“At the present time it would seem to be the consensus of opinion of school teachers, employers, and all those who are intimate with the problem that great masses of boys are growing up to manhood inefficient for adult work, and incapable of performing the elementary duties of home life and citizenship. The truer mode of regarding the problem may be illustrated by the following quotation:
“ ‘According to the main statistical sources of information the very serious fact emerges that between 70 and 80 per cent. of the boys leaving elementary schools enter unskilled occupations. Thus, even when the boy ultimately becomes apprenticed or enters a skilled trade, those intervening years from the national point of view are entirely wasted. Indeed the boy, naturally reacting from the discipline to which school accustomed him, usually with abundance of spare time not sufficiently utilized, and without educative work, is shaped during these years directly towards evil.’ (Majority Report of the Poor Law Commission, Part VI., Chap. VII.)”
Now, if the richer classes of this country could be brought face to face with a sight of their own boys from fourteen to eighteen planted in this morass that boys of the poorer classes have as a matter of course to struggle through, they would marvel that the poorer classes have not long ago demanded that it be drained. Working-class parents have not demanded this chiefly because the boy from fourteen to eighteen has meant so many scanty shillings in the family pocket. When shillings are scarce one more or less seems vital. But, economically as well as nationally speaking, such rotting-down of the boys is grievously short-sighted. By this scheme, I believe, the working classes would be the first to benefit, and, after a few years, the last to wish it given up. Their ultimate gain would be incalculable, and, collectively speaking, their immediate loss even would be small. One million five hundred thousand boys training four months in the year means a seeming withdrawal of one boy in three, or half a million boys annually, from labour. But the number of boys between fourteen and eighteen actually employed before the war was only 1,264,000, so that there would be available some unemployed towards filling the places of the half million withdrawn. In the withdrawal too, of so large a number of boys from the labour market lies some chance of solving a problem that will begin to loom as soon as Peace comes: How to find places for the women whom the war has accustomed to work and wages? By this withdrawal, also, old and unemployed men would benefit; we shall want all the help we can get to minimize the unemployment that will sooner or later follow the war. So far as the labour market is concerned, the problem, in fact, would be mainly one of adjustment, but boys could be paired for their four years of training, one taking the other’s job—boy A. working it eight months the first and third years and four months the second and fourth year; vice versâ with boy B. A nation which has achieved in these last few months such miracles of organization is surely equal to a task of adjustment no harder of accomplishment than that which has long confronted every militarist country in time of peace, and which may at any moment confront this country, if it neglects adequate preparation for home defence on some such lines.
Consider the life of the working man at present. The State provides him as a boy with education up to the age of fourteen; provides him as a man with labour exchanges, insurance, and old-age pensions. The one period, which in the more fortunate ranks of Society is regarded as above all preparatory for life, is the one period of which the State takes no account. It is a fatal hole in the ballot. Why should not the workers have the privilege for their sons that belongs by mere good fortune to the wealthier classes—the privilege of a training that will give them greater health, greater knowledge and technical skill, better habits, more self-respect, and the power as well as the inclination to defend their country if need be?
After this war the national readjustments that take place to meet the menace from without and the menace from within must surely have relation to fundamental necessities, and not merely be the top-dressing and timorous expedients that accompany the piping times of a long-unshaken peace.
In the expenditure of large sums to achieve its ends the State need not look for its money back this year or next, so long as there is a certainty of the money back manifold ten and twenty years hence.
The expense of a national scheme for the training and technical education of all boys from fourteen to eighteen would have been looked on before the war as an insuperable objection. But the truly wonderful example of faith shown by the Russian Government in cutting off their own colossal revenue from drink at the outbreak of the war, and the immediate incalculable advantage to the strength of the Russian nation that accrued thereby, has knocked penny-wisdom off its perch.
This is not the time or place, nor am I qualified to examine the cost in detail. But, whatever that cost, can there be any doubt that the increased physical and industrial efficiency, coupled with the national security guaranteed by such training, would bring the outlay back tenfold within a generation? And can there be any question that it would conserve wealth, which adult training would but dissipate? When the war is over there will be great numbers of men whose lives have been hopelessly jolted, who have to find new occupations—men qualified, and probably only too willing, to take positions of technical instruction and military training under such a scheme. And the boys of the nation, already infected with desire to stand for something in the national security, would fall in with good spirit.
Apart from the question of expense, opposition would come, no doubt, from the employers of boy labour, and from the working-class parents of boys who are contributing to the family purse.
Both these objections can surely be met in the main by careful organization and dovetailing of employment. Only half the boys would be training at once; and for the winter months, of greatest stress for the poorer classes, none would be training; boy-labour is not highly-skilled labour, it is rarely of a nature that cannot equally well be supplied by another boy, and, failing that, by women, or men past the prime of work. With good-will and co-operation it should not surpass the wit either of employers or of the officials of special Boy-Labour Exchanges to cope with the dislocation. A boy’s earnings are not vast; when his own keep has been paid there remain but few shillings for the family exchequer. The value of these few shillings is in many cases, however, enormous; the loss might be made good by some system of insurance. Nor is it inconceivable that camp work would produce a small wage that could go to the assistance of the boys’ families. Omelettes cannot be made without breaking eggs; and, even if distress were caused at the start, can it be seriously weighed against the great ultimate benefit to the working classes, and the overwhelming advantages of rejuvenation in the blood and brain of a whole nation? The war has shown what those who have had to do with camp life for boys knew well before—the vast change that can be made in the physique and bearing of young fellows by a few months of fresh air and training. If those months are repeated yearly for four years, the training combined with civil instruction, and followed by a short spell of full military service, the country will have not only potential soldiers, but real men and citizens, at the end.