THE ENGLISH BOY OF THE FUTURE.
To all appearance, there is “a good time coming” for boys and girls. This year—an extraordinary one for many reasons—will be a marked one in the history of English education, for a fresh start in the training of the body, which cannot but cause a fresh start in the development of many of the faculties of the mind. The Prime Minister has listened and spoken on the subject of the physical training of the rising generation. So has parliament. So have the managers of popular education, and the guardians of the poor. Rifle matches between select boys from our public schools have been witnessed at Wimbledon; and drill has been introduced into various classes of schools. In my long life I have seen many changes and varieties in the treatment of human limbs in their growing state; but all that I have seen in half-a-century is less remarkable than the progress made this year towards giving the youth of the country a sound body in which to develop a sound mind.
Many a boy, in reading history, has sighed that he was not born in the ages when every child was practised in the use of the bow, and exercised in town and village games, and brought up to the chase, and to fitness for war. We were all fond, in our youth, of reading of the village butts, and the games on the green in the summer evenings, and on the ice in the wintry sunset. We have all wished that the wild animals had not perished out of the woods, and perhaps regretted that there was no real chance of invasion, with its risks, and its spirited preparations, and its openings for active heroism. I have seen those regrets most wistful in the generation which came between the national perils of the beginning of the century, and the revival of national soldiering within the last ten years. I trust that no future generation of English boys will undergo the privations of the one which is passing away.
Among my earliest recollections is that of troops of little boys playing at being volunteers. That was when Mr. Pitt and the country gentlemen were reported in the newspapers to be training their volunteers, in expectation of the landing of the French. In the streets of towns, troops of little boys were marching and halting, and scaring the horses with their drum and fife, under some ragamuffin who called himself Mr. Pitt, or King George, or the local lord. We who saw these things from the windows might not go out and join them; so we drilled in companies of three or four in a garden, and longed to go to school, that we might do it with more effect in the playground. It seems to me that boys found more scope for their physical energies then than since, though we certainly felt ourselves very small in comparison with our fathers, judging by what they told us of their early feats. An uncle of mine used to tell us about a schoolfellow of his,—Horatio Nelson,—who led in such enterprises as we dared not attempt. Nelson helped a set of boys out in the night, to rob an orchard, in a very daring way. We climbed apple-trees; but it was not in the night; and somehow we fancied it was tame work in comparison. An aunt of mine used to tell us of her frolics in country visits, when a whole village was filled with young people who came to one of the great balls of those days. The ball was all very well; but there was better fun when the girls jumped up behind the boys on any horse they could catch, and rode the country round, with or without hats and bonnets, astonishing the farmers, and mystifying the cottagers, and being lost sometimes for hours together. The practical jokes involved feats of activity which we knew ourselves to be unequal to; and we wished we had been born a generation earlier. One of the strangest things was to hear the precise old gentlemen and formal old ladies declare that those times were somehow better for young people, than the more staid and intellectual régime. under which we were growing up. They often told us how sensible we ought to be of advantages in the way of learning such as they never had; but now and then would come out an avowal that the boys had more spirit, and the girls more originality and more grace, when there were fewer books and more pranks. Those were still the days when mothers let their boys alone, or even encouraged them, about black eyes and swollen noses from school fights; and when there was as much pride at home about eminence at the wickets as about a prize for Latin or Algebra.
Boys were unchecked in defying “Bony” and the French, as Nelson had done. That time, degenerate as we thought it, was a stouter one than the period which succeeded. When our parents were looking after the waggons which were to carry the women and children away from the coast on the appearance of the French, the girls were carefully hardened against any helpless fear of “Bony,” and the boys were promised that they should stay and fight him, if circumstances permitted. That period seems to me now full of spirit, in comparison with that which followed.
After the idea of invasion died out, an enthusiasm for “education” burst forth. Little children, from the time they could speak, were to be made, by a new method, wiser than ever little children were before. They were puzzled with questions; they were crammed with knowledge; Dissenters’ schools expanded and multiplied; and rural labourers’ children were taken from the field and the dairy, and the cottage cradle and oven, to be shut up in school for nine years together, “getting learning,” as their parents supposed, but coming out as little able to read anything but “a chapter,” or to keep the weekly accounts, as to trim a hedge or make cheese. The young gentry were not much better off. Boys in our public schools had their races, and games, and fights; and they kept up the repute of English pluck and activity: but it was a dull time for the others. It was piteous to see homebred children take their daily constitutional walk. Happy those in the towns who knew of a place where timber was lying, where they might at least get some jumping! Happy those who knew of a green slope where they might roll, or who dared to trespass into a hayfield where they might get a tumble once a year! Happy those who could reach a heath, where they might play hide-and-seek among the furze! But for one such, there were hundreds