The Modern Chivalry

I.

NOTHING could be more remarkable than the extent of the modern indulgence in sport, except perhaps the rapidity with which it has come upon us. Men who still regard themselves as young recall the time when, outside a small circle in two or three Eastern universities, sport was associated with schoolboys in knee trousers and with corner loafers in highly colored linen and cheap jewelry. But nowadays the bench and the bar may be seen to glory in knickerbockers, while pink shirts have not been unknown to the most exquisite. It is perhaps natural that cautious parents have tried to dissuade their offspring from what seems at the best childish, and at the worst perilous; and that the most scholarly of our magazines, reviews, and daily papers have been divided on the question of intercollegiate contests, while the very faculties of the universities have neglected academic administration and finance in an effort to grapple with it. The satirist is more than justified who described the American university as a place where the students manage the studies, while the professors manage the sports. Yet many a doubtful pass might have been clear, and many a hard word might have been spared, if we had all realized that the point at issue has been pretty well threshed out in the mother country of modern sport, and that it is, in fact, one of the oldest questions in history.

The animus of the puristic press is precisely that of the modern English Puritan, — Trafalgar-Squaring, as Mr. Pinero would say, on the Curse of Sports; and this, in turn, is milk and honey beside the invective of rare old Stubbs in his sixteenth-century Anatomic of Abuses. And long before Stubbs the spirit of sport was mighty in the land. While yet the “friendlie fights ” of “ base foot ball players ” were unknown, chivalry flourished like the green bay tree, transcending the glory of modern football; Rome made a political centre of the chariot races, and the calendar of Hellas was regulated by Olympiads. More than this, the Assyrians of the date of 600 B. c. made a royal virtue of braving the perils of the chase, as any one may see in the exquisitely spirited sculptures, now in the British Museum, which once graced the banqueting hall of Asurbanipal. And one need not rest with the evidences of even the most ancient history. The instinct for play is native in all animal life, and has lately been made the subject of a shrewd psychological research by Professor Karl Groos, of the University of Basel, in two works on The Play of Animals and The Play of Man. It need not surprise us if it is one day discovered that the original protozoan prepared its offspring for the struggle of life by holding oozing matches in the depths of ocean. The only question which tyrannous nature has left open to us is, not whether there shall be sport, but how we shall derive the most benefit from it.

That the national games of Greece bore an important part in the cultivation of Hellenic manhood does not admit of argument; and the jousts of the Middle Ages had an even clearer relationship to the military system. The importance of modern athletics as an element of national defense should be equally clear, and indeed was made so some years ago in English discussions of the relation of school sports to the national army. The signal aspect of our athletic system is an aspect in which it differs from that of all other ages. The new factors are those which have made a tabula rasa in so many phases of modern life, — steam and electricity; in a word, machinery. To the gentleman of Washington’s day — and for that matter, of very much later — the walks of life were literal walks, or else journeys, no less athletic, in the saddle. To the modern the socalled walks of life have become mad rushes by railway, trolley, or motor car. The mechanic of our fathers worked a loom by hand, wielded the cobbler’s hammer or the carpenter’s saw and chisel. To-day the mechanic feeds a machine or directs pneumatic tools, while his muscles fall into a stupor. The husbandman of old ploughed, harrowed, and hoed by hand; the modern farmer is a master machinist. In short, that struggle for existence, which we now know to be the origin and rough foster father of progress, is no longer waged by muscle and sinew; it is a matter of intelligence and of nervous energy.

This fact, I take it, has been, consciously or unconsciously, the major premise of those who reprobate athletic sports. We are no longer doomed, they say, to live as mere animals. What need of lithe muscles and sinews trained to endurance, when applied knowledge is the only power ? Warfare itself — since so much of the brute is still honored among us — is soon to be a mere matter of railroading, marine engineering, and machine guns. Some such fact must be granted, but is the deduction sound ? More sound than sense, one is tempted to say.

