BOY SCOUTS.

   Sir Henry May's speech yesterday evening will be read with deep interest by the parents of Hongkong, and, we hope, by a large number of our boys. Many of us will sigh, with him, that when we were boys nobody thought of organizing brigades for us. Times have advanced indeed, and infinitely for the better. The Rev. H.O.Spink has organized a Boy's Brigade at Kowloon, and under his experienced guidance a company of our rising generation will be given the advantage of what His Excellency calls "a mission amongst boys to organize them and teach them useful knowledge, athletics and games, and to assist them to learn obedience and discipline, to become clean, strong and upright men." Sir Henry was followed by Colonel St. John, the officer commanding the troops in South China, who in a few admirable and manly words land stress on His Excellency's advice to boys about their bodies, pointing out that to keep them well and clean as well as their minds, was to extend the Kingdom of the best Man of all. Cleanliness and vigour of body do indeed make for purity and strength of mind, and this "Scout" system of training invented and established by General Sir R.S. Baden-Powell develops also a sense of honour and respect for all noble and lair things which add new joys to boyhood while lending it a graciousness and even a dignity which it too often lacks in the absence of those virtues, or in their imperfect possession and realization. For a really fine boy will generally make a really fine man, and this "Scout" system is no ideal training to that end. We would not seem ungrateful or churlish, or faultfinding; but is it not a little to be regretted that this Scout movement in Hongkong should be associated with anything like sectarianism. We welcome most warmly Mr. Spink's kind offices, but could they not have been secured without even the appearance of the Church's shadow. We note that some others interested in the scout movement met yesterday evening at the schoolroom of the Union Church? We cannot but approve of every scout organization, but we deplore the plain fact that the two first of these are associated with religious and sectarian activity, and that one should have already received the blessing of our Government while the other was still out in the cold of a Union Church schoolroom. We should like Boy Scouts to be wholly unsectarian, unconnected as Boy Scouts with any religious body, though individually and personally devout Christians and sincere members of whatever sect they adhere to.