^*f^/ HQ 797 F54 PirkG - ..^ Boy li" _/' ^:f- ] ^^^K Southern Branch ^^* of the University of California Los Angeles Form L 1 HO^ 737 ^5^ This book is DUE on the last date stamped below MAY J --, ic- m ^ '' li c > fAO 1 5' 1936 m JAN ft m f}. 'iM Form L-9-15m-8,'24 1974 1^ no "fl^ BOY LIFE AND SELF-GOVERNMENT ,1" BOY LIFE AND Self-Go VERNMENT GEORGE WALTER FISKE Professor of Practical Theology in Oberlin Theological Seminary, Oberlin College, Ohio ^sifiiociation l^vm New York: 124 East 28th Street London: 47 Paternoster Row, E. C. 1912 R7036 Copyright, 1910, by Thk International Committee of Young Men's Christian Associations Ha TO THE OTHER BOY IN MY OLD NEW ENGLAND HOME MY BROTHER CONTENTS I. Jiramie, James and Jim: a Diagnosis . 11 II. A Gymnasium for Citizenship ... 21 III. Boy Life and the Race Life ... 41 IV. The Boy and his Instincts ... 69 V. The Struggle for Manliness ... 87 VI. Boy-made Societies .... 107 VII. Rudimentary Society Among Boys . . 119 VIII. The Epochs of Boyhood and Youth . . 147 IX. Group Clubs and Mass Clubs for Boys . 169 X. The Association's Work with Boys . . 193 XI. Progressive Self-Government Among. Boys 205 XII. Some By-Laws of Boy Leadership . . 221 XIII. The Boy's Religion . . . .241 XIV. The Boy's Home 277 FOREWORD The best excuse for this book is probably the fact that its pubhcation is requested by the International Committee of the Young Men's Christian Associations. It is given to the press, not as the last word on the boy problem, but simply to add another hand- book to the working library of boy lovers and boy leaders, with such suggestiveness as it may offer them for their own better coun- sel. In its original form the manuscript was prepared as a course of lectures on the assigned subject ^^The Principles of Self- Government Among Older Boys." These lectures were given in August, 1909, at the annual Y. M. C. A. Institute at Silver Bay, Lake George, New York, before the advanced Boys' Work and County Work Secretaries. The closing chapters on The Boy^s Religion and The Boy's Home have been added at the request of the International Committee. Acknowledgments are due the Sunday School Times Co. for permission to republish here from their book, "Building Boyhood," the 10 BOY LIFE author's chapter on The Boy's Normal Home Relationships. But books are usually born, not made. They grow naturally with the slow process of the years. Perhaps this little book finds its genesis back in a certain old New Eng- land town where the same grand old elms shade the same crooked streets where thirty years ago the writer was the proud marshal of a troup of some fourscore small boys, who in keen imagination "fought, bled and died" as youthful patriots in the strenuous cam- paign for the everlasting glory of Garfield and Arthur ! In all the years since, he has been a lover of boys and an interested stu- dent of boy politics. Believing that much of the perplexity of the boy problem and the difficulty of boy management in church, club, home or school can be relieved by frank- ness and tactfulness in trusting the boys and developing tlieir manliness through respon- sibility and initiative, he is glad to share these studies in the principles of progressive self-government in boy life. L.HAPTER I JIMMIE, JAMES AND JIM: A DIAGNOSIS There is no predigested way of making a man out of a boy. Formulas are delusive. Prescriptions fail. The fact is, boys are not run in a mold. They grow, and you may be reasonably sure that the process is a struggle. Sometimes it is a struggle be- tween the boy and his teachers, often with his parents ; but always a struggle between the boy and himself. The passive, sleepy boy, who never wakes up till his middle teens, is apparently an exception ; but usually the active, natural boy of eight to fourteen summers, in a civil- ized community, is living a double life. He is practically two boys under the same hat. He lives his life on two distinct planes, which are more or less incongruous. His poUte life is controlled largely by civilized sanc- tions, especially within his home. He eats with his fork at the family table, wears cuffs and perhaps even gloves in the family pew, if he sits there at all. Externally he may be the pink of propriety, the acme of civil- 12 BOY LIFE ized progress, the flower of silk-stocking culture ! This is the side he keeps trained toward his unsuspecting mother and his pious aunt. For all civilized functions, this is the nice little man, James. But for a certain period, the root of the matter is not this manikin, but Jimmie, the rollicking savage within, the boy as the gang knows him, not as his fond mother imagines him ; unless she be a modern mother with Sherlock Holmes perceptions. It is hardly fair to James to say that the real boy is Jimmie and the artificial boy James. Both boys are real ; only one is more so. Neither is it fair to Jimmie to call him the by-product in the civilizing process of producing James ; nor merely the raw material. The boy him- self, if consulted, would probably allow that he was really Jimmie, though his maiden name was James. Let us rather find the truth in the strange duality of boyhood. Every natural boy is, more or less clearly, two boys, both James and Jimmie; the prim little pink-and-washed Puritan, and the saucy little rough-and-tumble heathen, struggling together for the mastery for several busy years. If the good angels are propitious, and the father of the twins has JIMMIE, JAMES AND JIM 13 good luck, the resultant, emerging from this seething retort, will be neither James, the Pale Face, nor Jimmie, the Mohawk Brave, but Jim, a manly boyish fellow, frank of face and sound at heart. Meanwhile let us not be too fearful for James. Jimmie probably won't hurt him; he'll do him good! Were it not for Jimmie, Jim might never be. In that event the "nice little man James" would just become a color- less, weazened-up, highly proper and harm- less person for the rest of his life. At least he would never set the world afire, for he hasn't got the brimstone. Nor let us tremble, lest, after the smoke of the conflict clears, only the young barbarian is left. The dan- ger is much less than we think, for James has a good effect on Jimmie meanwhile. He tones him down, and clips his claws, and sometimes rings his conscience on him ! And besides, Jimmie has a mother. Let us have patience with Jimmie, have due respect for James, have faith in God; and Jim, in due time, will win out. Right here is the storm center of the boy problem. Find here the key to that strange fickleness of boy life which makes many a boy the despair of his mother and of all who 14 BOY LIFE know him — or fancy that they know him. The pecuhar irresponsibiHty of Jimmie is entirely normah He is not a finished prod- uct and should not be so regarded. He has a right to be treated as a growing boy. We are apt to treat him as a microscopic man. Boy life is complex. Boy thoughts are subtle sometimes, but crudely illogical. Boy feelings are changeable, fitful, mercurial. Boyish actions often seem inconsistent and baffling, until you discover that the incon- sistency is due to this fact of the duality of boyhood. You are dealing with two oppos- ing natures rolled up into one. Utterly blind to Jimmie, his mother grieves sorely because she "simply cannot understand James." Neither does his busy father. So James suffers many a whipping on Jimmie's account; though this contributes nothing to the peace and good-will of the household. The fact is, young Jimmie for a few years is a good deal of a savage. Do not blame him. He cannot help it, for he has many generations of savage and barbarous ances- tors back of him ; so it takes time for James to civilize him. James will sometimes need help ; and sometimes not. If the family interfere too often in the process, you get JIMMIE, JAMES AND JIM 15 a forced evolution rather than a natural growth into manliness. The boy problem then is really The Mak- ing of Jim; developing a kingly young man, a manly, Christian citizen, out of the irre- pressible and irresponsible boy. To do this, we must first let Jimmie have his fling — with no "wild oats," but all innocent, rollicking fun. Let him be the boy savage and bar- barian if need be, when Nature seems to indi- cate it; and then be done with it, and give Jim, the white man, a chance. Do not regret these turbulent years, for remember that where there is no Jimmie, the boy is apt to be nothing but James, the puny Pale Face. Jim, the good Old Scout, is far better, and he owes a great deal to Jimmie. It will be important to consider later the question. What if Jim comes too soon.? Tliis is the tragedy of precocious Httle-manhood. It is a great misfortune, for the boy and for the race, thus to cheat Jimmie. Let him be protected in his boyish rights. This is pre- cisely what our child-labor committees and children's aid societies and juvenile courts are doing, jealously protecting and prolong- ing normal boyhood, and retarding manhood. Equally serious is the question. What if 16 BOY LIFE Jimmie hangs on too long and our manly Jim fails to appear when due? How can we hasten delayed adolescence? How can we develop manliness in a rollicking, ne'er- do-weel of an overgrown, chronic boy, who persists in playing Jimmie, long after the clock has struck for Jim? Here we find comedy turning to tragedy. Too often we find the boy who is suffering from too much Jimmie, his real manliness delayed by a per- sistence of the barbarian spirit, the horse- play, the laziness, uncouthness, awkwardness and general lack of purpose of belated boy- hood. Perverts of these two abnormal types form our "hooligan" and "hoodlum" ele- ments respectively. The former is a pre- mature man. The latter is a boy barbarian in arrested development, lacking in manli- ness. These two questions involved in The Mak- ing of Jim are not inconsistent. Let child- hood and boyhood be prolonged. Let man- hood be postponed. But let manliness be promptly developed. Notice the vital dis- tinction between the terms. Manhood should not come until Nature rings the bell; if it delays until sixteen, all the better. Civic manhood will not come till twenty-one, and JIMMIE, JAMES AND JIM 17 adolescence normally persists till twenty-five. But true manliness can hardly appear too early. To be sure there is a kind of mani- kin mannishness which attacks mere "kids" like the chicken-pox, when they try to assume the toga virilis by way of the first cigaret, the first loud bet, the first quiet gamble, the first dash at profanity and the first beer. But if Jimmie is sound at tlie core, he will discover ere long that mere mannishness is only fake manliness, and he will quit every sort of imitation thing which fails to satisfy a really manly Jim. The manliness which consists in self-con- trol, a trained and self-disciplined will; a ris-ht heart with Jesus Christ enthroned within, with the impulses and appetites in leash; a sound mind, ruled by level common- sense, and an undercurrent of determined purpose to play the man in life, to put his life in for all it is Avorth — this sort of manh- ness rings true, and often sounds its clear note of chivalry, nobility and Christian knightliness in rather early boyhood. It is a good note to hear. We welcome it and encourage it. Senator Hoar said rightly, "That is the best country where the boys are 18 BOY LIFE manly and tlie men have a good deal of the boy in them." Grown-up Jim will be more kinds of a good fellow if young Jimmie has run the whole gamut of healthy boy life with all its clean fun ; running through all the series of race cultures, absorbing the best of them all, and perpetuating in his enduring habits the noblest instincts the past has given him. And the young man Jim should ever retain the best feelings of boyhood, Jimmie's zest for life, his optimism, his joyousness, his enthusiasm. Dr. Stanley Hall said wisely, "The real fall of man is to do things with- out zest." To grow old is to feel old. Need- lessly to lose the best feelings of youth is the great sin of maturity. With great patience with Jimmie's short- comings, and a deep, true sympathy witli him, if we are men with memories, let us con- sider together his big life problem, how to grow Christian manliness, how to develop true citizenship, and maybe leadership, through self-control and personal initia- tive. These are not new questions ; and they are not easy questions ; but they are very fascinating questions, both because of their very difficulty and because of the vast JIMMIE, JAMES AND JIM 19 issues at stake. To be sure, Jimmie's spin- ster auntie says it's all impossible from the start, for he is bound to go to the bad any- way ! But you and I have faith in the whole boy family, Jimmie, James and Jim — espe- cially Jim. CHAPTER II A GYMNASIUM FOR CITIZENSHIP The sorting of boys is uncertain business at best. We are learning to let them clas- sify themselves — as they will do anyhow, try as you may to sift them. They have a won- derfully slippery way of wriggling through your sieve. We all know the precocious youngster with the preternatural wisdom, the keen wit and the precipitate will, who myste- riously bobs up in an older "gang," or a higher class in school or church. Let him warn us that we must always expect our most beautiful classification of boys to bow humbly before the unaccountable boy who is older than his years and big for his size. With due respect for this type of boy, and a warning to keep a weather eye out for him, let us suggest the convenient term, the teens, as covering fairly well the range of our study. As we shall deal especially with older boys, it might be better to subtract a year at each end of this period ; for most boys at thirteen are "older boys" only by courtesy ; whereas it is almost a discourtesy, and surely a blun- 22 BOY LIFE der, to call the young man of nineteen, or even eighteen, any kind of a boy. By that time his chum's most affectionate term for him is probably "old man !" However, there are youngsters of nineteen, as well as weaz- ened-up wiseacres of barely a dozen summers. The natural habitat of the latter is the slum, the alley, the glass factory and the coal- breakers. The former you find all too often at the opposite social pole, in the homes of the pampered rich. Both are abnormal and demand special consideration. If the major premise of self-government i« the develop- ment of the will, the obstructed-will of the pampered rich boy needs the self-government gymnasium far more than the precipitate will of the self-reliant street boy. The lat- ter needs rather the strong hand of the Big Brother Movement. Making due allowance for extremes and special cases, the development of will power and personal initiative on the part of boys will usually be accomplished, if ever, in the adolescent period between childhood, when control is external, paternal, and manhood, when control must be internal, self-control. This intermediary battle-ground, where the battle royal of life must be fought out, ?s GYMNASIUM FOR CITIZENSHIP 23 the storm and stress period of the middle teens, the high school period of Jim's middle adolescence. Here then must be the empha- sis of our study of boy life and self-govern- ment; though we shall find it necessary to hark back rather frequently to the earlier days of Jimmie's childhood, to discover the reasons for much that puzzles us in Jim ; for no one can thoroughly understand Jim, with- out having known Jimmie. The term "self-government," as applied to boys' club work, is a convenient and increas- ingly popular term. But it is so elastic it seems to mean various things to the different classes of people who use it ; about anything, in fact, from mere parliamentary gymnas- tics under rigid adult oversight, to the other extreme of rough-house riot, where small boys have attained the premature dignity of doing as they please. Neither of these is self-gov- ernment. One may be a mild but subtle form of tyranny ; the other is anarchy. Self-gov- ernment is rational democracy, either in a republic or a constitutional monarchy. Pro- gressive self-government is the gradual win- ning of the rights of democratic citizenship, as the capacity for their exercise develops. Literally of course, self-government is the 24 BOY LIFE government of and by a self. When applied to the individual, we use the more common synonym, self-control. Figuratively, the term is applied to any social body which by personification can be conceived as pos- sessing a self. Then the term connotes a group of persons, self-directing, subject to internal not external control, and by a self- direction shared by the various members of the group, though net always equally. Unfortunately the word government is so exclusively a political term, it is hardly broad enough for our purpose, though usage compels us to adopt it. It has the usual inaccuracy of the figure synecdoche, the use of the part for the whole. Our modern life in a republic is full of self-directing groups of every conceivable name and serving every namable purpose. The trouble with the term self-government, in connection with boys and boys' clubs, is the fact that it focuses our attention altogether too nar- rowly on functions of politics. It really includes broad social interests, all of which deal directly with character making and will development. This narrowing of the vision in the use of the term self-government must be guarded against, for this tendency ex- GYMNASIUM FOR CITIZENSHIP 25 plains the limitations and partial failures of the average self-government plan for boys. It is too much a matter of mere politics, and the machinery thereof. The most enviable office in these boy states is often that of the policeman, and his excessive dignity and unwonted activity are hardly true to life. Doubtless such boy states tend to develop efficient guardians of the peace and shrewd practical politicians ; but few of their youth- ful members will ever be needed to serve their country in these particular ways. It is pos- sible to find great practical usefulness in the boy-republic and boy-city plans. They have elements of real success in them. But let us avoid the undue emphasis which exalts too highly the mere governmental activities in boy life, which in adult life occupy such a minor part of the day's work. The Ameri- can people do not live to be governed, not even to be self-governed ; nor is the aim of life merely to escape ari*est ! We are com- pelled, however, to use the term self-govern- ment in this connection, for it is now too deeply intrenched in practice to be ignored. It is a useful enough term, of course, pro- vided we bear in mind its limitations and avoid its narrowing tendency. 26 BOY LIFE It is important to notice that most of the self-directed social groups, which furnish both the complexity and the active useful- ness of our American society, have a mini- mum of the governmental element. In fact, their success is partly due to their being purely voluntarj' organizations, in which no authority but moral suasion is sufFerable. They are brought together as societies simply because of the social gravitation of their members — a force even more subtle than chemical affinity — the force of common purposes, talents, social capacities and ideals ; and the members may resign and retire at will. This last factor is distinctly non-political. No citizen of any govern- ment is at liberty to avoid his allegiance unless he leaves the country and is natur- alized elsewhere. In this connection Prof. Colin A. Scott, in his "Social Education," makes a clear distinction which is just as true in its appli- cation to boj's' work as to the public schools : "It is the introduction into our schools of such voluntary, self-directed purpose groups, rather than the functions of coercive fjovern- ment, which maj' be expected to gratify the social instinct of the children, to develop GYMNASIUM FOR CITIZENSHIP 27 their resourcefulness and initiative, and to fit them for the comphcated hfe of present- day society. It Is in this direction that the school may show itself naturally and easily as an embryonic social organism, manifest- ing its own laws of growth, rather than as prematurely molded after the model of a not too perfect adult community." ^ It is clear that our treatment of this sub- ject would be decidedly narrow and inade- quate, if we should confine ourselves simply to self-government schemes for boys. The subject must Include that complete training in self-control and initiative, and in the lead- ership of self-directed social groups, which Is needed to prepare our boys for full citizen- ship in the republic as well as In the King- dom of God. Our ideal is the self-controlled, efficient citizen, Avith personal resources fully developed, and with such powers as God has given him well trained for every needed ser- vice. This Involves the problem of personal and social adjustment to our complex mod- ern life, an adjustment which must somehow find its beginning and Its training in the practice years of adolescence. It involves far more than leadership; it includes self- 1 "Social Education," p. 76. 28 BOY LIFE control, comradesliip, lo^'al obedience and self-reliance as well; but the crown of it all, and its ultimate aim, for the efficient life, the chosen life, is leadership. Happy is he to whom is intrusted the training of leaders. Most teachers, pastors and Association leaders enjoy a measure of this privilege. Thousands of the future leaders in American politics, education, religion, in social and business activities, are now to be found in the ranks of our Association boys. What shall be the quality of that future leader- ship? The importance of this subject of ours will be readily appreciated if we reflect for a moment on the pressing need of well-trained leaders in our country. The cost of poor leadership has proved to be a heavy tax upon the people. A competent judge declares: "At present our American society is suffer- ing more from the lack of true IcadersJiip, and the kind of insight and morality neces- sary for such a function, than from any other fault. The leader is so scarce that an undue premium is placed upon him. This shows itself strikingly in commerce as well as in politics, where the wage of even blun- dering leaders forms an enormous tax upon GYMNASIUM FOR CITIZENSHIP 29 the community." ^ In all ranks of life, in every trade and profession, in all grades of social service, there is a need of efficient leaders, to replace blind guides and costly blunderers. When even imaginary names have been elected to office in Philadelphia, as the Outlook for July 14, 1909, claims, there seems to be a dearth even of partisan politicians who dare to clamor for office with- out the protecting disguise of a pseudonym ! The ugly chasm between the big-salaried business genius and a host of low-waged common workmen, is doubtless due to the scarcity of the former and the oversupply of the latter. The business world still has a great shortage of real leadership. It is true that he who would learn to command must first learn to obey. It is equally true that he who would best obey must also learn to lead. Here is the trouble with our poorly paid workman. He is lacking in initiative through want of practice. The surest leaven to raise the level of the industrial classes is an education in initiative which fits either for sympathetic leadership or for intelligent cooperation. It is a significant fact that the children of our poor immi- 1 " Social Education," p. 101. so BOY LIFE grants in America are ambitious to secure such training, at any cost, and bj the thou- sands they are industriously toihng upward in the social scale. If most social ills, as Professor Jenks remarks, are due to "malad- justment in social relations" — which is all too true — then it is surely a great kindness to bo3's in their teens to give them such training in social adjustment, in initiative and in cooperation, as shall fit them to find and fill their useful place in life. Further- more, the need of such a study as this is suggested by the vast boy waste in our modern life ; our failure to make manly men out of boy raw material. We are begin- ning to ask ourselves that unanswerable question : "What shall it profit a community, if it gain the whole world, and lose its own boys.'"' Do not try to find an answer to this question. No words can answer it. We can only reply to it with an attitude of anxious love and a program of determined, intelligent action, which declares, more effec- tively than any Avords could utter, "Though we lose the whole world, if it please God, we •will save our boi/s." One of the surest signs that our genera- tion is not a sordidly commercial age, is the GYMNASIUM FOR CITIZENSHIP 31 fact that the modern business discovery of the value of the by-product, and the avoid- ance of waste, is being carried over into the realm of humanity in the saving of boys. Rescued boys have become the most valuable by-product of our wickedly wasteful civili- zation. Much of the business failure of the past generation was due to the large proportion of wasted raw material which found its way to the scrap-heap, the bonfire or the sewer. One of our greatest industrial corporations, a miracle of business efficiency, is said to be making forty-five per cent of its profits now from the b3^-products of its raw material, which formerly it threw away. A large creamery, visited not long ago, is saving thousands of dollars a year by selling its refuse dry curds, a supposedly valueless by- product of its buttermilk, which had been destroyed by the ton until it was found to have a commercial value in the sizing of paper. These are typical instances in the marvelous story of modern business efficiency. The records of juvenile crime are a cumu- lative proof that we have not yet solved the problem of preventing our boy waste. Crime is continually growing more juvenile, and 32 BOY LIFE the general increase of industrial schools is an indication both of the bad situation today and the promise of improvement tomorrow. Our reformatories and jails are still filled with mere boys. The maximal age for malicious mischief is only fourteen, for petty larceny and assaults, fifteen, for crimes against property, sixteen ; while the maxi- mum curve for fornication is at seventeen.^ Early and middle adolescence is still the •great crime period. The shirking of the average home largely accounts for this boy waste, but the ethical failure of the public school is to a degree responsible also. It is significant that the worst year in boyhood is usually the year after leaving school. Mere age does not account for this, nor the change in life habits. Neither is idleness the chief cause, for most boys are working boys at that period. The big fact is the gap between the school and life, and the failure of the former to prepare for the latter. But the morning dawns. We are discovering the value of the boy, and are making every effort to save him. In thus redeeming the by-product of wasted boys, 1 Hall. "Adolescence," I:3S2. GYMNASIUM FOR CITIZENSHIP 33 a Christian civalization will find its way to a more substantial progi'ess. Again, and more specifically, there is a call for boy-workers as such to go to the bottom of this subject, because of the marked tendency of much "boys' club work" to de- generate into mere frolic, with little intelli- gent effort toward any definite goal. Many church boys' clubs are simply schemes with the modest aim of keeping the boys out of worse mischief and giving them as mild a dose of boys' play as their sated appetites will be contented with; while the easily sat- isfied parents complacently acquiesce — for the home meanwhile is peaceful, and the boys are safe at church! However, as we face this problem of train- ing the boj'^s for self-controlled citizenship, there are some fundamental reasons for en- couragement. Our primary asset is the un- deniable fact that the boy wants to be a man more than he wants anything else in the world. It is a mania with him sometimes, and most of his vices are to be interpreted in the light of it. The imitated swagger and bluster, the awkward attempts at pro- fanity, the early experiments with cigaret and cigar, are not due to any inherent liking 3i BOY LIFE for these things, or to a depraved taste, but simply to the overpowering hankering after manhood's estate and a man's character- istics. Here is a mighty impulse to be tamed and utilized. Let the impulse to imitate the externals of the life of men be directed inward to hasten the development of essen- tial manliness in the unseen life. You can count on the boy to help you make a man of him — because nothing would suit him better. I believe you may also count on his re- sponding to right appeals to his latent man- hood. He will gladly cooperate with your efforts to help him, if he has confidence in you and your ideals of manliness ; if he feels instinctively that you want him to be a man of the right sort, and not a mere holy puppet of a man. To stand at the bar of a boy's reason and conscience, and appeal to the manhood that is waking and stirring within him, is splendid pleading! No mere petti- fogging shrewdness, nor subtlety of logic will win him, only the honest sort of straight appeal, face to face, friend to friend. The appeal to his honor, to his self-respect, to liis honest lieart, to his willingness to help, to his heroic impulse to attempt the difficult GYMNASIUM FOR CITIZENSHIP 35 task, all these he will respond to; you may count upon it. Without trying to enumerate all our rea- sons for optimism in the presence of this task, let us add but one more. We should thank the Lord and take courage because of the proved success of so many of the modern social movements which are conspir- ing together to save the boy and make a man of him. The great boys' club movement the civilized world over, the increasing effi- ciency of the public schools and of well- ordered private schools, the attention given to the street boy, the newsboy clubs, the humane juvenile court, the friendly proba- tion officer, the parole system with its strong appeal to honor, the industrial school which is cheating the jail, the trade schools even in prisons, the civilized child-labor laws rap- idly becoming effective, the working-boys' night schools, the summer camps, the Good Will Farms and George Junior Republics, the Big Brother Movement, the increasing breadth of the boys' work in the Young Men's Christian Association,^ and the grow- ing attention given to the problem in all live churches — these things all serve to remind 1 Fifteen times as many boys' secretaries as eight years ago. 36 BOY LIFE us that the Christian world is finally awake to the fact that it has been wasting its boys and must do so no longer. The prospect is certainly hopeful. The boy is going to be saved. Great is the conspiracy of evil forces to curse him, to exploit him, and ruin him. But the boy has friends. They are more intelligent than they used to be; and they are wonderfully active in these recent days in their manifold efforts to rescue him and make of him a useful, self-controlled citizen. Let us now consider the out-reachings of this subject and some of the problems in- volved. It involves the ultimate problem of personality; particularly the mysterious way in which a human will develops and grows strong, preparing for the stress and strain of life. It introduces the question of the boy's thought environment, the boy world in which he does his thinking; the question of the instincts and propensities in the boy- bundle, which are his strange racial inherit- ance. This involves the study of recapitu- lation and the culture epochs theory, the former in the biological phase being an inter- esting chapter in the doctrine of physical evolution; the latter in its psychic phase GYMNASIUM FOR CITIZENSHIP 37 revealing the boy's tendency to live over again the life of the race. This involves the examination of the likeness between the child and the savage; and the comparison of the later periods of boyhood with the corre- sponding periods of race history. The sym- pathetic study of savage and barbarous cul- tures would well repay us, for we discover therein the origin of much that has puzzled us in the life of the boy. In applying these theories of boy life we are confronted with the query: What shall be done with the boy's instincts.? Shall re- capitulation be encouraged or repressed, and why? What are the possible dangers of repressing what seems to be normal to boy hfe? The question of belated instincts out-cropping in later adult life interests us here. We raise the question of belated and precocious manhood and how to treat both; also the comparison between manliness and its counterfeits. At the heart of the specific problem of will development in hastening the process of manliness, are the five grades in will achievement: self-control, comradeship, personal loyalty, self-reliance, and leader- ship, and the characteristics of each. Realizing the necessity of following the 38 BOY LIFE natural method as much as possible, it will be important for us to make such examina- tion as we may into rudimentary society among boys and their spontaneous organi- zations, their gangs and groups and unfet- tered attempts at self-government among tliemselves. We shall then be ready to con- sider one of the questions which first sug- gested this study. How shall we organize our boys in their teens, so that an increasing amount of responsibility and self-govern- ment is placed upon them, as they measure up to it, and a decreasing amount of exter- nal authority be used? Shall we or shall we not attempt to reproduce at certain periods everything from the patriarchal and tribal form of government down through the monarchies to the highly organized democracy ? We shall study the normal transition from external and parental control to internal or self-control, and try to determine the place of the adult in connection with organizations of boys, in contrast with the sphere of boy leadership. A careful study of the epochs of boyhood and youth will be necessary for us, to determine the riglit sort of organi- zation and degree of authority for each GYMNASIUM FOR CITIZENSHIP 39 period. Then follows naturally the discus- sion of mass and group clubs, the varieties of each and their appropriateness at the different boy periods. We shall consider the special question of administration of the boys' department of the Association, in the light of the great opportunity and the twofold danger of auto- cratic control and indiscriminate self-gov- ernment. Plans now in use will be analyzed and a scheme of graded, or progressive self- government will be proposed. In the chapter on By-Laws of Boy Lead- ership, we shall show how we must supple- ment all self-government plans by genuine social education for character making. The work of the adult adviser, in the different stages of boy life and boys' clubs, will be worked out suggestively, A number of con- densed principles, by-laws of boy leadership, will be suggested leading up to the topic, types of boy leaders, which will be treated as incarnations of the various boy ideals dominant in the different periods of boy life. The two subjects of supreme importance in boy life, the boy's religion and the boy's home, will complete our study. CHAPTER III BOY LIFE AND THE RACE LIFE In all boy problems the boys themselves must first give us the cue ; for after all, the Supreme Court of Boyville is the heart of the hoy. The best pedagogy declares that the pupils must teach the teacher ; that the chil- dren's spontaneous interests must dictate the course of study, and their voluntary atten- tion the methods of teaching. But it was not always thus. Formerly the acme of garden beauty was the formal Italian garden, with its dinky little evergreen monstrosities, filed into weird pyramids and grim Noah's ark styles of arbor vitae. Now we see neither sense, life nor beauty in such gardens. Our foresters now follow the lines and the inclinations of nature and give us the trees in their normal symmetry, allowing each tree to Avork out its own salvation, according to the laws of its being, and grow up in unfettered freedom as God intended. Formerly the laws of childhood were framed by old folks who had forgotten what bo3^hood was like, and were trying to make 42 BOY LIFE prim little old men out of healthy boy Iiulians. How ludicrously pathetic are the little Amish boys, dressed in long pantaloons and old men's broad-brimmed hats, as soon as they get well out of the cradle ! This is about what the average pious, well-meaning father used to try to do metaphorically with his boys, before the new day of open-minded child study. It was a long step toward heaven when fathers and mothers began to take the cue from the boy and to ask them- selves why he Avanted what he wanted. With divine wisdom Jesus placed the child in the midst, saying, "For of such is the kingdom of heaven." "Back to the child," says the modern psychologist, "of him we must learn the ways of life." It is certainly true that one of the greatest triumphs of Christianity is the discovery of childhood; yet long ago the Chinese sage said: "Genius is the preservation of the pure ideas of child- hood; art is the preservation of the play of childhood; science, of its curiosity; inven- tion, of its fancy ; rehgion, of its faith." It seems a very trite thing to say that the failure of a Christian home to make Chris- tian citizens out of natural boys, is the fail- ure to understand the boys and the world BOY LIFE AND RACE LIFE 43 in which the boys are living. Adults have always found it difficult to remember the world of childhood. Grown men forget that "A boy's will is the wind's will, and the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." Fathers fail to understand their sons ; can- not follow their train of reasoning nor see their point of view. They wonder how the boy reaches such strange conclusions. They wonder that he sees such funny things. They are as much surprised at the contents of the boy's mind, as they are at the con- tents of his first set of pockets. Surely the boy is not looking at the world through the spectacles of maturity. He has glasses of his own, if you please ; but his glasses seldom fit his father's eyes. The simple fact is, the boy's world is not his father's world. Not only are his interests different, but his very concepts and sense perceptions are different. His feelings are radically different ; his grade of culture also. The father perhaps is a hard-headed, practical man of affairs, bent on the material necessity of getting a living out of his busi- ness. His world is the world of today; a world of tangible things. Unless the boy is abnormally civilized and unimaginative, 44 BOY LIFE his world is quite likely the world of the past, the age of heroes and troubadours, of chief- tains and mighty men of valor, of knights and men-at-arms. His thoughts are allur- ing pictures, foreign entirely to his father's serious cares and problems — pictures of legend and myth and poetic fancy, full of flashing lights and enticing shadows, edged with gnomes and fairies, Lilliputian pigmies and doughty giants. Strange things are in the boy's world ; in fact, about all the strange things that all races of men have ever thought or seen, all rolled up in a bundle; for the boy, in a deeply significant sense, is the product of the past, the climax of all past cultures. The background of his feeling and thinking is the whole experience of the race in the spiral struggle of human prog- ress. We cannot hope to understand the process of making self-governing citizens out of boy savages and jolly barbarians, unless we reconstruct for ourselves the content of the boy's world, at the different stages of his development. We shall not rightly under- stand and rightly lead the boy in middle adolescence until we have with him climbed the ladder of childhood and boyhood up to the glorious days of youth. BOY LIFE AND RACE LIFE 4,5 Since the echoes of Ticonderoga have died away and men have finally been able to revise their ideas of the Indian as "a blood-thirsty demon," and have begun to think charitably even of the barbarian and the savage, the interesting fact has been noticed by very many people that there is a close resemblance between the civilized child and the savage races, the "childlike races," as we now prefer to call them. In many senses it is true that the savage is a child and the child a savage. They both live near to nature — give them half a chance — and they know little of the conventions of society. Both live self-centered, egoistic lives and are little influenced by public opin- ion. They live simpler lives, more natural lives than we are apt to live, using simple tools, utensils, toys; both live in the crude age of culture and intelligence. Both are apt to shun labor, responsibility and care; hav- ing little foresight, worrying little and laughing much. Creatures of physical appe- tite, they are seeking for the creature com- forts and the untrammeled delights of an out- of-door life. Prof. A. F. Chamberlain well says: "The passwords by which travelers of a truly scientific bent have entered into the 46 BOY LIFE realities of primitive man's thoughts and actions are absolute trust, comradeship, absence of guile and overreaching, careful avoidance of giving offense, sympathy with the habits, customs, prejudices, superstitions of savage and barbaric life, and display of interest in the things really important to them — and these same keys open all the doors of childhood." ' Stanley Hall writes : "The boy of ten or eleven is tolerably well adjusted to the envi- ronment of savage life in a warm country where he could readily live independently of his parents, discharging all the functions of personal life, lacking only the reproductive function. In his instincts, amusements and associations, his adjustment to such an envi- ronment is quite stable. In many ways he resembles the savage and each furnishes the key for understanding both the good and bad points in the other's character." ^ The world of the savage and of the child is the world of the senses. Both depend upon instinct, observation, intuition, rather than reason. Both are creatures of impulse and imagination ; myth making, myth loving, 1 "The Child," p. 203. 