The logic of the position outlined can lead to only one conclusion, and that is that in the man of the present the sinews and the muscles are disappearing, together with tonsils, vermiform appendixes, and sundry other survivals of an earlier stage of brute life; the sooner we are rid of them, the better. If this really were the case, however, we should expect the man of the present to be a creature of sounder nerves and a more tireless brain than the man of history. The patent fact is that he is rather a victim of neurosis and mental derangement. His medicine is to rest long weeks in bed and to feed hugely on the most nourishing foods. The severest exercise his shattered nerves can endure is a massage. When by these means his muscles and viscera have been resuscitated, his medicine is golf ora constitutional horseback ride. Many of us have not forgotten an eloquent paper in which Professor William James showed that not only the nervous and intellectual forces, but even the natural human emotions flourish most in a sound body. The conditions of modern life, in fact, far from enabling us to dispense with athletic culture, make it all the more necessary. The intellectual vigor of the race, to say nothing of its physical prowess, can be maintained only by availing ourselves of the instinct of play. If in maturity and old age we wish to work on, snapping our fingers at the admirable rest cure of Dr. Weir Mitchell, we must in youth and manhood take enough physical recreation to make sure that all our animal functions are sound.

II.

In any sporting contest the element of physique is of primary value. The man who has the stronger digestion and assimilation, a heart of greater pumping power, muscles of finer fibre, and more vigorous nerves to drive them has the game half won.

The other half, however, is the better part. It is technically known as training, and no one who has not tried it knows the difference it makes. A man who, untrained, can run a quarter of a mile in a minute, can in a few weeks reduce his time by five or six seconds, and in a season by six to eight seconds; and a fifth of a second in a race may be as decisive as the proverbial inch on a man’s nose. In all contests, from football to golf, the difference between the trained and the untrained is as great, though perhaps less calculable to the uninitiated. A young fellow whose main hope of distinction in his college lies in athletic prowess soon learns that much indulgence in tobacco and malt liquors, in some mysterious but painfully evident manner, clogs his lungs, and that the fonder he is of spirits and wine, the more treacherously they sap his energies; while the most cheerful night owl learns the blessing of early sleep. A man may be gifted with twice the natural powers of his self-disciplined rival, but unless he masters himself there is an end of all hope of excelling. Let us not cry down faculty resolutions, the college sermon, or the Young Men’s Christian Association, — they are a source of much comfort to all well-disposed young men; but let us frankly recognize that the undergraduate who stands most in need of a jog to conscience is most easily reached by the lesson of experience on the athletic field.

This physical training is not all. No type of athlete is more familiar than the man who has a superlative physique, superlatively trained, and yet somehow, in the final test, fails to excel. In practice he is capable of the most brilliant fielding, the most marvelous running and tackling, breaks all records on the track; but in the important contest he is a cipher. Because of some defect of mind or of temperament a crisis undoes him. Every earnest athlete knows how he feels, — the sinking in the vitals at the thought of a contest, the haunting dread, the nights of wakefulness and worry: it may almost be said that unless a man has felt all this his fibre is too coarse to respond to the demand of the final struggle. If these swarming suggestions of the nerves are not mastered, they become tyrants; if they are, they raise a man above himself. The difference is a question of self-conquest, which is a purely moral question, and quite as important now as in the days when it was thought desirable to take a city. The rough material of success in life is a good physique; but this is quite useless without discipline and self-command.

III.

It is perhaps possible to claim a further virtue for sport. Sir Philip Sidney has related of his riding master how he discoursed so eloquently the praises of horses and horsemen that in hearing him you would think there were no such great virtue in the world as horsemanship ; “ and such more, that if I had not been a piece of a logician before I came to him I think he would have persuaded me to have wished myself a horse.” Sir Philip archly begs indulgence for speaking in a similarly exalted strain in defense of poesie. The conceit is a pleasant one, for what was chivalry but the poetry of horsemanship?

It may not make us think the worse of the riding master if we try to interpret his saying in modern terms. All praise to the discipline and self-command of the athlete ; but at best these are mere moral qualities, the products of enlightened self-seeking. There are higher manifestations of sport, known as sportsmanship. In America, it is to be feared, the word is still discolored by the Puritan abhorrence of all delight ; one cannot be sure that it does not suggest hoarse voices and the tobacconated air of the poolroom. But in England it stands for a spiritual attitude that ennobles both winning and losing, the preparation and the fight.

