The normal attitude of the natural man is a graceful slackness of body, but with eyes and ears alert, able on the instant to spring like a cat from apparent inertness to steel-spring readiness.
Study the individual fads and characteristics of your boys, and, having found them, encourage their development on these directions; then when advising the boys as to their future line of life you will be in a position to direct the square boy to a square hole in the world, and the round boy to a round one. Don't, as many people do, make him aim for some sphere for which he is not really fitted. Aim for making each individual into a useful member of society, and the whole will automatically come on to a high standard.
One great cause of unemployment—in all walks of life in England—is the inability of our men to take up any line other than the one they have first attempted and failed in. We call a sailor the "handy man" with admiration, because he seems to be the only kind of man among us who can turn his hand to any kind of job. Well, so can anyone if he only has the idea put into his head and tries it for himself. Our aim should be, therefore, to make the boys "handy men."
But most of all we want to raise the lowest to a higher place. "Go for the worst" is the motto of the Salvation Army in its great work. "Our mission is to the bottom dog" says Colonel Ruston, Mayor of Lincoln.
Mr. A. J. Dawson, in his very able articles in the Evening Standard, has put the question of the loafer in clear and easy terms.
He points out that the very efficient work of our police in big cities has stopped thieves, but produced a class of criminally-inclined loafers.
"On the Canadian prairie," he says, "if a perfectly able-bodied man without means were deliberately to abstain from work for any considerable time he would die and would cease to cumber the earth." But in London it is different; a man can loaf for months, or years, leaning against a public-house—and they do it by the hundreds. He assigns two reasons for this:
1. Want of discipline in the lives of those who are not absolute criminals.
2. Indiscriminate charity.
We want to save lads from drifting into this class of loafer who swells the ranks of the unemployed. The complaint has recently come from Canada that "No Englishmen need apply for employment" there. The subsequent Canadian explanation was to the effect that the average type of Englishman who came there was unsuitable, because: