Scouting for Empire
If the British Empire were to be saved, it would take a renewal of Britain’s youth. Robert Baden-Powell had the answer: self-reliance, patriotism and the Boy Scouts.
‘There suddenly appeared in my world – I saw them first, I think, in 1908 – a new sort of little boy, a most agreeable development of the slouching, cunning, cigarette-smoking, town-bred youngster, a small boy in a khaki hat, and with bare knees and athletic bearing, earnestly engaged in wholesome and invigorating games up to and occasionally a little beyond his strength – the Boy Scout. I liked the Boy Scout, and I find it difficult to express how much it mattered to me, with my growing bias in favour of deliberate national training, that Liberalism hadn't been able to produce, and had indeed never attempted to produce anything of this kind.’ H.G. Wells, The New Machiavelli (1911)
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