AMERICAN ATHLETICS

disinclined to do so. There is certainly an
element of Prussianism in American football,
and Prussianism is not a good quality to introduce
into a game. M. Bergson's account of religion
as a compound of drill and mysticism (dressage
et mysticite) might be applied to games—at least
to the best types of them. In American football
there is too much dressage and too little mystidie,
and it is the mysticite that gives a game its essential
quality. Still, as I have said, there is ample room
left for courage and skill, and the discipline has
its good side.

Indeed the play, as exhibited in the great
matches, has been brought to such a high degree
of technical perfection and demands such excep-
tional physical strength in the players, that
only a very few young men in a town or a college
can ever hope to take part in it—I mean at that
high pitch* It is essentially an affair of trained
experts and of the few who are born with special
aptitudes for that kind of expertness and prowess.
I doubt if one per cent of the young men at
Harvard, Princeton or Yale have the faintest
chance of ever playing in their college teams.
I doubt if the percentage is higher than that
of those who are likely to become poets. The
great game is essentially a spectacle, exhibited
by a play-aristocracy for the entertainment of
the multitude, and stands as far removed from
what the multitude themselves can do as a tourna-
ment of great lords in armour stood removed