It is to participation in such a nation-wide service, and to local leadership in enriching the lives and purposes of local boys that the Scout Executive comes. His is not only to train boys to serve their Community but to bring the Community into a Consciousness of its boy resources and probable wastage and to help the Community serve its boys..

What Awaits His Leadership

The welfare of the boy through the community's men, is the business of the Scout Executive.

The community, with all of its rich, oft-unmined spiritual and man-power resources awaits awakening to a consciousness of boy-need. It then awaits mobilization to begin better meeting that need. The Scoutmasters expect the Scout Executive's help and ever sympathetic counsel in their vital task of enriching boy life through purposeful companionship.

All these await his vision, the exhilarating influence of his fine character and manhood, the skill of his informed, trained leadership, his recurrent inspiration to cooperate in boy service, and his inspiring example of an effective mastery of self, of job, of the use of time. The Community

The community is fundamental in Scouting. 20% of its population are boys-boys with all the mysterious impulses and contradictions which real boys exhibit. Very, very few of them are necessarily bad boys-but the impulse to action, to adventure makes it imperative that there be leadership in providing activities for them. Boys will do things if left entirely alone, be it in the country or on the crowded, sociallydiseased streets of the city. But what things will they do? Who can predict? Even the boys cannot foretell.

What they do, fixes their habits and habits are the woof and warp of character. The welfare of the community demands certain definite standards of ideals and conduct. Such standards rest ultimately on habits. To expect such habits to be the by-product of accident or unweighted chance is to expect the unnatural. Only as the community can provide selected,

purposeful, and intrinsically attractive things for its boys to do can it with a measure of confidence look for results worthy of the term social education.

Surveys of various communities indicate that seven to ten per cent of the population are between the ages of 12 and 18 or 20. The Tenth Annual Report of the Boy Scouts of America indicates that various community councils are reaching from 3% to 50% of these boys.

In New York State a careful study revealed that of 300,000 boys amenable to the Military Training Act, less than 30,000 were being reached by the school. Meanwhile the urban home finds increased difficulty in holding its boys while the number of those touched and gripped by various religious bodies is in no sense enough to satisfy their own spiritual standards. Probably more than 1/4 of the time of the average school boy is leisure time.

While vocationally purposeful activities must be gradually introduced no careful, informed analyst of boy-nature and of the physiology and psychology of play would have it otherwise.

That leisure time, however, must be filled with activities which shall socially educate the boys - prepare them to take their place in the Community life not only as self-supporting but as socially-motivated members. Experience has shown that the Scout program supplementing and used by the church, the home, the school does provide a very definite and effective means for the formation of socially essential and desirable habits.

Experience has also shown that the Scout Oath and Law the heart and life of the Scout spirit—and the spirit of social service, the "Good Turn" and indeed the whole new attitude of alertness carry over into the boys' daily affairs in the church, the home, and the school-thus reacting at once upon the community.

The Scout Executive, therefore comes to the community not alone as its skilled servant, not alone as a modest, yet ready, member of the community to participate in its life, but he comes to help this com

munity discover its boys-underprivileged, overprivileged and average-who, where and how they are and in the light of such facts to bring the community to make maximal provision to meet its opportunity and its obligation to its boys.

The Local Council

The local Council is the community organization through which community interest in scouting becomes articulate. It represents the transition from volunteer supervision to paid supervision of the general scouting activities of the community. It presupposes numerous boys to be served and a number of troops actual or potential.

Article National Council Constitution.

Clause 1-Purpose. In order to relieve the National Council to the fullest extent practicable of the responsibility for leadership and supervision of troops of scouts, and the extension of the Boy Scout Movement, it shall be the policy of the National Council, through its Field Department, to encourage the organization of local councils in towns, cities, and counties throughout the country, in accordance with the organization policy herein set forth, when such local councils provide an adequate budget for the maintenance of the local headquarters, the conduct of a boy scout camp, and the employment of one or more men one of whom shall act as Scout Executive and devote his entire time to the promotion and supervision of the program of the Boy Scouts of America. Councils thus organized and chartered shall be known and designated as councils of the first class.

It must be "a group of citizens representative of the institutions in which scout troops are organized, and of the independent troops, and of the business, civic, educational and religious interests of the territory" involved.

NOTE-While the Scout Executive is from the nature of things concerned with the First Class Councils, (i. e. those who have Executives) yet he should not forget that half of the Scouts in the Country are not yet under his type of organization.

This group organizes, (see P. 74 Constitution and By Laws) elects its officers, registers at the office of the National Council formal evidence as required under Federal Charter of having met the requirement

set by the National Constitution for those who would bear the name of the Boy Scouts of America, effects financial plans, selects an executive (in First Class Councils) who under their direction, is executively responsible for furthering the community's boy service. This group approves and directs, and under the inspiration of a real executive may be made and kept active and hence interested in the performance of worth while work for boys.

The local council has a very definite responsibility to the boys and to the Nation to see to it that evidences are presented to it from time to time that real scout training and life is being experienced by their boys.

They must see to it that their executive sees to it that mere entertainment or amusement of scouts (important as these are) does not pass for the real thing. Scouting is a balanced program of pleasurable activities and of outdoor and life craft, but character building and citizenship habits through doing and living these in companionship with high-minded adults are the real heart of the Movement. The Local Council must guard against counterfeit service to boys as the eternal values involved are too priceless to subject to chance.

The Local Council is not an organization in and of itself, but is rather a body which exists to represent the citizenship of the entire community. The Executive therefore, though employed by the Executive Board of the Council, is in reality working for, and through his council is responsible to the community as a whole.

The Parent Institution

A church, a school, a Y. M. H. A., a Y. M. C. A., a Board of Trade, a grange, a club some relatively permanent form of community life will have a number of boys in the families it represents.

This social group becomes the "Parent Institution" when it provides its boys with scouting privileges. It has been the policy of the Scout Movement to thus be used by local agencies already in the community.

The Parent Institution gives a definite guaranty of troop permanence for the year to which it binds itself through its troop committee to—

"(a) Provide the necessary facilities for meetings
of the Troop.

(b) Provide adequate leadership, including the
supervision of a man, 21 years of age or over
to be commissioned as Scoutmaster and of a
committee of adults who will visit the Troop
and cooperate in its direction and supervis-
ion.

(c) Endeavor to provide an opportunity for the
members of the Troop to spend a week or
more in a summer camp.

(d) Conduct the Troop in accordance with the
Rules and Regulations of the National
Council of the Boy Scouts of America."

Indeed it gives promise of permanence beyond that period to serve the following generations of boys who will come on-needing companionship.

The place and purpose of the Parent Institution may be further indicated by the following article by H. W. Hurt which appeared in Scouting, Feb. 26, 1920:

"Boys-A Scoutmaster-A 'Parent Institution'

These are the three elements, but one's sober second thought reverses the order.

Should the Scoutmaster move or die or tire, what then.

To be fair to the boys and to give them some guaranty of an unbroken chance to secure and enjoy Scout training-the organization of the troop must structurally begin with some relatively permanent group in the community.