Of what use is it to be strong and steadfast unless the spirit, like the flesh, rises superior to the conflict ? How ignoble to desire success unless we can be serene in defeat! A football team, let us say, has worked hard all through the autumn, and in the end is beaten by professionalism or illegal roughness on the part of its opponent. How easy to make a public protest — and how undesirable ! How hard to smile and play honestly through another year, with the prospect of being beaten again in the same way! A baseball team is playing on the grounds of its rivals, and at the crisis of the game is purposely “rattled ” by the organized shouting and cheering of its hosts, and loses the game. How difficult and how infinitely worth while to master rage and disappointment, and, when the return game is played, to meet discourtesy and unfairness with a courteous desire that the better team win! And yet the remedy is such a simple matter, consisting only in a will to prefer the sport to a championship, the amenities of life to any factitious success. It is the will to do this that denotes the sportsman. May not Sir Philip’s riding master have been thinking of some such virtues when he was so eloquent in the praises of chivalry? The bare struggle for existence exacts strength and masterhood, but to live in the fair name of a sportsman it is necessary to rise to spiritual heights.

A few young men have a natural love of things of the mind, but even in a university the greater number find their really deep interests only in actual life. To these, athletic sports, while they are more indispensable nowadays than ever for the preservation of health and strength, have this further advantage: that, like the chivalry of old, they afford the most generally available school for the humanities of living.

IV.

It is in England that the spirit and the practice of sport are oldest and most thoroughly developed; and it is from England that we have taken and are taking our outdoor recreations. Perhaps nothing is so enlightening with regard to the potentialities o£ sportsmanship as to understand fully its place and its functions in English life. To trace its many manifestations to their source is hardly possible, but we shall not be far wrong if we begin with the climate.

Of all known climates the English is at once the worst and the best. From year’s end to year’s end the whole island and the heavens above are steeped in the soft damp of the four surrounding seas. A long and drenching rain is almost unknown ; if a man can forego the vanity of being quite dry, and is not above an occasional retreat into a cab, an umbrella or a rain coat is scarcely necessary. Yet the sky is never crystalclear, as it so often is with us; the sun seldom dazzles; the stars never flicker and blaze. Month in and month out the landscape is blurred in all-pervading damp: thin, almost imperceptible in summer, yet changing the verdure to an olive green; azure and opalescent in spring; purple in autumn; golden gray or lurid dun color in winter. And frost and snow are as rare as the heat of pure sunlight. The defects of this climate are at one with the virtues in that they drive men into the open; indeed, it would not be easy to say what are defects and what virtues. The temperance of the summer heat makes out of doors a paradise. In the winter one is chilled to the bone in English houses, — not only American residents, but the natives themselves, if they stay long indoors. The coal consumed seems enough to heat the entire island to incandescence; yet such is the efficiency of the open fireplace of the country that the man who crouches before it goes blue in the lips and white to the roots of his nose, while the particles of half-consumed carbon gather minute globules of mist above the chimneys, shroud the city in a black natural fog and the citizens in a fog of the spirit. At least I can think of no other explanation of these concurrent phenomena, unless indeed we assume with the satirist that it is the people who give rise to the fogs.

In many countries commonly reckoned temperate much exercise is dangerous during the greater part of the year. The heat of summer threatens sunstroke, and the cold of winter pneumonia ; only in the spring and autumn is it pleasant and profitable to be long in the open, and even then drenching rains are not infrequent. The climate of England is temperate to the point of intemperance. When the green fields and mild skies of summer beckon, small wonder if the white flannels of the cricketer enliven every common, and the red blazer of the golfer blooms among the poppies of heath and down. In winter the weight of the low-hanging skies cannot be sustained without the stimulant of constant recreation, — rowing, rackets, field hockey, cross-country running, Association and Rugby football, — while the fields are even softer and greener than in summer. Under the brisk American climate, a man may, without knowing it, go into nervous prostration for the lack of exercise; but in England it is necessary to exercise daily, or else to fall daily into a blue fit on the fender. So all England goes sporting, each according to his lights. In the short days of winter the Saturday half holiday is celebrated by countless paper chases, games of field hockey, and football matches. In summer daylight lingers until almost ten o’clock, and the drudging city clerk and the factory laborer can have his outing between supper and bedtime. Even in the dingy alleys of Whitechapel the coster hunts rats with his terrier, or races whippets.

