Builder of Empires

Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell was an empire builder of the Kipling school. All set to enter Oxford at the age of 19, he took a crack at the Army examinations for a lark, finished second out of 700 and wound up as a subaltern in the 13th Hussars in India. An expert at reconnaissance, he served with the 13th in the Afghan War in 1881. On service in Zululand he won the name of Impeesa (The Wolf that Never Sleeps) from the awed natives, moved on to Ashanti and Matabeleland. By the time of the Boer War he was a colonel in command of Mafeking, where he held off the Boers with a heroic 217-day defense. In 1907, aged 50, big-game hunter, author of Aids to Scouting, an Empire hero, he was back in England as Inspector-General of Cavalry.

That summer Empire-Builder Baden-Powell, with one career behind him, had an idea for another. In a camp at Brown-sea Island he gathered 21 young Britons together, began teaching them the rudiments of scouting. The following winter the Boy Scouts were inaugurated in Birkenhead, two years later the Girl Guides were started with the help of his sister, and he resigned from the Army.

The ideas he taught spread fast. Within six months after Birkenhead there were 80,000 scouts in Britain. The movement spread abroad as well. In 1910 the Boy Scouts of America were organized in a combination of such existing groups as Ernest Thompson Seton's Indians and Daniel Carter Beard's Sons of Daniel Boone. At the Third World Jamboree in 1929 Sir Robert Baden-Powell, Chief of the Boy Scouts of the World, met with 50,000 scouts from 73 countries. That year raised to the peerage for his work, Baron Baden-Powell of Gilwell had built a new empire of good and useful young citizens--nonmilitary, nonpolitical, nonracial, inter-sectarian.

It was too good a thing for totalitarianism to miss. Instead of the Scouts' motto, "Be Prepared." Italy's Balilla leaders preached: "Believe, Obey, Fight"; instead of democracy, "Mussolini is always right." Naziism began its youth organizations with a will, started pumping them full of fine Nazi phrases: "There is no greater honor than death for the Fuehrer," "Command and we follow."

Three years ago, old Lord Baden-Powell trekked off to his plantation in Kenya. There one day last week, aged 83, he died, where he had hoped to, "in Africa where my heart is."

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