2 "Adolescence," Vol. I., p. 44. BOY LIFE AND RACE LIFE 47 nature worshiping. "Childhood is a curious world," says Professor Lombroso, "in which we get glimpses of primitive man, in mental development, in the emotions, in impulsive- ness, in the prevalence of imagination over intelligence." ^ The dances of barbarous peoples (some- times even their war dances) resemble the ring games of children. They are often of the merry, rollicking sort, strangely rythmi- cal, sometimes as graceful as the children's *'ring around the rosy." The very songs they sing remind us of the meaningless ditties of childhood, when play and song are instinct- ive, the heart of a care-free life. The sav- age love of play is no more childish than their proverbial love of bright colors and their mania for crude ornamentation and display. Some one tells of wasting sympathy on a barefoot negro boy and offering him a pair of shoes. The boy said he could get along without the shoes well enough, but he was ^'suffering for a breast-pin !" The savage's love of the dramatic, of stor^'-telling, rhym- ing and chanting, are all very childlike, like their love for elementary colors. Many interesting similarities are discov- 1 "Saggi di psicologia del bambino," p. ix. 48 BOY LIFE ered in the language-making of children and of primitive peoples. Both depend largely upon gesture, the universal language. Some savage peoples cannot converse in the dark. Some mothers have to light a lamp to dis- cover what the baby is crying for. Both have a limited vocabulary. They have a fondness for reduplication, also for explo- sives, fricatives, nasals and queer clicking sounds, rather than sibilants. Lisping is not uncommon. Their penchant for sentence words, a sort of vocal shorthand, is referred to by Herder. "Primitive man," said he, "was like a baby ; he wanted to say it all at once." This interesting analogy of lan- guage is discussed in detail by Chamberlain in his book "The Child: A ^Study in the Evolution of Man," a work which treats this general subject with great thoroughness. Without going into further particulars, it seems sufficiently clear that this fact of the likeness between the savage and the child is remarkable enough to demand explana- tion. Ethnologists, biologists and psycholo- gists together have contributed a perfectly natural, logical, as well as necessary expla- nation, in the "recapitulation" theory, called in its later aspects the "culture epochs" BOY LIFE AND RACE LIFE 49 theory. In the light of modern knowledge, it seems a sensible answer to the question, "Why is the child so much like primitive man?" Why, simply because he inherits the instincts, the feelings, the consciousness, the experience, of generations of uncultured an- cestors and "climbs up his own genealogical tree" by passing more or less rapidly through the various stages of progress by which his fathers have become civilized before him. In technical terms, the whole story is put in three words : "Ontogenesis recapitu- lates phylogenesis." That is, the develop- ment of the individual parallels the succes- sive stages in the progress of the race. The embryo in utero recapitulates the story of animal life from the simplest germ cell to man ; and the baby, growing up through boy- hood — what a wonderful process ! — repeats the age-long struggle of mankind upward from savagery to civilization. My rever- ence for the boy is due not only to the won- derful possibilities rolled up in him by the divine involution, but also to the marvelous heredity which he rediscovers to us through his rehearsal of the divine evolution. This is, to be sure, but a single chapter in the great wonderbook of God's ways of work- 50 BOY LIFE mcT his marvelous will. Irreverent indeed is the man who fails to discern the divine splen- dor and glory in the continuous creation of life. Yet the significant fact today is this: Many of the most devout and reverent Chris- tian scholars in this twentieth century find the doctrine of evolution, in its later con- structive form, not at all hostile to the Chris- tian religion, but a most welcome support of a vital, evangelical faith. Immeasurably more wonderful than the older theory, is the profound belief that God has always worked as He works today in His world, patiently, gradually, through the progressive unfolding of the powers of hfe, revealed in ascending forms from the simplest living cell to the physical perfection of humanity. " A fire-mist and a planet, A crystal and a cell, A jelly-fish and a saurian, And caves where the cave-men dwell; Then a sense of law and beauty. And a face turned from the clod; Some call it evolution ; But others call it Ood." Not sudden cataclysm in a few brief days, but gradual development through patient millenniums, has been God's plan in His uni- BOY LIFE AND RACE LIFE 51 verse, and when we see this vision in its sub- limity, it not only widens vastly our horizons, but it also clarifies, strengthens and enriches our reasonable faith. Instead of making us think less of God, it fills us with loving rever- ence and awe as we discover the majesty of His infinite patience and the perfect nicety of His wise prevision. The Father God of the Christian evolutionist is a far greater God than the world could conceive of before. "Of all the implications of the doctrine of evolution," says John Fiske in his book "Through Nature to God," "I beheve the very deepest and strongest to be that which asserts the Everlasting Reality of Religion." The first chapter in this remarkable story of recapitulation is purely biological and physical, and for our purposes can be briefly stated. Most concise is Professor Baldwin's version: "The individual in embryo passes through stages which represent morphologi- cally to a degree the stages actually found in the ancestral animal series." ^ That is, the human embryo in the uterus, from the time the ovum is fertilized until birth, passes through various stages of development wherein for a longer or shorter period, it 1 "Mental Development in the Child and the Race," p. 14. 52 BOY LIFE resembles some one of its primitive animal ancestors, — or more properly their embryo. Although the early periods are recapitulated very rapidly, and the parallelism is doubt- less irregular in different embryos, vestiges of these former epochs of development are plainly seen. Shortly before birth the human embryo greatly resembles the embryo of the anthro- poid ape, though each speedily grows unlike the other. From this point we may trace backward the progress of development by which life has ascended.^ Perhaps most notable is the fish period of the human embryo, at about the end of the first month. Dr. F. E. Bolton in his paper on "Hydro-Psychoses" or water-atavisms, very clearly describes these proofs of man's amphibian and previous aquatic ancestry, or as Professor Drummond called them, the vestiges which smack of the sea. There are definite fish-like appearances in the brain, and in the construction of the heart, accord- 1 For a very complete and fascinating description of atavism, anthropoidal and othcrvirise, read Chamberlain's chapter "The Child as Revealer of the Past ": Chapter VII. in "The Child"; also an older paper by Dr. R. Blanchard on "Atavism in Man," published in Rev. d'Anthrop. (Paris). Vol. VIII., p. 4S5-492, in vehich some thirty vestiges of animal ancestry still observable in the human physique are speciflrally noted. BOY LIFE AND RACE LIFE 53 ing to Romanes. The lungs which super- sede the gills are very primitive, as Darwin noted. There are clefts or gill-slits in the neck region until about the fourth or fifth week, sometimes lasting until birth or after; and fin-folds which later develop into hands and arms. Emerson truly said, "The brother of man's hand is even now cleaving the Arctic sea in the fin of the whale, and innumerable ages since was pawing the marsh in the flipper of the saurus." "In this process," says Dr. Hall at the very beginning of his great work, "Adoles- cence," "the individual in a general way re- peats the history of its species, passing slowly from the protozoan to the metazoan stage; so that we have all traversed in our own bodies, ameboid, helminthoid, piscian, amphibian, anthropoid, ethmoid, and we know not how many intercalary stages of ascent. How these lines of heredity and growth, alon^ which the many thousand species, extant and extinct, these viatica of the Holy Spirit of Life, the consummate products of millennia of the slow travail of evolution, have been unfolded, we know scarcely more than we do what has been the impelling force, or will to live, which seems so inexhaustible 54 BOY LIFE and insistent The early stages of growth are telescoped into each other almost indistinguishably, so that phylogenetically the embryo lives a thousand years in a day, and the higher the species the more rapid relatively is the transit through the lower stages." ^ Doubtless in different embryos some stages are passed through more rapidly, while others are lingered upon. The proper nutri- tion probably causes the hastening of the departure of a certain stage, while poor, in- sufficient nutrition will cause the embryo to linger in some stage of its long progress ; and this unnatural lingering doubtless causes certain malformations to persist in the child and sometimes through life. For instance the malformations of the human neck or ear, occasionally noticed, are probably due to the abnormal persistence of the fish period in the prenatal life, caused by defective nutrition. Such, very briefly, is the recapitulation doctrine of the biologists, important for our present purpose only to lay the foundation for the "culture epochs theory" of the Her- bartian teachers, who have emphasized the 1 "Adolescence," Vol. I., p. 2. BOY LIFE AND RACE LIFE 55 more important fact, that recapitulation is not merely a ph3'sical fact but psychic and social as zvell. If true, this is a fact too great to be ignored by students and lovers of boys. Mosso well said: "What we call instinct is the voice of past generations rever- beratina: like a distant echo in the cells of the nervous system. We feel the breath, the advice, the experience of all men, from those who lived on acorns and struggled with wild beasts, dying naked in the forests, down to the virtue and toil of our father, the fear and love of our mother." ^ It is to learn the origin of the strange instincts of boyhood, which so largely dominate boy life and often become immortal through habit, that we next turn our attention to the culture epochs theory which is at the basis of much of the Herbartian pedagogy. It is quite reasonable and rather evident, that the parallelism between the human embryo life and the stages of physical evo- lution preceding man, is continued in the child life as it recapitulates the race develop- ment since the birth of race consciousness. Rousseau, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Hegel, Comte, and Spencer are some of the great 1 Monograph on " Fear," p. 226. 56 BOY LIFE names of philosophers who have developed this doctrine. Said Hegel : "The individual must traverse the stages of culture already traversed by the universal spirit. Doing this he must yet be aware that the spirit has outgrown these older forms. He must pass through them as over a well-traveled way." ^ Lessing in his great work, "The Education of tlie Human Race," writes : "Education is revelation coming to the individual man, and revelation is education which has come and is yet coming to the human race. The very same way by which the race reaches its per- fection nmst every individual, one sooner, another later, have traveled over." Among modern teachers, Prof. George A. Coe, though he states it very guardedly, says : "As the human body before birth passes through a series of forms that correspond in the main to ascending embryonic forms of animal life in general, so after birth, the mind progresses toward maturity through stages which correspond roughly to the stages of human history in the large. In a certain modified sense, the child is first a savage, then a barbarian, then a civilized being. The general correctness of this 1 Luqueer, "Hegel as Kducator," p. 11?. BOY LIFE AND RACE LIFE 57 theory there seems to be no good reason for doubting." ^ Dr. W. B. Forbush speaks of the years of infancy as "rehearsals of prehistoric and feral ages, and the years of early childhood as reproductions of the protracted and rela- tively stationary periods of the barbarian days. It is because these ages were so long and so deep ; because man has been a savage so much longer than he has been a Christian, that this subconscious heritage needs to be recognized, and the work of habit making, which is the analogue of the past, must dur- ing childhood be made the central endeavor of all nurture." ^ In his very discriminating discussion of this subject. Prof. A. F. Chamberlain says: *'This view that the individual more or less distinctly repeats at least the chief stages in the development of the race, both mentally and physically, has been accepted as the car- dinal doctrine of the newer theories of edu- cation which in the form of child study have made their influence felt in America and in the old world." ^ 1 "Education in Religion and Morals," p. 211. 2 "The Boy Problem," p. 15. S "Ti>e Child," p. 52. 58 BOY LIFE Before applying the theory of the culture epochs constructively to boy life, let me clearly sound the note of warning that zee should not overwork the theory/ unwarrant- ably, for it has very manifest limits. Let us not forget that even more powerful than^ the forward push from behind which the boy receives from the racial past is the modifying influence of his own present environment. The great variety of social surroundings today is sufficient cause for the fact that different boys recapitulate differently the same racial history. The higher the grade of culture in the family into which he is born, the more a boy is likely to telescope whole racial periods in his development — whether to his advantage or not we shall soon con- sider. It is also true that we do not have to go back to the past to find our different levels of race culture. We may find them all, parallel in time and place, in any of our great cities, in the different social strata of our modern life, where boy instincts are inhibited only by the varying repressive forces of a more or less barbarous or civilized home. But boys from all these grades of cultured and uncultured homes make up our schools. BOY LIFE AND RACE LIFE 59 our Sunday-schools, our boys' departments in the Association. It is evident, then, that any mechanical scheme for handling boys simply along culture-epoch theories applied indiscriminately to fixed periods of boy life will never fit the variety of cases in hand. We must find some better sieve than age, or school grades, or wealth, or social status, by which to sort out the boys who may best be handled together.^ However this note of caution does not negative the great practical value of the theory. Some people are inclined to dis- card it altogether, simply because there is danger of overworking it ; and thus they lose its fine suggestiveness. This is manifestly illogical. There is value in it, if applied dis- criminatingly and with reasonable common- sense. As a key to the boy problem it fits more locks than any other key I know. We shall try the key in our next chapter. The best constructive statement of the culture-epochs doctrine available is by Dr. 1 In spite of this clear warning, two things are pretty sure to follow, I presume. Some who object violently to any use what- ever of this theory will accuse me of overworking it: while others lacking in discrimination, will probably carry my con- structive suggestions farther than my carefully guarded words would warrant. 60 BOY LIFE C. C. VanLiew of the Illinois State Normal University : "I. The child in attaining a grasp of the social order and civilization into which it is born, and the power to adjust itself to that order, must pass through those stages of spiritual development that have been essential in the evolution of the race. "This, the so-called theory of the culture epochs, is an application to the psychical development of the child of the theory of recapitulation which the doctrine of evolu- tion regards as established for the physical development of the individual. The analogy between individual and generic development may be briefly indicated as follows : "II. (a) In both child and race, mental development proceeds from absorption, in the mass, of sense perceptions, through the highly imaginative or mythical and legend- ary interpretation of phenomena, to the higher historical, philosophical and scientific interpretation. "(b) In both child and race the develop- ment proceeds from the grosser, uncontrolled forms of impulse, througli stages of fickleness and caprice, or childish trust in the patri- archal guidance, of rebellion against the law, BOY LIFE AND RACE LIFE 61 and the lesson of necessary subjection to the law, or autonomy. "(c) Similar lines of comparison may be drawn for the development of the interests and emotions ; which are, however, very closely associated with, and implied in, the intellectual and volitional development of the individual and the race. "III. As to material: The subject mat- ter of development, i.e. the stimulus to development found in both the natural and cultural environment, is very largely the same for the race and for the child, thus giving occasion for the parallelism of devel- opment." ^ Now for purposes of comparison, let us examine two or three of the more prominent schemes of division into epochs of human culture history. A long-accepted division into six periods leading up to Civilization — Early, Middle and Later Savagery and Early, INIiddle and Later Barbarism — was formulated by the American anthropologist, Morgan, a genera- tion ago. Under this subdivision, the period called Early Savagery began with natural 1 Abbreviated from "First Supplement to the Year Book of the National Herbart Society," 1895: p. 1S8. 62 BOY LIFE subsistence upon fruits, herbs, roots, nuts, etc., and ended with the use of fish diet and the discovery of fire. Middle Savagery began with the use of fire and ended with the inven- tion of the bow and arrow. Later Savagery developed the mythological period and cul- minated in the invention of the art of pot- terv, with which it merg-ed into Barbarism. Early Barbarism developed village life, with many crude household arts and ended with the cultivation of plants and the domes- tication of animals. The latter achieve- ment introduced the Middle period of Bar- barism, with its institutions, its agriculture and pastoral arts ; its beginnings of national life, its feuds and wars, and animal diet. The invention of the process of smelting iron and the use of iron tools brought in the period of Later Barbarism, the iron age, beginning Avith the crowning invention of the phonetic alphabet and the art of writing, which began literature and was the real birth of civilization.^ A more modern scheme is that of Dr. Woods Hutchinson,^ who adopted as his basis 1 L. H. Morgan. "Ancient Society." N. Y.. 1878. 2 "The Growth of the Child Mind," Educational Times, Vol. 52, p. 220. BOY LIFE AND RACE LIFE 63 for division into stages the different methods of food getting. His epochs have major reference to child development, with less emphasis on the racial history : s s ■< o e ■< Cfi >• •« CU h O > u X u U S O a C en C8 13 c ai a >. "JS / s -Com *i cs 2 " ^^ a; OT WJ a c- if 3 c c 0) — v> *-> C tn to u nJ ^^ w be 4) C ho c« in ■» .5 J3 OJ K=i ■ C ■!-> — 3 . 'Ox « 'i- be ^ ~ to cfl 3 be •-• tn be 6 be a u •■ tn 4) 0) bO'O ^"^ .^ — 4) .M ' _ as C J- tn •-« .5 y C be ^ bC.^5 O cS cc ^O !! be be be c .'^ — "Sd — a -- 05 tn y bo c .S bo's a^ If c8 2 03 .-- en M be « be ., =«^ C tn V V ;s i> 3 a C •- c8x eS >■ > -M m tn O si c 'u *j . 'C be in J3 3 O c a tn tn cS o . • ^ S y . Si ^ o in t- rt -S (U 3 S X.S-C U ., o tn o 4-> o o ao a; OS >> o f-H o 4-> ■•-> i-i o 4-> o -M I- o c 4J 8 c3 C et to .S u S 3 1 o *•> Cm 1 u < to a B o O C c« WD cc >«5 BOY LIFE AND RACE LIFE 65 Major J. W. Powell, In his studies in the development of human society/ makes simply a fourfold division: Savagery, Barbarism, Civilization, and a dawning period which he calls Enlightenment — or characterized as the Hunter Stage, the Shepherd Stage, the Tyrant or Monarchical Stage and the Free- dom or Representative Government Stage. From these suggestive schemes, it is evi- dent that the author's special emphasis, or criterion of analysis, largely determines his results in this matter of culture classification. It is also rather clear that the three ancient periods of Hunter, Shepherd and Farmer are generally recognized as essential stages of savage and barbaric progress. However, we must remember that different peoples have sometimes reversed, mixed or omitted one or two of these periods, just as individuals now telescope and omit certain of the culture epochs, and for the same reason — the in- fluence of environment. All of these schemes are very suggestive, but for further use in our special study, two simple divisions are proposed, one from the point of view of the evolution of government 1 "From Barbarism to Civilization," American Anthropology, Vol. I., p. 121. 66 BOY LIFE and the other of the evolution of industry; the former applicable to the self-government problem particularly, and the latter classi- fying the boy's spontaneous interests, rooted in his out-cropping instincts. I. Stages in the Evolution of Government. 1. The Primitive Democracy of the sav- age kinship Clan. Patriarchal. 2. The Limited Democracy of the Bar- barian Tribe; becoming monarchial when the single tribes ruled by the "council of braves" come together as allied tribes, under the increasing authority of a "Chieftain by prowess." 3. The Tyrannical period of Feudalism ; serfdom, despotism. 4. The Revolutionary period which developed the Constitutional ]\Ionarchy. 5. The Republican Period: Social De- mocracy in a Self-Governing State. II. Stages of Industrial Evolution. 1. Industry developed by the Acquisitive and Collectional instincts. BOY LIFE AND RACE LIFE 67 2. Industry developed by the Productive and Destructive instincts. 3. Industry developed by the Construc- tive and Transformative instincts. 4. Industry developed by the Commer- cial and Cooperative instincts. This simple classification of the principal stages of racial progress will be kept in mind in the later chapters for purposes of comparison with the development of boy life. Somewhat detailed treatment of this interest- ing parallelism will be found in Chapter VIII., "The Epochs of Boyhood and Youth." Meanwhile let us see if the culture-epochs key fits any of the puzzling locks in Boyville. CHAPTER IV THE BOY AND HIS INSTINCTS Now that we have reviewed the facts of the recapitulation process and have outlined the main culture epochs of human history which are paralleled to some extent in the lives of individual boys, the practical ques- tion arises, What shall we do about it? We have discovered that what we call "crude" in the boy is simply the natural expression of his instincts due to recapitulation. Now, is it best to encourage or discourage this pro- cess? Shall we repress these instincts in the boy which tend to reproduce the race life, or shall we encourage their expression? These are keen questions of fundamental importance. Although different environments may change all rules for boy life, in general it is best to encourage recapitulation. Growth rather than surgery is the normal treat- ment here. This may be contrary to good old-fashioned doctrine ; but I believe in help- ing the boy to make a business of being "a young barbarian" for a time, the proper 70 BOY LIFE time, and then be done with It. My reasons follow for your consideration. First, it seems to be nature's way for the growing boy, under normal conditions. What is natural is right and best. It is dangerous to thwart nature. Until recently instincts were supposed to be animal, brutish, not properly human. We were taught to despise them, and to repress them ; to root them out as belonging to lower natures. They were supposed to prove the doctrine of original sin ! But now, as Prof. H. H. Home says, "Nothing characterizes the educational theory of the last fifteen years more than the demand that the instincts of children be studied, known and utilized." ^ We have learned that the repression of instincts is dangerous and the neglect of instincts is a dead loss. The only safe treatment, good or bad, is expression. Thus only can the nobler instincts be utilized and perpetuated ; and, though it seems a para- dox, thus often can the evil instinct best be gotten rid of. Often repression only exag- gerates the lower instincts and perpetuates them by postponement ; and bad habit re- sults. If the boy is instinctively something I " The Psychological Principles of Education," p. 266. THE BOY AND HIS INSTINCTS 71 of a savage at a certain period, let us take hold and help him to be a royal savage ; then he will the sooner outgrow the unworthy phases of savage instinct and get civilized. *'The wild life of the world is caged in the cerebrospinal nervous system of the veriest child," says Home again. Surely some of it needs to be let out ! To repress it is to seal up dynamite. Let the boy be a bar- barian when he hears the call of the wild, and then be done with it. It may keep him out of prison later on. Again, this expression of instincts by re- capitulation is the way to form good habits. Right habit many times is simply the per- petuation of right instincts. Habit will be all the surer and more permanent, if the boy has been able to sort out his own instincts for himself, retaining such as appeal to his best judgment. Let him "try the spirits, whether they are of God," and "hereby he shall know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error." ^ It is through the medium of play that recapitulation most often occurs. It gives the boy the chance to indulge the play instinct most naturally. It is a crime to 1 I John 4: 1, 6. 72 BOY LIFE cheat a child out of his childhood by dis- couraging his play. Notice how frequently the labor, the crude handicraft, the trades of each epoch become the boy's play of later generations. Says Chamberlain, in his keen argument for the necessity of play: "Just as helplessness in infancy is the guarantee of adult intellect, play in youth is the guar- antee of adult morality and culture. Play may be termed the genius side of intellect, youth its inspircr. Man had to be young to be civilized ; had he no youth and no play, he were perpetually a savage." ^ Thus recapitulation prolongs boyhood and postpones the period of unimaginative maturity. Within reasonable limits this is a vast gain. As you very well know — for John Fiske has made the principle a commonplace now — civilization rests upon the primary fact of the lengthened period of infancy and childhood. This simple fact, by developing true family life, produces civilization and safeguards it. To quote very briefly: "The prolonged helplessness of the offspring kept the parents together for longer and longer periods in successive epochs ; and when at last the association was so long kept up that the 1 "The Child," p. 27. THE BOY AND HIS INSTINCTS 73 older cliildren were growing mature while the younger ones still needed protection, the family relations began to become permanent. The parents lived so long together that to seek new companionships involved some dis- turbance of ingrained habits." ^ Thus out of the helplessness of the child arose the permanence of the human family, the basis of civilization. It is likewise true, in general, that the longer the period of youth with its era of preparation, the higher the grade of civilization. Adolescence it- self is one of the triumphs of civilization. Barbarians know it not. Savagery short- circuits directly from childhood to manhood. An Aleutian Indian boy is an independent hunter and often a husband, at the age of ten. By preventing precocity, recapitulation favors a better mental development later, and tends toward longevity. Contrary to the opinion of fond mothers, precocity is an atavism, a sign of primitive man ! Says Havelock Ellis, "The lower the race, the more marked the precocity of children and also the arrest of precocity at puberty." " 1 "Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy," IV., 134. 2 " Man and Woman," p. 177. 74 BOY LIFE As long ago as the sixteenth century, the Spanish physician, John Huart, discovered that when the period of childhood is shorter than the normal, each succeeding period, youth, manhood and old age, is also short- ened, and death comes prematurely. The early death of most precocious geniuses sus- tains this theory. In particular, recapitulation tends to postpone the sex function, giving the body a better chance to develop in preparation for puberty. Premature sexual life is the most unfortunate phase of the precocity of un- civilized peoples, and usually stunts their mental development. Of too many sexually precocious boys has the remark been true, "when he began to grow wliiskers, he stopped growing brains." Too often this is true of working boys, child laborers; but the boy who is allowed to give free rein to his play instincts, and thus prolong the days of child- hood, thereby tends to postpone sexual de- velojjment, and consequently, arrested mental development is less likely. When boys tend to rehearse the race life, it is })etter to let them follow their bent, for this reason if for no other: Thus only can they work out the spontaneous organizations, THE BOY AND HIS INSTINCTS 75 games and pursuits which develop their in- genuity, their initiative and will power far better than the plans foisted upon them by their elders. Thus recapitulation is inci- dentally valuable for the instruction of adults. "It furnishes," as Professor Coe says, "a natural perspective for studying the phenomena of child life. We are re- minded that the child is not a being having fixed qualities, but one that is continually outgrowing itself. We are better able to judge what is normal and what is abnormal at any period. We learn that the child naturally outgroAvs many traits that we should not wish to have perpetuated. We cease to measure his conduct at any one period by the standards of a later period. We learn to tolerate and even approve much that our forefathers, comparing children's conduct with adult standards, felt con- strained to condemn." ^ (For instance, the fighting instinct in small boys.) No doubt the very common adult failure to under- stand boys, and the reflex boy contempt for adult wisdom, is due first to our failure to observe the unfettered boy in action, to dis- 1 " Education in Religion and Morals," p. 212. 76 BOY LIFE cover the 'vvorld epoch he is just now living in. Recapitulation offers us the key. "Got a brace of rabbits," proudly ejacu- lated a very j'oung youngster of my ac- quaintance (obviously in the hunter stage!) as he paraded into the parlor, with the family cat tied by her toes and slung over his shoulder by a crooked stick! It would have been a tremendous injury to the self- respect as well as the prowess of the mighty hunter, to spank him, instead of promptly releasing the suffering pet, while you entered into the boy's play, and yet taught him that rabbits had short tails and cats were not good for food ! Here enters nature study, the taming of the savage hunter and the beginning of the pastoral stage, with its love for domestic animals and pets. Again, the free expression of instincts enables us rightly to appreciate the meaning of certain spontaneous interests of children and youth. A few years ago, for instance, we found a new meaning in the boys' "gangs" when we discovered how closely they imitate the tribal form of human society. Simi- larly, we came to understand the tempora- rily absorbing love for hunting and explora- tion, and the interest in war at certain ages. THE BOY AND HIS INSTINCTS 77 Here again the key unlocks many a combi- nation that has puzzled us. Unquestionably the clue to successful boys' work is the arous- ing of latent interests, to develop healthful, useful effort. The touchstone of special interest for wliich you are searching will doubtless be found within the zone of culture- life through which the boy is just now pass- ing. Thus, a listless, unruly boy, unsatis- factory in every way perhaps, may be trans- formed into a wide-awake, active, untiring fellow, working out the suggestion of a new absorbing interest. For example, there is great value here in thus discovering, not merely to the parent but to the boy himself, a genuine vocational interest and aptitude. While the boy is in the more primitive periods of race culture, realizing for himself the experiences of Robinson Crusoe is of decided value. He thus learns to figure out how a dozen differ- ent arts and industries originated under the crude compulsion of necessity. Later, under the impulse of the constructive instinct, he fashions for himself these rude contrivances, and discovers perhaps some special aptitude as well as interest, which native ingenuity increases and develops, until the boy is seen 78 BOY LIFE to have a distinct calling for some special mechanical profession. The Dewey School in Chicago has developed this principle in a most interesting way. An important reason for encouraging recapitulation, which has already been hinted at, is this : The repression of certain in- stincts when they normally first appear, may result in the later outcropping of belated instincts in manhood, with their foolish train of moral and social anachronisms. I have no doubt that the boy who "fights it out as a kid," and learns self-control under the compulsion of gang-law in the alley, is less likely to become an adult scrapper. Most of us like a good fighter, but we detest a "scrapper." As Dr. Balliet once said, "If you crush the fighting instinct in the boy, you get the coward ; if you let it grow wild, you have the bully; if you train it, you have the strong, self-controlled man of will." In similar vein. Miss Winifred Buck writes: "No boy has instinctive principles against fighting and it will take him years to acquire intellectual principles against it. Brutality cannot be suppressed. All children must work through and be^'ond it With the development of reasoning power and THE BOY AND HIS INSTINCTS 79 sympathy, the desire to fight and the satis- faction gained from it ceases ; but as long as it seems to be the natural way to express justifiable anger or indignation, it should not be suppressed." ^ Cruelty and brutality in a grown man is an atavism which should have been sloughed off or fought out in boy- hood, in the savage period before sympa- thetic imagination had properly developed. Likewise I am inclined to explain that remarkable phenomenon of adult male life in America today, the strange "joining" fever, and the love for the pomp, ritual and regalia of the secret orders. It is a belated instinct which was not properly expressed and worked off in boyhood. With all due respect for the splendid fraternal work of all true brotherhoods, and a cordial word of appreciation of their real ser\nce, let me suggest that the instinct for secrecy is normally expressed in boyhood, and especially girlhood ; tliat the instinct for barbaric display and wearing costumes of blue and red and gold, with plumes and brass buttons and epaulets of gilt is nat- urally expressed in the soldier plays and the play-acting of healthy childhood. If the 1 " Boys' Self Governing Clubs," p. 38. 