It is not unlikely that the very character of English and American athletes and the genius of the national sports has been determined by the difference of climate. If our summer evenings were as long as those in England, it is not improbable that baseball, like the kindred game of cricket, would require three long days for a match to reach a conclusion, instead of taking scarcely longer than the far more strenuous football. The sparkle and brilliancy of American skies and the sharp alternations of heat and cold must have not a little to do with giving our athletes a keen, nervous, and resourceful temperament. Certain it is that the American, by virtue of his energy and skill, can outsprint and outjump the English athlete, and per contra falls behind in contests of endurance. Baseball is not only a shorter game than cricket, but gives more scope to ingenuity and skill in team play, with a concomitant of artifice and perhaps of fraud ; and by means of the rapid alternations of innings it is infinitely more dramatic. American Rugby differs from English Rugby as a complex modern military campaign differs from a mediaeval mêlée; and it must be added, owing to the severity of the preparation required and the keenness of existing rivalries, it offers temptations to roughness and foul play that are as yet imperfectly resisted.

V.

As exercise is peculiarly needful in England, it is fortunate that English life is everywhere peculiarly well organized for its enjoyment. This is especially the case in the public schools and universities which are the ancient homes of sport and the great modern training grounds of sportsmanship. The first requisite is a community organized into separate units on which to base genuine rivalries; and nowhere is the life more thoroughly developed in small communities than in the public schools and universities. The public schools, in spite of the name they are known by, are in point of fact private and select, being quite like what we call preparatory schools, with these important exceptions : that instead of being few they are legion, and instead of being mainly subsidiary to the universities they are the characteristic and all-important educational institution. They are, in fact, responsible for the bulk of the education of the middle and upper classes, and the lad of fourteen to nineteen years of age who does not go to one of them is in much the same position as the young American who does not go to college. Not only do they afford the inevitable matches between rival schools, but each institution is so organized as to give scope to an infinity of civil contests. In order to insure home life and individual care, the schools are generally divided into separate “ houses, ” each containing a score or two of boys under a master. Every house maintains a football team and a cricket eleven, and a boating crew if the school is near water, each of which enters competitions with teams of other houses for the school championship. There may be house matches also in golf, tennis, rackets, and fives.

The national respect for sport may be seen in the fact that the schoolboy is virtually compelled, not only by public opinion but by the authority of his superiors, to take regular exercise. It does not much matter what his sport is, but some sport he must have, and he must do honest work at it. If a lad who elects to play cricket is slack at his fielding or batting, one of the sixth-form boys in authority remonstrates with him; and if this is not enough, canes him soundly, with the full approval of the masters. If a youthful football player does not fairly bear out his part in the scrimmage, the game is stopped while he is taken to the side lines and smacked. Such means are not often necessary. In fact, the shoe is on quite the other foot, — at least from the point of view of the Puritan parent, who keeps up a pretty constant outcry against the waste of time and energy in sports.

At Oxford and Cambridge there is no actual compulsion, but the rivalry among the score of colleges is quite as keen as house rivalry in the schools. And when a college of a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty undergraduates maintains a team in each of the half dozen chief pastimes, there is need of the services of every able-bodied man. To have a sport is as much a matter of course as to bathe. The fellow who can play and won’t play is made to play; and the force of a public opinipn now and then expresses itself even by means of personal assaults, known as “ragging, ” or as we should say, by hazing. The very studies seem to be planned as secondary to sport. The system of instruction makes attendance at lectures optional, and the tutor is rare who has the courage to hold forth between luncheon and tea, — the time which custom gives over to recreation. Furthermore, in order to take the degree, it is necessary not only to pass certain examinations, but to complete a minimum of residence, — three years. This is ample for the studies required; but if a man is dull or negligent, he may, by a special dispensation, stay on four years, or even more. As for the studious part of the university life, a man may have done with it, if he is clever or diligent, a full term before the appointed time; but he is allowed no such liberty with the social and athletic part. He is required to keep on residing, studies or no studies, until the minimum is completed. To a sportsman brought up under American faculty regulations this is the most delightful of paradoxes; but it is very characteristic of the Englishman, who rivals the Chinaman in standing fixed ideas upon their heads. The “ solid-reading man ” who goes in for honors differs from the passman only in degree. His whole duty is supposed to be fulfilled if, as the phrase goes, he reads his five good hours a day. Oarsmen and cricketers often stand high in the schools, and he who runs may read.

