People's Pilot, Volume 2, Number 51, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 June 1893 — The Beys' Brlgade. [ARTICLE]

The Beys' Brlgade.

The average boy doesn’t care very much for the average Sunday school, although the average boy is just the person the average Sunday school is after. The boy’s lack of interest has been no secret for a long time, and various methods of arousing something like enthusiasm on his part have been resorted to with more or less success, the gauge of the interest aroused generally being the novelty of the method adopted.

This was the reason of the origin of the Boys’ Brigade. It started in Glasgow about ten years ago. Mr. William A. Smith was its originator. He was interested in Sunday school work and devoted a great deal of thought to the problem of howto make the schools more attractive to boys and at the same time enforce the necessary dicipline. It occured to him that “by handing them together into a military company for weekday drill he could teach them valuable lessons in obedience, patience, neatness, punctuality, without their being conscious of it and almost in the form of amusement.” The drill was accordingly instituted and kept up during the winter. It was so successful that the idea spread to other Glasgow Sunday schools and then to England, Ireland, Canada, the United States and elsewhere.

The first American company was organized in San Francisco in 1889, and the national headquarters are in that city. Then companies were formed in the central and eastern and ; these sections now have their own divisions, each with its executive officers. There are already more than 200 companies, and new ones are being enrolled every day. The brigade is wholly undenominational, and organization is simple. Each company is connected with a church, and all members must belong to a Sunday school. The captain and lieutenants are appointed by the school authorities, and the boys elect sergeants and corporals. The regulation uniform is a blue blouse, blue trousers and blue cap, but some of the companies have adopted the West Point cadet gray. Many of the companies use dummy rifles at the but the boys prefer the real thing, and regular army guns are being rapidly adopted. There is a weekly military drill, and some of the companies go off in the country in the summer time on a regular encampment like the national guard. In towns having more than one company competitive drills are sometimes held, and there is quite a rivalry between the young soldiers to uphold the efficiency of their companies.