80 BOY LIFE boyhood of a generation ago had been en- couraged to express its inherent instincts for such things at the proper time, many overgrown boys in the adult ranks of today would not be so infatuated with belated boys' play. Sane and sincere fraternalism is of course a permanent asset of society, but certain phases of lodge life may perhaps be outgrown, with developing culture. Possibly the best positive reason for en- couraging the expression of instincts in boys is the actual culture value in the process, for it is thus that the boy in his own conscious- ness actually reaps the harvests of the past. Why should we be so provincial in our esti- mate of life as to flatter ourselves that we only are the people and our age the only age, which has developed permanent human values? Let the boy be a savage for awhile in his heart. Let him sit at the feet of some ancient medicine man or mighty woodsman, and learn of him. There was much in the free, simple life of the clever savage which we have unfortunately lost out of civilization, and which in adult life some of us are striv- ing to recover. Let the boy thus learn the savage's har- mony with nature and his closeness to the THE BOY AND HIS INSTINCTS 81 earth his mother, and the wood-folk his fel- low citizens. Let him emulate savage wood- craft, the woodsman's keen, practiced vision, his steadiness of nerve, his contempt for pain, hardship and the weather ; his power of en- durance, his observation and heightened senses ; his delight in out-of-door sports and joys and unfettered happiness with un- troubled sleep under the stars ; his calmness, self-control, emotional steadiness ; his utter faithfulness in friendships ; his honesty, his personal bravery. A thorough study of the finer characteristics of savage and barbarous cultures would be of great value for us. There is much in them that the boy needs and can easily and instinctively gain with our encouragement, and be a far stronger, finer type of man by and by, a much finer type than the hot-house boy brought up in a city palace. The boys' secretaries of the Young Men's Christian Association are doing a splendid service in making the American boy today a whole boy, a full- orbed boy, inured to hardship and the doing of the difficult. While emulating these attractive quali- ties of the savage, there is very little danger that the normal American boy, safeguarded 82 BOY LIFE by the restraints of civilization, will to any extent copy and perpetuate the bad quali- ties which made the savage infamous instead of whollv famous for his virtues. Environ- ment is recognized today as far mightier than heredity. Our opening chapter, in dis- cussing the duality of boyhood, touched the key to the situation here. Jimmie will never really become a barbarian boor so long as James has a chance to keep the balance in the growing boy's life. Whatever good in- stincts, inherited from the care-free, out-of- door life of distant uncultured ancestors, Jimmie may wish to express and develop, James with all his fastidiousness cannot pre- vent. But a powerful combination will op- pose Jimmie if he attempts to disgrace the family by really objectionable reversions to savagery. James then would be supported by the whole household, and, in fact, by most of the social forces of the boy's civilized environment. ^ The question is now in order, which has doubtless occurred to most of you while we 1 After this discussion of the boy and his instincts, the reader will appreciate more fully the writer's intent in the opening chapter. A glance back at Jiinmic, James and Jim, is suggested hero. THE BOY AND HIS INSTINCTS 83 have been spending so much time on this culture-epochs theory. After all, is not this whole matter of instincts a small boy affair? Is it not about all finished before the boy gets to his middle teens? In discussing the self-government of boys, is it not Jim we have to deal with rather than Jimmie or James? This is quite true. But it has been necessary to emphasize this fundamental matter of boy consciousness and instinctive life, for two reasons : Adolescence is founded on childhood; and there is much belated childishness in adolescence. It is doubtful if any one can fully understand Jim, Avithout first having known Jimmie ; and surely a good deal of Jimmie still persists in Jim. In fact, many a Jim comes on the scene too soon, just because Jimmie has been held back and hasn't had a good chance to kick and hunt and be a good savage ; or conversely, because he has run wild at it, and has not recovered from his overdose of Indian measles — then Jim comes too late. In other words, our treating this phase of the subject so fully was necessary not only to lay the founda- tions in boyhood for the problems of adoles- cence ; but also because in so many cases we find belated instincts working out in older 84 BOY LIFE boys, which we must understand, properly relate and tactfully handle. Of the two evils, precocity is apt to prove more disastrous than delayed manli- ness. The latter, however, is more apt to follow the overindulgence of savage instincts. Hypnotized by the glamour of his play- world, the chronic boy presents a real case of arrested development. When the element of manhness is delayed by the persistence of tlie barbarian spirit, horse-play, laziness, awkwardness and lack of manly purpose, Jimmie becomes a serious problem and some- times a public nuisance. A case of too- much-Jimmie calls for very tactful, sympa- thetic handling. Sometimes the continuous discipline of a winter in school will accom- plish your purpose. Oftener this very routine aggravates the difficulty and makes the ninth grade the hardest to manage be- cause several boys of this description are conspiring to make barbarian nuisances of themselves. Probably the best time to get the best of this particular kind of measles IS in the summer, and at a summer camp, if you can get a continuous influence over the boy. The cases are best handled in small groups or alone. The discipline of the camp THE BOY AND HIS INSTINCTS 85 is an excellent tonic and will accomplish much, especially if at this period there is a growing measure of self-government allowed. But what will win is the appeal to the boy's honor and his self-resoect, assuring him of your confidence in him and faith in his future. Overlook his crudities and make him think you reckon him at several years older than he acts. This will bring him quickly up to your estimate of him, and his latent manliness will rapidly appear, at least in your presence. He will soon have a keen desire to win your approval and hold your respect. Trust him and he will not disap- point you ; for he will come to feel that you, among all his friends, understand him. En- courage his confidences, and he will soon con- fide in you freely, and at such times you may readily influence him by the power of sug- gestion to which such boys are peculiarly susceptible. You can then arouse in him new purposes, higher standards of manliness, right ambitions for his own future, and per- haps a true ideal of usefulness. Now is the time when the boy is ripe for a sensible, manly Christian experience, which will exalt these new experiences and purposes and make them permanent ; binding him, through your own 86 BOY LIFE friendsliip, to your Master, the manly Christ. Let young Jinimic run the whole gamut of healthy boy life with its clean fun. Let liim run thrcjuoh all the phases of race cultures, absorb the best of them all and perpetuate in his enduring habits the noljlest instincts the past has given him as his racial endow- ment. Then let manly young Jim come on the scene in due season, with a Christian man- liness which becomes him well, not only the heritage of his Christian home and liis civilized environment, but the result of the grace of God working in his soul through boyhood years as his will has been developed through struggle. As Jimmie's moral problem is the making of right habits and a conscience, Jim's prob- lem is the making of a WILL, a man's will. Emerson said a near truth which all boys should heed, "The real man in you is the will in you." The making of a young man's will is the tempering of the finest steel, by perhaps the finest process known in human life. To this specific problem we next give our attention. CHAPTER V THE STRUGGLE FOR MANLINESS We now address ourselves to the problem of developing the boy's will. It must be done naturally, by the use of his own initia- tive as the boy passes through the various stages of progress up to the high plane of intelligent, self-directive American citizen- ship with its complex demands for social adjustment. The early stages of this pro- cess constitute a will-crisis, the change from parental and external to internal or self- control. During the plastic days of childhood, parental control is normal and usually not too difficult. It is natural for the child to lean upon the will of others, to depend upon their judgment, their decisions, to profit by their mature experience, to obey their com- mands and to follow their advice. But a new sense of sclfness comes at puberty. It is the new birth of individu- ahty; and, with a sharp experience some- times, the boy life cuts loose from the peace- ful moorings of its child environment. In early adolescence the boy becomes psychi- 88 BOY LIFE callj independent. His will asserts itself vigorously and the problem of parental con- trol becomes a serious one, if in fact it has not previously. The boy is manifestly too young and inexperienced to be master of himself. Yet he is too old and too conscious of his new powers to be managed comfort- ably by adults. He particularly objects to parental discipline. His father's commands and his mother's orders he no longer obeys if he can help it, and he even begins to dis- count their advice. If the boy is anchored to his home by a mighty cable of mother love and father's comradeship, his suddenly careening balloon will outride the storm, this first strange gust of self-discovery. But too often the boy is likely to be actually at war with his home at this period, chafing bitterly at every restraint and resenting every well-meant attempt to curtail his liberty. The real cause of this domestic strife is the boy's intuitive feeling that the folks don't recognize his developing manhood and the dignity of freedom it deserves. He is mis- understood. He feels that he is not appre- ciated at his true valuation. If all the members of the family, the boy included, are STRUGGLE FOR MANLINESS 89 fortunate enough to be remarkably good- natured, and rather phlegmatic in tempera- ment, it is possible that no serious trouble will ensue. The flint and steel of personali- ties are not hard enough to strike a spark, and the boy magazine does not explode. Quite likely he gets his own way anyhow, merely by asserting it. But if the boy inherits a strong will, from either side of the house, and the sort of wil- fulness commonly called spunk, you may look for fireworks. Happy that home if there is a single member keen enough to sense the situation and hold the boy's confidence suffi- ciently to have at least advisory influence with him, by keeping pace with his suddenly developing manhood. Unfortunately "Some mad parents," says Dr. Forbush, "take this time to begin that charming task of break- ing the boy's will, which is usually set about with the same energy and the same imple- ments as the beating of carpets." The re- sult is sure disaster if this insane policy is continued. A boy of indomitable spirit either fights it out merrily day after day, or, wearying of hostilities, runs away from home. To attempt to break the will of such a boy is to ruin the peace of the home and 90 BOY LIFE make a ghastly chasm between father and son. On the other hand, if the boy is not high- spirited, but naturally lacking in courage and ambition, he finally surrenders the cita- del of his embryonic manhood, and with broken spirit submits his will to the imperious will of his father or mother. Henceforth he is apt to be a maimed, dwarfed personality, lacking in courage, in nerve, in self-confi- dence. Filial obedience purchased at such a cost will never be any comfort to a parent, except to please his vanity. Manifestl^s then, the worst way to handle the boy at this crisis is to "break his will." It means breaking his spirit. Enforced sub- mission, compulsory obedience, unwilling subserviency to the will of a parent and his iron-clad rules of conduct, witliout reason or intelligence, never tend to the making of character. At best it is but a temporary substitute for it, which is laid aside as soon as freedom comes. It perpetuates the irre- sponsible weakness of the child and prevents the development of a sovereign personality. After puberty, obedience to parents must be a reasoning obedience to reasonable requests. STRUGGLE FOR MANLINESS 91 It need not be said that the reverse policy of coddling, begging and buying obedience is equally foolish; as is also an overdose of teaching or preaching. The boy is spoiling for action, good or bad. The breath of life is in his nostrils. Red blood is surging in his veins. He is impatient at overmuch talk on an}' subject, when the impulse to do things and to dare things, the impulse for activity, adventure and danger is tugging at his heart strings. In view of these facts, some one suggests : "The boy's will doesn't need developing. Isn't it already overdeveloped.^" Yes and no. As usual, it depends upon the boy. Even the most normal and well-balanced boy is inexperienced and needs such practice in initiative and in the development of coopera- tion as shall fit him for all manner of social adjustments. But boys of the obstructed- will type need positively will development. This, to be sure is not the sort of boy I have been describing, but he is very numerous, though not so much in evidence as the more active boy. He is passive, hesitant, bashful, shrinking, sometimes backward in his studies, and his teachers think him dull ; sometimes too pre- 92 BOY LIFE cocious with books but otherwise defective ; slow in learning new movements, and a poor hand at competitive games. Either his ideas block each other, or else he lacks ideas and such as he has are deficient in impulsiveness. He therefore has the making either of a genius or a blockhead; and is pretty sure to be eccentric in either case unless somebody rescues him. He is lacking in the courage to make starts, which we call initiative, and this he must learn by practice. As Professor Home says, "The great principle in dealing with the obstructed-will is in some way to secure expression, to open the flood-gates of nervous energy, to connect mental states with physical reactions, to make action easy." ^ Such a boy needs to learn self- confidence, self-activity and facility. The boy of the opposite type, the ener- getic boy with the precipitate will, has will enough but it sadly needs harnessing, direct- ing. This is doubtless the kind of a boy referred to in the witticism, "If God made the first man out of the dust of the earth. He must have made the first boy out of dust and electricity." In dealing with such boys, we strike the boy problem with all its fasci- 1 " Psychological Principles of Education," p. 276. STRUGGLE FOR MANLINESS 93 nations and most of its difficulties, but with the distinct advantage of understanding our subject, for, unlike the obstructed- will type, this boy is constantly revealing himself in word and action. He is very impulsive, easily led astray, and forms the class which supports the juvenile courts and the jail; though his criminal tendencies are not at first vicious or malicious, simply mischievous. He is generous to a fault ; volatile, irrespon- sible, fickle. Physiologically, his nervous system lacks inhibition. He has a hair- trigger will; jumps at conclusions, short- circuiting directly from idea to action, with- out stopping to consider consequences. The bully, the boy leader, the alley king, are all of this type. They are usually pre- cocious, self-confident, resourceful in emer- gencies, impatient, domineering, showy, in- clined to be superficial, too hasty to be thor- ough in anything except their well-loved specialties ; resenting opposition, hindrance or direct control. If unchecked, they are in danger of monomanias which result from in- sistent ideas and uncontrolled impulses. Such a boy does not need to be threatened, commanded or whipped. He needs to be held back by association with bigger boys who 94 . BOY LIFE will check his impulsiveness, initiate his fresh bumptiousness as it deserves, and tone down his too eager love of leadership. He needs the wholesome lesson of defeat and failure, to reduce his conceit. Let him reap the good fruits of discouragement and enforced hu- mility, until he learns what a splendid good fellow his chum is ! Meanwhile we have the task of furnishing his fertile brain and rest- less hand some worth while interest, already latent within him doubtless, which will utilize his abundant energy, keep him busy and regularly tired at night. ^ There is a vast reservoir of manly power and efficiency in this sort of a boy, if you can stop the leak in the dike, and then teach him how to con- serve and direct his powers and utilize his talents. Yes, whether the boy is of the obstructed- will type, or over-impulsive and precipitate, or splendidly well-balanced and uninterest- 1 There is a civilizing force here of tremendous efficacy. No one can estimate the value of regular business hours and routine work for the majority of men as a peace-preserving factor and a force for social control. One of the triumphs of civilization is the regularity of work among civilized peoples. Ferrero con- siders the work habit largely responsible for civilization. He says in his "Lea formes primitives du travail" (Rev. Scientif. 189fl, p. .l3l-3.«), "The habit of regular and methodical work has destroyed the violent impulsiveness of primitive man'f character." STRUGGLE FOR MANLINESS 95 ingly normal, his will needs our help in its development, as he gradually passes through the crisis from home-control to self-control. In nothing is the pedagogical principle truer than in this matter of will making: the pupil learns not by being taught, but by doing the thing. Experience is the greatest teacher. Will power grows only through exercise, like every other function. Intelligent will-activity comes by practice in personal initiative and growing leadership. The breaking of the will, the overpowering or the eclipse of the will, the surrender of the will, the substituting of another's will, can never provide a boy with a will of his own. He must take his own observations, make up his own mind, form his own habits, come to his own decisions and personal choices, and learn to use his own will with the quickness of decision and sureness of mental dexterity which successful character build- ing, as well as business life, requires. For a number of years the boy needs guidance in all this ; but he must increasingly be self- willed, in the right sense, and less and less depend upon the judgment and advice of others. This compels even the most fond and unwilling parent to face the fact that 96 BOY LIFE parental control must gradually but per- sistently he zvithdrazcn from the boy and an increasing degree of freedom of action al- lowed him, all through the period of the teens ; gradually at first, but increasingly, until he safely reaches independence with man's estate, in late adolescence. This process of growing will independence is just a bit dangerous at first, like learning to swim; and just a little uncertain at first, like learning to walk. The self-sufficient boy Avho obstinately refuses to obey his father, seldom knows the limits of his own untried powers. His inexperience with the world's uncharted seas and with the helm of his own life-craft makes independent sailing a dan- gerous sport. If we can confine his experi- ments in reasonably shallow water, and near enough home, it is sometimes the most salu- tary experience for him to let him take his own risks and get capsized. Thus he will learn the wind's treachery, the water's dan- ger and discomfort (when he has boots on!) and his own poor judgment and insufficiency. He needs to buy, as cheaply as possible, the necessary experience of failure, which will tone down his wilfulness, develop his caution, cultivate his dexterity in handling his own STRUGGLE FOR MANLINESS 97 craft, practice his judgment and his quick- ness of decision, and give him a working knowledge of his world. All this means growing initiative. The boy's will may not grow steadily in this fashion, but it grows surely. He learns to sail his craft by sail- ing it, ten times as quickly as he would if his father simply tried to teach him how by watching him at the tiller. Let us tabulate some of these suggestions on rcill development which we have been con- sidering : 1. The boy must develop his own will, not borrow or lean on ours. 2. He can develop it only by practice; he cannot be taught it passively. 3. Yet tactful teachers and parents may accomplish much by friendly encourage- ment, moral support, watchful interest, un- obtrusive guidance, timely and definite sug- gestion, and a frank spirit of comradeship. 4. "Breaking the will" results in open rebellion, or a maimed personality, a broken spirit. 5. The domestic warfare of the active, independent boy must be met by duly recog- nizing his maturing manhood, and retaining the boy's confidence at all hazards. 98 BOY LIFE 6. Paternal surveillance must gradually give place to frank trust in the boy's honor, just as fast as he proves worthy of it. 7. Increasing freedom of action must be allowed the adolescent boy, or urged upon him, if he has an "obstructed-will," 8. Increasing range of activity and usefulness must be allowed the impulsive boy ; or discovered for him, if he lacks creative imagination. 9. The obstructed-will needs positive development, by securing expression at any cost, to increase self-confidence and initiative. 10. The precipitate will of the impulsive boy needs wise direction into useful chan- nels ; not forced repression, but the natural checking by older associates and sobering responsibilities. 11. Experience with difficulty, opposi- tion and failure is needed, and must be pur- chased as cheaply as possible. The impul- sive boy needs this most. 12. The incentive and exhilaration of well-earned success is needed, and will rapidly develop skilful initiative. The obstructed- will needs this most. 13. Practice in expert judgment and quick decisions is needed, to develop efficiency STRUGGLE FOR MANLINESS 99 and accuracy. This must be gained in each branch, or similar branches of activity, to be serviceable. 14. Games of skill requiring team-play as well as leadership, arousing healthy com- petition, developing alertness of mind and muscle, quick judgment and cool temper, as well as many other moral qualities, offer the most normal sort of will practice for boys in early adolescence. 15. There is a vast will-developing value also in work. This appeals to sensible boys through its worth while results. It should not cheat the young boy of his play privi- lege and curtail his childhood, but gradually it should enlist the growing boy's interest and will speedily encourage self-expression and initiative. In early and middle ado- lescence a reasonable amount of manly work develops manliness, self-respect and personal efficiency. 16. But no boy's will is normal without good-will. Here enters the distinctly reli- gious phase of the problem. The religious impulse of loyalty to Jesus Christ is the mightiest force to make the boy manly and to develop all his personal powers for use- fulness in life. 100 BOY LIFE As we endeavor to apply these principles, we soon discover five distinct and progres- sive stages of will achievement: Self-Control, Comradeship, Personal Loyalty, Self-Re- liance and Leadership. . If you please, these are the five degrees in modern knightliness, more significant than the ancient orders of Page, Esquire and Belted Knight, because they are personal, not external. Progress from stage to stage is automatic, as the boy equips himself for his task. In each grade the growing manliness of the boy is prepar- ing by practice for the responsibilities to come. It is quite evident that self-control is the first essential in will progress. Without it no boy need dream of leadership. This diffi- cult task of controlhng self is the great work of childhood with its rapidly forming habits ; though it is seldom completed when child- hood ends. For years the awkward child struggles for muscular coordination until he is finally captain of his ten fingers and master of his muscles. The under world of inherited instincts has to be reckoned with also, until right habits rule, and impulses are put under control. The fight is then on with tlic physical appetites and passions and STRUGGLE FOR MANLINESS 101 until the issues of this fight are determined, it is needless to think of leadership. Finally in this process of self-mastering, the think- ing, the stream of consciousness, is more and more brought under the control of the grow- ing will, and an orderly life purpose emerges from the chaos of childhood's dreams. The boy is now discovering how to master his own personal resources ; and soon follows the enthronement of conscience, the moral goal of childhood years. After attaining a working capital in self- control, the boy is ready for the beginnings of social adjustment involved in comradeship. This is a difficult step in boy life and many a childish quarrel results. It is usually true that childhood is so egoistic and often so essentially selfish, that no real comrade- ship can be developed. The period of the discovery of The Chum really marks the beffinninffs of altruism and sometimes comes as late as puberty. At or near this period the gang spirit grows suddenly strong, and this loyalty to the gang is the essence of comradeship, the consciousness of kind ; the wholesome discovery of personal values and talents in other boys, as well as the recogni- tion of common interests and purposes and 102 BOY LIFE feelings. Socially this is the tribal period of boyhood, with its primitive democracy. Next, the cultivation of personal loyalty is a normal outgrowth of the gang-comrade- ship. The gang normally develops a strong leader who sets the pace, interprets the pub- lic opinion which is gang law, and manages by his own natural magnetism or shrewdness to focus the gang loyalty toward himself, until the spirit of comradeship, which was so manifestly democratic, is transmuted into a genuine hero worship, if the leader be suffi- ciently capable and winsome. To be a good follower is a higher stage in will progress than merely to be a good comrade. It requires that developed sense of trust in a strong character, and that disciplined obe- dience to recognized law, which connote a higher stage of civilization than the tribal commune. It is the personal loyalty of the genuine monarchy. This boyish hero wor- ship, soon directed toward a higher ideal than the boy leader, often becomes a mighty idealism, and, appealing as it does to the imitative instinct, is a tremendous factor in character making. If you wonder why obe- dience is not emphasized here, reflect that loyalty is deeper than obedience and the STRUGGLE FOR MANLINESS 103 ultimate cause of it. Real obedience is will- ing obedience. Loyalty is the spirit of obedience. It is by way of this third degree in will progress that the boy acquires self-reliance, by imitation, and through the self-revelation which grows with practice in daring the diffi- cult. It is a weary road, beset with many hardships and discouragements ; but it is a splendid test of native knightliness, and with every tilt against fate and circumstances, as well as more tangible foes, the new man- liness gains fresh courage, and the self- reliance is born which presages the coming leader. If a boy has the making of a leader in him and half a chance to develop it, his own sincere hero worship and spirit of loyalty will lead him to the self-discovery of the ability to lead others. Sometimes it is the growing intimacy with his hero that brings this self-revelation ; more likely it is the actual practice in leadership on a small scale which gives him the needed sense of confi- dence and the "feel of the reins." Then comes the liberation of new and undreamed- of powers. He is attaining a real manli- ness. The responsibility of leadership 104 BOY LIFE sobers him, matures him, and gives him a new world view. He gets a ghmmer of the point of view of father, teacher, and all the disinterested friends who have tried to help him win his spurs. He can now understand many lessons he could see no meaning in before. He begins to see things whole and in their right relations. Having learned the rudiments of leadership, he is now for the first time capable of complete self-gov- ernment. The process has been a long and rather tedious one, and the boy by this time may be nearly old enough to vote. The dignity of leadership Is of course not always won. Some boys are obviously born to be leaders ; others, obviously not. Very few have leadership thrust upon them ; the competition is too fierce. But It Is certainly true that more boys might become leaders if they had suitable encouragement and opportunity for practice. It is the privi- lege of Association secretaries, pastors and other adult boy-workers, to furnish hosts of the "good followers" a chance to develop their Initiative and responsibility, until in the world of mature manhood they can qualify as leaders, and win the highest degree in will achievement. STRUGGLE FOR MANLINESS 105 For most boys, as our chapter title indi- cates, this attainment of manliness is not the mere pastime of a summer holiday. It is a struggle. Rather it is a splendid victory won through struggle. The battle royal of life is the moral conflict in the breast of a noble-hearted boy; a battle waged with the Apollyon of temptation for many stren- uous years, until right habits become fixed in Christian character. The winning of this victory is no mere chess game of cold logic or bloodless psychology. It is a matter of religion, a man's religion. Temp- tations must come. The boy needs to face them. Strong young manhood is seldom grown in the protecting shade of a sheltered life. The battle cannot be shirked and character won. It must be faced and fought. In this struggle for character — unseen, smokeless, noiseless, but momentous — the bo}' needs friendship, constant, sympathetic, discerning friendship ; but above all, he must be on friendly terms with Jesus Christ. Give him the great protection of the Christ love, the high incentive of the Christ ideals, the mighty impulse of the Christian purpose, the Christ loyalty, with the brotherl}^ com- 106 BOY LIFE radeship of the Christian Church — and you have armed him with all the panoply of God. He will win his fight. He will win in the struggle for manliness. We naturally turn next to the social organizations which help the boy to develop these five stages in will progress ; giving our attention first to the boy's own spontaneous attempts at organization and social expres- sion. CHAPTER VI BOY MADE SOCIETIES In the ascent of the will from self-control to leadership, the organized social effort of boys for and by themselves is infinitely more serviceable than most organizations foisted upon them by adults. The very word tells why. The only true organization is self- organization. Organization is a biological term, and refers to life and growth. It is the mode of activity and development natural to an organism, and its form is determined by growth from within. Let even intelligent adults prescribe a form of activity for children, and it will inevitably reflect the grown-up's world, his conceptions, his stock of ideas and range of ideals. It will embody adult notions of what is right, interesting and worth while. Unfortunately it is easy to get the trusting and plastic minds of children to adopt these adult plans for their happiness and welfare ; and consequently there is great danger of raising up whole generations of little men and women, instead of normal children who 108 BOY LIFE reap, as they grow, their rightful share of the wonderful harvests of childhood. In fact it has been until recently our avowed but mischievous policy to make "nice little men out of the noisy, boisterous boys !" Forcing our adult plans upon the children tends of course to stunt their originality and diminish their initiative. The danger nat- urally diminishes as the boys grow older, and their world merges into the world of adults. Consequently blundering adult made plans for older boys are somewhat less disastrous. It usually follows, liowever, that boys will organize themselves into more or less in- formal groups, anyhow, with or without the attention of adults ; and these groups of their own have the greatest influence upon their character making. Parallel with the most elaborate social organization, planned and administered for the boys by well-mean- ing adults, you will often find some of the same boys banded together in the more pre- cious comradeship of a gang of their own ; an irresponsible free-masonry in somebody's barn attic, or a freebooters' gang whose most laudable purpose is the "swiping" of sign letters or the smashing of window panes. BOY MADE SOCIETIES 109 Professor Scott of the Boston Normal School in speaking of school discipline sug- gests this fact: "The average school is often merely an aggregate. There is every reason why the teacher should aim to or- ganize this aggregate. In no other way can he really become the leader. But when this is not done, the aggregate does not remain in a neutral condition. Organiza- tion sets in independently of the teacher. It is not always fully conscious of itself, but it is none the less influential. Certain boys and girls are looked up to by the others for indications as to how far the class as a whole may go in opposition to the teacher. Some- times there are chiefs for war and chiefs for peace. When a teacher runs against such a chief, it is no longer an individual he is dealing with ; and even when he finds fault with some humbler member of the tribe, un- less the chief consents to ignore or condone the treatment given, the teacher may meet with as much difficulty and silent antago- nism as if the individual had been socially important. The flag of the tribe protects its feeblest member ! " ^ The same excellent authority states as his 1 "Social Education." p. 94. no BOY LIFE opinion that fifty per cent of the higher grade classes in our pubHc schools are thus at war with the teacher. This seems an over-estimate. It suggests the former days when a teacher had to whip the gang leader in personal combat before he could maintain discipline in the school.^ The power of the self-organized gang is far-reaching. It is pretty sure to create the public opinion by which the boys govern their conduct, rather than by the standards of the home or of the teacher. Such an education in hostility to the orderly forces of society, as represented in the teacher, and perhaps also the police- man, is a most unfortunate training for boys. It is training in social anarchy, and is the very worst preparation for citizenship. This reveals to us the grave importance of the whole matter of discipline as a funda- mental factor in boys' work. The key to this grave situation, undoubt- edly, is to study the forms, purposes and methods of the organizations in which boys spontaneously organize, and then approxi- 1 I remember hearing my grandfather describe a certain stren uous session in his New P'nBland district school in his boyhood acentury ago. The schoolmaster interrupted his opening prayer three times that morning to flog a boy! " The gang " is not nec- essarily a modern invention; it is merely a modern discovery. BOY MADE SOCIETIES 111 mate these in our work with them. The boys themselves must give us the cue. It is certainly true that the adult plans for boys' work which are the result of most careful study of boy life are inevitably the plans which have attained the largest success. It is equally true that clubs in which boys are given an increasing degree of self-direction and initiative, appropriate to their age and progress, are the clubs which have yielded the largest results in developing responsi- bility and character. This brings us to the necessity for a care- ful analysis of spontaneous organizations among boys. The impulse which causes these organiza- tions comes of course from the gregarious instinct, the desire for comradeship and the consciousness of kind. The boy of ten or a dozen summers, who has attained a reason- able measure of self-control in childhood, hungers for the comradeship of real bo}'- hood. He longs for more worlds to con- quer; for a chance to develop the second stage in his will achievement. Heretofore his base of operations has been the home. But the radius of the home circle is too short ; it offers too meagre opportu- 112 BOY LIFE nitles for social development, so he goes a hunting for chums. This necessity is of course more acute in the modern small family than it was in the patriarchal households of a few generations ago. The latter offered great facility for practice in social adjust- ment within the home circle to the mutual advantage of its members. The widening interests of the modern boy, in the family of only two or three children, soon force him to look over the back fence for playmates, and ere long lead him farther and farther abroad for chums, till he gleefully joins, first a clannish little clique, and later a truly barbaric tribal gang. His natural yearning for his own kind can of course not be satisfied long at home, and it is well that he goes. As Dr. Forbush says : "Out among his peers God intends that he should go, to give and take, to mitigate his own selfishness and to gain the masculine standy)oint which his mother, his nurse, and his school teacher cannot give ; and to exer- cise a new power, which is one of the most precious ever given to man, that of making friendships." ^ Only recently have we rightly estimated 1 "The Boy Problem," p. 23. BOY MADE SOCIETIES 113 the character making power of the gang. It is not necessarily an invention of the devil, as our mothers used to think; though the devil finds it a very useful instrument if we give him half a chance. The gang renders a valuable service in boy life. It is what saves the boy from ladylike fastidiousness, from effeminacy, from self-conceit. It helps him outgrow the distorted conceptions of his little child world, so narrow and self-cen- tered. The boy who does not get the altru- istic practice of the gang is too likely to develop ultra-selfishness out of the egoism so natural to childhood. He is rather sure to lack in courage, in capacity for difficult undertakings, and in rough and ready viril- ity and "gumption." The gang teaches the young fop that clothes do not make the man. It teaches the young mollycoddle that man- ners onlv seem to make the man ; and the young aristocrat, that wealth and blue blood can never make the man. The gang when it has the chance teaches essential and vigor- ous democracy to the dweller in the brown- stone front. It gives the boy practice in agility and watchfulness, and teaches him to take care of himself in a crowd. Such self-respect as is maintained by the handy 114 BOY LIFE use of his fists, he is Hkely to have plenty of chance to develop. The hollow pretensions of deceit and sham, and the essence of gen- uineness and reality, the gang is sure to teach him, with many another lesson of fundamental manliness. He may be just as good a boy, but less of a goody-goody boy, after the gang gets through with him ; at least, he will be a real boy, not too much like his sister. There may be brutal tendencies in the gang; there often are criminal ten- dencies ; and sometimes even vicious ten- dencies, which are far worse. But this is simply saying there is life in the gang. Whether the boys become white-cross knights or mere banditti, depends mainly upon the leader, the key-boy who precipitates, and even personifies, public opinion. But notice, please, that usually the gang's worst evils are exaggerations of its strength, and its greatest danger, low ideals of man- liness. But recall also that this was exactly the trouble with the patriarchal tribal life of Old Testament times. It is a normal stage, which will be speedily outgrown, given the right leadership, and sympathetic, pa- tient comradeship. Its dangers are not to be underestimated or ignored; but the whole- BOY MADE SOCIETIES 115 some boy, with some true man for a Big Brother, will come through this tribal stage unscathed; all the stronger for his gang- experience, infinitely more manly, and better fitted to live his life in the world of men. • The aims and purposes of the boy made societies will depend directly upon the boys' hfe interests. The gang is the inevitable outlet for the boy's surplus energy, along the line of his greatest interest for the moment. It is his own hand-made medium for self-expression. Doubtless it is the safety valve which saves him from bursting. If the gang in the back yard makes our ears ache, let us reflect that a safety valve is not to be blamed for being noisy. The quiet safety valve and the silent, moody boy, are fraught with similar dangers of approach- ing volcanic disturbances. Beware of both! Dr. Henry D. Sheldon's article in the American Journal of Psychology on "The Institutional Activities of American Chil- dren" is still the best available classification of boys' spontaneous clubs. He obtained 1022 responses from boys of ten to seven- teen years of age, 862 of whom were mem- bers of such gangs or boy made clubs. 116 BOY LIFE Sixty-four were members of more than one club. Of the 623 societies of wliich he obtained careful description — li^ were philanthropic societies. 3^% were secret, at least in part. 4i^ were purely social for "good times." 4i^ were literary, musical or artistic. 14^ were minor clubs, mostly of a quiet nature. Sh% were industrial organizations, with a variety of aims. n% were frankly predatory clubs, for hunting, fight- ing, tramping, etc. ; the typical street gang. 61^ were game clubs, mainly athletic. 86^ were for various active interests. Thirteen was the age of the maximum club activity ; though from ten to fifteen it was fairly steady; declining at sixteen, probably because of changing interest, particularly the interest in the other sex and in adult made societies for older boys. Dr. Sheldon's investigations proved that boys and girls after ten and under seventeen have divergent interests, and almost never organize together. The girls organize three times as many secret societies as boys ; and three times as BOY MADE SOCIETIES 117 many literary and industrial societies (mainly sewing). They report five times as many social and twice as many philan- thropic societies — due in part to the lack of athletic interests for girls. Physical activity was the attraction in only ten per cent of the girls' clubs, as compared with seventy-seven per cent of the boys' organi- zations. This will doubtless be less true in the future. Dr. Sheldon says in compari- son : "Girls are more nearly governed by adult motives than boys. They organize to promote sociability, to advance their in- terests, to improve themselves and others. Boys are nearer to primitive man : they associate to hunt, fish, roam, fight, and to contest physical superiority with each other." But boys' clubs are apt to be creatures of a single summer. They lack the time perspective and the test of continuous in- fluence which we should like to see. If in our study of boy life, we could discover a modern boy colony, with a distinct social life of its own, continuing through a series of years, isolated from cities and free from adult interference, how delighted we should be! Then we should be able to study boys 118 BOY LIFE in a true boy's world, and watch the activi- ties of the unfettered boy will. Then we could discover how boys, untrammeled by adult notions and customs, would develop naturally such social and economic customs of their own as their needs required. Then, too, we might see clearly whether or not the influence of race habit would work out, and the modern boy really recapitulate the prog- ress of the race. Such a self-governing boy world, if we could discover it, would also teach us many things about our subject of self-government in boy life. Our next chapter will introduce us to just such a boy colony, a little world of its own, where for more than a generation, boy life has developed in reasonable freedom ; and our study of it will reveal just these points of interest mentioned above. CHAPTER VII RUDIMENTARY SOCIETY AMONG BOYS A study of genuine boy sociology, apart from the restraining and preponderating influence of adults, is seldom possible. Per- haps as good an illustration as could rea- sonably be expected is found at the Mc- Donogh School in Maryland. It is a very normal type of spontaneous social develop- ment among boys in early and middle ado- lescence, and therefore furnishes a valuable contribution to our study of boy life and self- government. For the details of information regarding the school which are utilized in this interpretation, we are indebted to Mr Sidney T. Moreland, the courteous and effi- cient principal at McDonogh, and Dr. J. Hemsley Johnson, whose illuminating and discriminating thesis on the subject is a val- uable addition to boy science, from which we quote freely in this chapter. The McDonogh School, with its ample farm and forest of eight hundred acres, is located among the low-lying fertile hills northwest of Baltimore. Here a wise phil- 120 nOY LIFE anthropj is being most tactfully adminis- tered, for the benefit of a hundred and fifty boys, who are allowed, particularly during recreation hours, considerable scope for their untramnieled activity and ingenuity. With unusual foresight the head of this institution has avoided the evil of "institutionalizing" liis boys, which is all too common under such conditions. Their school and farm duties must of course be faithfully attended to, and they are kept orderly and respectable by a reasonable and unobtrusive exercise of authority ; but they are given the hills and woods to roam over at will during their hours of freedom from routine, and have been allowed to use the woods as their own possession. The teachers have consistently declined to interfere with the play life of the boys and consequently the customs and unwritten laws which in the course of stu- dent generations have grown up at Mc- Donogh to regulate the inner life of this interesting colony, and their unfettered use of their 800 acres of Eden, form a most enlightening chapter in the annals of boy life. On entering the school, the boys are young RUDIMENTARY SOCIETY 121 enough to be quite unsophisticated in civil- ized customs, so that their evolution of social restraints may be considered original. We may rightly expect, therefore, that a study of this experience at McDonogh will reveal to us the way boys by themselves naturally regulate the vexed question of land owner- ship and control ; how they go about to legis- late for the peace and welfare and justice of their free community ; how they execute the law and administer justice; and how they develop the rudiments of economics, such as mediums of exchange and a banking system. Each of these items Dr. Johnson has faith- fully reported, and the striking fact is made constantly evident that the boys, sponta- neously developing these social customs in an isolated nook in a modern civilized society, have unwittingly reproduced the identical stages of development which the race, in its various ethnological periods of culture, has laboriously been developing through the cen- turies. We have here then the culture- epochs theory practically worked out in the social and economic realm. Let us examine first the matter of land tenure. 