There is reason in all this, — at least British reason. The passman is the historical undergraduate, and little short of a convulsion could disestablish him, — that is the best of British reasons. And then, the authorities argue amiably, if it were not for the pass schools the majority of the passmen would not come to Oxford at all, and would spend their impressionable period in some place of much less amenity. Clearly they learn all that it is needful for a gentleman to know, especially in the way of sportsmanship; and they are perhaps kept from a great deal that is dangerous to young fellows with money and leisure. It means much to the aristocracy and nobility of England that, whatever their ambitions and capacities, they are encouraged by the pursuit of a not too elusive A. B. to experience four years of the sport and good-comradeship of the university. Even the ambitious student profits by the arrangement. Wherever his future may be passed, in the public service, in law, medicine, or even theology, it is of advantage to know men of birth and position, and to have met them in the contests of field and river, — of far greater advantage, from the common sensible English point of view, than to have been educated in an atmosphere of exact scholarship.

Still more than in America athletic success is the great distinction of school life. The leading athletes constitute an aristocracy as well recognized and as well organized as the house of peers. At Eton the captain of the boats wields an authority in his little kingdom as well established as that of the sovereign across the river at Windsor, and far more absolute. At the universities a great athlete is awarded the privilege of wearing the colors, which makes him a “blue,” much as a successful general is awarded a peerage; and there are half blues as there are baronets and knights. The instinct of play is not only cultivated in England ; it has been organized into one of the unrecorded institutions of the realm.

VI.

The man who has spent his boyhood and youth in school or university athletics falls beneath a tyranny of the flesh as rigorous as that of the climate. When a mind that has been highly cultivated is doomed to mere workaday life, it falls prey to a malady of unrest which is too well known; and the body that has once felt the high tide of physical well-being is as loath to revert to an ignoble estate. Like the other muscles, the heart develops with exercise. The lungs expand and build up new air cells; the blood vessels increase in size and in number. On a sudden change to a sedentary life, the increase of tissue, now superfluous, degenerates, and brings a physical stupor greater than that of the man who has never trained. Not infrequently the degenerate tissues offer lodgment to diseases which a normal physique would shake off. When, as sometimes happens, a famous oarsman or football player is carried away in middle life, the fault usually lies with the inactivity of his postgraduate days. The worst results can be avoided by making the transition from activity to inactivity gradual, — by tapering off, as the Yankee says; but the best rule is, Once an athlete, always an athlete. The full development of national sport requires sports for all ages as for all. seasons.

