CHAPTER IX
.
PATRIOTISM;
or,
Our Duties as Citizens.
CAMP FIRE YARN.--No. 26. OUR EMPIRE.
How it Grew--How it Must be Held.
HINTS TO INSTRUCTORS.
_The use of a large Map of the Empire is very desirable for illustrating this. The Arnold Forster or the Navy League or the League of the Empire Map are very good, and we hope to issue one specialty designed for the Boy Scouts._
_Look up the local history of your neighbourhood, and give your scouts the more interesting and dramatic bits of it, on the actual scene of the events if possible._
OUR EMPIRE.
Any of you who have travelled much about this country by train, going for your holidays and so on, know how two or three hours will take you a good long distance and six or eight hours will take you to the other end of England.
Well, if instead of hours you travelled for as many days, even six or eight days would take you a very little way over our Empire. It would get you into Canada, but you would want several more days--not hours--to get you across that country. Eighteen days' hard travelling day and night would get you to India or South Africa, but either of these are little more than half way to Australia. And all that distance off, across the seas, on the other side of the world, we have a British country into which you could put nine Great Britains and Irelands.
9 United Kingdoms = 1 Australia. 10 " = 1 Canada. 6 " = 1 India and Burma. 5 " = East Africa, Uganda, and Soudan. 5 " = South Africa. 1 " = New Zealand. 1-1/2 " = Nigeria.
Then there are numbers of smaller Colonies or Dependencies, such as Guiana (nearly as big as the United Kingdom), North Borneo, New Guinea, Somaliland, Straits Settlements, Gold Coast, West Indies, Tasmania, etc., and numbers of islands in ever sea all over the world.
Our Colonies together are something like forty times the size of the United Kingdom at home.
Our fellow-subjects amount to four hundred millions, and comprise almost every known race. Almost every known species of wild animal occurs in British territory.
It is a magnificent Empire over which the Union Jack flies, but it is still only at the beginning of its development. The territories are there, but the people are only coming. The white population of all these Colonies only amounts to a little over a quarter of the population of our crowded little island. We have nearly forty-four millions here; they have among the colonies a little over eleven millions.
Many of you scouts, as you grow up, will probably become scouts of the nation, and will find your way to some of the Colonies to help to push them up into big prosperous countries. Your scout's training will come in very useful to you there. But when you go there you must be prepared to work, and to work hard, and to turn your hand to any kind of job.
HOW OUR EMPIRE GREW.
All those vast Colonies did not come to England of themselves. They were got for us by the hard work and the hard fighting of our forefathers.
AMERICA.--When we first got to America it took Sir Walter Raleigh, Captain John Smith, and other great pioneers four or five months to get there in their little cockleshells of ships, some of them only 30 tons measurement--no bigger than a Thames barge. Nowadays you can get there in five or six days, instead of months, in steamers of 30,000 tons.
Think of the pluck of those men tackling a voyage like that, with very limited supply of water and salt food. And, when they got to land with their handful of men, they had to overcome the savages, and in some cases other Europeans, like the Dutch, the Spaniards, and the French; and then they had hard work to till the ground, to build settlements, and to start commerce.
Hard sailoring, hard soldiering, hard colonising by those old British sea-dogs, Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh, Hawkins, Frobisher, and, best of all to my mind, Captain John Smith.
He left Louth Grammar School in Lincolnshire to become a clerk in an office, but he soon went off to the wars. After two years' fighting he returned home.
He admitted he had gone out as a "tenderfoot," and had not properly prepared himself as a boy for a life of adventure; so he set to work then and there to learn scouting. He built himself a hut in the woods, and learnt stalking game, and killing and cooking it for himself; he learnt to read maps and to draw them, and also the use of weapons; and then, when he had made himself really good at scoutcraft, he went off to the wars again.
He afterwards became a sailor, fought in some very tough sea-fights, and eventually, in 1607, he went with an expedition to colonise Virginia in America. They sailed from London in three ships, the biggest of which was only 100 tons, the smallest 30 tons. But they got there after five months, and started a settlement on the James River.
Here John Smith was captured by the Red Indians one day when out shooting (as you have seen by the play in