122 BOY LIFE When the McDonogh School was first opened, the boys were few in number, barely a dozen, and the 800 acres seemed a vast, limitless storehouse of unattached wealth, so boundless that a dozen boys could make little inroad upon it. There were plenty of rab- bits and nuts and squirrels and birds' eggs for all, without crowding anybody. Doubt- less for this reason, there was no thought of private ownership and the land was con- sidered a communal possession, in which all the boys had equal and undivided rights. This condition of primitive blessedness is of course parallel to the halcyon days of the prehistoric Communal Period of the race, when people were few and land a plenty, and everybody, therefore, owned it all ! It is difficult to get up a quarrel among children playing on the boundless ocean beach. There are too many million grains of sand. For this reason, in the Aryan villages in the East, as well as in ancient Italy, Germany, Peru, Mexico and China, "land was not con- ceived of as property in the modern sense, or as belonging to any individual," ^ until 1 Phear " The Aryan Village in India and Ceylon," p. 288; also De Laveleye. " Primitive Property," p. 2. RUDIMENTARY SOCIETY 123 numbers increased and land rights became crowded and division became necessary. It is interesting to see how the McDon- ogh boys next evolved the second stage in land tenure, temjjorary individual owner- ship, through the periodic redistribution of the land. This was exactly true to the primitive custom, as developed in ancient Germany (see Tacitus) and England ^ and still practiced in the primitive communal vil- lages of Russia.^ Recall also the Jewish custom of redistribution of landed property in the Jubilee year,^ In these primitive vil- lages in Russia the land is still owned by the entire community but regularly the arable land and meadow is alloted proportionately to the needs of the different families of the village. At McDonogh the boys for all practical purposes divided the land annually, after the increased numbers began to cause embarrass- ment and frequent quarrels. During their leisure hours the boys were in the business of gathering nuts and other trophies of the harvest time. In the spring, it was birds' 1 Sir Henry Maine, " Village Communities," p. 82. 2 Wallace. "Russia," Vol. I., p. 207. 8 Leviticus, ch. 25. 124 BOY LIFE nests and eggs ; in the winter, rabbit and muskrat trapping, et cetera. We must remember that this for the boys was the serious work of life. The farm work and the studying were merely incidental, simply the chores of life — the drudgery that was the price they had to pay for their subse- quent freedom. Their real life, with its vital interests and issues, was the life of their own initiative and freedom from restraints, the restraints of adult leadership. For instance, in the matter of the nut harvest, they gradually developed the pecu- liar custom of seizing individual trees for the fruits thereof and regulating this act of force by a scheme which was more than a semblance of justice, a scheme which really sprang from and satisfied the boy's instinct for fair play. To prevent the wholesale annexation of the forest by the greedy, a definite time for the beginning of the harvest was mutually determined and, beginning the following midnight, the boys who were most alert, wide awake and vigorous, gained law- fully the rights of ownership in the nut trees by running to the woods, climbing the choicest trees and shaking down the fruit. Custom forbade any boy to seize the prod- RUDIMENTARY SOCIETY 125 uct of another's labor. He must pile the nuts then on the ground which had been brought down by another before he might do his own shaking and harvesting. Conse- quently, as it was easier to work a fresh tree than to pile another boy's nuts, the first shaker usually obtained the use of that par- ticular tree for that year, so far as the nuts were concerned. This did not mean perma- nent ownership, but merely temporary rights which lasted until the next harvest brought its own redivision of the spoils ; a truly primitive, communal custom, as in the child- hood days of the race.^ Similarly by the labeling of trees contain- ing birds' nests or other trophies, and by the temporar}'^ control of the best land frequented by rabbits, under the mutual agreement of "squatter sovereignty" for traps, to the distance of forty yards, the same develop- ment took place with perfect naturalness. All titles expired by limitation at the end of 1 The latest word from McDonogh reports slight changes in this custom. Walnut Day is now a fixed holiday, the Monday after the first Saturday in October. The rush for the trees is made after breakfast instead of midnight, the boys forming in two lines on either side of the dining room and starting at the firing of a pistol. The gathering of bird's eggs and capturing wild animals for pets have been tabooed for some time. 126 BOY LIFE the season. They thus conserved the ancient rights of the commune to the ownership of all the land. They thus secured a fairly reasonable division of the land for the sea- son, in which individual enterprise, ability, skill and sacrifice were suitably rewarded. They recognized the fundamental principle of justice — to the laborer belongs the fruit of liis toil. Sir Henry Maine states that "there appears to be no country inhabited by an Aryan race in which traces do not remain of the ancient periodic redistribution of the land." ^ It was doubtless true all through the feudal period when many people lived in walled towns and did their farming in the outlving fields. The periodic redistribution oi communal land was the natural step leading to perma- nent private ownership, by the encroach- ment of the strongest and the shrewdest. On the ruins of common property, ownership in severalty was soon established at Mc- Donogh. Still keeping within the letter of the law, the shrewd older boys retained their allotted portions and gathered more, com- bining the force of personality with the power of accumulated capital ; and ere long 1 "Village Communities," p. 82. RUDIMENTARY SOCIETY 127 the equal rights of all to the woods and game were forgotten. For instance, the rabbit traps were left in the woods througli the summer and were easily reset next January, thus retaining the same land continuously, until finally the claim was not contested. Partnerships were enlarged, poor retainers were hired to assist in the harvesting and the trapping, with the simple reward of a mess of rabbit pottage, and thus the stronger boys gained the permanent, individual ownership of the land and the trees. The newly in- vented custom of devise, by wills, when the landlords left the school at the age of seven- teen, clinched the matter and made perma- nent this ownership in severalty. Land Monopoly. The tendencies just described soon resulted in land monopoly, at McDonogh, as elsewhere. In the primi- tive village, the great warrior or the man of thrift, soon accumulated rights to land, by purchase, by strategy, by force and by legacy ; often in combination with a few others, who thus speedily became the landed aristocracy of the village. Evidently follow- ing the racial instinct, these McDonogh boys did the same; and quickly the most of the land was possessed by a few. All the best 128 BOY LIFE rabbit land was controlled by three boys, who had combined in early autumn to make fifty traps and set them at intervals over all the finest rabbit tract. This trick of the greedy was strictly within the letter of the law, though abrogating the original purpose and spirit of it. The buncoed majority had no recourse except to force; and the greedy were strong, well organized, more mature ; and overawed their plundered rivals. Be- sides, did they not have the moral support of having obtained their property by legal right.'* Thus individual ownership was abused and made permanent and monopolistic. As usual, the odds were all on the side of Capital! This soon discouraged com| ctition and nearly everybody went out of the rabbit busi- ness, making no claim to rabbit land. A few with the rabbit habit subserviently trotted around for the rabbit lords and tended the traps for pay. Is it not always thus, when a trust is formed.'* The small manufacturer has to go to work for the cor- poration which has monopolized the only business he knows ! But hard luck is the best incentive to invention. Losing the rabbit land aroused RUDIMENTARY SOCIETY 129 ingenuity. If the rabbit business had not been monopohzed, it is doubtful if any boy would ever have promoted the muskrat industry ! But learning shrewdness from once getting "stung," the muskrat trappers launched their industry a full-blown trust. Six of them, and the largest boys in school at that, secured the franchise of practically all the available muskrat land along the borders of the brook. No attempt was made to resist them or to challenge their rights. Thus the collective ownership in the land was forgotten and private owner- ship and monopoly were developed. Doubtless testamentary rights had much to do with it both in Boyville and in primi- tive society. The "last will and testament" is a comparatively modern invention. "Primitive nations," said De Laveleye, "could not understand how the mere wish of an individual, taking effect after his death, could decide the ownership of prop- erty." ^ Among the ancient Irish, the custom was made permanent, largely by the influence of the Church. In Bengal, wills were not introduced until after English 1 "Primitive Property," p. 178. 130 BOY LIFE sovereignty came, with the break-up of the viUage system. In this interesting evolution of boy society we next discover the rise of a Socialistic Parti/ clamoring for a redistribution of the land ! This stage in land tenure brings us down to date, and this very thing inevitably happened at McDonogh; probably because it was "human nature" as we say, that it must happen, under the given circumstances. What is this but saying that the racial instincts in the boys, which told them auto- matically just what the race had done when confronted by these circumstances, impelled them to do likewise? Mr. Johnson tells us that since monopoly developed at McDon- ogh, an agrarian revolution has at various times been threatened, by certain restless spirits who have caviled at the greed of the landed aristocracy, in spite of their long- established rights. Envy of the prosperous caused the rise of a socialistic party demand- ing that every new boy entering school should have an equal share with those already there. "The land belongs to all of us. Every boy here has the right to catch rabbits. Boys that leave school have no right to give away tlieir land. It be- RUDIMENTARY SOCIETY 131 longs to those who come to take their places. We are forty-seven to three. We must combine and force these robbers to divide." This platform has a wonderfully familiar sound ! But the recapitulation process goes still farther. The monopolists, with the shrewd- ness of their kind, threw a sop to quiet the leaders of the mob. They gave away some of the least productive land to leaders of the noisy agrarian party. The effect was not lasting, however. Sops never last. The socialists returned to the attack later, when the three land monopolists conspired to will all their land to one boy. This over- reaching was the expiring folly of the Bour- bon dynasty. Under compulsion of an enraged public sentiment, the land was finally divided among about eight owners by rightful sale. And about this time the socialistic demagogue, with characteristic disinterestedness, got into the muskrat industry "on the ground floor"; and the zeal of the reformers died of prosperity. The close parallel between the sponta- neous evolution of the five stages of land tenure, on the part of these isolated Ameri- can boys, and the similar evolution in the 132 BOY LIFE economic history of the race, is a rather clear substantiation of the theory of the culture epochs : beginning with the commu- nal ownership of the land, then successively passing through temporary individual own- ership with periodic redistribution, perma- nent ownership in severalty, land monopoly, and the rise of a socialistic party clamoring for redistribution. Surely the unfettered boy left to himself tends to recapitulate the progress of his ancestors. In connection with our study of self- government among boys, the story of the McDonogh boys' methods of law making and judicial procedure is particularly val- uable. We get direct evidence here of what the natural method is with boys of this age. Notice a few of the most apparent features: no fixed constitution, an unwritten code, a growing body of precedents which are in- voked as authoritative but not unalterable; a law-making body that is absolutely demo- cratic ; manhood suffrage ; a minimum of legislation, never called for until needed, then enacted with all respectable speed, though after due deliberation ; no theories of government and no red tape. Appar- ently this is near-anarchy, yet the public RUDIMENTARY SOCIETY 133 welfare and peace are preserved. There are likewise, at the beginning, no officers. The assembly is utterly informal, collected anywhere and at any time, for immediate purposes of legislating, administering jus- tice and executing the law on the same spot if necessary. The pure force of public opinion is all powerful. No one has the right to call any speaker to order, but popu- lar clamor unceremoniously silences him if he transgresses. Justice is rigidly maintained, but it is of the crude, immature, primitive sort. A strict adherence to the letter of the law is counted as righteousness among primitive peoples ; and the boys evidently are in this stage of primitive justice. There was often a very bare regard for the ethics of the case, but punctilious observance of "the rule" in question. When there is business to be despatched, the ones most interested, or the personalities with greatest initiative, push the matter through to an issue; general agreement is obtained and the new rule immediately goes into effect. The close parallel between this utterly democratic school assembly, as it was at the beginning at McDonogh, with the village 134 BOY LIFE assembly in the Russian Commune as de- scribed by Wallace, is worth noting/ "The Commune is in fact a living institu- tion, whose spontaneous vitality enables it to dispense with the assistance an4 guidance of the written law. All the real authority resides in the Assembly, of which all the heads of households are members. The simple procedure, or rather absence of all formal procedure, at the Assemblies, illus- trates admirably the essential practical character of the institutions. The meet- ings are held in the open air. Any open space where there is sufficient space and little mud, serves as a Forum. The discussions are occasionally very animated, but there is rarely any attempt at speech making. The whole assemblage has the appearance of a crowd of people who have accidentally come together, and are discussing in little groups subjects of local interest. Gradually some one group, containing two or three peasants who have more influence than their fellows, attracts the others and the discussion be- comes general. Two or more may speak at a time and interrupt each other freely, using plain, unvarnished language, not at all 1 Wallace, "Russia. ' Vol. I., p. 198. RUDIMENTARY SOCIETY 135 parliamentary ; and the discussion may be- come, for a few minutes, a confused unin- telligible noise; but at the moment when the spectator imagines that the consultation is about to be transformed into a promiscuous fight, the tumult spontaneously subsides, or perhaps a general roar of laughter an- nounces that some one has been successfully hit by a strong argumentum ad hom'mem or biting personal remark. Communal measures are generally carried in this way by acclamation. The Assembly discusses all matters affecting the communal welfare. It fixes the time for making hay and for plowing the fallow fields. Above all it divides and allots the communal land among the members as it thinks fit." Likewise the informal McDonogh assem- bly set the annual date for the nut harvest, and made the attempt to secure a fair divi- sion of the communal rights in land. They also passed the rules regarding the use of the rabbit land; the rules concerning traps, and the marking of trees and the protection of property in nests therein. Occasionally an especially complex question would be decided by a written referendum, publicly posted where each boy by signing his name 136 BOY LIFE could express his will and exert his share of influence. This literary method of invok- ing the pencil showed the influence of the school environment and perhaps some knowl- edge of modern balloting. We must next notice the important fact of the loss of democracy at McDonogh and the rise of oligarchical government. An emergency arose requiring a new rule about tree labeling. Labels would blow off. So a small caucus decided that the rule ought to be that unless the label was in sight the tree was "anybody's tree." Then this small caucus consulted the other influential boys of the school and got their assent to the new rule and it was declared in force. This marked the beginning of the downfall of the popular assembly. Soon the stronger were tempted ])y the very consciousness of influence to propose new laws and declare them adopted without troubling to gain the consent of the majority. This was oligar- chical government, in eff^ect, and the prac- tical disenfranchising of the masses. The few resourceful, influential boys with initia- tive, daring, shrewdness and personal prow- ess practically became dictators, restrained only by their desire to be themselves pro- RUDIMENTARY SOCIETY 137 tected in their property rights by the estab- lished laws and customs; and also by their love of popularity and approbation. Pub- lic opinion still ruled, but it was autocratic- ally interpreted by the leading older boys; in one instance two boys were able to set the date of the nut harvest against the wishes of the majority. The development plainly indicated here is along the line of racial evolution, though not to the extent indicated in the matter of land tenure. In the matter of legal procedure at Mc- Donogh, we see many striking paralleUsms suggesting savage, barbarous and primi- tive cultures. Fights have always occurred among the boys and have consistently been ignored by the teachers. The boys early discovered that they must settle their own quarrels and they have a well-regulated order of procedure for accomplishing it. When a fight begins, the principals are taken in hand by the crowd ; a ring is formed and the contestants are compelled to fight it out to a finish and settle the quarrel then and there. Therefore they seldom fight, for they know it means a fair fight and a hard one. The older boys especially will exhaust 138 BOY LIFE all possible efforts before an appeal is made to fists. The inconvenience of fighting over all matters of property disputes gave rise to the invention (or shall we call it the re- discovery?) of an archaic judicial system. Serious crimes like robbing rabbit traps were promptly punished by a popular thrash- ing, which soon put an end to that variety of predatory sport. Chronic insolvency was also properly grilled after due time. But less important matters were subjected to the primitive methods of settlement known as the ordeal. These were of various kinds, the appeal to chance, the laying of wagers, the making of bets, and the drawing of lots. This unreasoning and wholly bar- baric custom gradually gave place to the beginnings of arbitration. Bystanders were commonly appealed to, to settle disputes and thus prevent a fight. Soon the big boys, and the ones with a reputation for good judgment, become favorites in arbitration and gain great influence. Here enters the beginning of chieftancy and gang and clan leadersliip. However, in grave disputes, the judgment of a single boy was seldom trusted. All the bystanders, and sometimes all the school, were appealed to for justice, and we RUDIMENTARY SOCIETY 139 have the beginnings of the jury system. It is interesting to see how the crowd surround the principals in this quickly improvised court of justice, hear both sides patiently and in great detail, listen to the witnesses, weigh the evidence, decide the guilt or jus- tice by acclamation ; and immediately execute the penalty — sometimes by bumping the criminal's body against a convenient tree ! Thus we see in this boy court of justice the old primitive "folk moot" assembled to see justice done. Each boy, standing in the ring around the orators pro and con, knows that tomorrow he may be there himself to maintain his own rights before the same body, in which trial the plaintiff and de- fendant of today will have a voice to decide upon his claims. As Dr. Johnson says : "He has a feeling that a decision contrary to established custom, however it may accord with his momentary sympathies or friend- ships, will be treated as a precedent to over- throw his most cherished interests and to pre- vent the operation of the rules upon which he has confidently counted in every venture in which he is engaged. Every boy there is determined upon the preservation of the system of law upon which he has based all 140 BOY LIFE his hopes of filling his egg-cabinet." There- fore, with a characteristic analogy to primi- tive habits of justice, the literal fulfilment of the law, and exact compliance with its minutest provisions, was all that was con- sidered, without regard for the interests of justice. "I stand here for law," said Shy- lock. The idea that moral rights were above legal rights was a later development in human history. But they that live by the letter of the law shall perish by it, was the just verdict upon Shy lock, and all his ilk. The evident progress then, in this tumult- uous boy-court system, was by way of avoid- ing the fight by a reasonable discussion of facts at issue; settling them when possible on the basis of the evidence ; when not pos- sible, by the barbaric appeal to chance, lot or the ordeal ; using the arbitration method when convenient and mutually agreeable, or a jury of one's peers, when the gravity of the case demands it ; but in all cases recog- nizing that the dispensing of justice was a sacred trust which the community itself must exercise. Mr. Johnson's interesting study of Boy RUDIMENTARY SOCIETY 141 Economy at McDonogh is not close enough to our subject to warrant our giving it much attention. Suffice it to say that the common custom of barter suggests the hunting stage of culture, with such staples of exchange as birds' eggs, cherries, apples, pies, grapes, knives, tops and slings. The keeping of squirrels and rabbits as pets, by boys a little older, and hiring younger boys to feed them, suggests the shepherd stage of cul- ture; and the manufacture of taffy and its sale for so many "butters," or school credits, suggests the commercial stage. The agri- cultural stage is evidently telescoped in their play life because they got too much of it in their regular work life. Quite evi- dently these economic schemes show just as close recapitulation as the matters of legal and judicial interest. Here then at McDonogh is a pure boy community, which, in its inner and non- institutional life, has developed year after year by boy initiative independently, with- out the help or hindrance of adults. Self- government was freely allowed the boys in all recreation hours; central government being maintained in school and work hours, 142 BOY LIFE Avhich was in a measure necessary with the younger boys, though decreasingly neces- sary with the older boys. These McDonogh boys seem clearly to have proved the truth of the culture-epochs views along social, economic and partly governmental lines. They paralleled first the primitive, patriarchal society of the old communal village, with its collective owner- ship of land, its democratic assembly, and informal legal customs, its ready reflection of public opinion, its swift, impartial, crude and literal interpretation of justice, its simple barter and conveniently simple medium of exchange. Later they repeated the limited democracy of more formal days, with the gradual development of private ownership in land, the growing tendency toward centralization of wealth and power, and essential government by oligarchy, with the gradual disenfranchisement of the masses. Later came the monopolizing of land and boyish wealth, until a very few were in control ; followed by the rise of a powerful socialistic spirit, indicating the return, ere long, to essential social democracy, provided the boys are old enough to warrant it. RUDIMENTARY SOCIETY 143 The fact that the economic evolution in modes of land tenure and in trade and ex- change was more complete than the develop- ment of forms of government, was doubt- less because thej worked at it more. Gov- ernment was merely incidental. Their spe- cific interests were not political, but indus- trial, and mainly collectional and acquisi- tive — the special interests of the barbarian stage of culture, as appropriate to early bo^diood particularly.' As the boys grew older, and the interests of the older boys pre- dominated, the industrial interests of higher cultures, the productive and commercial interests arising in the feudal and monar- chical periods, developed appropriately in the years of early and middle adolescence. This is cumulative evidence that we should learn to locate our individual boy ethnologic- allj-^ by discovering his spontaneous inter- ests, to see what progress he has attained in repeating the race life ; and that we shall then be able to locate him governmentally, whether in the more primitive periods, patri- archal, communal, tribal, in the monarchy period of normal early adolescence, or in the revolutionary period which demands larger measure of self-govei'nment and looks 144 BOY LIFE toward democracy, with its increasing de- mand for initiative and opportunity for leadership. B}'^ this time it should be perfectly clear that recapitulation is not a mere interesting coincidence; and that there is nothing abnormal, strange, or weird about it. It is not marvelous, except as all the ways of God with the boy soul are marvelous. It is a purely natural thing that the boy should in a measure repeat the culture epochs of the race. He is groping his way upward through the levels of human experience. It is entirely logical that the primitive individual should think, feel and act like primitive society, while he is in the primary school of experience. In so far as environ- ment allows, and freedom of action is given, it is entirely to be expected that the same impulses and process of reasoning which developed customs and institutions among childlike peoples, should have the same result in the case of child individuals, when the conditions are favorable, as they were at McDonogh. And this being so, it is logical to add the phrase in proportion, and to expect to find the parallelism all along the way of child RUDIMENTARY SOCIETY 145 development and race culture. The boy left to himself is pretty sure to think, feel and act, as his primitive ancestors used to think, feel and act, when they were at the same stage of culture — making large allow- ance for different environment. Race history then may be expected to furnish us some clue to the sort of social and governmental treatment which is nat- ural to the boy and the race at any given period, not in detail,, but along broad lines. We have finally come, then, by this long detour of the inductive process, to the point where we are ready to consider our ultimate object in this course of study, the specific question : How shall we organize our hoys in their teens, so that an increasing amount of self- government is placed upon them, as they measure up to it, and a decreasing amount of external authority he used? Shall zee. or shall we not attempt to repro- duce, at certain periods, everything from the patriarchal and trihal form of govern- ment, down through the monarchies, to the highly organized democracy? BOY EPOCHS No. Stage of Boy Life Age LiMi-i's Charactehistics Infancy Years 0—3 (Before Self-Con- sciousness) Early Childhood- Later 3—3 7—11 The Self Period The Clique Period Boyhood 10— li The Gang Period Early Adolescence 13—15 Grammar School Age The Chivalry Period Middle Adolescence 14—18 High School Age The Self-Assertive Period Late Adolescence 17—24 College Age The Cooperative Period Not^— For the explanation of this Chart, see pages 154 to 16S. It is necessary RACE EPOCHS Will-Progress Alle- giance Racial Phototvpe (Self-Discovery) (BUnd) Pre-Historic Period Self-Control Father Patriarchal Period Chum Savage Kinship Clan Comradeship The Gang The Tribal Period Limited Democracy to Monarchy 1 — Council of Braves 2 — Federated Tribes with Chieftain by Provt^ess Personal Loyalty (Obedience) The Hero The Feudal Period of the Absolute Monarchy Self-Reliance The The Revolutionary Period of (Through Struggle) Ego the Constitutional Monarchy Leadership The (Resourcefulness) State The Republic: Social-Democracy in a Self-Gover.iing State i;ike the periods overlap to allow for wide differences in boy development. CHAPTER VIII THE EPOCHS OF BOYHOOD AND YOUTH A few things are evident at this point of the discussion, which will suggest the line of further investigation. The question with which the last chapter closed refers to adult made organizations for boys. Such work, to be safe, must be experimental and induct- ive. We have learned that for such experi- mental work we must take the cue from the boys' own spontaneous organizations, and the subjective, instinctive world in which the boy is now living. We have discovered that these boy societies reflect somewhat, at differ- ent ages, the forms and ideals of the race cultures which the boys are just then reca- pitulating; but that this racial process is very uneven, and variant in diff'erent boys of the same age, and sometimes apparently absent. When it is in evidence, it helps us to locate the boy and Indicates the method of treatment which will best fit him, adapted to the stage of culture through which he is now passing. We have also discovered that, parallel 148 BOY LIFE with the recapitulation process, as indicated by the boy's active interests, shown most in his play, there is going on the great process of will development; largely as a result of his training in initiative, gained in his hours of freedom. We have called the results of these stages of will progress self-control, comradeship, personal loyalty, self-reliance and leadership. We have further discov- ered that in some real way the progress in this developing manliness is due to the boy's utilizing his environment socially, in each passing period or culture epoch. How to help him so to utilize his environment, and make normal progress at each stage, is a large part of our work. Again, we have found that this will be guided not merely by the boy's age, but by his mental characteristics and temperament ; particularly his degree of impulsiveness and consequent forwardness. More specifically, our study of gangs and the rudimentary society at McDonogh clearly indicates that mere governmental functions, political gym- nastics, should be reduced to the minimum in our boys' work in the earlier periods. This, too, is clearly in line with the theory of gov- ernmental epochs at the appropriate stage. BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 149 We need next to classify the modes of average boy development along industrial and governmental epochs, in the race and in the boy; then to discover how the five stages in will achievement, on the boy's part, correlate with these successive epochs. We shall then be ready for a detailed study of various forms of group and mass clubs, and their appropriateness to the different periods of boyhood as mediums for will development. Industrial Epochs in the Boy and in the Race. As previously stated, the main value of this special subject for our purpose is to help to locate the boy in the process of reca- pitulation ; that is, to discover how far along he is, on the road to modern manliness, in order to know what measure of self-govern- ment he is fitted for. As our problem is mainly with adolescent boys it is hardly necessary to develop the first part of this special topic, which relates particularly to children. But it has some value for us in helping us identify and treat the cases of tardy development. A simple and convenient scheme of indus- trial classification is the following: 150 BOY LIFE 1. The Reign of the Acquisitive and Collectional Instincts in the Boy. From infancy to puberty, normally. Ra- cially a long period, covering the periods of savagery and lower barbarism, through the hunting and pastoral stages of the patriarchal and communal clan life. This is the selfish period for the boy in his self-centered world. His hunting, fish- ing, gathering of treasures all indicate this. Earher it is the period of "hunting and cap- ture," with stealthy, stalking methods in games of hide-and-seek, bo-peep, black-man, prisoner's base, etc., but later comes the pas- toral stage with its fondness for pets and its home menagerie. The acquisitive instincts should normally develop into the habit of thrift; and the collectional normally con- tinues longer than this period of course; finally yielding its dominance to the pro- ductive instinct. 2. The Reign of the Productive and Destructive Instincts. Depending largely on environment, but probably from eleven to fifteen years, seldom continuing longer than a couple of years. BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 151 Racially this is the tribal and agricultural period of later barbarism. Sometimes a love for gardening is manifested strongly, with a childish tendency to pull up the seeds to see if they are growing ; of tener, if environ- ment allows, forestry is the special passion, giving play to the love for hewing and cut- ting, which is often transferred to desks, tables, and windows. This is the tribal period of the gang, in which the productive and destructive instincts are in the balance. If the latter wins, the goal is the juvenile court; if the former wins, the next stage comes rapidly, as the productive instinct grows naturally into the constructive, and the goal may be the shop or any useful career. 3. The Reign of the Constructive and Transformative Instincts. Sometimes beginning as early as twelve years, if a shop is handy ; developing through life if the technical bent is made permanent as a result; or ending quickly if the next period comes soon because of environment or special interest. This is racially the mediaeval period of the development of arts and crafts and the building of towns. The 152 BOY LIFE boy now learns to develop skill and power, having become master of his ten fingers and his well-coordinated muscles. 4. The Reign of the Cooperative and Commercial Instincts. Racially the growth of social institutions and cities. The development of shrewdness in the boy and his social adjustment. Strong at fourteen years, when most boys are crazy to leave school and get to work, as eighty per cent of them do ; and when many school boys go into some sort of busi- ness in leisure hours. Baseball reaches its climax now as an absorbing interest, because of the team work involved. This is the period of swapping, trading, bartering, bar- gaining, truly the Yankee period of boy- hood. Dr. Woods Hutchinson emphasizes the bulging pockets of the grammar school boy; his demand for pay for services, his new sense of arithmetic and recognition of value. Often this commercial period is apt to appear earlier, and the children run a pin store somewhere in the neighborhood, which they are more apt to do if the father of one of them is a storekeeper. Hence environ- ment hastens the appearance of this stage. BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 153 The good habits resulting from the right expression of these two instincts are too numerous and too evident to mention here. Let us take but a single paragraph in further application of these industrial epochs. Besides revealing the boy's inter- ests, and thus telling us where to locate him, we can here get the clue to guiding him on, to the older period, if he is inclined to linger too long in some stage of arrested develop- ment. We can readily interest him in the productive or constructive arts if he is too immature and childlike. We can arouse his cooperative instinct or his commercial taste possibly, at least the former, if he is inclined to stay all day in the woodshed working with tools. This will insure his getting some- thing of the value of each period, and make him thus a more symmetrical man ; and will also insure his making his choice of a life work more intelligently. Quite likely, many a boy has let his liking for tools and making things draw him prematurely into a me- chanic's life, before he had given himself the chance to discover real talent for leadership and commercial or professional life, by giv- ing his cooperative instincts their alloted reign. 154 BOY LIFE More directly connected with our problem is our next classification (see chart) : The Volitional, or Governmental Epochs in the Boy and the Race. 0. Infancy (0-3 years). Prior to self- consciousness and memory. Parallel to the Prehistoric period of the race. 1. Childhood (3-12). Including the Self -Period (3-6) and the Clique Period (7- 11). Parallel to the Patriarchal and communal period of the savage kinship clan. In this period the child yields unquestioned obedience to his father (or mother) and his will achievement should be Self-control. His social outreachings result in the narrow attachments of the clannish clique of play- mates which is the rudimentary form of the Gang. 2. Boyhood {lO-l^). The Gang Period (i.e. the period when the gang is dominant). Parallel to the Tribal period racially ; the limited democracy of the barbarian tribe, with its council of braves and sagamores ; later the federated tribes with chieftain by prowess. BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 155 In this period the boy yields his inner allegiance, first to his boy chum, then to the gang as a whole, developing a keen gang loyalty ; and his normal will acliievement is Comradeship. 3. Early Adolescence (13-15). The Chivalry Period (i.e. the hero dominant). Parallel to the Feudal period racially, the period of Absolute Monarchy, under czar or king, with its rough chivalric virtues and vices. This is normally the grammar school period for the boy, with its development of team work under a leader, its follow-the- leader stunts, its love for mihtary drill and display, and its great impulse, hero worship. The boy's inner allegiance is now passing from the gang collectively to its leader, or some other hero; sometimes degenerating into subservience to the bully who acts the boy-czar in this Absolute Monarchy period. The boy's will achievement now is Personal Loyalty, the spirit of obedience. 4. Middle Adolescence (14-18). The Self-assertive Period. High school age. Parallel to the Revolutionary period, his- torically, and the rise of democracy under a 156 BOY LIFE Constitutional Monarchy; rebellion against despotism. The boy's independence is now rising fast, in this storm and stress period. He is rest- less, obstinate, domineering, combative, self- conscious, bashful or arrogant — sometimes by turns. It is the great competitive period in games and in school work ; team work wanes for awhile. He demands the right to be "put on honor" and to be allowed increas- ing freedom. His inner allegiance is very fickle, but usually given only to the ego at this period until normally yielded to Jesus Christ, He is struggling after Self-reliance in his will-achievement process, and is grad- ually gaining it, according to his capacity and his wisely guided opportunities for practice. 5. Late Adolescence (17-24). The Co- operative Period. College age. Parallel to the development of the self- governing Republic, a genuine social demo- racy. If the boy has developed normally he should soon be ready for self-government absolutely, and in every department of his life. He has learned respect for others which gives him confidence in social adjust- BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 157 merit and cooperation. Also, through imi- tation and through obedience, as well as through practice in the previous period, he has perhaps gained the great achievement of Leadership, at least relatively. His alle- giance is now to the State and is cheerfully accorded, because of his personal stake in it. Notice that in both of these classifications we are obliged to allow the different stages to overlap, because allowance must thus be made for both retarded and precocious de- velopment. Again and again Ave shall find individual boys who defy classification of course, because of their uneven development, as every boy-man well knows. Great differ- ences are sure to arise under the influence of different environments. It would be v/orth while to give an entire chapter to the discus- sion of the variant effects of environment upon boy development. Let us just mention, in passing, that in this classification broad differences will be discovered between boys in school and employed boys. Just as the whole period of adolescence was practically omitted in barbarian ages, so in proportion to the degree of culture we find that boys tend to telescope one or more of these three sub-periods. It is quite frequent for the 158 BOY LIFE Chivalric period to be omitted, as precocious street boys, particularly, pass directly from the Gang period to the Self-assertive period ; and then little-manhood sets in and arrested development cuts off the Cooperative period of late adolescence, as they hurry into the mill and factory and become devotees of the pipe and the labor union. Too frequently we find ill-considered strikes caused by the votes of mere boys whose youthful days ended abruptly at the Self-assertive period; and they gained too early the independence which comes automatically to the working boy, before he has any right to be a man. It is a serious loss when a boy, by the cruel sur- gery of our modern industrialism, has to suffer thus the cutting out of the Chivalric period and the Cooperative period of his youth. The loss is a needless loss, even though he be an employed boy, provided we make it good to him in our Christian Asso- ciation work ; and this is the great reason why the most important missionary work we are doing in our boys' departments is with the employed boys. We are safeguard- ing them from this loss, and giving them the privileges of a well-rounded adolescence, before they have to be men. BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 159 By reverting to this second classification just given, you will notice how the develop- ing allegiance of the boy's will, in the various stages, parallels the governmental progress of the race. It is interesting to see how closely related the two facts are. The boy yields his heart's allegiance first to his father under the normal influences of home life, as in the patriarchal period; next to his chum in the primitive democracy of the clan ; then in the tribal period, to the gang, which absorbs his loyalty so strongly; then to the hero in the feudal period, with its absolutism, as represented by the gang leader or the bully — or more fortunately as represented by the hero to whom the boy has given his admiration and devotion. Then comes the turn in the tide at middle adolescence, as the developing individuality of the boy comes to resent the dominance of the bully and the gang's tyranny, as well as every other form of authority which is unreasonable, and with increasing self- reliance he withholds his allegiance alto- gether, until he finds a personal Master again in Jesus Christ. "Our wills are ours, we know not how; Our wills are ours, to make them thine." 