Hunting has been followed in England ever since there were vermin in the fields and men of some leisure with horses in their stables; shooting since there were stone arrows, beasts and birds. The primitive form of football (if not, as some maintain, its spiritual prototype) is said to be a prehistoric festival in which the Saxon inhabitants of the midlands made a pastime of kicking about the heads of vanquished Danes; and cricket traces back through dimly shadowed centuries of stoolball to the unrecorded annals of rounders, — the parent also of our own baseball. But the nineteenth century, which witnessed the sudden flowering of school and university sport, brought a new era in the sports of the nation at large. The old boy and the graduate have clubbed together for the cultivation of their favorite games in every possible walk of life and with sportsmen of all feathers. The Thames, the Clyde, and other boating rivers are crowded with rowing clubs, in most of which school and university oarsmen have been leading spirits ; and there are many regattas on each of them, of which Henley is only the most famous. Every town has its football field, and the sport is so universal and so much a part of the life that clubhouses for its cultivation are rare. Every village green has its cricket creases, and many a common its golf course. In the cities, each of the large business houses is likely to maintain teams in all the most popular sports. One of the many functions of the houses of Parliament is that of a golf club. The Hon. A. J. Balfour is not unknown as a cabinet minister and as the author of a philosophic disquisition on the Foundations of Belief; but it is said to be his particular pride that he is a winner of the parliamentary handicap. It is the same in all professions. Mr. Dan Leno, after an arduous year of acting in the Drury Lane pantomime and on the music-hall stage, lately ended his season by captaining a cricket eleven of fellow actors ; and in a charity match against a rival team of professionals of the boards, he enacted cricket with such histrionic distinction that the conscientious scorer felt obliged to credit him personally with 9999 runs. “After the game,” said a newspaper reporter, “an impression prevailed that Mr. Leno’s team had won.” Dr. Conan Doyle achieved equal success in captaining an eleven of authors against an eleven of artists. As opponent after opponent fell before his bowling, the secret of his provess became known. No man of sensibility, the artists explained, could keep his eye in while that hulking figure in a pink shirt stood against an olive-green background.

So indigenous are country life and sport that what we call country clubs are all but unknown. Each household estate outside the large towns is a country club in itself. When clubs and clubhouses exist, they are for those who live in town, and are located in the suburbs. The most fashionable London clubs, Ranelagh and Hurlingham, are on the Thames, at Chelsea and at Fulham, and can be reached by the underground. They provide pigeon-shooting, golf, tennis, cricket, fives, rackets, football, and polo. They are luxurious in their way, and their membership is closely guarded ; but they are not very expensive, according to American standards. The Queen’s Club, Kensington, where the inter-university athletic and football meetings are held, as well as international athletic contests, has accommodations also for fives, rackets, and tennis. The famous Lord’s, the historic guardian of cricket and its very citadel, is in St. John’s Wood. Both are accessible from the city by the Tuppenny Tube and an omnibus. The initiation fee and dues of the purely sporting clubs seldom exceed five guineas each. Within an hour after leaving his office, and at the expense of a few pennies, the merchant or the clerk may be playing his favorite game.

This teeming athletic life of England has been organized, according to preexisting boundaries, into rival communities which bear something the same relationship to the nation as a whole that the “houses” bear to the school, and the colleges to the university. Long ago Norman rule trod out the warring Saxon kingdoms, and now railway and telegraph are banding Scotch, Irish, and Welsh into a common nation with the English. But sport has preserved many of the rivalries which statesmanship has destroyed. As long as “Willow the King, that monarch grand, ” rules the summer (and his reign is known to be everlasting) Sussex will meet Middlesex in the cricket field, as South Saxon of old met Middle Saxon; and the strife will be as serious, if not as sanguinary. And as long as football reigns in winter there will be fierce warfare among English, Scotch, Welsh, and Irish.

For some years to come, it would seem, England, by the help of its climate and in spite of it, will be able to bear up against the increasing tension of modern life, and to make the best of its instinct for play. The national heart will beat strong and true, and the national limbs will be lithe. Countless keen contests by field and river will teach thousands and hundreds of thousands of young men the stern virtues that make for success in more trying and more enduring struggles of life. Best of all, this love of sport will foster the spiritual ideal of sportsmanship, — candor, good sense, and generosity, that rise higher as the contest grows hot.

VII.

