WHITHER ARE WE DRIFTING? 



not by proxy, who played their own ball and did 

 not pay to see hired men play it; who rode and 

 walked, or followed a plow afield, or did some- 

 thing else which actually exercised mind and muscle 

 and built actual manhood. The English officer came 

 out of amateur and not commercialized sport 

 personal sport, not sport by proxy. 



In the opinion, let us say, of more than one sport- 

 ing writer, you cannot make any citizenry better 

 than the individual units of it ; and you cannot make 

 a man by his watching a fifty-cent game played by 

 some other man who is a man. In other words, 

 the best kind of sport in the world is that which 

 develops the individual as a sportsman and as a 

 physically and mentally efficient unit. If profes- 

 sional gate-money football does that for the ob- 

 server, if professional baseball does that for the 

 observer, if professional prize-fighting or horse- 

 racing does that for the observer, then I must say 

 I remain yet to be convinced, and still ask to be 

 shown just how that can happen. 



And yet if you will look about you among your 

 own friends in your own town, you will find so 

 many men finding almost their only recreation on 

 the old Roman Coliseum basis. They pay their gate- 

 money to see athletes perform; they are not them- 

 selves athletes, not themselves good specimens of 



313 