160 BOY LIFE In this Revolutionary period, while he is gaining for his rising personality more and more freedom from restraint, he is closely paralleling the progress of the race during the long struggle with tyranny, as out of despotism came the constitutional monarchy with its increasing political liberty. The last stage of progress was simply the natural development from struggle to mastery, with the ability for social adjustment, resource- fulness and leadership which is gained only with judicious freedom. We are now ready to answer our question about organization: How shall we organize our boys in their teens? .... Shall we attempt to reproduce at certain periods everything from the patriarchal and tribal form of government down through the mon- archies to the highly organized democracy? I think the following deductions may be drawn from our preceding study: (1) As a part of the general theory of the culture epochs, it is evident that there is a very close and logical connection between racial devel- opment historically, and the development of the individual boy. (2) It is also apparent that no organiza- tion of boys of the different ages, which BOYHOOD AND YOUTH l6l violates the principles of this natural development, is likely to succeed. That is, entire freedom from restraint given a boys' club under ten or twelve is pretty sure to result in the speedy necessity for a dictator — if in fact the whole club does not fall to pieces from mutual jealousies. And to give complete freedom to a boys' club of thirteen or fourteen years would be likely to have the same effect as in the average Central American Republic: another gang leader comes along and annexes the government. (3) The principles of the racial develop- ment, then, must be regarded in each boy period, but it is not to be expected that the parallelism of form can be rigidly followed, because of the great varieties of political stages as well as the bewildering complexity of boy types. The more we dif- ferentiate our forms of government, the more exclusive each becomes and therefore the more misfit boys would appear to spoil the plan. (4) We should aim then to reproduce in our organization only the stages of political progress which indicate broad distinctions which are quite clearly indicated in boy life. (5) Not more than four or five varieties 162 BOY LIFE should be attempted, unless, by a highly selective process, a man should chance to collect a group of boys different from any ordinary type, and yet ahke. In general, the five different periods of our classification suggest a single mode of treatment for each age. Let us consider each in turn. 1. Organization for the Childhood Period (3-10). Obviously there is little to be said here. Such as there is must be retail organization, in small groups and if possible with older boj^s as natural leaders in the little clan circle. The Brotherhood of David and the Captains of Ten are excellent types of clubs for this clique period. Also any simple group club. 2. Organization for the Gang Period (10-14). This is the small-boy problem and properly has no place in a course on self-government. Suffice it to say, that the big chief in this federated tribe of barbarian hordes, must be an adult Avhose prowess is unquestioned and who holds the boys by his strong, virile personality. His will is practically law, but it must be a lawful will or, hke his racial prototype, sudden disaster is likely to befall him! In no other work does personal force and magnetism count for BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 163 more than right in this stage of boys' work, where the personaHty of the leader must be law and gospel for the gang. Woodcraft Indians is the typical organization here. S. Organization for the Chivalric Period (13-15). This is more difficult than the earlier, but more simple than the later period, because there is less self-assertiveness on the part of the boys, except in case of the "precipitate will" and certain kinds of employed boys who are precocious. Al- though this is the absolute monarchy period racially, we must not fail to remember that feudalism's weakness was its failure to recognize leadership and reward it often. This, in general, it tried to do, and we are reminded of the elaborate hierarchy of knights and baronets and lords and dukes and earls who presumably had proven their capacity for relative leadership. Relative leadership under a strongly centralized control, then, is the key to this period. We may count on a strong personal loyalty from the boys, if we have any sort of a personality to attract it, and we may also count on a large degree of team work and willingness to serve under the orders of superiors. The difficulty is to choose these under officers so 164 BOY LIFE wisely that they will get the boys' support. The Knights of King Arthur is admirably adapted to boys of this period, as well as to the boys just a little younger. In this third period, as in the one just older, a large amount of initiative can be allowed and encouraged by "stunts" and tests of leader- ship appropriate to the period; yet usually the boys themselves will consider it necessary to have an adult leader capable of holding a firm rein when necessary. In the feudal period the king was noticeably popular with the masses, if he was half a man. Against the aggression of the feudal barons, the king was the preserver of popular rights and liberties. So should it be in the boys' club in this chivalric period. 4. Club Organization for the Self-assert- ive Veriod (14-18). This is our main problem. These boys are likely to need a strong hand; a mailed hand, sometimes, but it must be in a silken gauntlet. They have won constitutional rights, however, by their growing manliness, and they must not be treated as small boys, or have small boys classed with them. They have made considerable attainment in will achievement, and should always be consii- BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 165 ered as worthy of self-government until proven unworthy. That means, always put upon their honor when possible, until the unworthy have been sifted out by the test. They are increasingly self-rehant and are struggling for freedom of initiative and should be given work which will practice them in it. Yet their leadership experience is quite limited, so they cannot wisely be left to themselves. They will need a man's guid- ance and perhaps nominal control. The constitutional monarchy is a Hmited mon- archy, but still it has a king. Likewise these boys of fourteen to seventeen will need the experienced, tactful, conservative leadership of a manly man whom they can look up to, yet not fear, nor regard as a tyrant. How- ever, we must remember that in most consti- tutional monarchies the king does not rule, he merely reigns. The constitution is the ruler, as interpreted by both king and people. Yet the king has large controlling force. We are all familiar with the fact that in England and other countries in Europe, there is prob- ably a higher regard for law, more reverence for civil authority, greater sense of restraint and consequently less crime, than in free America. There are several reasons, but it 166 BOY LIFE is partly due to the influence of the king ; not his legal but his psychological influence. The king in a constitutional monarchy mainly controls the people and keeps the peace by suggestion, like father's sivitch hung up in the woodshed! Whether exer- cised or not, it represents and personifies the law. Our Republic lacks the Personification of Law, except as exerted upon the small boy by the policeman and the "Kid's Judge." Boys in the Self-assertive period, then, must have both a large degree of constitu- tional liberty and an adult adviser. Their freedom and self-direction should increase just as fast as they prove worthy and capable ; and the adviser should correspond- ingly retreat from reigning king to friendly counselor. He must always retain, however, the right of veto on matters of importance, as boys in middle adolescence are still apt to be fickle. His success will doubtless be in proportion to his ability to guide his boys without their knowing it. They should apparently be doing the whole business themselves, and usually may be trusted to, if the adviser can keep them in the habit of consulting him whenever their inexperience demands it. BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 167 As we concluded some time ago, the mere governmental functions in clubs of this sort should be reduced to the minimum. The McDonogh boys proved this to us. Consti- tutions are developed by growing precedents, not built up out of green timber, later to warp and check and split up sadly. The main purpose at this period should ever be kept in mind as something else than mere govern- ment. It is training in self-reliance and leadership ; development in initiative and originality. This raises a most interesting question which will be considered later, the stunts and tests of leadership in middle adolescence. The Phi Alpha Pi, the Pilgrim Fraternity, or some similar society with an adult guide who guides from the rear, is the tj'pical organization for this period. The failure and danger of the independent high school "frat" is its unfortunate lack of any adult assistance and advice. 5. Club Organization for the Coopera- tive Period (18-24). This period is really out of our range, for these boys are men, or ought to be. If previous progress has developed their will through self-control, comradeship, loyalty and self-reliance, and they have had reason- 168 BOY LIFE able practice in personal initiative, they are now ready for full self-government ; and any paternalistic authority over them would be disastrous, unless the group included only seventeen and eighteen-year-old boys. In tliis case, they might need treatment similar to the group next younger. But if the boys of seventeen were with the older boys of eighteen to twenty-four, it would probably result in the older boys dominating the group naturally and all would be well. It will be a manly, self-controlled, earnest set of men who do not need discipline, surveil- lance, or oversight, but encouragement, advice and guidance; which they will doubt- less be grateful for. They are abundantly able to govern themselves as a pure, social democracy. The church brotherhood, or independent association is the natural form of organization at this period. We are now brought close to the practical problem whether and when to use the "mass club" plan or the "group club" plan. This will necessitate a brief comparison of the two historic forms of boys' work to discover the advantages of each, in order to see under what conditions each is superior to the other in efficiency. CHAPTER IX GROUP CLUBS AND MASS CLUBS FOR BOYS The warm and enlightening discussion regarding the merits and demerits of these two forms of work with hoys is about over. The heat has subsided ; the hght remains. It is hardly necessary to take time to review the discussion. My own opinion is similar to the decision of a tactful negro who had been made arbiter of a warm debate between two of his colored friends. He gave his decision thus : "Ma f ren' Jones heah believes they aint no Gawd. Ma fren' Wash'n'ton says they sho' is. De truf seems to lie betwixt de two." Both group and mass clubs are right, and they need mixing; but each is particu- larly adapted to certain periods of boyhood. Let us briefly recall certain of the com- parative merits of the two plans and then see how they fit the stages of boy development. The mass club is wholesale work with boys ; the group club is retail work. The former is inclusive, democratic, free from castes or creedal tests. The latter is exclusive, selec- tive, homogeneous and includes boys of the 170 BOY LIFE same age, faith and social station. The mass club does a remarkably extensive work usually, and has to be superficial about it. The group club does intensive work and therefore can do it thoroughly. The mass club is having the great satisfaction of making a host of boys decent. The group club has the thorough satisfaction of making fewer boys better. The boy in the mass club gets one seventeen-hundredth of Thomas Chew every night in the week. The boy in the group club gets perhaps one tenth of a man's personality once or twice a week. Now that is a hard problem to factor ! Con- tinuous impressions and regular contact, but distant, on the one hand. On the other, close contact and vivid impression less frequently. Take your choice. The boys will also take their choice. The young tough dodges your close contact. The rough-houser and the chap-who-keeps- everything-lively likewise choose the larger field of activity. The boy who likes the protection of a crowd where either his bash- fulness or his deviltry may find safety, will of course avoid the group, if the mass club is handy and attractive. Here, also, the ragged boy and the poor boy and every sort CLUBS FOR BOYS 171 of boy-pariah will venture in, and be sure of a speedy welcome. But the boys at least think there's a finer sieve at the entrance to the group club, so you have to go for them, if you get boys of this type. The one hundred and fifty mass clubs in this country are doing a conspicuous and valuable work; not merely keeping the boys off the streets, but sometimes actually making the boyhood of a city decent, as in Toledo. The great factor which makes this possible is the continuous leadership year after year of the right man, a boy's man, who gradually by persistent sacrificing labor makes himself a power in the city. Too often the weakness of the group club, in church or school or settlement, is the almost indistinguishable procession of temporary workers who seldom stay by the boys long enough to become leaders, and make little impression on the boy life of a city or even of a precinct. The few boys they are able to serve, however, may become splendidly developed Christian citi- zens, who will always remember their kindness. The danger of mass club effort is the danger of the superficial, of reducing social service to a ragged sort of boy-work vaude- ville with little lasting worth and then losing 172 BOY LIFE all sight of the boy at fifteen. The danger of the group club work is the danger of coddling a little bunch of chaps who are already too much pampered in their homes of luxury. The group club needs the enthu- siasm, the esprit de corps, of the mass club. The mass club needs to organize itself inten- sively into natural groups for thorough work with definite, purposeful aim, under competent leaders who shall big-brother them, and never let go till they make them men. In other words, when the group gets the spirit of the mass club, it is sure to succeed better. And when the mass club leader, as is con- spicuously the case with John Gunckel of Toledo, does his wholesale work on the retail plan — running the mass club intensively — ^lie gets the splendid group club results in character and permanency. However, the by-laws of boyhood seem to indicate the natural periods when each of these plans will most naturally appeal to the growing boy. It may be worth while to see how it works out, though wide divergence must be expected, due to variant local condi- tions. Normally the home remains the boy's refuge — or "prisoner's base," according to CLUBS FOR BOYS 173 circumstances — until he is seven or eight. Unless his migratory instinct is unusually- persistent he seldom gets far from this home center, in which his social group is simply his own famil}'. Up to three years or so his whole world is the household, widening for a year or two only to include relatives and other visitors and perhaps the little girl the other side of the garden. But at five, possibly, he begins to annex the neighbor- hood; suspiciously and in some cases for predatory or military purposes only. Still self-centered, the boy of seven or eight finds his brother Jonathan, and a few choice kindred spirits who play and quarrel nicely every day and make it up next morning. Th'.s clan period of childhood has evidently a short radius to its social circle, and up to ten years the group method in neighborhood and Sunday-school is all that fits. A crowd bewilders the youngsters into bashful silence if not tears. If the boy's social geography permits, he outgrows the clan period soon after ten and joins the gang, a larger group that is auto- matically generated by a sort of spontaneous combustion which always occurs when twenty boys of ten to twelve happen the same 174 BOY LIFE summer to live in the same block. He is now rapidly developing the will achievements of self-control and comradeship. As fast as his social capacity develops he enlarges the circle of his activities, and our work with him should keep pace. He is probably ready for the mass club when the gang spirit is well developed ; but at first, even in the mass club, he needs to be shepherded in a group within the mass lest he be overawed by the older boys. He must avoid being lost in the crowd. He should preserve his individuality, his ingenuity, and not stunt his growing initia- tive by the strange hypnotic influence of the crowd. There is less danger of this in the case of the impulsive type with precipitate will. The best period for the simple mass club is the chivalric period of the boy, when he is developing personal loyalty — racially the feudal period of absolute monarchy. Here the enthusiasm of the crowd is particularly welcome and stimulating, and his response to the club leader will be the strong loyalty of hero worship ; but if possible, the mass club would best be made up of group units even then. When the self-assertive period comes, how- CLUBS FOR BOYS 175 ever, the case is different. Mass methods will not work so well, particularly with high school boys. The boy of fifteen is very class conscious. He looks up, never down, for his comrades and refuses to be catalogued in "a kids' club." There is a strong tendency now toward the close comradeship of a select group, and the fraternity plan is conspicu- ously successful just here. As soon as leadership begins to develop, however, with increasing self-reliance the young man welcomes a larger scope for action and influence, and finds it again in the mass club. At this period the correlation of mass and group methods is very desirable, in order that the developing initiative and independence may find practice and opportunity while the intensive thoroughness of the group method is developing the rich vein of worth while interests. First group, then mass, then group, then both plans for older boys, seems to be the pedagogical order. But we must remember that the influence of a strong per- sonality overrides all obstacles, and these suggestions will not hold when environment dictates the contrary. A strong, attractive personality will build up a splendid mass club work if he sets about it, by the sheer force of 176 BOY LIFE personal magnetism. Or if he choose to gather a little group about him, instead of the crowd, he will do so, and can practically pick his boys. The relative ease or difficulty of the process, at different periods, will be explained in part, at least, by the sugges- tions given above. In general, the law of the social radius will be found a fair guide in this question of group or mass clubs. The size of successful boys' clubs will depend upon the boys' social radius. In general, the boy's social radius, and therefore his social capacity, increases normally as the boy grows older. The nota- ble exception is the cliquey period of high school life, with its reaction of exclusiveness. A modern psychologist naively says "the story of the subconscious mind can be quickly told ; there isn't any." Then he proceeds to describe just about what other people describe as the functioning of the subcon- scious mind, though he eschews the name! Likewise, I would say of the place of the secret fraternity in boys' work, there isn't any place for it; and I have yet to find any boy worker who really advocates it. Yet, there are elements in such clubs as the Phi Alpha Pi, the Pilgrim Fraternity and the CLUBS FOR BOYS 177 Knights of King Arthur, etc., which have led the uninitiated to class them with secret fraternities. They are all fraternities, but none of them are secret, except as every well-regulated family, by mutual consent, keeps its own counsel as it chooses. With our modern facilities for publicity, perhaps it may truthfully be said that there are no really secret fraternities anyway this side of the Italian Mafia and the Tongs of China ! About all the secrets have by this time leaked out. More and more the members of secret organizations are empha- sizing their fraternal element and minimizing the secret element. However, there are two factors which make the fraternity plan with ritual elements particularly useful with boys. The first is the growing demand of the adolescent for the close comradeship of his own kind; and the other is the diminishing demand of the adoles- cent for spectacular display. The gang spirit of early adolescence ripens into the fraternal spirit of the high school and college periods. My personal experience has con- vinced me that the key to the young man problem is the frank, close friendship of a fraternity of boys in comradeship with a 178 BOY LIFE riffht-hearted man, not too much older. Just this is the weakest point in the work of the average church, and most ministers seem to consider it an impossible problem. How- ever, for a number of years I have personally enjoyed the fascinations and rewards of the young man problem even more than I have the jolly contradictions and naivete of the boy problem. I do not consider it an especially difficult problem, provided you have the right sort of an adult adviser who can be the social magnet around which the fraternal cluster may gather. Young fellows of sixteen to the early twenties will respond sometimes with remarkable keenness to advances from a manly pastor or teacher who offers them his friendship in the charmed circle of a real brotherhood. And when once this charmed circle has developed coherence, strength, unity and the peculiar camaraderie which is indescribable but precious, then, if you chance to be tliat social magnet aforesaid, you can lead those young men into any sort of service which your own enthusiasm can make genuinely attractive to them. Now as to the element of secrecy already referred to. Oaths of secrecy are not at all CLUBS FOR BOYS 179 necessary or desirable ; and none of these boys' or young men's fraternities require them. They can, therefore, not be called secret organizations, any more than your oathless household can so be styled. But on the other hand, the custom of reserve, privacy, caution, restraint, reticence, discreet secrecy if you please, not only may wisely be encouraged by your fraternity, because these traits of character and qualities of mind are distinct virtues in civilized man- hood; but also because at just this period in youth, the appeal to secrecy finds a most welcome response and gives a coherence to the organization which makes the fraternal bond as strong as steel. This distinction may at first seem trivial. You may think there is no difference between a fraternity with secrets and a secret fraternity, and so it sounds. But there is a difference nevertheless, and it is a vital one. Let us not stand for anything that is clan- destine, stealthy, sly or underhanded, or secrecy enforced by oath. But let us develop in our boys' clubs discreet, self- restrained secrecy, enforced simply by mutual consent, as in the normal home. I think this distinction is what President Hall had in 180 BOY LIFE mind when just after he has punctured with a volley of keen criticism the oaths and pledges of young people's religious societies, with seeming inconsistency, but entire reason- ableness he adds this paragraph, which is directly in point here: "The following conclusion at least seems warranted. Every adolescent boy ought to belong to some club or society, marked by as much secrecy as is compatible with safety. Something esoteric, mysterious, a symbolic badge, countersign, a lodge and its equip- ment, and perhaps other things owned in common, give a real basis for comradeship. This permits, too, tlie abandon of freedom in its yeasty stage, which is another deep phyletic factor of the social instinct. Inno- cent rioting, reveling with much Saturnalian violence, vents the anarchistic instincts in ways least injurious to the community and makes docilitv and subordination more easy and natural in their turn. Provision of time and place for barbarisms, or idiotic nonsense without adult restraint, helps youth to pass naturally through this larval stage of candi- dacy to humanity. "Their celebration of their dawning future in an ascendant age and race is in many a CLUBS FOR BOYS 181 curious way the counterpart of the Indian ghost dance, which invokes and worships a lost glory in its evening twilight. The com- memorations of the lost paradise of the red men of the stone age are in some respects a remarkable intaglio of the perfervid ways in which youth hails the golden age to come. "Such an organization must select its members according to the natural instincts of affinity, with power to discipline or expel those found too unlikeminded. It will prob- ably have a ritual of initiation, with grades of apprenticeship in the novitiate, the lowest involving much subserviency, almost like that of the villein to the manorial court, and all perhaps symbolic of the putting off the old isolated self by regeneration into a larger new social existence. If such a spontaneous organization of boys in the later teens has any inner work, it is not likely to be the direct promotion of piety or any form of outside social service, but is most likely to be dramatic or musical, or to promote debate or declamation, and to cultivate a peculiar form of group honor, the best form of which for this age is the idealized court of King Arthur. In cultivating friendship intensely for a small circle, conscious of representing the 182 BOY LIFE corps to others, many academic youth would owe more to this circle than to the curriculum and faculty. But as enjoyment and self- culture must slowly yield to service, so neither this nor any one type suffices, and every youth should connect himself with as many other associations of diverse type as practicable ; for at this age when individu- ality may be lost in one group only, it is saved and developed by several. In fine, group selfishness is the first step in over- coming individual isolation."^ It is, of course, evident that the special susceptibility of boys to the appeal of ritual and the spectacular and the mysteriousness of initiations is due to their inherited instincts. This is apparently the stage when most normally they express these instincts which were so deeply fixed in savage and barbarian customs. The great variety of pubic initiations, ethically graded all the way from the revolting practices of the Kosa tribe in Africa to the dignified assumption of the toga virilis among the Romans, indicate how deeply ingrained in the history of the race is the element of initiation in middle adolescence or earlier. This age-long race 1 U.'ill. "Adolesrenoe," Vol. II., p. 429. CLUBS FOR BOYS 183 habit of public initiation, finding its normal response in adolescent boyhood, accounts for the special susceptibility of our older boys to the appeal of mystery, ritual and the spec- tacular in their select fraternal circles. There is, of course, opportunity for grave abuses, and quite likely many illustrations could be collected if sought for. But rightly guided and stripped of all clandestine and underhanded elements, this instinct for initia- tion rites may be safely expressed and wisely utilized by workers with boys. It offers the key to many a boy's heart, which heretofore had been an impregnable fortress of formid- able reserve. Let me here mention a few principles which should govern all work of this general type, particularly with middle adolescents : The fraternity plan is necessarily in danger of exclusiveness. It owes its grip on the boys partly to this fact. But it should be regarded by the leader as a stage of progress which should not become permanent. Group selfishness is the natural step between egoism and altruism. After the fraternity has succeeded in lead- ing the boys out of selfish individualism into the broader group selfishness, the positive, or 181 BOY LIFE obverse of this, which is group honor, the good-of-the-order, should be empliasized, until the height of life is found in the beauty of self-forgetful service. Then altruism is easy and natural. The Phi Alpha Pi motto, "Help the Other Fellow," is ideal. Usually this stage must be prepared for by developing a well-rounded personality in boys who are uneven in their growing manhood. The appeal, therefore, to complete manliness is the normal appeal which crowns and completes right-hearted selfness, and prepares for efficient service. Then comes altruism. Of course the two motives can be worked together, as much of this development should be parallel. The accusation of exclusiveness can be avoided by setting a higli standard for fra- ternity membership, thus making natural selection the chief eliminator. The evils of exclusiveness may be avoided by introducing new fraternities, or new chapters of the same, as fast as the number of the boys justifies it. Criticism may be avoided by inviting one or more congenial men to be honorary members and attend sessions occasionally. This is especially desirable in a church fra- CLUBS FOR BOYS 185 ternity, and disarms criticism, particularly on the score of secrecy. The intermeshing of major and minor clubs is an interesting and sometimes a serious question for consideration. Varying with the natural social radius of the boy and his tendency to scatter fire socially rather than to become absorbed in few interests, this intermeshing or social rivalry will be discovered. It is particularly troublesome in the case of high school boys who are disproportionately absorbed in the complicated Interests of high school activi- ties, especially in the cities, and sometimes have no time or strength left for church or Association work. The whole problem of course is to get the boy to determine which really are the major clubs. It is purely a question of relative values and true proportion and perspective. This is a matter for tactful, careful private conference. About the best time for such a conference is after you notice that the boy has had a new vision of life values, or a new inspiration, gained at some religious meeting possibly, or in the revela- tion of a new found joy in worth while service. Then is the time to put a new perspective in 186 BOY LIFE the boy's own estimate of the different sorts of clubs he is putting his time and strength into. The question of number is fundamental also. You notice that Stanley Hall pre- scribes that the boy join "as many clubs of diverse type as practicable," in order to "preserve his individuality." I am not con- vinced that this is good advice. Experience with adult "jiners" indicates that a man who joins ten or a dozen orders finally loses all individuality — if in fact he has enough to start with to give him courage to stand on his own feet and not lean on a dozen different sorts of "brothers." President Hyde is, of course, correct in saying that a man's life is rich in proportion to the range of interests he makes his own. The same is true of the growing boy. But the social capacity of the boy determines how many different interests he really can make his own, and do justice to. Our high school boys particularly are suffering keenly from scattering their interests, and are becoming habitually superficial, if not also physically exhausted. Concentration is the word to emphasize. Encourage the boys to do fewer things and cultivate accuracy, patience and CLUBS FOR BOYS 187 thoroughness. Then, with just discrimina- tion between clubs with a purpose and mere pastime affairs, the intermeshing will fall in line naturally, as the right of way is given in order of relative importance. The girl complication of the boy problem is a matter demanding increasing attention, and the subject deserves more careful treat- ment than space will allow here. Our interest in it in this connection is mainly the social one, the bearing of the girl question, not on boys as individuals, but upon their organizations. The girl problem is far more intricate than the boy problem, and is certainly farther from any solution. It awaits the thorough, pains- taking investigation of consecrated female scholarship. Its intricacies are beyond the comprehension of mere man. I would humbly suggest that it is high time the women got after this girl problem with the same zest and the same sense of its vital con- cern with which the men have given their best attention to the boy problem. So painfully acute is the girl problem, in more than one city, that little progress can be made with the boys now until something more definite and comprehensive is done to save the girls. 188 BOY LIFE So long as the little boy is willing to play dolls, and the small girl responds by keeping store or even playing Indian, the two get along very nicely as playmates ; but the gang period divorces them, and their social ways become more and more divergent, as the instincts of each become more and more strikingly variant. There is little in common between the predatory youngsters of the barbarian period and the motherly little miss with the homing instinct and the civilizing cares and responsibilities of a large family of dolls ! Neither is likely to appreciate the other for several years to come. It seems to be nature's way to segregate the sexes rather effectually during the agitated period of pubescence. Tlie interests of each are usually very different, so much so that they can with difficulty understand each other, having little in common, and consequently are more inclined to quarrel and tease than to play together amicably. The situation is often aggravated by the fact that the girl at this period is likely to be physically and perhaps mentally the boy's superior, as her growth is accelerated so that she matures normally at least two years ahead of him. For this reason boys about this time CLUBS FOR BOYS 189 quit the companionship of girls of their own age and usually never renew it. When, several years later, they again discover the other sex, with the interest not of childhood but of adolescence, they probably become interested in a younger set of girls. Naturally school relations somewhat modify this tendency. We noticed in Chapter VI. the well-known fact that girls and boys between ten and seventeen do not naturally, spontaneously, organize together. However, there are always boy-girls and girl-boys, who illustrate the opposite tendency, the girls being usually of an athletic turn, the "tomboy" type ; and the boys usually the opposite, the non- athletic boy, who shows very slightly the recapitulation tendency. The sissy boy with the girl fever probably needs a good stiff dose of out-of-door games more than he needs parlor athletics ! The indication is clear then that a mixed organization during early adolescence as well as later childhood is pretty sure to fail. This explains much of the history of the Junior Society of Christian Endeavor. But we should avoid the extreme of entire separa- tion of the sexes at this period. An occa- 190 BOY LIFE sional mixed social, carefully regulated, would be a wholesome thing for both boys and girls ; giving to both sexes what Dr. Hall calls tonicity. The boys are sure to do their very best in athletic games, also, if the girls are present, like fair ladies at the ancient tournaments. Separate societies, like the Knights of King Arthur and the Ladies of Avilion, may Avell be managed parallel, with an occasional joint session, largely for social purposes. The civilizing effect upon the young knights is quite noticeable ; always provided that such juvenile parties are thoroughly planned and conducted by adults. In the middle adolescent period the boys are still shy of girls in the plural — and in fact, most of them, when grown men, are destined never to get over it. But woman in the singular interests them more and more. It is an interesting fact that the awkward boy, who is apt to be the butt of the quips and sallies of a bunch of girls, can single out a favored one and not only escape her ridi- cule, but even win her smiles ! In cities or suburban towns, where social life is more highly developed than in the country, the young folks of high school age have sufficient practice in the social arts and CLUBS FOR BOYS 191 graces so that this shyness and mutual diffi- dence departs and they welcome all attractive social privileges. But when it comes to the question of mutual organization, it seldom occurs spontaneously. Their interests are still widely different. Even in the college period, there seems to be no tendency to organize together, except for social purposes purely ; and it is probably better so. I should say, however, that an occasional ladies' night, to witness a debate or mock trial or some program of special excellence, would be a good ching for the older boys' club. The Senior Christian Endeavor society may still be successful with both sexes, but I believe in having a separate religious meeting for the young men in addition to it, if possible. CHAPTER X THE ASSOCIATION'S WORK WITH BOYS This brief chapter will not undertake to describe the vast work for the boys of America which the Young Men's Christian Association is doing today. Our purpose is merely to relate this work to the subject of self-government in hoj life, and to indicate, in passing, the Association's unique oppor- tunity if it applies with discrimination the principles of progressive self-government in its boys' work. It is not my purpose to enter upon a criticism of Association meth- ods, but I do wish to emphasize the crisis of opportunity which the boys.' department is just now facing. It is a magnificent company of earnest young men that is enlisted in the Associa- tion's boys' work in this country. A more energetic, alert, or ingenious body of men it would be difficult to find. With a winsome boyishness of their own which has survived the ravages of increasing years, coupled with an utter devotion to their boys which often costs much sacrifice, these men are 194. BOY LIFE "putting their lives in" in a masterly way. As a rule they are showing great patience and tact in handling this lusty young army of nearly a quarter of a million young Americans, a tumultuous host, yeasty with the sudden growth of untamed impulses, bubbling over with all the ardent freshness of life. Hundreds of well-drilled boys' classes and successful clubs in very many cities testify to the skillful generalship of the leaders as well as the splendid raw mate- rial with which they have been working. Association boys are becoming manly men, efficient, Christian men, thanks to the conse- crated cleverness and brotherliness of the secretaries for boys. The work, however, has been largely experimental and the methods tentative to a greater degree than in the men's work, where experience has a longer perspective and the ruts are deeper. I am sure that all boys' work men would agree that no tradi- tion of the Association as to forms and methods should be considered sacred or in- violable, and that no form of administration is inspired. The principles of boy life should dictate, not our preconceived notions or tra- ditions. At least, one thing is sure, success ASSOCIATION BOYS' WORK 195 with boys will in the long run inevitably depend upon our adopting the by-laws of boyhood, and our occasional unwillingness to do this explains our failures. When it comes to the test not one of us will let his devotion to the means interfere with his devotion to the end of our labor, the welfare, the salvation of our boys. The Boys' Work is the strategic depart- ment of the whole broad field of Association