LET US GO AFIELD 



cisc of their own bodies on the Thracian and not 

 the Roman basis would more easily make soldiers 

 than the average man of the other ninety millions 

 who perhaps take sport by proxy, who do not care 

 for their own bodies to the extent of manly physical 

 sports practiced at first hand. 



But the query comes from certain departments at 

 Washington, "Why prepare for war and why talk 

 of soldiers?" Because fitness for the soldier's game 

 is fitness for any work or business, almost any sport. 

 Sport by proxy does not make a better man out of 

 one; it simply wastes an afternoon for him and 

 leaves him where he was before, plus only a little 

 better knowledge of Connie McGraw or Willie Col- 

 lins or whoever those gentlemen may be if rightly 

 named. 



Blood tells but it must be real blood. If the 

 blood of the Roman Coliseum told, if it tells today 

 in the form of descendants, it was the blood of the 

 survivors in the arena which survives today, not of 

 those who paid certain sesterces for box seats on 

 the inside of the rail. If the blood of English nobil- 

 ity tells, it is because that nobility found its sport, 

 not by means of paid gate-money entertainments, 

 but by means of hunting, shooting, riding, angling, 

 swimming all the sports of the outdoors. Those 

 things build blood of the sort which does tell, and 



