CHIEF OF BOY SCOUTS.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 5121, 4 May 1927, Page 3

CHIEF OF BOY SCOUTS.

MAJOR-GENERAL BADEN-POWELL. WORK OF THE MOVEMENT. There were, many tributes recently . Major-General Baden-Powell, the of the Boy Scout movement, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. The “Manchester Giuardian” says:— “Th& point about the sort of play which Baden-Powell has devised and instituted is that it does elicit in those who practise it something valuable valuable to themselves and valuable to the Beyond doubt or question they become, better boys, better men, better citizens ; necessarily, therefore, also happier boys and men and making for a better and 'happier community. “That surely is a great discovery, a great achievement. Men have had statues put up to them and received coronets and dukedoms for. services of infinitely less worth to their country and the world. “For the implications of this new community of the Scout and the spirit Informing it are very wide and strike very deep. The first thi,ng to be noted about it is that its range is worldwide, and in this vast extension it has shed nothing of its original spirit, - the kindly, humane, humorous spirit of its founder. It has almost become a kind of religion resting on the simplest and also the most transforming of conceptions, that of the brotherhood of men and of. scouts. “ If anybody doubts it let him go to one of the annuel assemblies of the Scouts of all nations and of their instructors, the scoutmasters. There he will find not only the differences L of* nationality, but, wonderful to reK 'jate, the differences also of race and colour, completely ignored and overthrown. “He will find the white man and the brown man and the yellow man (perhaps also —we do not know —the black man), boy and man, meeting together, playing together, learning together as brother Scouts and brother men. It is really rather wonderful, and people, don’t perhaps quite realise that here, beneath their eyes, is taking place a transformation which, if only it goes far enough, will fulfil the very ideal of religion and make war between nations an anachronism and an absurdity. “That of course-, Is to look a long way forward, but there are to-day, or there were, we believe, when the founder last computed them, some r"two million Scouts of all nations actually enrolled, and perhaps as many birthday presents; he is already, perhaps, the richest man on earth.”