Yet the prophet of despair is abroad in the land : the commercial economist has joined the Puritan in crusading against the curse of sports. And there are abuses enough to anatomize. Let a fox hunt sweep by a factory, and every hand is outdoors gaping at the men in pink until they are out of view; when a race meeting comes to the neighborhood, work is virtually suspended until the races are over. The factory hand and the dock laborer taste the pleasures of hope by placing a shilling or a half crown on the Ascot or the Derby. The Saturday half holiday and the numerous bank holidays are as sacredly observed as the Sabbath of old, which itself has yielded to the passion of the sportsman. All this tends to increase greatly the cost of production. Labor, it is true, is cheaper by the day in England than with us; but the holidays of the sportsman combined with the inertia of life in an aristocracy have apparently reversed the balance as regards relative results. If an American business house is pressed with orders, it works overtime, nights and holidays, until the rush is past. An English firm is more apt to refuse the orders, keeping on with its holidays, while the neglected orders fatten its rivals. The capitalist is more lavish than the improvident laborer in taking holidays for sport. On Derby day, the same highway that takes the coster to Epsom Downs behind his pattering moke bears the prime minister or the king in a drag and four or in a motor car. Throughout London the day is dies non. The cricket match at Lord’s, between Eton and Harrow or the two universities, must not be neglected though the weightiest affairs go by the board. And throughout the year all business except matters of clerkly routine is apt to be suspended from Friday noon until Monday noon. Is it necessary that a board of directors shall meet and take action on August 12, or thereafter? Quite out of the question, for that is the opening of the grouse season, and the members of the board will be scattered to the moors of the four kingdoms. As for Parliament, nothing short of a foreign invasion could keep it from adjourning before that magic day. An American going to London on business will do well to allow two weeks for what he could do in one week in New York or Chicago; and if his business is of a kind to demand judgment and decision from his Englishman, he will be lucky if he gets through it in four weeks. Unless the American is a philosopher, he chafes while his heels are cooling, and bursts out in sarcasm, invective, and rude profanity. But he may comfort himself by the thought that in the long run these leisurely ways enable him to do the business the islander is neglecting. Like all the great functions of life, sport may be a curse as well as a blessing. The problem is the old one of the golden mean.

During the past decade the United States has caught the mother country napping, and has made deep inroads into her sources of national wealth; but the fate of a great nation is seldom determined in a decade or in a century. We have made a brilliant foray: can we maintain our position ? The question is largely one of solidity and endurance; and it is just here that the American physique and temperament, keen and active as it is, is likely to prove lacking. The country that is the home of the rest cure has the greatest need of rest; and of all forms of recuperation sport is the most powerful. Interesting testimony on this point may be gathered from Americans who are living and doing business in London. It is to this effect: the American is keener and more rapid; the Englishman lives his life slowly and more fully. As a business man, the American is said to be better up to forty-five or fifty; after that he is seldom as capable as the easy-going Englishman, who keeps his faculties steady and alert to a green old age. It is a sign of the times that no small part of the plentiful earnings of the American pioneer in English trade has gone into country houses and shooting boxes, and even the younger men are finding the “week-end outing” of commercial value. In the long run American industry can probably profit by more holidays and less worry.

In the larger business of empire-building the importance of athletic sports is even more evident. There is a saying that the English colonist plays cricket, drinks Scotch whiskey, and flourishes in numbers, while the French colonist drinks absinthe and dies — of the climate. And the humanities of sport are no less important than the discipline. Natives of India and New Zealand have learned the delights of polo, football, and cricket while playing with English colonists; the Egyptian cadets of Abasayah have been made sportsmen by means of contests with teams from the regiments of occupation. In a few short years a fellow feeling and a mutual confidence have arisen that would otherwise be impossible in generations. Nowadays, Ghoorka meets Ghoorka in contests of sportsmanship, Maori meets Maori, Egyptian meets Egyptian, and all are three parts Englishmen. Quite lately the Boer prisoners in Ceylon got up a team to play a British cricket eleven, and ended the day by singing a song, composed by one of their number, invoking peace in South Africa. Before the general balance in favor of British sports is wiped away there must be many decades of commercial and colonial reverses; if America is to enter into a lasting competition with the mother country, it will be necessary not only to avoid the faults of British sportsmanship, but to emulate its virtues.

In determining these virtues the national phlegm is a not unimportant factor, The Englishman has few of the temptations to exceed the limits of sportsmanly good feeling which beset the more strenuous American. Yet, whatever the cause, the result is one which Americans have good reason to emulate. The time will come when football and baseball may be made a powerful ally in exerting our influence on the jealous Cuban and in conciliating the reluctant Filipino. Against such a time, is it not worth while to make sure that the courtesies of the games are such that we need not blush in disclosing them to our intelligent pupils ?

John Corbin.