At a meeting of Edinburgh Business Club on 13th October last, Mr. Hector M. McKerrow, headmaster of Wellington Farm Approved School, Midlothian, spoke of young people today going astray. He said this was “because of parental neglect and lack of discipline in the home . . . A lad gets too much today, not too little. He asks and gets whatever he wants. If he doesn’t get what he wants, he sulks—and eventually takes.” He said further that over half of the
boys at the Approved School were there because they had been spoilt at home. It was not a prison but a place where the young offender was helped and received corrective treatment. Mr. McKerrow said that the first thing the boys were taught was discipline—”A boy must learn to do what he is told when he is told. We must try to raise his moral standard and he must be trained to apply himself to hard work.” These are revealing and interesting statements. But how discouraging it is that there are so many homes where essential discipline is lacking. Of course the Word of God reveals as a sin of perilous times “disobedience to parents,” which in cases means a reckless disregard for authority. The power of the gospel of Christ is the cure for old and young, parents and children.
Papist Tutor to the Prince of Wales.
Lieut. Jean Lajeunesse, a regular officer of the Royal 22nd Regiment, came from Canada to Balmoral to be companion-tutor to the Prince of Wales. He attended Roman Catholic schools in Montreal and afterwards graduated at Montreal University. He was chosen after the Queen had expressed a wish for an officer in her own regiment to give the Prince an opportunity to increase his fluency in conversational French. As the Ulster Protestant, for October records: “To the Queen’s loyal Protestant subjects this will seem a strange appointment, seeing that at her Coronation Her Majesty declared that she was a “faithful Protestant. . . . it is surely desirable that a person brought into intimate association with him (the Prince) as companion-tutor should also be a faithful Protestant.” On the lips of Protestants all over the Nation, these same words have been heard—”A strange appointment!”