effort. It even undercuts the Student Department, for it precedes it, anticipates it, fructifies it. Yet the conviction of the vast significance of the work with boys has been of very slow growth. It had long been quite generally regarded as inferior work; an opinion which is still embalmed in the constitution of some city Associations where the secretary for boys is a subordinate, if not an office boy. This condition, however, is rapidly changing. We are awaking to the fact that among all Association workers the boy workers are the Board of Strategy, whose plans are most far-seeing and funda- mental, whose work has the greatest lever- age on life, for they work at the roots of the whole great problem of saving the man- hood of a nation. Roosevelt uttered words 196 BOY LIFE of solemn truth when he said: "If you are going to do anything permanent for the average man, you have got to begin before he is a man. The chance of success hes in working with the boy, not the man." This is the responsibiHty and the glorious incen- tive of the task of the secretaries for boys. This strategic work, which has prospered remarkably in recent years, has vast possi- bilities before it in the next decade. Interest in boy life, intelligence about boy nature, and various kinds of religious and social work with boys is increasing yearly. It has gotten beyond the fad stage of super- ficial popularity. Even fathers and men's clubs have at last discovered the boy and his needs. There is now a great movement for boy-saving and the making of manhood. In this movement it is entirely reasonable that the Young Men's Christian Association should retain the leadership. It has the resources, the equipment, the traditions and the men. But it must adopt the by-laws of boy life, or it will lose the hoys. Then its splendid buildings would be monuments to loving generosity, but little more. It would probably never lose the boys of a dozen ASSOCIATION BOYS' WORK 197 summers; but the self-assertive older boys from fifteen to twenty-one, in the most criti- cal period of human life, it would probably miss. In fact, not a few Associations find already a yawning gap between their small boys' ranks and the men. The critical problem of the Association, as well as the Church, is just here: how to win and hold these older boys who have the best claim on our efforts because they most need help, and because right now they need Jesus Christ. I discover in the present situation two dangers. Secretaries for boys know them well. One is the danger of giving immature boys premature Hberties. The other is treating self-rehant older boys like Httle children. Here and there you meet some sanguine individual who suddenly finds a panacea for all boy workers' troubles! He had made the mistake hitherto of thinking that what the boys needed was discipline, and plenty of it, of the stifF, old-fashioned sort. But no, now he sees what they need is liberty, self-government, more rope, room to spread themselves, with no adult around to say. No, Can't, Don't or Stop, to them! So forth- 198 BOY LIFE with he applies the panacea. He apphes it with the same dehghtful impartiahty to small boys and big boys, "kids," lads and youngsters. They are all going to be good now and act like nice little men ! No more rough-house ! No more worry ! No more police work! The boys will take care of themselves. Of course, it works too well. The boys who are mature enough appreciate it and respond to it. The youngsters wink, and let loose the Indian in them. Rough-house riot reigns supreme, if you don't watch out ; and self-respecting boys leave in disgust. The danger, in short, is the abuse of a good thing by working it indiscriminately and unintelligently. The rather sure failure which results puts back progress for a decade. After such a fizzle there is no hope for rational self-government for a boy gen- eration. "It does not work here," is the conclusive fiat of directors and committee- men of that local Association. The grow- ing popularity of self-government and its assured success in certain quarters is in- creasing the danger of spoiling the reputa- tion and delaying the progress of a splendid ASSOCIATION BOYS' WORK 199 thing, simply because of blundering experi- ments. The other extreme is probably still the greater danger. Boys in many quarters have not yet overcome the popular prejudice and suspicion that they are "little devils." Older boys have not yet proved to their elders the folly of treating them either as boys or men, for they are neither. Conserv- ative directors do not dare to trust val- uable property to fellows whom they con- temptuously style "irresponsible young- sters," though they may be high school stu- dents. INIeanwhile that Association is likely to have all the merits and demerits of an absolute monarchy — with a secretary-boss at the desk, and the committees subservient to his orders ; while such big boys as remain tiptoe around as if they were in a holy Car- negie library, afraid of taking the shine off the marble. The boys are pretty likely to take the same thrilling interest in such an enterprise as Bill Sprat the peasant took in old English days, when he simply had the privilege of paying his taxes ; and he then did his best to "do" the government, since he could not do the governing. Acquaintance with many secretaries for 200 BOY LIFE boys convinces me that they arc all anxious to avoid these two extremes, and to utilize but not abuse the self-government princi- ple ; for most of us have at least a suspicion that somehow this is the key principle in developing manliness in boys. I apprehend that if it can be discovered how to apply this principle by degrees, with the increasing self-reliance and responsibility of developing boyhood, and meanwhile preserve respectable order and save the property, we should all accept the plan. A thorough study of the principles of boy development should furnish us at least the basis for a plan. The local conditions must develop and will dictate the details of the plan. Foreign missions are now conducted on the principle that each nation must be Chris- tianized by natives. In general it is true tliat redemption is by resident forces, vital- ized by divine power. Americans are learn- ing that they can never evangelize the world alone, even with the help of God. China is to be saved by the Chinese. Our task is to train up in each nation a splendid corps of native missionaries who have caught our vision, and then trust them to win out for Christ with their own countrymen. ASSOCIATION BOYS' WORK 201 We may as well face the fact that we workers with boys are inevitably foreign missionaries in the boy's world. We may learn again to speak his language and under- stand his boy philosophy ; but he cannot for- get that we are foreigners from the world of grown-ups and will regard us with some reserve. Boys must be won and saved bi/ boys. The religious work of the Association is doing splendidly on this principle. The successful County Work likewise is frankly depending upon resident forces and is win- ning by it. The principle should be applied consistently and universally. It is needed even in the field of administration. The leverage on every epoch of boy life is the age next older ; near enough to it to gain confidence and admiration, yet enough older to hold respect. For instance, the grammar school boy is the natural leader of the boys in the gang period. He can make slaves of them, if he is mean enough ; and sometimes the bully does. The high school boy, if so disposed, can do wonders in devel- oping the manliness of the boy in the chiv- alry period ; and best of all, as the solution of our most perplexing problem, the self- assertive boy in middle adolescence yields to 202 BOY LIFE the magnetic influence of the older adolescent as quickly as the compass to the pole. That is why it is so appropriate to call this last period of youth the cooperative period. The boys of seventeen to twenty-four are our right-hand men, on whom we can count to help us win the hoy?,. Sometimes the college boy or the young man in business is about the only person the high school boy looks up to or will listen to. Yet to him he readily gives allegiance and he gladly accepts his leadership. A moment's reflection will assure us that the principle holds all the way down the boyhood line. The leverage on every epoch of boy life is the age next older. Now if we honestly accept this law of the leverage, we are bound to utilize the boys in helping us run the Association and care for the building. Otherwise, our seeking their cooperation in other matters will be hardly sincere. The fundamental argument for self-government is so primary it hardly needs emphasis here. It has been implicit in all our discussion. It is very apparent that trustworthiness is developed by trust ; that honor is multiplied when put on honor; that active interest is increased by active partici- pation ; that when the boys who are worthy ASSOCIATION BOYS' WORK 203 are trusted with responsibility, their manli- ness and self-reliance rapidly grows. When it once gets into the boy's mind that the Association is his and the building is his, he stops banging the furniture and abusing the gymnasium, and gets busy supporting the administration; just because he is it. CHAPTER XI PROGRESSIVE SELF-GOVERNMENT AMONG BOYS Having established the essential rightness of the self-government principle as the best working policy for older boys and, in a measure, with all boys, the question of detail and method now confronts us. It is clear that failures in applying this principle are usually due to lack of discrimi- nation in the different epochs of boyhood. The only self-government which is reason- able or safe is progressive, graded self- government, fitted to the capacity of the boys. As a clue to the governmental capac- ity of the boy in different periods, we have studied the political history of the race for the period which the boy is recapitulating. Let us follow then, not slavishly, but with reasonable closeness, the results of our race- epochs study, in order to make the self- government principle fit the average attain- ment of each boy period. We should bear in mind, however, the one universal law of boy leadership, that personality overrides all 206 BOY LIFE obstacles in boys' work and can, if sufficiently virile and magnetic, negative all rules and win success against all odds, because of sheer personal power and attractiveness. This explains why certain men, extraordinary men, by the force of exceptional personality, get such remarkable results from their work with boys without paying any particular attention to the scientific study of boy devel- opment. They can break all the common laws of boy life with impunity, because the boys are subject to the higher laws of per- sonal influence. Particularly is this true sometimes with young boys in the chivalry period. Loyalty to the superior will of the strong personality who has gripped them, practically hypnotized them, leads them to do his bidding with a marvelous faithfulness. Such boys may even be led to think they are self-governing ! But really they are being skilfulh', unobtrusively controlled by a benev- olent despotism. Doubtless this is just the sort of treatment best adapted to young boys in the feudal period. They are not ready for complete self-government, any more than were the knights and esquires of feudal Eng- land. But not all workers with boys are geniuses or mesmeric personalities. Most SELF-GOVERNMENT 207 of us have to follow the laws of hoy life or suffer chagrin and failure. Our personality is not able to compel success. It is well for us, therefore, to diminish our handicap to the minimum by following closely such laws of boy success as we can discover. Certainly our success with boys will be greater in pro- portion as we follow the clue in a graded system of self-government, progressively adapted to the progress in the boys' attain- ments. AVithout treating in detail the childhood periods, where real self-government is mani- festly illogical if not quite impossible, it is worth mentioning in passing, that the suc- cess of the Brotherhood of David with boys of the clan and tribal periods of develop- ment, and the success of the Knights of King Arthur in the feudal period of boyhood, is due to the fact that these clubs respectively appeal to the interests and the stage of will- development and grade of culture appro- priate to each of the periods mentioned. These clubs are pedagogically correct for their respective boy epochs, simply because they help the boys "to seize, at the height of their susceptibility, those interests, impulses, instincts and mental capacities which have 208 BOY LIFE found expression in the race at the different culture-epochs," as Dr. Van Liew suggests. In dealing Avith the three periods of ado- lescence, where our problem is most impor- tant, the general trend of policy is quite evident. (1) The young men in the cooperative period may safely be given full rights of citizenship and loaded with responsibility. (2) The older boys in the self-assertive period should be regarded as presumptive citizens, and be trusted with citizenship on their honor, with the understanding that these rights may be forfeited for cause. (3) Boys in the early adolescent period should be granted only partial citizenship ; becoming voters only after winning the privi- lege by proving their fitness to be classed as trusties. That is, from the point of view of progress in will achievement, after a boy has gained a fair degree of self-control, he is ready for a measure of self-government ; but until he has developed leadership he is not equipped for full self-government, with its demand for the self-direction of social groups. Having gained self-control, he needs enough scope in self-government to apply himself to the SELF-GOVERNMENT 209 gaining of comradeship through teamwork; and thus make progress enough in the art of social adjustment to qualify as a law- abiding citizen, and through the discipline of obedience to find in personal loyalty the spirit of willingness to serve. Having gained this loyalty, which is the finest product of the monarchy, he must be given more range for initiative in increasing self- government, in order to develop his self- reliance which, in turn, is the basis of leader- ship. Thus would I explain the rationale of graded self-government. The position is here assumed (which is the right theory of the civil franchise even in a republic) that the voting power is not an inherent right of citizenship, but a responsi- bility which should be withheld from the unfit. This responsibility should be forfeited by every convicted criminal, until won back by subsequent faithfulness to law and order. Such an interpretation of the franchise would vastly raise its value in the eyes of men. More men would vote if the ballot were worth more and the ballot rights weighed more. Likewise, we may believe citizenship in the boys' republic will be more wisely appreciated and used if, particularly in early adolescence, 210 BOY LIFE it be regarded as a distinction to be won; and in middle adolescence a probationary right which must be honored. This theory safeguards the boy ballot and makes it trust- worthy. Otherwise, if you extend universal suffrage to small boys you have to hedge your plan and protect your property by limiting the range to which the boy juris- diction may extend. This is hitching a string to your gift ; pretending to give self government but retaining its substance. Properly safeguard the franchise in the dif- ferent boyhood periods and your govern- ment is safe. Anyway, full self-government by children cannot be much more than a game, for there is no adequate sense of re- sponsibility and ought not to be. If it assumes reality it degenerates into a farce — except when a strong personahty dominates the situation. The reality begins with the chivalry period, and even then it must be well safeguarded. The varying status of the adult leader in this graded self-government will be considered in the next chapter. The adult leader's prominence will of course retreat as the boy advances in self-govern- ment. It would be entirely possible to give a SELF-GOVERNMENT 2 1 1 fractional voting privilege to the boys in the feudal period, giving a single vote to a group of five, for instance, or letting the chosen leader of each group of small boys be allowed to cast a representative vote for his group until, in the leadership of these small groups, a boy proves his fitness to become a "trusty," and earns the personal responsibility of the ballot. This word "trusty" should be used with caution, especially if a state's prison or jail is near and the boys happen to be familiar with its technical usage. It is a good useful term, however, and should be redeemed from its penitentiary associations. Bear in mind, please, that we are here discussing the proposition of real self- government by boys. We are not referring to mere parliamentary practice in a govern- ment game, but to sharing the actual man- agement of the club or the Association. Where nothing is at stake it is, of course, perfectly safe to let the smallest boy vote, except that you thus multiply the danger of civic corruption in your boy republic. I presume the question might naturally be raised, would not consistency with our theory compel us to reproduce in early adolescence the forms of feudalism in our boys' organiza- 21£ BOY LIFE tions ; and in middle adolescence the forms of the limited monarchy with its parliament? Having advocated this in connection with the }■ ounger periods, why not here ? There is a reason for this which is readily seen. It is a primary principle in recapitu- lation that the earlier periods of parallelism are more distinct than the later ; which is but another way of saying, that as the individual grows older he responds more to his environ- ment and to his own will and less to his instincts. Boys in the self-assertive period manifest strongly the spirit of the revolu- tionary epoch which developed the constitu- tional monarchy but, in this country at least, their democratic environment so strongly influences them that they become essentially men of today, and they would doubtless rebel against the forms of the monarchy in their clubs or fraternity hfe. The important point to notice is simply this: the essence of the constitutional monarchy, not its form, must be regarded in our organization of these older boys; that is, a reasonable amount of adult guidance, as represented by the veto power, and by the provisional franchise, held as a probationary right, is perfectly normal to this period of boy life. SELF-GOVERNMENT 213 There is very much to commend in such plans for self-government as the "George Junior Republic" and the numerous boys' republics that have imitated it ; also in Harvey L. Smith's "Tuxis City," in the Bedford Branch of the Brooklyn Association ; and John L. Alexander's "U. & I." clubs in the Philadelphia Central Association, a simpler but novel scheme of intermeshing clubs for different ages. Varieties of these plans are quite popular in many quarters and are meeting with varying success. Sometimes their success is rather surprising and can hardly be explained except by the leader's power. Again gradual failure appears, because too much or too little self- government has been granted at different periods, and disintegration begins. The danger of granting the voting privilege to boys under twelve is enhanced sometimes by the complexity of the scheme. There is too much routine for such small boys and, unless buoyed up and carried along by the interest of the older boys, they lack the necessary sustained interest really to enjoy the plan and make it succeed. So the machinery is soon running perfunctorily and creaking sadly. 214 BOY LIFE Experience with younger boys suggests that they do not naturally take to elaborate machinery in organization or give much time to such details. Their own gangs are very simply organized. The civic ingenuity of youngsters is not extensive. They soon run out of ideas for even the bare bones of parlia- mentary practice, and it becomes puerile and petty. This criticism of premature self- government would gradually lose its force, however, for the longer such work is practiced by the boys of a city or village, the earlier their initiative and trustworthiness will develop ; so that after a few years the capacity for citizenship in boy life would doubtless mature very early. Among the good results of the best of these plans the following may be mentioned: It treats the growing boys frankly as they deserve, giving them an actual share of real influence commensurate with their manliness and capacity for initiative. It gives them actual political practice with their peers, which develops and tests their power of leadership. It throws them on their own resources and develops self-reliance. It makes them often remarkably intelligent regarding the ci\'ic life of their community as SELF-GO VERNMENT 2 1 5 well as its mere political machinery. The danger of developing unscrupulous politi- cians may be largely neutralized by a frankly Christian atmosphere, the highest ideals, and a brotherly adult leadership or comradeship of the right kind. Thus it doubtless tends to cherish high political ideals and essential patriotism. It certainly develops patriotism of the practical sort which applies itself directly to the improvement of local condi- tions. The practice in judging questions of honesty, fair play, practical morality, personal and property rights, surely develops not only the capacity for judgment between right and wrong, but also the habits of right living. The sobering influence of responsi- bility naturally fosters true manliness and reduces cases of petty discipline to the minimum. The fact that the boys themselves are the government takes away all the attractiveness of lawlessness and makes it unpopular. Notice how the whole problem of discipline and order settles itself here in all genuine self-government plans that are wisely safe- guarded. Punishment must be moral, or it is demoralizing. Unreasonable or misunder- stood discipline is simply brutalizing. The 216 BOY LIFE essence of punishment is not mere physical pain. The only effective punishment is ostracism by one's fellows ; or, as Professor Scott says, "the disapproval and repression of the group one feels he belongs to. Nothing else is punishment." Any other punishment may be turned into the glory of martyrdom ; this cannot. Real social loss is loss of caste with one's cherished comrades. This is why boss discipline of boys so often gives the keenest delight to the boy who is singled out for punishment. He is glad of the chance to pose before his fellows as a martyr. Likewise smartness in evading the law and outwitting justice is considered by the gang the hall-mark of skilful leadership. This unworthy ambition may even develop into a mania, and is the essence of all hood- lumism. Inoculation of the gang with a measure of responsibility for law and order, prevents the smallpox of hoodlumism ; nay, it cures it, and it is the only remedy that will. Self-government, rightly safeguarded and applied with pedagogical discrimination, logically settles the whole problem of disci- pline. Without discrimination, however, it breeds botli anarchy and hoodlumism. Tlio city plan or village plan for the SELF-GOVERNMENT 217 normal boy community in town or village is preferable to the Boy Republic plan, which takes the state or nation as the unit. The latter perhaps is more spectacular, and with higher sounding titles ; but it is less practical and more like a mere game of politics. It is apt to be mere gymnastics ; it hoes no corn. Local self-government is the root of the matter; and the boys should begin right at home, taking as their model the actual work- ing plan of their own community, whether it be the complex borough government of Greater New York, the commission plan of Des Moines, the federal plan of the ordinary city or the town meeting of the New England village. More than half the value of the plan is its real connection with local condi- tions, and the chance it gives the boys for actual training for future citizenship in their own community. What a wonderful thing it will be when the boys of our Associa- tions and churches, the country over, are thus trained, each in his own town and village, so that as soon as they are old enough to cast their first royal ballot, they will do so intelli- gently, and will immediately add real civic strength and political capacity to the man- hood of their city ! Very soon this will come 218 BOY LIFE to pass, and tliese thousands of boys will wield a tremendous influence for the purifying of our city politics and raising the standard for public office. Do 3^ou catch the vision? It is a great opportunity which pastors and secretaries for boys have within their reach: the automatic training of manly, Christian citizens, through progressive self-government work with boys. Let us remember, however, what was sug- gested in Chapter II., in mild criticism of self-government schemes. Mere practice in politics does not make citizens. We must not focus our attention too narrowly on mere functions of government ; we do not live to be governed, not even to be self-governed. The training for broadly efficient manliness must include other activities than the merely political — the whole broad range of social interests in the life of men, all of which deal directly with will development and character building. As Dr. Scott well says, "Real initiative is developed not so much by self- government as by suitable opportunity for real leadership and organization in regular work." Let the self-government plan be tactfully utilized, but let it also embrace every manner of worth while activity which SELF-GOVERNMENT 219 the symmetrical development of the boys may need, until the stature of perfect manliness is happily attained, and our boy has become a man.^ 1 The problem of self-government for boys in middle adoles- cence and especially for young men in later adolescence includes of course the question of college discipline and administration. For a more adequate treatment of this special phase of our subject the reader is referred to an address by Professor Fiskeat Nashville, Tenn., March 0, 1910, on "Student Cooperation in Col- lege Government." See the annual volume of Minutes of the Religious Education Association, for 1910. CHAPTER XII SOME BY-LAWS OF BOY LEADERSHIP Having outlined briefly in the last chapter the principles involved in a graded system of self-government among boys, the question is now in order, What should be the place of the adult leader in boys' organizations? This question often involves a delicate matter of adjustment upon which may depend a man's success or failure with his boys. It is certainly worth careful consideration. In general, the adult should guide from the rear. His influence may be potent, some- times masterful, but it should usually be unobtrusive. His rightful authority is in inverse proportion to the boys' age and ad- vancement. In any scheme for progressive self-government, the adult leader's responsi- bility will progressively recede in the different periods of boyhood. In small boys' clubs, the adult should be Director, practically Dictator at first ; in early adolescence, he should be Supervisor, with large discretionary powers ; in middle adolescence Adviser, with great opportunity for suggestive guidance, 222 BOY LIFE but no overt authority except in a crisis ; in late adolescence simply the position of a Comrade, frankly on an equality with the young men, receiving only such deference as his superior experience and personality may naturally command. From Director, Super- visor, Adviser to Comrade, the adult leader thus recedes to the rear in the four periods of boyhood and youth. These names indicate with sufficient clearness the degree of authority which the adult officer can reason- ably or safely exercise in each period. A more important function than mere discipline is the adult's opportunity to stimu- late originality, to develop ingenuity. This too will be decreasingly necessary in the dif- ferent periods. In the boyhood period the task will test all a man's resources to furnish brains for the youngsters and suggest new games and ingenious schemes to develop interest, when the boys, conscious of their own meager ingenuity, constantly ask : "What can we do now.''" In the next period the supervisor's burden will be considerably lighter, but will be similar. The breadth of the boys' interests and consequent outlook upon life will depend on the supervisor's own fertility of resource and his skill in suggesting SOME BY-LAWS 223 indirectly, thus leading his boys to discover ingenuity for themselves. The adviser's task in the middle youth period will be still less in evidence. The boys' own leaders doubtless now will suggest twice as many wild schemes as could possibly be executed. The adviser will have to teach discrimination and judgment, and offer plans of his own for comparison and criticism, always leaving the final decision with the boys themselves. The adult comrade in the young men's club should frankly be "one of the boys," and hold no official station except such as they intrust to him. His opportunity is particularly to tone up the boys' social tastes and broaden their social interests. They will frankly appreciate his contribution to the common stock of inventiveness, but will not depend upon it. The comradeship, however, with a keen fraternity of young men will tax the man's resources to the utmost and spur him on to do his best for the boys' sake. The adult adviser will develop the best results in his boys if he follows consistently the pedagogical order in will achievement. Self-control, comradeship, the personal loyalty which inspires obedience ; self-reliance and leadership, in each successive epoch of 224 BOY LIFE boy life must be stimulated under adult guidance and brought to full flowering and fruitage. Caution is needed here, however, more than in any other branch of our study, to detect and treat cases of belated develop- ment. We are too well aware that a large proportion of boys fail to develop these degrees in will power at the period indicated. Handicap in health, in heredit}", in home con- ditions will make a vast difference, and racial and other social characteristics also. With this warning, then, not to expect anything like uniformity at the different periods, let us consider the general trend of our task of help- ing the boy to develop his initiative. 1. Guiding the boy to self-control. The normal boy will begin this fight early and get a good start before he reaches the Association or the boys' club. Lack of control is due to one of two causes, too strong impulses or too weak inhibitions. One needs toning down; the other toning up. The latter is anaemic, he needs help, stimulus, encouragement, and what Scott calls "a course in temptation ! " ^ A gradual testing of his capacity for resist- ance, his mental persistence, his strength of purpose, by carefully graded tests or tempta- 1 "Social Kflucation," p. 140. SOME BY-LAWS 225 tions if you please, fitted to his moral calibre and strength, just as you prescribe gymna- sium work to build up the muscles, will give the boy the chance to Avin his personal victories and learn the joy of it. Gradually he will grow in the power of self-control. The impulsive boy must get his hard knocks until he is able to reason backward from result to cause and make up his mind that it is foolish to yield to his passions. The abnor- mal boy whose self-control is destroyed by the cigaret habit needs special treatment. He will need at first the suggestive help of your stronger will, until by a reasonable auto- suggestion he can stiffen up his own will against the habit. Mr. T. S. Knowlson in a recent book^ gives Dr. Quackenbos's prescrip- tion for this interesting and important sort of mental cure. It is worth studying and adopting in abnormal cases. 2. Directing the hoy^s comradeship. It is hardly necessary to say that self-control is not a finished product in childhood ! Neither is comradeship complete in early boyhood. In using these terms to characterize the will development in the two early periods, the writer is simply indicating the epoch of boy 1 "The Education of the Will," p. 198. 226 BOY LIFE life when the will activity focuses on these achievements. Self-control, beginning early, underlies the moral struggle of an entire life. Comradeship, functioning first with the rise of the social instinct in boyhood, normally continues to grow in scope and power, as the social radius lengthens. But its attainment is the special task of this second period, and it is the natural product of team work in social endeavor. It is exercised and strengthened in every manner of game requiring team play, as well as in the boy's ordinary friendships. This principle is so thoroughly understood* I need not develop it. The literature on games and the value of play for the growing boy is increasing. I wish, however, to call attention to the interesting variety of prac^ tical plans which Dr. Scott suggests, to serve the same purpose as the team play in games, with the added advantage of being construc- tive, with definite results in something made; e.g. in group work in manual training, etc.'^ 3. Arousing the hoy^s personal loyalty. The supervisor in the boys' club of this third period has a delicate but important task. In 1 "Social Education," Chapters fl and 7. SOME BY-LAWS 227 the whole process of developing a boy's will, personal loyalty is the most subtle achieve- ment, and the least susceptible to rule or analysis. To be sure, obedience is developed by the soldier's discipline. This we may secure by the routine of the Boy's Brigade and similar plans ; but even making obedience instinctive, through habit gained by drill, secures for our boy only the husk of obedience, the mere ex- ternal form. The heart of it, the spirit of it, is that which alone makes willing obedience, i.e. the spirit of personal loyalty. This is a matter of sheer personality. Personality cannot be taught. It grows by contagion. I feel sure that boy workers must depend most of all at this stage upon the Christ power in helping the boy. Only the Christ- inspired personality can kindle that finest personal loyalty in the boy which makes him knightly, law-abiding and increasingly manly. If at this period the boy can be guided, as the majority are not, to focus this new-born hero worship in Jesus Christ, the finest fruitage of this early adolescent period will be developed; and the sting and much of the struggle of the following period, the self-assertive, will be prevented. 228 BOY LIFE 4. Challenging the boy's self-reliance. Most boys, however, do not find their Avay to this early Christian experience. So the middle teens is often a period of great struggle, before conversion comes at perhaps seventeen. But the very struggle of this storm and stress period is often needed to develop a healthy self-reliance. This is the time when the boy, particularly the choleric energetic boy, needs hard stunts. He needs repeatedly to be "put up against it," as he would style it, in order to discover to himself all his resources. Certainl}'^ if he is timid, he must be taught that every bogy halves its horrors when you know the worst ; and that often the mountains in the distance may be molehills when you reach them. The joy of conquest is never so keen or so neces- sary as now, when self-reliance is being won in this struggle of early youth. To be sure, he needs this all along the way, and his self-reliance will grow far more normally now, if it has been gaining con- tinuously since early boyhood. The tests and stunts so thoroughly planned in Mr. Smith's Tuxis scheme for character building are well adapted to this period and have challenged scores of boys to a finer, more courageous SOME BY-LAWS 229 self-reliance Mr. Seton's interesting policy of the coup in connection with the Woodcraft Indians is also exactly in line with our purpose. The principle is briefly this : In early and particularly in middle adolescence, self-reliance must be developed by stumping the boy to dare the difficult, to storm fort- resses and discover his own powers of initia- tive, of ingenuity, of skill and of achievement. Here comes the redemption of the fighting instinct. The value of all this is enhanced when the boy's own incipient leadership leads the way in these 3'outhful idctories. Never, however, must the element of unreality spoil the morale of these youthful struggles and make them stagy and superficial. Even the boy's play now must not be aimless ; it must be purposeful, with a very definite goal in view. He has learned the wholesome lesson of the earnestness of life. 5. Coaching the boy's leadership. This finest product of the developed will is a matter of slow growth by practice, along the lines of discovered ability, in the field of the boy's specialty. Yet it should not and must not be limited to the elect few, for every boy may have his specialty, and deserves his chance at leadership. But he needs a coach. 230 BOY LIFE and this is the great function of his adult comrade in the fraternal circle of his club. Few boys in any normal group but can excel at something. Find out what this is, in every case. Let this specialty be developed by each boy and be rewarded by the recogni- tion it deserves. This is one of the valuable services which select private schools under fine management can render. The coaching of future leaders is thoroughly and effectively done at Dr. Reddie's interesting school at Abbotsholme, England, and the plan is full of suggestiveness for the treatment of older boys. Special talent is speedily recognized. For instance, remarkable skill in swimming secures for the boy the honor of Captain, or Vice-Captain of Swimming; thus honoring unusual ability and developing leadership by responsibility. More specific attention to this matter in the later teens will enable many good followers to become leaders and enjoy the exhilaration and zest of leadership, as well as the gain in efficiency which surely results. We have thus indicated l)riefly the general trend which adult workers with boys will naturally follow, to lead the boys along the road to manliness with self-developed initia- SOME BY-LAWS 231 tlve and self-reliant leadership. Let us now bring together a few condensed suggestions, which at this stage of our discussion will be sufficiently clear without much comment. Some By-laws of Boy Leadership. 1. The \a.w oi Personal Influence: Strong personality may negative all rules and over- ride all obstacles in boys' work, compelling success by personal attractiveness. 2. The law of Experience: Leadership must be developed by practice, since expe- rience is the truest teacher. 3. The law of Independence : True or- ganization being self-organization, boys must be encouraged to organize into groups for useful purposes, social service and study, in which they may follow out their own ideas and make them constructive. 4. The law of Interest: Self-direction will be most certainly aroused along the line of the boy's spontaneous interests or devel- oped interests. Probably here only is lead- ership either safe or efficient. 5. The laAv of Latent Personality : Self- expression is necessary at all hazards, to project the boy's personality into mutual 232 BOY LIFE and worth while Hfc, and develop his latent capacity. 6. The law of Social Environment: To stimulate a boy's initiative intelligently, you must be able to bound the boy's social con- tacts, know how the world touches him at every point, and how his interests react most naturally. 7. The law of Free Play: To develop leadership, a boy must be given the chance to direct his fellows and mold their opinions by persuasion ; thus submitting his leader- ship to their free criticism. 8. The law of The Hazard : Real leader- ship is developed only where there is some- thing at stake. It is child's play unless both success and failure are possibilities. A "sure thing" is no incentive to leadership. 9. The \si\v oi The Trusty: Being trusted by a superior is a powerful social appeal. Tims a leadership experiment is likely to draw out all the boy's latent initiative and discover unexpected powers. 10. The law of Silent Suggestion: A boy who respects your opinion will strive to be what he thinks you think he is. Manli- ness is thus grown wonderfully by silent suggestion. SOME BY-LAWS 233 11. The law of the Leverage: The lever- age on every epoch of boy life is the period next older. Therefore boys adopt their ideals and often their leaders from the next older group. 12. The law of the Social Radius: Nor- mally the boy's social radius, and therefore his social capacity, increases as he grows older. The size of successful boys' clubs will depend upon the boys' social radius. 13. The law of Boy Ideals: A natural leader dominates his group in proportion as he incarnates personally the ideals of the group. 14. The law of the Precocious Leader: The boy leader gains leverage to move the gang by virtue of his precocious develop- ment in the will achievement of the respective periods. He is prematurely self-controlled, self-reliant or resourceful. 15. The law of Intuitive Leadership: Often boy leaders are intuitively resourceful and ingenious, as the younger boys are not apt to be. Therefore they readily usurp the natural place of the adult adviser. They may become his arch adversary or his effi- cient ally. 234 BOY LIFE 16. The law of the Social Barometer: Most boys do their best in an atmosphere of liope ; but many thrive by conflict and opposition, and need the incentive of neces- sity to develop their utmost. Some make progress by encouragement ; others are spoiled by it, and need the bitter experience of failure. The normal boy learns much from both defeat and victory. 