This is the key to success in scout-training.
Foster the patrol spirit and friendly rivalry between patrols and you will get immediate good results in an improved standard of the whole. Don't try to do everything yourself or the boys will merely look on, and the scheme will flag.
DISCIPLINE.
Insist on discipline and strict obedience; let them run riot only when you give leave for it, which is a good thing to do every now and then.
A nation to be powerful and prosperous must be well disciplined, and you only get discipline in the mass by discipline in the individual. By discipline I mean patient obedience to authority and to other dictates of duty.
This cannot be got by repressive measures, but by educating the boy first in self-discipline and in sacrificing of self and selfish pleasures for the benefit of others. This teaching is largely effected by means of example, and by expecting it of him. There lies our work.
Smiles gives in his book on "Duty" Baron Stoeffel's report comparing the discipline of the Germans and the French before the war, 1870-71, in which he foretold the victory of the Germans, on account of their superior discipline; and, in commenting on this, Mr. Smiles writes:
"Can it be that we are undergoing the same process in England as in France; that the ever-extending tide of democracy is bearing down the best points of a very vain-glorious people?
"We are a very vain-glorious people.
"We boast of our wealth, our naval and military strength, and our commercial superiority. Yet all these may depart from us in a very few years, and we may remain, like Holland, a rich and yet powerless people. The nation depends on the individuals who compose it; and no nation can ever remain distinguished for morality, duty, adherence to the rules of honour and justice whose citizens, individually and collectively, do not possess the same traits."