Message of Baden Powell to all good Scouts:

Message of Baden Powell to all good Scouts:

“Any fool can smoke but a wise Scout doesn’t.

In the Boy Scout Movement our aim is, as far as possible, so to shape our syllabus as to make it a practical form of character training.

The camp must be a busy one and not a school for aimless loafing.

A Scout official’s line is rather that of an older brother or a father to his boys than of an officer or a schoolmaster.

Our aim is to get hold of the boys and to open up their minds, to bring out each lad’s character and no two are alike, and to make them into good men for God and their Country, to encourage them to be energetic workers and to be honorable, manly fellows with a brotherly feeling for one another.

It is by the character of its citizens, not by the force of its arms, that a country rises superior to others.

We were against war; we were not against self defense. We are helping to build the foundations for the eventual establishment of common interests and friendships which will ultimately and automatically bring about disarmament and a permanent peace.

Our object is to wean them from indoors and to make the outdoors attractive to them. We are not a brigade - nor a Sunday School - but a School of the Woods. We must get more into the open for the health, whether of the body or the soul, of Scout and of Scoutmaster.

We want to show the boys how to be happy, how to enjoy life, both in the present, and in the future. By encouraging, in a healthy, cheery, and not in a sanctimonious and looking-for-reward spirit, your Scouts to do good turns as a first step, and to do service for the community as a development, you can do more for them even then by encouraging their proficiency or their discipline or their knowledge, because you are teaching them not how to get a living so much as how to live.

What is Scouting? It is brotherhood - a scheme which, in practice, disregards differences of class, creed, country and color, through the undefinable spirit that pervades it.

We are a movement, not an organization.

The spirit of adventure is inherent in almost every boy, but adventure is hard for him to find in the crowded city. One reads of gangs of boys of all ages, self-organized for crime, boarding lorries for systematic robbery, stealing motor cars, holding up wayfarers, etc. Stout lads! What Scouts they would make, if we had the men to handle them! But what sort of citizens are they going to make, if left to drift? We in the Boy Scouts want to prepare our lads for the future that lies before them.

Let us tackle it, with all the joy of the adventure in these dangerous times, to build up with the help of God a valuable breed of young citizens for the future safety, honor, and welfare of our nation.

The end is character — character with a purpose. And that purpose, that the next generation be sane in an insane world, and develop the higher realization of Service, the active service of Love and Duty to God and neighbor.”

- Lord.Robert Baden Powell