itwas argued that our 
clerks ought to be more like German clerks, our workmen 
more like German workmen : it was only rarely that the 
argument was based on the wrong done to men and women 
by treating them as if their faculties were of no importance in 
themselves, or the injury done to the nation by leaving these 
great resources of character and intelligence undeveloped 
New Value of Youth 
The war, we may hope, has destroyed this spirit. For as 
our armies march to the trenches we think of our boys of 
nineteen not as the property of this or that employer, nor as 
the discarded instruments of this or that wasteful trade : 
we think of them as the arm of a nation fighting for its life. 
Yesterday they were hanging behind a van for fifteen hours 
a day, or doffing bobbins in a mill, or running errands in the 
street with a blank and empty future, and nobody asked 
what was to become of them or what was happening to their 
minds and bodies. The world went on its way as if it were the 
most natural thing that school life with its interest and its 
games and its opportunities and its ambitions should come 
to an end for all these children as soon as an employer could 
find a use for their fingers or their muscles. Then came the 
war, and the nation learnt to put a new value on its youth. 
When peace returns will our boys be merely van boys, 
errand boys, riveters' boys, bobbin boys again, or will they be 
looked upon as the true riches of a nation ? Are we going 
to say that it is only when we need their shoulders for a rifle 
or their fingers for turning a shell that we count our youth, 
or are we going to resolve that this hideous waste of the past 
is over and done yrith ? There can surely be no doubt of the 
answer. 
There are few people whose imagination is so dull and slow 
that the war has brought home to them no sense of shame 
and guilt for that past. The sacrifice of youth, with all its 
golden hopes, is the great tragedy of the war all over Europe, 
and thousands pf Englishmen who have scarcely given a 
thought to the subject before the war, are determined that 
the youth of to-morrow shall have a fair chance in all classes 
of life. That reparation at least can be made to the youth 
of yesterday from whom their country has taken their all : 
to whom she had given nothing. 
Accusing Facts 
The accusing facts have been brought before the country 
again and again. The Consultative Committee of the Board 
of Education issued a report in 1909 on the lamentable 
deficiendes of our education system for all above the age of 
fourteen, in which it was pointed out that our industrial 
system was beginning to exploit for its own purposes the 
increased efficiency of boy and girl labour due to the improve- 
ment of our Elementary Education. '' There are signs that 
the factory system (where its operations are not held in check 
by the conscience of the employer or by the regulations of the 
State) is beginning to seize upon the improved- human material 
turned out by the elementary schools at the close of the day- 
school course. Certain branches of machine production are 
being so organised as to make profitable the employment of 
boy and girl adolescent labour in businesses which, while 
demanding some intelligence and previous school training, 
are in themselves deadening to the mind." 
It is nobody's business to consider their minds ; it is nobody's 
business to consider their bodies. It is nobody's business to 
ask what is going to happen to them when they grow too old 
for the particular temporary place that they fill in our system. 
We have begun tentatively with Advisory Committees of the 
Education Authorities and with Juvenile Committees 
associated with the Unemployment Exchanges. In the 
sphere of physical training we have a most promising 
institution in the Boy Scouts. But this provision barely 
touches the problem. It was stated in the report of the 
Consultative Committee that there were rather over two 
million boys and girls in England and Wales between the ages 
of fourteen and seventeen, and that three-quarters of these 
