It is stated that quite a number of youths, from the Confederacy, who were pursuing their studies in England, have unexpectedly returned to their native land, and given as a reason for the abrupt termination of their scholastic engagements, the constant jeers and ridicule of their British schoolfellows, who were eternally taunting them for their absence from home while their country was engaged in a struggle of life and death.
It is impossible to rebuke with severity the inconsiderate conduct of these young gentlemen, who were, no doubt, sent to England without consulting their wishes; perhaps, in many cases, against their own inclinations. Under the circumstances, their parents ought not to punish them with too much severity, nor send them back to England by the next packet. Youth is the season of rash, generous and disinterested impulses. A boy always has his head full of fighting and fair play, and it is more than you can expect of juvenile human nature to keep its eyes on a book and be amusing itself with dead languages when it sees its own house set on fire and the red blood of its own brothers and sisters staining the threshold. Sidney Smith once declared that boys ought to be put under a barrel and kept there from fourteen to twenty-one, as the only mode of keeping them out of mischief. We certainly cannot expect boys to act like men. Besides, the army is, after all, a very good school for Confederate boys. They can learn there what will be more useful to them hereafter, and to mankind, than all they can acquire at the best classical schools. There is no teacher of grammar in England who can convey to them, for example, the meaning of a verb — to be, to do, to suffer,--as they will learn it in the Confederate army. If they want Greek, they will find a living Greece in the Thermopylæ of the Confederacy; or Latin, there is Robert E. Lee, the best Roman of the day, at the head of the Southside University, with a good many thousand promising boys under his charge, who do the Latin exercises in a style that the world has never seen since the days of Cæsar.
At any rate, the parents of these returning youths should not expect from them the discretion and self-command of the grown-up Confederate men, who, having remained in their country, and given her the benefit of their counsel and advice till her affairs became unfortunate, felt constrained, by a sense of duty to themselves and their posterity, to make their home on a foreign soil.
‘ "Now all is done that men could do,
And all is done in vain,
My love, my native land, adieu,
For I maun cross the main, my dear,
For I maun cross the main."
’
The boys having gone to England against their will, and the men of their own free choice, it is obvious that no such obligation could exist to remain abroad in the first case as in the last. --Besides, all that the boys could pick up in England would be intellectual cultivation, whereas their seniors have the solid advantage of saving their bacon and solacing their inner man with better cheer than is to be found at Eton and Harrow. The spectacle of these exiled patriots discussing huge surloins of beef and quaffing vast goblets of ale, while their countrymen are hungering and bleeding at home, must satisfy the world that the South is not altogether that race of impulsive and hot-headed abstractionists which it is often represented. We dare say that these well-fed exiles have their trials too — just the trials which maddened the more sensitive youngsters and drove them back to their country. --No doubt the sturdy Britons, as far as politeness will permit, give them occasional hints that a Confederate abroad in these times is more out of place than a Yankee, but it is about as easy to reach the sensibilities of such persons by the pricks and stings of sarcasm as to puncture the hide of a hippopotamus with a knitting-needle. They would rather hear a roar of derisive laughter than the roar of artillery, and the keenest irony can inflict no such wounds as a Minnie bullet. We are happy to assure their friends that there is no danger of the Confederate men in Europe imitating the Confederate boys, and running away to their country.