17. The law of Ingenuity: A boy's in- genuity is best stimulated by putting him in new situations which require him to make new brain paths and invent the way to suc- cess. Necessity is the mother of invention. 18. The law of Dependence and Free- dom: The power of self-direction is best learned under the kindly eye of a superior. The power to create plans and direct others must be developed independently. 19. The law of ''Sink or Swim'': Self- reliance is best cultivated by forcing a boy to trust his own resources and to "find him- self." This indicates that paternalistic clubs for boys in their teens discourage leadership and delay real manliness. 20. The law of Equal Chance: Opportu- nity for boy leadership must not be limited to the most fit. Practice must be given even SOME BY-LAWS 235 to inferior initiative, that it may profit by experience. Great leaders have been devel- oped in the school of defeat. 21. The law of Contagion: Boy leader- sliip is a mighty incentive to the rank and file; stimulating imitation, encouraging am- bition and arousing efiPort ; thus multiplying leadership by contagion. 22. The law of Altruism: Leadership among boys must not be regarded selfishly, but as the highest form of social service. Disinterested leadership is the finest type. 23. The law Against Bait: Don't troll for boys with a baited hook. Trust the altruistic appeal. Flash on them instead a suit of knightly armor. They are keen for a chance to help some other fellow. 24*. The law of the Shingle: Shingle your boys of different ages with overlap- ping responsibilities. Anticipate the "Big- Brother Movement" by loading the older boys with the care of those next younger, both by individuals and by groups. Have every boy interested in some younger boy and responsible for him. It saves boys ; and it makes men. 25. The law of Approbation: Boys covet the approval of a leader they admire. 236 BOY LIFE Merited praise for appreciated effort en- courages them to attemjit more difficult tasks. 26. The law of Emergencies: Self- government practice may be purely artificial ; but real initiative is developed when the boy has a chance to organize and lead liis peers in regular worth while work. It is such practice that trains the boy for future emergencies. 27. The law for Redeeming the Gang: Raise the key boys' ideals of manliness. If this proves impossible, then help the gang to escape the tyranny of an unworthy leader by outgrowing their own low ideals which he personifies. The sentiment of the gang must be toned up, in order to get the whip-hand of real discipline. A nobler ideal of manli- ness, gained by the gang, will focus itself in a new leader, who will easily displace the old and help to save the gang. Speedily now enlist the boys in active, altruistic service and thus perpetuate their nobler impulses. Types of Boy Leaders. It is clear from the above that the two critical factors in our problem are Boy Ideals SOME BY-LAWS 237 and Boy Leaders. The latter are usually the product of the fomier and depend upon them. Boy leaders will vary with the variant ideals of different groups, and will change with the changing ideals of the same group. We shall find, then, as many types of leaders as there are distinct types of ideals which dominate the boy visions. In our task of redeeming the gang, it is exceedingly impor- tant for us to study the process of the evolu- tion of ascending or descending ideals, and the types of leadership that result, in the different stages of boy development. In the period of childhood, the imitative impulse rules and makes the power of the boy leader especially dangerous, but in the later periods his power is only less influential, until even in mature life we find the poHtical boss and the "ward heeler" assuming the role of the gang leader among men. Without attempting any extended explanation of this interesting study, we offer a few suggestions condensed in tabulated form for convenience of comparison: ill St 1 4) 1 "o ^ a en the W) illy ighly c hter, t f the i o ^^ 4, a < 3 JZ hcO hool -Doz 1-1 O CO id e, the Hun e Chieftain erful Boy er Boy Th Boy, wi acteristic: ler, the I Boy H< 'pe II Hero Czar Gentleman cal High Sc ball Hero oiter lectual Bull Criminal >< Showy ed char Wrest perficia ilsive ty Baseba H e Brav •ior, th e Mast eBigg >.a3 OhO a « >. o , o X -g o 4) t; O 3 ^ 4J 4^ 4^ 4) 4J 4) 4^ 4) JZ -^=43 ^ j:^ j= j=x-c H r^b^ H H H H H H H H H H L i 3 o a 3 Ji TS TS C to be to a a to . " c ij 2 u a o Simple savage qualities barian virtues Self-mastery, physically Big-boyishness Barbarian virtues Physical strength, agilit ance and skill Team play Feudal virtues Knightliness High school characteristi Complex team play Resourcefulness Mental alertness, shrewd Skill in evasion and ge of scrapes ^ Q r3 O •z -z ^ a o O EARLY ADOLESCE "Chivalry Pei (Grammar Sc Oh 3 X ^ >- 5 O ^ X « - o 11 a < O rr. » a. be 3 o tfi H ^ •« 13 ^ C a h c ca t =8 o Q. ^ >S CO 'T^r o »= 0) (U Si 'a -3! o m ■4-> cn 2 3 4) U c 05 11) CO 1 ^ 3 J o c ■a o 4-> r^ n 3 U V eS a> 4J 1} C > ^ ^siJi cu WH b^b-*'^ f) b 4-> lU 4) ^ b •M * #> •4-) ;s C ct! <5 B V 05 c 3 •> a ce a •• c ^i""^ 05 05 t« 1) ffi > b 4J ^^ CO M a V M — H ^ B CO c 0) bc_o a c o 5 0. 4) > 4J U V 05 05 < CO be < O Oh U •J 'J 2-^ be o 9 :0 !> 4> PC. :§ O CHAPTER XIII THE BOY'S RELIGION If it be true that "Man is naturally reli- gious," I believe it is doubly true of boys. Adolescence is perhaps the most religious epoch of a human life, due in part to the fact of the sudden unfolding of the sex powers, as well as the flowering of all other elements in the personality. Earlier boyhood, also, must be regarded as religious, or else we do the boy an injustice. He is naturally reli- gious. But it must be a natural religion, that is, a religion natural to him, or it is unreal. Permanent harm has been inflicted upon boys by well-meaning people who have tried to graft adult religion upon boy experience. The result ir either a farce or a monstrosity. To the boy, it is either a joke or a funeral, usually the latter, in generations past. We today can see only a tragedy in the well- meant but cruel custom of forcing mere chil- dren to learn by rote the Westminster Cate- chism. Imagine what an active boy of eight or ten used to think about the answer to the 242 BOY LIFE question "What is Effectual Calling?" "Effectual Calling is a Work of God's Spirit, whereb}^, convincing us of our Sin and Misery, enlightening our minds in the Knowl- edge of Christ and renewing our Wills, He doth persuade and enable us to embrace Jesus Christ freely offered to us in the Gospel." No wonder the boy was afraid of the dark, while he stretched his boy brain wondering what all these fearful words might mean. To "convince him of his Sin and Misery" was quite an undertaking ; for he knew little of misery and less of sin. Any deep sense of sin before puberty is precocious. I happened to notice, recently, a young man of perhaps twenty-five studying this catechism, as ho sat directly in front of me on the train. It was well adapted to his adult intelligence and probably did him good But to give such spiritual food to small boys Avas as inappropriate as to feed lobster to babies ; or possibly hardtack, to use a more accurate figure. Yet this pedagogic blunder is not all ancient history. It comes down to our own day. A prominent "child evangelist" of a generation ago published the following in his book, "The Conversion of Children": THE BOY'S RELIGION 243 "Little ones of five or six years tell us that they wet their pillows night after night with tears of sorrow for sin." To such a mon- strous statement the best suggestion is possibly the hope that the good brother misread the weather signs ! Let us hope the tears were only a sunshower with purely a natural cause, and maybe a rainbow some- where. We would not condemn any sincere man, but it does seem that a man who spends his energies trying to convict babies of siri is not a fisher of men but a scooper of minnows. The appeal to fear has its proper place, a small place ; but its place is not with children. Let us use it only with grown men. The boy who is scared into the Kingdom, will either find a better reason for staying in, or he will leave by the most convenient gate after his panic is over. It is perfectly evident, is it not, that the old-fashioned blunder of treating children like little old men, instead of embryonic can- didates for humanity, is most of all apparent in the realm of religion. Religiously, the boy has been abused, no mistake about it. He has been offered a grown-up religious diet which he simply could not use. It was abso- 244 BOY LIFE lutely not adapted to his nature or his needs. It gave him a bad case of spiritual indigestion if he tried to swallow it, and if he had courage and sense enough to refuse it, he was branded as an unregenerate. Poor boy ! No wonder not one man in twenty was a church member in those days. As in all other matters relating to boy life, we must study the boy to find what is natural and right. Socially, physically, pedagogi- calh^ we are learning to take our cue from the boy. It is most important in the realm of the spiritual. The boy is susceptible to religious appeals, all the way along through his boyhood and youth ; but we must let him teach us what religious experiences and forms of expression are natural to him, and what sort of religious appeals Mnll win him. In this connection, one of my brightest students in Religious Education recently reminded me of the famous Botanical Gardens at Edinburgh. In different rooms, under glass, may be found the flora of different climates and countries, growing in great pro- fusion and beauty, each fulfilling the demands of its own nature, though far from its native heath. The horticulturist, by painstaking study and observation, had discovered accu- THE BOY'S RELIGION 245 rately the sort of environment and treatment, soil and temperature, which was natural to each variety of plant and flower; and then, in the foreign land, he produced artificially the perfect imitation of the plant's natural habitat, with perfect results. Now suppose he had insisted upon growing his flowers according to his own preconceived notions as to the sort of temperature and moisture they ought to want, and had tried to grow tropical plants as he would the Scotch heather — we should call him a plain unvarnished fool! He would either have killed his plants out- right or at least denatured them in the raw Scotch climate. Equally foolish has been the treatment of boys by men who have insisted on dictating terms to boy life, instead of discovering the secrets of boy nature. To enforce con- formity to adult notions, in this matter of religion in boyhood, is to destroy the vigor and spontaneity and fruitfulness of the boy's religious experience. The product will prob- ably be a weak, characterless person, devoid of originality or effectiveness. Let nature dictate nurture not the reverse. A few weeks ago, I asked a class of twenty men, all college graduates, if they had ever 246 BOY LIFE seen a tadpole shed its tail. One of them thought he had when a boy, and said he assisted the process! The cruel boy; he prevented that tadpole ever growing into a frog. Stanley Hall has made good peda- gogic use of the fact that tadpoles never shed their tails. As you well know, the tails are absorbed ; or rather, the same material wliich formed the tail is taken over into the legs of the growing frog. If by some accident the tadpole's tail is cut off, it is doomed to die a tadpole ; for it can never become a frog and live the higher life of an amphibian. It cannot climb out upon the land. Exactly this process is repeated in boy life in connection with all the rudimentary traits and functions of boy nature, the inherited instincts, the race habits which have come down to the boy from the distant past; the cruder instincts which tend to rehearse some of the world drama of long lost savagery or barbarism, or the boisterous culture of the feudal age. To repress these instincts, or root them out, is to repeat the tragedy of cutting off the tadpole's tail. Let the rudi- mentary stages of boy life have their day, their normal sway. It is dangerous to thwart nature. Obey her, and the boy will THE BOY'S RELIGION 247 grow into all the richer manhood. "Well," says Froebel, the master teacher of modern pedagogy, "every child must Hve out com- pletely every complete stage of childhood, or he can never develop into complete maturity." We should discover then, if it is possible, the stages of development which the rehgious instinct and the religious impulses and senti- ments pass through in the years of growing boyhood. Here boys will differ greatly, and wliich type of boy is the truest type, it is hard to say. In very early bo3^hood we get occa- sional evidences, usually in very imaginative children, that the boy is rapidly passing through the same general stages of religious experience which the race passed through long before him. Dr. Hall asserts, "Every child that has a fair chance at life passes through the stage of being a fetich- worshiper."^ This opinion is shared by many writers of recent years, though not always so confidently. Few of us can re- member such an experience in our own child- hood, for it occurs so eai'ly ; but occasionally we find a little fellow whose quaint ideas remind us of the religion of childlike races of men. His world is a highly imaginative 1 "Principles of Religious Education," p. 168. 248 BOY LIFE world of countless spirits. Everything is alive to him and has a divinity within it. There are fairies and hobgoblins, happy sprites and wicked gnomes and pigmies with giants in the forest caves and nymphs in every wooded stream. Such a child is apt to imagine such living spirits within the familiar objects about his home and even personifies his toys. Crude playthings with no special value he prizes beyond all reason. Dr. Hall cites a case of a little knot of wood with a curious spot in it, which the boy had carried a long time in his pocket, even wrapping it up to protect it from the cold, and taking it with him like a charm wherever he went. This animistic instinct in the child or the childlike race is due to the half-discoveries of life. The child is waking to the wonderful discovery that everything living has its own secret of life and growth. There is a spirit in it, true enough. It is the spirit of the living God. Can we blame him for personifying this spirit? Neither can the small child at first distinguish between the thing that has Hfc, and the mechanical toy that seems to have life. He tears both open to find the secret, only to discover that the spirit has fled. Tlic THE BOY'S RELIGION 249 spirit of the butterfly or of the talking doll from Paris cannot survive dismemberment. Nature worship is often an important stage in the natural religion of early boy- hood. The grov/ing love for the beautiful in form and color, added to the sense of the mystical, centers the child admiration in the world of nature which God has made so beau- tiful. Particularly strong is this religious impulse in early spring time, in normal child- hood in the country. As the miracle of the spring resurrection returns, the healthy boy often finds keen delight in a real communion with nature. Daily he consults her oracles, listens to her secrets, worships at her shrine, and his unfolding soul is fed from her abun- dant storehouse and his thirst for knowledge and for God slaked at her sacred springs. The Heavenly Father has many wonderful lessons to teach the growing boy just at this time ; and unless the boy has a chance to learn them, his imagination is never again so strong, his sense of the beautiful dwindles, and with it much of the esthetic power which should enrich his heart life Avith the poet's vision and the artist's perspective and pro- portion. Just now with a microscope you may help the boy find God. 250 BOY LIFE The larger aspects of nature, as well as the more minute, have their own grand mes- sages for the boy soul. Renan has reminded us that the clouds and the thunder and the mountains had a vast influence in shaping the religious ideas of the Hebrews. The sun and the moon surely had great religious influence not only upon Zoroastrianism, the purest of the non-Christian faiths, but upon all the world. It is from the grandeur of nature that we learn the majesty of God. While the clouds lure the boy's imagination through sky pastures of riotous fancy and suggest to him the boundless riches of space, it is from the mountains he learns his little- ness and from the thunder he learns his weak- ness. Both suddenly teach him to be humble in the presence of their sublimity. Our Aryan ancestors were polythcists, worship- ing, we are told, upwards of three thousand divinities. Among these gods we find all the powers of nature deified and almost every type of natural object personified. It now seems as though the boy, with his primitive consciousness and childish intellect, were passing through the experiences of his child- like ancestors in the primitive days of the race. "It is the same spirit," says Dr. THE BOY'S RELIGION 251 Dawson, "that led the Druids of Western Europe to worship the trees ; the Aztecs, the sun ; and the ancient Egyptians and Hindus, the waters of the Nile and Ganges." The myth-making tendencies of children follow th-jir impulse for nature worship. The mythologies of Greeks and Romans, of the Norsemen and the children of the East, were very childhke; and many modern children of poetic and fanciful mood pass through this stage of development clearly. Tiele in his Gilford Lectures ("Elements of the Science of Religion") emphasizes this Mythopoeic stage in the childhood days of the race. Haslett says this tendency sometimes begins as early as the fourth or fifth year. Poor indeed is the boy's imagination and dull his inner vision, if he does not fancy that every- thing has its story; and lacking the answer to his stream of questions, in the great "Why Period" of life (from six to nine years, says Professor Baldwin), he conjures up his own answers according to his best fancy. Now is the time he hungers for the won- derful. The miraculous entrances him. Nothing is too grotesque to please him. The impossible story, he delights in. He 9.52 BOY LIFE revels in myths in prose or poetry, in folk- lore, saga, epic, legend, and miracle. Fiction he enjoys more than truth. This is why he does not always find truth telHng easy ! Superstitions, traditions, symbolism, ritual, all wield a great power over him, while he gropes his way to a personal faith, and personal standards of right and wrong. This ethical phase of his child religion comes after the nature worship and myth-making periods have waned, and the boy finds the spirits of life really to be one Spirit, the Great Spirit, the Father God whose will is law, whose wish is righteousness. It is unnecessary to say that this process of rehearsing the racial experience is by no means uniform nor universal. Perhaps few children are animistic ; too few are nature worshipers, or myth lovers, and more is the pity ; for the dwarfing of the child imagina- tion results in mental poverty and religious barrenness. Each of these racial instincts should yield its rich contribution to the boy's growing religious experience. From the first stage he should learn to find God present in all things living. In the second, he should find in the very beauty and grandeur of nature the character of the Father God; and THE BOY'S RELIGION 253 out of his myth-making should finally emerge the simple truth in its beauty, all the clearer by contrast with fancy ; while the ethical stage should furnish him a conscience, clear and strong. But to leave the growing boy to grope his way unaided along the spiral struggle of the race is needless and unnatural. Rousseau was anxious to keep even the name of God from little Emile before the years of adoles- cence ; and some still have this foolish theory. In Christian homes, however, the boy will be strongly influenced by the Christian char- acter and teaching of his mother and his father. Upon the warp of primitive racial experience, as described above, will be woven the woof of Christian influences. So we find it in every phase of the small boy's life, psychic, social and religious. There are two great forces in the boy constantlj'^ in stress, the force of distant heredity and the force of environment. Whether the inherited racial religious instincts or the enfolding Christian influences are dominant, will depend upon the strength of the latter, the temperament of the boy and his susceptibility to the influences surrounding him. But in any case the boy should very early come to feel the touch of 254 BOY LIFE his parent's faith and to love his Heavenly Father with a simple, childlike naturalness. Baldwin^ beautifully traces the early reli- gious development through two main lines of growth, in response to the sense of dependence and the sense of mystery. When the child in a state of physical helplessness first awakes to his surroundings, his mother and his father are his only divinities. Soon he comes to regard his father with superior awe, partly because he knows his mother better ; and though he may love his mother more, his father is his hero. But the day he discovers his father incapable of meeting all his needs, that day he projects into the unseen his feel- ing of dependence, and begins to grope for God. In the same way the growing sense of mystery leads him Godward. His father for awhile is to liim all-wise. He can answer all questions and explain all problems ! But the unhappy day dawns when the father belies his omniscience or flatly says he does not know. Again the boy, in hurt surprise, out- grows his idol and carries his unsolved mysteries of life to a higher Being, who must be wiser than his father. 1 "Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development," p. 840fr. THE BOY'S RELIGION 255 This explains to me the fact which Pro- fessor Barnes states in his "Studies in Educa- tion": "A child has a natural need of a theology, and if he is not given one, he will create it. The deeper demand which drove little George Sand to develop an elaborate theology and ritual, and which drove Goethe, at seven, to erect an altar and enact the part of a high priest, must surely come to imagina- tive children who find themselves so con- stantly hemmed in by the phenomenal.'"- Certain it is, that in very early years most of the great fundamental mysteries of life are frankly faced by the boy whose mind is at all active. He discovers early that there are great fundamental philosophical and reli- gious problems, which still puzzle his father; and if he cannot get satisfactory explanations from his father he thinks out some very crude answers for himself, and 4:rusts God for the rest. Yes, no one can deny that the child is normally religious. He is not a child of the devil; he is born the child of God. Old sinners must be born again as little children, that they may enter the kingdom of Heaven. The little children are already in the king- 1 Vol. II., p. 287. 256 BOY LIFE dom : for "of such is the kingdom," and they need to be guarded only lest they be con- verted away from the heavenly kingdom into which they were born. We should never forget that Jesus' word, "Ye must be born again," was said, not to a child, but to a grown man ; and a church member at that. Certain elements of the natural religion of later childhood, perhaps at ten years, are significant items in the childlikeness which Jesus praised as the essential characteristic of the kingdom of heaven: Notable is the boy's inherent faith in God and simple trust in God ; his clear acceptance of immortality as an axiom ; his faith in the goodness of God and his instinctive dependence upon it; his intuitive knowledge that God is a loving, personal spirit, the causal agent and source of life, at the heart of things ; and also his honest conscientiousness. These are among the fundamental religious instincts of the human race. In their purest, simplest form, the child possesses them. No wonder the Wisest and Best once said: "Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven."^ "Except ye turn and become as 1 Matthew 19:14. THE BOY'S RELIGION 257 little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven." ^ Haslett well describes the transition from the child's religion to that of the older boy : "About ten or eleven the child begins to mani- fest an interest in the why of things chiefly for ethical reasons and not merely as a result of curiosity or the functioning of the self. Until this time the religion of the child has been taken as a matter of course, as a part of the daily routine of life. The concrete, practical and motor phases of the religious life were interesting. But now the mind questions partly because the spiritual char- acter of religion is becoming prominent. Religion is now more than an ethical code framed and imposed by those in authority ; it is felt b}'^ the individual and has a meaning. It deepens, is inspiring and enforces obliga- tion. Religion is becoming a personal affair and possessing some relation to the actions of life. During this stage the creature is being transformed from a creature of command, law and custom in religious life to one of freedom, choice and experience. The indi- vidual manifests a tendency to form his own creed and shape his religion. This independ- 1 Matthew 18:8. 258 BOY LIFE ence is developed in the later years of adoles- cence. But these transitional years are years of beginnings, awakenings, fathomings, transformations and revolutions." ^ The evolution of the religion of boyhood is beautiful, wonderful, entii'ely natural. The evolution of the religion of youth is more subtle, still more wonderful, but no less natural. It is simply the way of God with the boy soul. We shall find a distinct difference often between the boy's religion in the three periods of adolescence, due of course to the differ- ence in the boy. Let us try to trace this development, so far as we can find the average experience at each stage of the process. The boy on the verge of physical manhood is at the first crisis of his life, and though he understands it not, he is conscious of strange movings within him. It is of course a mental crisis no less than physical and it should be a religious and social crisis also, for puberty is essentially a new birth of the person into a larger life. It is the new birth, not merely of bodily functions and powers, but of new thoughts, feelings, sympathies, ambitions, emotions, passions, ideals and convictions, in I "The Pedagogical Bible School," p. 155. 2 do, p. 15S. THE BOY'S RELIGION 259 short, of everything which deepens, exalts and enriches the boy's hfe. It is the real birth of the individual, into independence in thinking, feeling, choosing; though not fully realized for two or three years to come. It is the slow awakening of the God-given reason, born to supersede instinct and to check or direct impulse. It is especially the flowering of the social instinct, which hitherto has not been prominent. With the birth of altruistic feel- ings the boy outgrows his egoism, often his selfishness, and his interests broaden with his sympathies. His social radius, Avhich had been very short, progressively annexes the world. He becomes a citizen, a social unit worthy of the toga virilis which the Romans conferred at fourteen. The special religious crisis at dawning adolescence was recognized even by the savage. Dr. Haslett strongly avers that "It has been recognized by all peoples, in all ages and in all climes. You find it in the lowest savage tribe where the individual is mutilated, beaten, sent away to the forest to live or die according as he possesses or lacks the strength or endurance to undergo the experiences that form part of the ritual. You find it in the most elaborate service of 260 BOY LIFE the mother of churches, the Roman CathoHc, where the appHcant is trained, instructed, robed, honored, and finally confirmed amid all the splendor and display of that confirmation rite. Between these two range the manifold forms and ceremonies that man in all stages of his long course from savagery to culture has developed and observed for the initiation of the young adolescent into the new Hfe." ^ The great religious value of a confirmation service of dignity, impressiveness and sin- cerity has been noted by many writers. Doubtless the evangelical churches which do not confirm may secure for their children the full value of this timely and historic function by encouraging conversion at about tliis period and following it with a worthy and impressive service, when the boy takes the covenant of Christian living and joins the church. It is no meaningless coincidence that the culmination of the religious impulses and the sex impulses come together. Both, as Mercier says, are founded on the universal principle of self-sacrifice. Both mean life for others. Now as never before, the boy is sounding the depths of his soul. It forces him into unselfishness, as his new abundance 'The Pedagogical Bible School," p. 158. THE BOY'S RELIGION 261 of life overflows for the life of others and his childish religion of formal routine and ritual now outgrows itself and becomes a life passion, a loyal devotion, a heart consecra- tion. This is the chivalry period of boy life, early adolescence, and its characteristic is personal loyalty and hero worship. Nothing could be more natural than for the boy soon to yield his supreme loyalty to Jesus Christ his Lord. The religion of childhood is necessarily the religion of authority, like the religion of childlike peoples. But in adolescence, reli- gion becomes a matter of personal choice and personal experience. The authority of tradi- tion wanes gradually now and reason begins to assert its sway. Often boys now are strangely reticent, and for a season the objective religion of childish deeds swings over to an almost morbid subjectivity. Especially the boy of the obstructed-will type, who has probably not come to the point of religious decision as his playmates have, will develop too much introspection and sensitive- ness. He becomes an ingrowing soul, just when he should expand, radiate, overflow. Normally the boy seeks expression rather than repression of his feelings. He grad- 262 BOY LIFE uates from the cliildlike love of nature to the love of persons, and crowns this love with deeds of loyal devotion. He finds new incen- tives in the joy of doing for others. His personal hkes and dislikes are strong, some- times illogical, but vast in motive power. His admiration for certain types of character is unbounded. He is successively choosing his ideals, testing them, discarding them, out- growing them ; but meanwhile reverencing the object of his hero worship with an unselfish- ness good to see. " How beautiful is Youth ! how bright it gleams With its illusions, aspirations, dreams ! Book of Beginnings, Story without End, Each maid a heroine and each man a friend!" Middle adolescence intensifies the perma- nent qualities and tendencies of the earlier period. It is rather generally agreed that this is the most important period of a human life. It is the epoch which determines the use of personal power. Many habits of course are already acquired; but now life ideals are determined, controlling purposes, ultimate interests grow strong; the moral tone and spirit of the life become set, and the character is formed. Seldom does manhood belie the prophecy of the middle teens. THE BOY'S RELIGION 263 Early adolescence marks preeminently the social awakening of the soul, the discovery of the world of persons. Middle adolescence completes the boy's discovery of himself. Individuality is the key word best describing the rehgious development now. The boy has finally come to himself. He has wandered through the flowered meadows of childhood, fancy free and joyous, led by the guardian angels of instinct ; gradually he gained self- consciousness in boyhood and found the answer to many Hfe riddles, seen through the glorified haze of the half-understood. But now through the gateway of puberty, the youth emerges into the broader fields and mountain-girt prospects of the larger life of manhood, a way beset with many dangers, to be sure, but with high ambitions, exhilarating visions, and worth while work to do in the world to keep one strong. The high school boy consults the oracles and finds himself a man. He is a person, he will stand alone ! He resents interference, coddling, discipline, advice, except from whom he chooses. It is the self-assertive period of life, often the revo- lutionary period. Its dangers are grave and serious ; but its opportunity is glorious ! It is the life chance which comes to every 26(4 BOY LIFE healthy, wholesome youth, born to the purple, the royal purple of sonship to God ; the chance to live a kingly life, to master self, to overcome selfishness, to throttle evil passions and unworthy emotions, to crown with grow- ing efficiency and usefulness every worthy talent and personal power; in short to grow into symmetrical, well-rounded manliness, Christian manliness, the threefold life which makes a man, in body, mind and spirit. This cannot all be accomplished in this brief period ; but it can all be planned. It is this utter self-devotion to a lofty life ambi- tion to which normal conversion leads. In boyhood, imagination soars ; in youth, ambi- tion. It is the age of faith and courage undaunted, and an enthusiasm that stirs even the dry bones of sophisticated age. How truly I/ongfellow sings of this period of youth : " All possibilities are in its hands, No danger daunts it and no foe withstands. In its sublime audacity of faith, 'Be thou removed' it to the mountain saith; And with ambitious feet, secure and proud. Ascends the ladder leaning on the cloud!" When this natural heroism of youth is combined at this period with the religious impulse, the result is inspiring. Conversion THE BOY'S RELIGION 265 in early adolescence is entirely safe and normal in the thoroughly devout home ; but probably in these days it seldom occurs before the beginning of the high school period. All investigations show the conversion curve to be highest now in middle adolescence. It is probably best so, in most cases. Surely the personal religious experience will be deeper, fuller and more earnest now than in the shallower life currents of childhood. Now the full tides of feeling and emotion will give impressiveness and power to the experience, arid developing reason will interpret intelli- gently its meaning to the soul. It is likely to be a permanent investment of the life, as a child conversion may not prove to be. Even when the boy in the Christian home, who has always considered himself a Christian perhaps, at least has always meant to be, and has as a child loved Jesus Christ with a sincere and childlike simplicity ; all of which is as natural as it is beautiful ; even in such case, when the boy passes through the deeper experiences of adolescence, he finds the re-birth of the soul as necessary as was the new birth of body and of mind. In such cases the "illumination" experience of whole- souled dedication to God, which may come 266 BOY LIFE several j'ears after church membership, is practically a new conversion, made necessary by the higher levels, or rather the deeper currents, of the adolescent life. The winning appeal to the boy at this period must be the broad appeal to his whole manhood. A narrow religious appeal fails to win a whole boy. I long since ceased to believe people who claim that the young man is hopelessly irreligious, because he is not pious according to his grandfather's stan- dards or does not like to pray in public. The young fellow may even pretend to be irrev- erent and like to parade his doubts, but he is not immune to religious influence of the right sort. It is a double slander on young manhood and true religion, to assert that when the boy graduates from boyhood on leaving his toys, his tops and his marbles, he has outgrown his capacity for rehgion. No, he is just discovering that capacity, and is finding that his childish, formal religion of boyhood does not satisfy it. I have even more faith in the young man than I have in the boy. You can win him for Christ and the church. You need not make the confes- sion of the defeated minister, that the only way to save the man is to catch him young THE BOY'S RELIGION 267 and win the boy. Do not give up the high school boy ; you can win him with God's help. The simple prescription is an intelligent personal interest, a working plan, and a moderate investment of time. The young man of eighteen Is no longer a boy. You have treated him as a boy? That's why he vanished around your corner ! He knows he is a man, in everything but experience, and sometimes he has more of that than is good for him, and more than any one gives him credit for. There is much of the boy in the youth of eighteen. There ought to be. But there is also a deal of man- liness in him. Sometimes it is a frank, wholesome manliness that is good to see. At other times it is tinctured with a cynicism which suggests the disillusionment of boy- hood's visions, and the disappointment that follows Hfe's early shocks of defeat. He is no longer a boy ; but not quite a man. In these days the young man has absorbed not a little criticism of the church and of religion ; and though trained in a religious home, has little regard for static piety, or conventional religious forms and usages. His Christian Endeavor Society has not made a reverent mystic of him ; possibly has had 268 BOY LIFE quite the opposite effect. It is with difficulty that he has been kept in the Sunday-school; more likely he has prematurely graduated therefrom. He feels a revulsion from all sorts of religious emotionalism and you cannot touch him with a year of prayer meet- ings, even of the quiet, modern type. Yet the young man is deeply earnest at this period, even though he may try to con- ceal it sometimes by feigned frivolity. For this period is especially the period of the battle royal of life, the struggle for char- acter, that subtle conflict between the good and evil forces incarnate in the young man's person, a conflict perhaps which no one knows but himself and his God. In this struggle for character the boy needs friendship, constant, sympathetic, dis- cerning friendship ; but above all, he must be on friendly terms with Jesus Christ. Give him the great protection of the Christ love, the high incentive of the Christ ideals, the mighty impulse of the Christian purpose, the Christ loyalty — with the brotherly comrade- ship of the Christian Church ; and you have armed him with all the panoply of God. He will win his fight. He will win in the struggle for manliness. THE BOY'S RELIGION 269 If the young man is sound at the core, and he usually is, he honors above all things real nobility of character, and covets genuine manliness. He instinctively echoes Presi- dent Hyde's glowing sentiment: " A creed is a rod. And a crown is of night; But tiiis thing is God: To be man, with thy might; To stand straight in the strength of thy spirit And live out thy life as the light." The young man is usually silent about it; but he has his own ideas on religion, and plenty of doubts of his own as well. He needs a rational basis for his life creed, and he needs it soon ; or he never will get it. It must be proved to him, in some natural un- dogmatic way (or better, flashed upon his intuitions) that the well-rounded manhood which he covets, needs culture on the spirit- ual side, to complete its symmetry. In short, he needs, not the effeminate sort, but a man's religion, which will appeal to his whole man- hood. For the young man is not all spirit. He has a body to keep strong and well, and a mind to discipline and develop. These facts are evident to him and he welcomes 270 BOY LIFE any means which will help him in his life problem. He needs the right hand of fellow- ship, the heart of good friendship and the moral backbone of upright comradeship. These things, with God's Spirit to help, will save him, and he will pass through this try- ing period unscathed, and will enter later adolescence wiser and stronger and a happier man. The closing period of youth I sliall con- sider briefly. If the religious life has been normal in the earlier periods, it will be easy and natural now. If it has been neglected or belated, it will be difficult now. Professor Home suggests the word "Independence" as the characteristic key-word for this age, from eighteen to twenty-four years. I would also add the word "Cooperation." It is an age of independence, and also of the begin- nings of splendid social cooperation. Athe- istic or sceptical tendencies often appear, but are usually of short duration, and the young man who thinks his way through independently finds surer ground for faith than ever. At all events, he must have free- dom for independent thinking. He resents the tyranny of religious tradition. The college man is the born Protestant. He THE BOY'S RELIGION 271 insists on the regal rights of his God-given reason, and he searches fearlessly for truth. He worships reality, sincerity, and will brook no sham, pretense or cant. Empty forms and professions, however pious, he will have none of. He demands honesty and reality in faith and life. His doubts some- times are serious, and there are doubts that are the fruit of sin ; but usually they are not symptoms of decay, but the growing pains of a larger, stronger faith, in which his tested soul ultimately finds rest and satis- faction. There is a solemnity and a grandeur to me in the fearless search for truth which impels our college man to scan heaven and earth relentlessly for facts, and which finally gives him the spiritual power of a real faith, a tested faith, which leads Godward with unerring flight, as it seems to say: " Higher, my soul, higher ! Into the niglit, Into the black night; Beyond where the eagle soars strong to the sun. Naught hast thou if only earth's stars be won. Earth stars are won, Beyond where God's angels stand silent in light. Higher, my soul, higher! Into the light! Straight into God's light." 