On January 24 of 1908, in what does seem a vanished era of tranquility and earnestness, Robert Baden-Powell organized the first Boy Scout troop. But those days were not as tranquil as they seem, the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts are still enormously popular, and the mission of forming character is not as obsolete as some might suppose.

To begin with, Baden-Powell formed the Scouts in the wake of the (Second) Boer War, which had proved far more challenging for the British army than anticipated and which concluded less than a decade and a half before the outbreak of World War One. During the conflict then-Colonel Baden-Powell became a hero for his successful conduct of the defence of Mafeking, aided by the Mafeking Cadet Corps formed by Lord Edward Cecil.

Deeply impressed by the Corps, Baden-Powell wrote Scouting for Boys, based on his earlier Aids to Scouting, a brief guide to military scouting and wilderness survival that, he noticed, was exceptionally popular with boys. A huge success, currently the fourth best-selling book of all time, its tone might seem outdated. But the spirit of self-reliance, duty and cheerfulness it inculcated clearly helped Britain and Canada win World War I.

The scouts have changed enormously since 1908, mostly in good ways. Baden-Powell’s sister Agnes created the Girl Guides just two years later (after a group of girls showed up at the first Scout Rally in 1909 in uniform and informed Baden-Powell they were the "Girl Scouts," a commendable exhibition of initiative that evidently struck "B-P" as he is sometimes known as favourably as it does me. Agnes also created the Brownies (originally Rosebuds) for younger girls while Baden-Powell’s wife took over as president of the Girl Guides in 1920.

Among other changes, the uniform has been adapted over many decades for greater practicality as well as a not necessarily beneficial greater casualness. And at least some branches have dropped God from their pledge. But while one must I suppose move with the world, not too far or too fast. And sometimes one must stand against the world.

So it is worth reading the words of Baden-Powell, then nearly 80, at the Scouts’ 1937 World Jamboree, in the shadow of Hitler in a world in which racial prejudice was taken to be so normal one faced ostracism for not sharing it. The Scout uniform, B-P declared proudly, "hides all differences of social standing in a country and makes for equality; but, more important still, it covers differences of country and race and creed, and makes all feel that they are members with one another of the one great brotherhood".

Surely that surprisingly modern sentiment casts a different and more favourable light on the supposedly stuffy, naïve, chauvinistic and even jingoistic "stiff upper lip" tally ho chaps ambiance of Edwardian England. Just as the scouts’ methods for promoting self-reliance and cooperation simultaneously is strikingly up-to-date for something from that vanished era.

So here’s a confession. I have never read Scouting for Boys. But I think I’m the worse for it, and intend to track down a copy.

As a result of the "Affair of the Placards," six Protestants were burned at the stake in front of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on January 21, 1535. And while it’s fashionable to mock those WWJD bracelets as cloyingly sentimental, there are worse questions you could ask yourself. Especially if you’re, you know, a Christian cleric or would-be governmental defender of the faith.

When I say this grisly execution happened "as a result of" the Affair of the Placards, it might be more precise to say it happened afterward and on the ostensible basis of it. The Affair itself was the scandalous posting of a series of aggressive protestant posters in Paris and other French cities denouncing the Catholic mass. They were intended to be offensive, and it worked. But the total number of people killed during their production and display was zero. Not even the King of France.

Here I say "not even" because one of the placards was actually put on his bedroom door in Ambois. It was not merely an affront but a pointed demonstration that had they chosen to they could have gone in and killed him. But they did not, nor did they try to. So he responded with a big public show of affirming his Catholic faith, reversed his earlier policy of trying to protect French Protestants from their more aggressive Catholic countrymen.

Bear in mind that France was dangerously riven by religious sentiment at this point, and a very great distance indeed from any real conception of separation of Church and State. Indeed they still have issues with it, being militantly secular. (I know it has been said that atheism is a religion in the same sense that not collecting stamps is a hobby. But I disagree. Atheism offers equally firm answers to the same full range of metaphysical questions, and to enforce it through the state is not religious neutrality.) So I have to ask two key questions.

First, did either side gain anything by being deliberately obnoxious? I grant the Protestant grievance at being silenced on theological questions and living in perpetual fear of extreme mob violence. (In the wake of the Placards a number of leading Protestants pre-emptively fled France including John Calvin.) But to have posted reasonable comments on the advantages of free discussion of religion would have been a better move, surely, than to put up something highly likely to provoke Catholics into measures that further inflamed feelings in ways that reduced the likelihood of their acting with genuine charity.

As for the Catholics, to respond with extra-legal violence and state murder could not have been better calculated to reinforce their non-co-religionists’ worst suspicions about their motives and the need to arm against them. So everybody lost, and France spiraled into religious wars, intolerance and intellectual stagnation.

Among those who lost most, surely, are the self-proclaimedly Catholic king and the clergy who said there’s probably nothing Jesus would like better, nothing he’d be more likely to do if he were here, than to destroy some fellow human beings as horribly, painfully and messily as possible right at our best church. Oh yeah. I’m sure that’s in the Sermon on the Mount somewhere.

"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the industrious out of it. You don’t multiply wealth by dividing it. Government cannot give anything to anybody that it doesn’t first take from somebody else. Whenever somebody receives something without working for it, somebody else has to work for it without receiving. The worst thing that can happen to a nation is for half of the people to get the idea they don’t have to work because somebody else will work for them, and the other half to get the idea that it does no good to work because they don’t get to enjoy the fruit of their labor." Adrian Pierce Rogers in his 1996 Ten Secrets for a Successful Family (frequently misattributed online, incidentally)

"The mark of civilization, says [Yale professor David] Gelernter, is the shortening of the list of reasons that justify taking human life. But now footnotes are being added to the list." Richard John Neuhaus in First Things January 2004

"This book argues that our civilization depends, not only for its origin but also for its preservation, on what can be precisely described only as the extended order of human cooperation, an order more commonly, if somewhat misleadingly, known as capitalism." First sentence in Friedrich Hayek The Fatal Conceit

In my latest National Post column I argue that the horrifying fate of Aleppo reminds us that things are better in Canada than in most of the world, and that they are better because of our beliefs and habits, a.k.a. our "Canadian values".

In my latest National Post column I lament the casual way the Ontario government has breached doctor-patient confidentiality including laughing off search warrants.

In my latest National Post column, I object to people imposing facile negative gender stereotypes on the men's rights movement.