272 BOY LIFE The right of independent thinking, the college boy must have. Freedom is the atmosphere in which his real faith must grow. But his religion must grow strong through exercise. Some one has said of German university students, that about one third go to the devil, another third break down under the strain of life, and the remain- ing third govern Europe. Surely the per- centage of college waste product is not so great in this country. And the significant thing is the college boy's capacity for coop- eration. He covets power, not merely to lead, but to serve. With every year that passes there is a rising tide of earnestness in our college youth in America, which impels them to apply their religion helpfully in social service. The best way to get rid of doubts is not merely to think them through, but better, to work them off. Instinctively, the college boy seems to feel he must make his religion practical — and some of his doubts vanish from neglect! He finds stand- ing ground for his own faith, by lashing together a few planks for a raft, on which to save some other fellow. And faith grows strong with testing. Our college Christian Associations are THE BOY'S RELIGION 273 paying less attention to the merely oral expression of personal piety, but in a great variety of ways are proving their vital reli- gion by applying it to human needs around them. It is a natural step toward the nor- mal religion of adult manhood today, the religion of the mature life, a religion which is not metaphysical nor introspective, but the practical helpful religion of Applied Chris- tianity. It is the age of the Social Gospel. The Sermon on the Mount is coming to its own. Men are broadening their gospel and including in it not merely good news for the soul, but good news for the race; the good news which not only saves a man from sin, but saves men from suffering and ignorance and every moral and physical ill. It is the gospel of clean streets and homes as well as clean hearts ; the gospel of redeemed cities as well as the Heavenly City for the Redeemed; the gospel of salvation, of health for the soul ; but none the less the new gospel of health for body and for mind, with its war against tuberculosis, its fresh-air homes, its outdoor schools, its hospital ships in the harbors, its city parks right in the slums — breathing spaces for the wornout and the aged, and playgrounds for cheated chil- 274 BOY LIFE dren ; the gospel of schools instead of spin- ning rooms, of homes instead of sweat shops ; in short, the gospel of real brotherliness as well as fatherhood and sonship. Such a gospel, a broadly social gospel, touching life at a thousand gleaming points today, is the religion of our full-blooded American man- hood, yes, and our intelHgent, sympathetic womanhood, organized in her countless wel- fare clubs. Into such a practical religion of humanity the college boy is growing, with his love for freedom and liis genius for coop- eration. Religiously now, the boy has become a man. The child, wending his way through the mazes of life, has in each year, we trust, found a religion of his own ; a faith fitted to his needs, developed through his own expe- riences, appropriate to his partial knowl- edge and his imperfect vision, but finally emerging in the full-orbed religion of man- hood. St. Paul's words apply best of all to the growing religion of a normal life: "Wlien I was a child, I spake as a child, I felt, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; now that I am become a man, I have put away clu'ldisli things. For now we see in a mirror, darkly; but then face to face; THE BOY'S RELIGION 275 now I know in part ; but then shall I know fully, even as also I was fully known. But now abideth (the three great principles of true religion) faith, hope, love, these three ; and the greatest of these is love." CHAPTER XIV THE BOY'S HOME This chapter touches the spot of the most serious weakness and the finest possibilities in the whole range of the boy problem: the Home, the inner social environment where the boy's character is initially made or ruined. Other tilings are important; this is all important. Other influences are mighty ; but the strong, splendid home is normally invincible in the making of char- acter. If the club or gang is evil, something is lost ; if the Y. M. C. A. is missing or the public school defective, much is lost ; if the church is weak and impotent, because not virile, still more is lost ; but if the home is wrong, the boy is lost. That is, this is the rule; but all rigid formulas fail in Boyville, and a lost boy is simply a boy not yet found ; and a splendid host are hunting for him, following the blazed trail of the Master of Men, that Sa\'iour-Shepherd who never quits his wandering-boy quest. We all doubtless share the faith of the hopeful boy lover that there is some way 278 BOY LIFE to find and save every sane hoy. A really incorrigible boy is abnormal, a case for the doctor or the surgeon or tlie alienist — not the minister. But we shall all readily agree, and the longer we have worked with boys the more heartily we shall agree, that Professor Peabody is right in liis assertion that a boys' club is in most respects only a substitute for the perfect home, and that practically all other agencies for boy betterment are merely supplementary to the home. As Dr. Peabody says : "A good boy is the natural product of a good home ; and all the efforts of philanthropy to make boys better are consciously imperfect substitutes for the natural influences of a healthy- minded home. The great and overshadow- ing peril of a boy's life is not, as many sup- pose, his bad companions, or his bad books, or his bad habits ; it is the peril of homeless- ness. I do not mean mere homelessness, having no bed or room which can be called his own, but that homelessness which may exist even in luxurious houses — the isolation of the boy's soul, the lack of any one to listen to him, the loss of roots to hold him to his place and make him grow. This is what drives the boy into the arms of evil, and THE BOY'S HOME 279 makes the street his home and the gang his family, or else drives him in upon himself, into uncommunicated imaginings and fever- ish desires. It is the modern story of the man whose house was empty, and precisely because it was empty, there entered seven devils to keep him company. If there is one thing which a boy cannot bear, it is himself. He is by nature a gregarious animal, and if the group which nature gives him is denied, then he gives himself to any group which may solicit him. A boy, like all things in nature, abhors a vacuum ; and if his home is a vacuum of lovelessness and homelessness, then he abhors his home." Homeless boys and boyless homes both seem to be increasing. But whatever the home, or the apology for a home, back to that home we must go to learn the boy. There we may find the straightest clue to the perplexing riddle of his temperament and character, the mazy puzzle of his tastes, talents, feelings, ambitions, inherited or developed — or the lack of these. Our social and religious efforts for the boy are apt to be quite futile unless we get some cooperation from the home. And conversely the home which is at all abnormal needs our help. It 280 BOY LIFE is surely time tliat all the great agencies for boy-saving got together in the closest kind of way. Aimless, independent effort is a costly waste and always a partial failure. I think it is fair to claim, however, that the failure to cooperate has usually been due to the carelessness of parents. In the wild rush of modern living, parents have abdicated their responsibihty. They have surrendered to the church, the school, the Sunday-school, the Christian Association the full care of the moral, religious, intel- lectual and social welfare of the boy. And these institutions are staggering along bravely but rather helplessly under the burden. It is hard on them, and harder on the boy. American boys are suffering from over much institutionalizing. Just as they are now barbered and tailored and shod and doctored by outside experts — in the home- spun days all these wants were attended to at home — so also the boys are schooled and churched and exercised and danced, and even manually trained, by outside agencies, to the joy and relief of a certain kind of parents. They are glad to avoid a respon- sibility which they feel incapable of sharing. For often the boy knows more algebra than THE BOY'S HOME 281 his mother and more religion than his father, if not more worldly wisdom than both. But the noblest church and church-school can never furnish the boy that choicest religion of the home where the father is priest. "The father was God's first priest." Thousands of conscientious fathers and mothers realize the seriousness of their boy problem and are doing their utmost to save their boys, but against great odds. We shall treat our topic most intelligently if we take time briefly to suggest some of the difficulties confronting them, as they face this greatest task, their duty to their boys. 1. The simple fact that they are of an older generation is a handicap. The differ- ence in age between father and son naturally widens the gap, usually proportionately, though not always. Not merely the age, but what it connotes, makes the difference; the different kind of bringing up, the differ- ent social environment, the different world- generation with all its altered customs, standards and ideals. All these things widen the gulf which must be bridged to bring father and son together in sympathy and view-point. 2. The greater difficulty is the fact that 282 BOY LIFE the father, in growing older, has lost his youth, or rather, his youthfulness. He has forgotten how it seemed to be a boy. The interests which absorbed him in his boyhood have been submerged in the colder tides of later life. The idealism, maybe, and the hero worship, and the noble altruism of ado- lescent daj's have been lost in the glare of life's realism. Perhaps the iconoclastic days have come, the saddest in human life. Imagination is dormant, memory is ineffect- ive, dim and fickle ; boyish dreams and youth- ful visions, forgotten. And the feelings, the surest criterion of age, the only real test of age, are greatly changed. The finer emotions and the naive enthusiasms, the man has lost forever ; and with these his lost youth. It is one of the needless tragedies of life that men thus lose their youthful joy, the zest for living, and with it the real sym- pathy of their own boys. What business has any boy's father a-growing old, except in 3'ears and baldness — which don't count I 3. The father is often handicapped by his failure to understand his boy. Were his memory of his own boyhood efl^cient, he could interpret that boy in the light of his own boyhood and understand his strangeness ; THE BOY'S HOME 283 but often the mother's intuition gets her closer to the boy's heart. Sometimes the mysteries of the boy-soul are too subtle for either of them and they frankly confess they cannot understand the boy. How often we have heard this confession of parental de- feat: "Harry is such a peculiar hoy; I cant understand him." And in the bosom of the family doubtless the queer streak is traced back to some scapegrace uncle who dis- graced the family by living the simple life! 4. Not to multiply these reasons for the home failure, I will mention just one other, a type of a number of very concrete sug- gestions which might be given, the failure of the parents to know where the boy spends his time. The fonder the parent, the more superficially precise the home-life, the more of course the boy reacts against propriety and seeks the refreshing gales of the uncon- ventional. Particularly if the domestic dis- cipline is of the feminine order, the young chap, fearing like creeping paralysis his own ingrowing effeminacy, flees to the alley where he can shed kid gloves, hide his white necktie in his pocket and assert his manhood. He comes home finally, not in the odor of sanctity, with raiment sadly mussed, and fists 284 BOY LIFE still clenched ; but there is glee in his face and oxygen in his lungs. Mother fumes and fusses. The boy naturally lies — and soon lies naturally. No one really knows where he has spent the day. His father is too busy to go and see. This is a very common symptom in the small boy problem. We are all familiar with it. It is an almost inevitable stage, fraught with grave danger; but it may prove to be nothing more serious than the boy's declara- tion of independence, the birth of his manli- ness — if promptly taken in hand by a tactful father, or a brave and trusted mother. A certain wise mother, more discerning than her husband, discovered that her three small boys were slipping away from the home influence and spending much of their time elsewhere. They would do all their studying before supper, then hastily steal out for a long evening "with the other boys." They evaded her questions with unsatisfactory explanations. They began to grow pale and listless in appearance ; did discreditable work at school and became more and more unman- ageable, until the mother was in despair. One night she followed the boys, and was appalled to find them, with a few selected THE BOY'S HOME 285 cronies, in the back room of a neighboring saloon listening to the exciting tales of a maudlin old soldier who shared with them his beer in return for their pocket money. Prompt action and subsequent tactfulness saved the boys. In the light of these and similar difficulties with which even conscientious parents are contending, how shall the boy be saved? Nearly all failure in life is a failure in adjustment. Given right relations between the members of the home group and we need not worry for the boy. The principles involved in this vital ques- tion can only be discovered as we analyze and define the terms, the boy's normal home relationships, 1. Without question the first essential is recognized parental responsibility. If the head of the household shirks, the boy must be expected to. The first essential then is to reload the father with the responsibility he has been shouldering on to others ever since Sunday-schools and Christian Associations and similar institutions were first invented. Busy men must learn that they cannot hire the duties of fatherhood done by proxy. If a man has brought a boy into this world, he 286 BOY LIFE must stand by that hoy. We must not allow him to think that he can farm out to us his duty to that boy — not for one hundred dol- lars a year pew rent, or ten dollars sustain- ing membership fee ! Perhaps our financial pressure has led us into temptation, in the past ; but we should certainly not accept his money, on even the tacit understanding that we as churches or colleges or Christian Associations can do the father's duty by the boy. The in loco parentis theory long since proved a pitiable failure. We can do some things the father cannot do for the boy ; but he only can do for that boy what the boy most needs. We must make him under- stand it, and emphasize it until his business, his club, his lodge and fraternal order all will seem petty to him compared to saving his hoy. I believe profoundly that most fathers can be counted on to respond to this appeal. Most men are at heart idealists. Dr. Abbott is right: "It is one of the divine mysteries of man's life in this world, that while he is always dealing with material things, strug- gling for them, storing them up, and count- ing himself rich or poor according to his possessions, he is ready at any moment to THE BOY'S HOME 287 hold them as dust in the balances, if the real things he carries in his heart are in any peril. He will open the dikes and destroy the country he has worked for centuries to create, rather than to suffer her tyrant enemies to possess her. He will sacrifice everything he has accumulated in a lifetime for the sake of wife or child. Immersed in materialism, man is always at heart an idealist. Putting his strength into the mastery of things, he is always finding his real life in ideas, emotions, convictions. He works with his body, but he lives in his soul." When you once get the modern boy's father to stop and think, he readily responds to every reasonable appeal, and will do abso- lutely anything for the boy's sake. When the father reaches the point of self-sacrifice, the boy is probably safe. 2. A primary essential in normal home relationships is the mutual reverence for per- sonality. There is a golden mean doubtless between the suppression of the child in the old Puritan home, where he was overwhelmed by the sense of his littleness, and the opposite fashion today, when occasionally the lone child in the home is made an insufferable egotist by the prominence given him (oftener 288 BOY LIFE ]icr !) on all occasions, and it is quite appar- ent that the youngster rules the household. The normal relation makes the child neither the tyrant nor the abject slave, but a person with both rights and duties, and because a person, therefore worthy of respect. A home is not merely a barracks where the parent commands and the child obeys. This mediaeval conception must yield to the nobler ideal that the great purpose of the home is the sharing of life. Mutual self-giving for mutual good is the great home privilege. As the wisest interpreters of this mutual wel- fare of the home group, the parents deserve obedience ; but only as they respect the child's personality in seeking his obedience. For among the first of children's rights is the simple human right to be treated as a person. I suspect that here begins the trouble in many a home. A rough unappreciative father insults his boy's self-respect. His blunt command assumes the right to domi- nate. He is inconsiderate. Perhaps he is unreasonable. The boy rebels ; or worse, he sullenly acquiesces and outwardly obeys. But that boy's sensitive nature is deeply scarred, and his pride wounded, perhaps THE BOY'S HOME 289 irreparably. As soon as he dares, he asserts his independence of that father. Probably he quits the house forever. If the father is wise enough to discover his error before it is too late, he will make atonement at any cost, to prove his respect for that boy's eternal soul, and will thus regain the boy's love and comradeship. Keenly do I recall how a father of my acquaintance roughly trampled upon the feelings of his headstrong boy and treated him with needless insolence. The boy left home, vowing never to return till he was of age. In growing bitterness of spirit that father, whose temper was the worst I ever knew, gradually developed emotional insanity, until one night in a burst of rage, a veritable brain storm, he drowned himself in the river. Then the boy came home to his mother, securing an honorable discharge from the United States Army, in which he had enlisted. The attempt to force, to drive, to coerce, to compel a boy's obedience against his judg- ment and his will, is to ruin the peace of the home, and makes a ghastly chasm between father and son. To reverence the boy's person by treating liim considerately and consulting liim when his opinion is of the 290 BOY LIFE slightest value, and taking him into the family councils whenever possible, is to teach him self-respect, a boy's moral capital, till he discovers the worth of his own growing manhood. Most boys will live up to your estimate of them. Treat them contemptu- ously, they become contemptible. Trust them and they become trustworthy. Recog- nize their growing manliness and you multiply it. One great corollary of this important rule is this. How else can a father teach his boy to reverence his own person, than by treating him with respect because he is a person.'' Thus are self-respecting boys developed and only self-respecting boys make respectable citizens. 3. Next to mutual respect comes mutual understanding and sympathy between father and son. This means the boy and his father must get acquainted, when often they are strangers. There is a pathos in the very architecture of the old Nantucket mansions. On the roof you still may see the little fence enclosed outlook where the women and the children used to watch for the signs of returning sail, far out to sea, back in the rigorous days of THE BOY'S HOME 291 the old whaling industry ; when a man would be absent from home for a three years' voyage, and would often on his return find a child missing or perchance a wife — and sometimes a new baby, old enough to talk with him. In these days of industrial strain and suburban city life, thousands of fathers seldom see their infant children except when they are asleep. All too frequently the habit is continued through the years, and the rear- ing of the boys is left to the women and older children. There's a hand-writing on the wall for such a father. Whatever be the reason for his unfatherly neglect, if he does not take the trouble to get acquainted with his boy he must not be surprised to find some day that that boy cares little for him ; that he appre- ciates him merely for what he is worth to him in food and clothing. The home is for the sharing of life; that father has been a parental bankrupt, compromising in nig- gardly fasliion merely on food and raiment and a place of shelter. Professor Coe says very truly : "If a choice must be made between living with one's children and any competing interest, whether the increase of wealth, social enjoyments, even philanthropic 292 BOY LIFE and religious activities, there should be no hesitation in choosing in favor of one's own children." Because so many fathers prefer business or selfish pleasure to the comradeship of the boy at home, many a boy's life is blighted. On the other hand, man}' a boy has found at home the best chum a boy could have, in the person of his father, and together they think and plan and frolic and chum, sharing each other's life. Thus the father learns the secret of perennial youth and lives again in the hopes and struggles of his boy. And the growing boy, sharing his deepest confidences Avith the father-chum, learns the secret of life's most sacred messages and grows strong in a holy comradeship. You may bank on such a boy. Let him loose in the street ; the gang won't hurt him. Send him to the public school ; home he comes unscathed, for his father is his confidant, his trusted adviser, with whom he shares unreservedly all the day's experiences. That boy is immune. He is safe ; let the world, the flesh and the devil do their worst. Though tliis ideal is rarely discovered in its completeness ; rapidly, I believe, American fathers are waking up to see that they must THE BOY'S HOME 293 chum with their boys, whatever be the cost. Why, the Big Brother Movement alone has done much to open the eyes of fathers to this fact, that they have been shirking. Every father knows that the natural Big Brother to every boy is his own father, and it shames him into decency to see another man, for the boy's sake, offering to fill his vacant place, to save that boy. Yet the father is often unable to under- stand the boy. He has the right disposition, desires to help the boy and do the right thing by him ; but he is untrained, handicapped in various ways, such as I have previously mentioned. Here the trained boy worker can surely help the father. And here the devel- oping science of child study and the psychol- ogy of adolescence renders a great service. Parenthood is a profession, perhaps the noblest profession. It is a life calling. It is a fine art ; and it is based upon a genuine science. There is, therefore, a psychology of fatherhood, and the rudiments of it every boy's father should know. We are coming to recognize that there is a psychology under- lying every profession. There is evidently a psychological basis for success in public speaking. There is a psychology of the 294 BOY LIFE ministry ; also of the law. There is of course a psychology of teaching; we call it peda- gogy. There is a new name for the psychol- ogy of the physician, the awkward name psychotherapy. There is a very shrewd psy- chology underlying mercantile success ; as taught for instance by the Chicago Sheldon School for Expert Salesmanship. I beheve psychology has a large contribution to make also to the profession of fatherhood. This is merely saying that trained boy workers in the Y. M. C. A. who have become familiar with the modern literature on ado- lescence should share this technical wisdom with the fathers, as well as practice it on the boys. Just as soon as fathers of boys are aroused to see that the whole crux of this boy problem is in their hands, and they discover that they have got to face it like men and shoulder the responsibility, then they will be willing to come to boy experts for advice and direction. There is much Association men can teach them which will help them to understand their own boys and the special treatment which they need at different stages. We examine the boy's body and prescribe certain physical exercises to help him outgrow his THE BOY'S HOME 295 abnormalities. Why should he not also be given psychic tests which would determine his mental and temperamental deficiencies? We have made very tardily the discovery that a large proportion of the criminals of this country are simply young men and boys of abnormal mental development. I am con- fident that sensible psychic treatment, with perhaps some slight surgical attention, early in life, might have corrected very much of this abnormality and developed well-bal- anced, wholesome minds and good citizens. Whether or not brain surgery for klepto- mania, insanity or alcoholism ever becomes safe, all reasonable precautions should be taken in boyhood to secure normal brain development and functioning. The great city school systems are already recognizing this need. But to avoid debatable ground, and to give my suggestions in merest outline : I suggest that earnest parents of good intelligence can be taught to discover when the boy is defect- ive in his observation, his imagination or his memory, and how to treat such defects. They can learn to observe how his mind works, whether he is a visualizer or an audile, or motor-minded, etc. ; and the clue will help 296 BOY LIFE them to understand him and how to help him. They can be taught how to develop his judgment in different fields to make him well-balanced, and to help him to think for himself and form reasonable conclusions. If the boy is an emotional fellow, volatile, un- reliable or subject to fits of anger, then the father should be taught how to help him overcome these tendencies. Conversely, if the boy is phlegmatic and passive, the father should learn the secret of arousing his enthu- siasm and stirring his feelings of loyalty, patriotism and sympathy. He should be encouraged to lead the boy out of the egoism and selfishness inevitable in childhood, into the normal altruism and kind-heartedness of 3'outh, and on to the finer ideals and nobler visions and deeper sympathies of later ado- lescence. If the boy is too matter-of-fact and commonplace, and his sense of the beau- tiful deficient, this should be stimulated, to enrich his own soul and develop his future happiness, his very capacity for happiness. Most boys will find their way to this through love of nature and appreciation of her beauties. Tlie best art greatly helps, and the removal of abominations in the form of crude THE BOY'S HOME 297 pictures in the homes is certainly a kindness to the children. But it is in the field of mill that the boy needs most attention psychologically. The enigma of misunderstood boyhood is often solved by careful study of the contrasting types of children, the impulsive boy with the precipitate will and the backward child with the obstructed-will. When once a father can locate his boy under one or the other and thoroughly study the type, he may under- stand why the boy acts so queerly and discover the special treatment he needs to make him normal. The father needs to know something of the power of suggestion. Though if he is shrewd and tactful he has already intuitively found his way to the secret of this powerful agency. Certainly he must know the awful and the splendid possibilities of the law of habit, that most important of all moral subjects. The father should be taught the different kinds of habitual decisions, to dis- cover how he may pigeon-hole his boy's ordinary choices and how to help him to develop that nobility of character which comes in its fulness not from emotion, or impulse, but from the regal function of 298 BOY LIFE conscious choice. Is the boy's will naturally reasonable, drifting, reckless, convertible or strenuous? The wise father will find out, and profit by his discovery in the guidance and particularly^ in the religious training of his boy. And, lastly, the father should be encouraged to discover and arouse the boy's native interests, the secret springs of his enthusiasms and his truest ambitions. When these are identified, the formula is discovered by which many of the boy's life problems can be worked out with ease and satisfaction ; all needless factors eliminated, the surds rationalized, fractions reduced to a common denominator and "the unknown quantities in his personal equation reduced to their Hfe values. The boy's interests, his immediate interests and his ultimate profound interests, his life standards and holiest ambi- tions, by all means let his father discover these and help liis boy develop and secure them, and lead him to consecrate them in the true chivalry of Christian knighthood, seek- ing life's holy quest of worth while service in the Christ's name. 4. When we have helped the father to understand the boy, and particularly the boy's life interests, the next thing is to help THE BOY'S HOME 299 him keep the hoy busy. A large element in normal home relationships is mutual helpful- ness with everybody busy. The normal home is a character garden, not a girl factory, nor a boy foundry, but a garden where character grows. It can only grow in an atmosphere of happy contentment. The normal home is a place where the boy likes to be. It must therefore be made attractive, and reasonably boylike. Here again countless homes fail ; and here boy workers, experts in boy lore, can greatly help the home. One family, not wealthy either, fitted up a gymnasium in the attic to keep the boys at home — and went without new parlor furni- ture. What eminent good sense ! Many wise parents have introduced dark rooms for photography, laboratory rooms for chem- istr}^, work rooms for carpentry, *'bug rooms" for natural history, even mushrooms in the cellar and so on through the whole fad chapter; and it all works splendidly. The boy likes his home, stays at home and brings his friends home. What if accidents do happen ! One boy of my intimate acquaint- ance blew out the kitchen window with liis home-made gunpowder and located a new sort of torpedo on the sore spot of the force 300 BOY LIFE pump, just when the servant girl was ready to be frightened nearly to hysterics; and electrified all the door knobs that happened to be metal and shocked his father into mysterious chuckles and affectionate neai'- profanity! Never mind. Nobody cared. It helped to save the boy. Explosions were less harmful than drunks and a broken window was more easily mended than a ruined boy. The same boy soon made his own telescope, and was the first to discover the arrival of the sun spots and informed the city of 40,000 people all about them in an original article in the local paper. Keep your eye on boys like that. They may need watching, but they'll bear watching. Happy the home that can discover the boy's interests and keep him busy and contented at home. Particularly happy the home where the boys can share the home responsibihties and duties. In modern flat hfc of course this is extremely difficult, and mucli is lost thereby. Doing things together in the household with mutual concessions and burden bearing, is a mighty binder together of hearts. As Professor Starbuck says : "It is the rule, not only outside the home but within it, that the strongest attachments THE BOY'S HOME 301 spring up and happiness abounds when people are losing themselves in a common task. When people have honestly worked together, notliing can separate them." The stronger this community of interest is felt, in common toil or even hardship and suffer- ing, the stronger the home ties. Some people suggest a common purse, in this true home commune, with a ledger account with each member of the household ; the payment of the children for special services, with the assign- ment of regular tasks. This leads to my next suggestion: 5. The normal home relationship is one in which is clearly made the beginning of social adjustment, which is the great under- lying problem of all our modern Hfe. Charity is not the only thing that should begin at home. About everything else that is good should begin there in the little com- munity group which is the microcosm of society at large. Surely here if ever must be acquired the "fine art of getting along with people," and this social adjustment practice will of course be most effective and thorough in a large family with all normal relation- ships. Herein is the special advantage of such a home. Psychologists are urging the 302 BOY LIFE adoption of children in homes where nature gives but one or two, in order to do justice to those one or two. Surely to learn to be a comrade, a socius, a partner, an associate, is one of the important lessons which the boy should learn in the normal home, that he may early plan and prepare for a useful life. This doing things together at home is fine training for the greater teamwork of citizen- ship. The special religious phase of this topic is yet to be developed ; but this chapter would surely be incomplete without it. No home relationships will be felt to be quite normal if the religious life is given no place therein. Dean Bosworth recently remarked: "I believe we are on the eve of a great revival of family worship; not the old type perhaps, formal and perfunctory, but simple, brief, frank and natural. It's a great thing for children to hear their father pray." The recent men's movement in the great churches of the country seems to justify this prophecy. We should hail it with eager welcome and encourage it with all our power. The intelH- gent direction and stimulation of the habit of family worship on the part of men's organizations would greatly help. Let us THE BOY'S HOME 303 not return to the formal custom of the past, when a dreary ten minutes were spent on the floor ; every member of the household turning his back to all the rest. Not this; from most homes it is gone forever. But the reli- gion which is not a separate compartment in life, but interfused in life, a holy sentiment which rises to expression at different times and in different wavs ; at the breakfast table often just before the meal, while all repeat a psalm together, or a few words from the great Master ; or at other times after the more leisurely evening meal, when the burden of the day's work is laid aside and we gather together in thankfulness for the Father's blessing. Often, best a little later, when the children are about to go to bed, the sacred hour in so many homes when all are drawn most closely to each other after the frolic on the divan or the eager listening in the big arm-chair to the wonder story or the Gospel love story. Naturally and simply then come the few words from the father priest, raised in gratitude to the unseen member of the home, the Christ whose love must never be forgotten. Were I to reiterate any single point as in need of special emphasis, it would be the 304 BOY LIFE treatment of parentJwod as a profession, requiring skill and training, for which the new ps3'chologj has a large contribution to make and In which the trained boy worker may be of profoundest service; and through which intelligent cooperation w^e may reason- ably expect large results in years to come. The American boy that shall be, must be, and by the grace of God will be, a cleaner, stronger, happier boy and a more symmetri- cally developed man, a more efficient Chris- tian citizen, than are we, the generation of his fathers. It is this typical American boy of the future, 3'es, even of the present in many a home, thank God, of whom Edwin Markham sings, and to whom he is appealing in his stanza "To Young America" : " In spite of the stares of the wise and the world's derision, Dare travel the star-blazed road, dare foUow the Vision. " It breaks as a hush on the soul in the wonder of Youth, And tlie lyrical dream of the boy is the kingly- Truth. " The world is a vapor, and only the Vision is real. Yes, nothing can hold against heU but the winged Ideal." INDEX Abbott 286 Abbottsholme School 230 Adolescent rites 259fT Adult advisers in boys' clubs ....166, 221-9, 233, 292 Altruism 184, 235, 259, 262, 287, 296 Animistic instinct. The 247fif Arrested development 158 Atavism 52 Baldwin 51, 251, 254 Balliet 78 Barbarism 62 Barnes 255 Big Brother Movement, The 35, 235, 293 Blanchard 52 Bolton 52 Bosworth 302 Boy leaders. Types of 236-9 Boy life and the race life 41ff Boy saving agencies 35 Boy waste 31, 278 Boys' Brigade 227 Boys' Clubs ..75, 116ff, 161fiF, 169fiF, 179, 185ff, 207, 221fF, 278 Boys' work at liome 300 Boy's world, The 43, 201 Breaking the will 89, 95, 288 Brotherhood of David 162, 207 Buck 78 Bully, The 93, 155, 159, 162, 201, 236 Business in boy life 126fif, 131, 141, 152 By-laws of boy leadership 221-39 306 INDEX Captains of Ten 162 Catechisms 241 Chamberlain 45, 48, 52, 57, 72 Child-like races and boy life 45 Cliildren and the Kingdom of Heaven 255-7 Christian experience of boys ..85, 99, 105, 156, 159, 191, 194, 197, 227, 242, 252flf, 256fiF, 260, 264, 268ff, 298 Church and the boy, The 33, 35, 106, 168, 185, 189, 191, 197, 218, 260, 266ff, 280, 302 Cigaret habit. The 225 Citizenship 27, 110, 208, 217 Civics 214-8 Coe 56, 75, 291 College boys 156, 191, 202, 219, 239, 271ff Comradeship 101, 155, 180, 225, 292, 302 Conversion 228, 242, 260, 264-6 Crime, Juvenile 32 Culture Epochs theory. The 54ff, 59, 121, 130, 132, 142, 160, 211, 247, 252 Dawson 251 De Laveleye 129 Delayed manliness 16, 83-4 Discii)line 88, 109, 198, 215, 283, 288 Doubts 269-70, 272 Druriimond 52 Duality of boyhood. The 12, 82 Economics in boy life , 127, 141 Ellis 73 Emerson 53, gg Erni)|()y(!d boys I57 Environment, Influence of ..58, 144, 157, 212, 232, 245, 253 INDEX 307 Epochs of boyhood and youth ..147-168 (and chart) Epochs of child life 64» Evolution and God's plan 49fF Feelings of youth, The 282, 289, 296 Ferraro ■ 94 Fickleness 13 Fighting instinct. The 75, 78, 137-8, 229, 283 Fiske, John 51, 72 Franchise, The 209ff Forbush 57, 89, 112 Fraternities 79, 175, 176, 179, 183ff Froebel 247 Games and play .71-2, 76, 79, 99, 150ff, 222, 226, 229 Gangs, Boys' 76, 101*^, 110, 112ff, 154-5, 158, 159, 162, 174, 201, 216, 236 George Junior Republic 35, 213 Girls and the boy problem 187 Girls' clubs 117 Government; Stages of development 66, 154ff Group clubs and mass clubs 169-191 Gunckel 172 Habit 71, 86, 94, 100, 225, 262, 297 Hall 32, 46, 53, 180-2, 186, 190, 246, 247 Haslett 251, 257, 259 Hegel 56 Herder 48 Hero worship 102, 155, 261 Home, The boy's 277-304 Honor 156, 202, 215 Hoodlumism 108, 216 Home 70, 92, 270 Huart 74 Hutchinson 62-4, 153 308 INDEX Hyde 186, 269 Ideals in boy life 237, 262 Imagination 248fr, 250ff, 264, 279, 295 Imitation 237 Individuality 259, 263 Ingenuity 222, 234 Instincts 55, 69-86, 150ff, 246, 263 Interests 76, 116, 124, 143, 150ff, 186, 222, 231, 235, 257, 282, 298, 299 ff Jenks 30 Johnson 119ff, 139, 141 Justice among boys 124, 133, 137, 139ff Keeping the boy busy 299 Knights of King Arthur 164, 177, 190, 207 Knowlson 225 Language making 48 Latent manliness 34 Law making among boys 132, 135 Leadership 28, 104, 157, 163, 202, 221-39, 229, 230ff Lessing 56 Leverage, The law of the 201, 233 Lombroso 47 I>ongfellow 262, 264 Maine 123, 126 Manliness 17, 87-106, 200, 219, 269, 274 Mannishness 17, 239 Manual training 226 Murkham .304 McDonogh School, The 119ff, 148, 167 Mental defects 295 Moreland 119 Morgan's race epochs 61 INDEX 309 Mosso 55 Myth-making 251 Nature worship 249 Obstructed will, The 92, 98, 261 Parenthood, a profession 293, 304 Peabody 278 Personality and boy leadership 163, 175, 206, 227 Personality, Reverence for 287 Personal loyalty 102, 155, 209, 227, 261 Phear 122 Phi Alpha Pi 167, 176, 184 Pilgrim Fraternity 167, 176 Politics in boy life 25, 131, 136, 161, 208, 213 Powell 65 Precipitate will. The 92, 163, 225 Precocity 15, 73, 84, 157, 233 Recapitulation 49, 51, 53, 57ff, 69ff, 144, 246 Religion in boy life ..106, 156, 159, 191, 194, 227, 241-75, 303 Religion in the home 281, 302 Religion in young manhood 178, 266 ff Renan 250 Ritual and the spectacular 177, 180-3 Roosevelt 195 Rudimentary society among boys 119-45 Savage, The boy and the 46ff, 80ff School discipline 109 Scott 26, 28, 109, 216, 218, 224, 226 Secrecy 79, 177, 179 Self-control 100, 154, 208, 224 Self-government 23, 118, 143, 145, 160, 165ff, 168, 198-9, 202, 205-19 Self-reliance 103, 156, 200, 203, 228 310 INDEX Self-respect 290 Seton , 229 Sex life 74, 188, 211, 258 Sheldon 115, 117 Social adjustment at home 101, 285, 301 Social development 26ff, 173ff Social gospel, The 273-4 Social impulse. The Ill, 173, 188, 191 Social organization 107ff, 161, 182, 189 Social radius, The law of the 173, 176, 233, 259 Societies among boys 107fF, 119, 160ff, 169fif Starbuck 300 Temptation 105, 224, 284 Trust 290 Van Liew 60, 208 Vocational interests 77, 153 Wallace 123, 134 Will achievement. Stages of 100, 174, 208, 223 Will allegiance of boys 154ff, 159 Will crisis. The 87ff, 284 Will development, Principles of 97-9, 297 Woodcraft Indians 163, 229 Work 94, 99 Young Men's Christian Association, The 35, 81, 104^ 158, 193-203, 273, 277, 286, 294 '-!^^""THFRN RrniorjAi i irrary facii ITY AA 000 426 165 7 LOS ANGEL :, STATE NORMAL SCHOOL i:;. iW '.111 iijiii ijiiii !j I ;; , mm imi )!'!(' !';i!!i':n{i