The place of athletics in college life : A plea and a protest

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1908

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The Place of Athletics
in College Life.

LTHELBERT D. WARFIELD,

PRESIDENT OF LAFAYETTE COLLEGE.

GV 561 .W37 1908

Warfieid, Etheibert Dudley,

1861-1936.
The place of athletics in

college life

LIBRARY OF PRINCETON

THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

THE

Place of Athletics

IN

COLLEGE LIFE.

A PLEA AND A PROTEST.

ETHKLBERT D. WARFIELD, D.D., LE.D.,

PRESIDENT OF LAFAYETTE COLLEGE.

Easton, PjC
ESCHENBACH PRINTING |g©RARY OF

1908

APR

THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

PREFATORY NOTE.

These little papers appeared in the New York Independent for
January 25, 1894, and the Forum for January, 1894, and have
met with a reception and a demand which seems to justify their
publication in pamphlet form. They are, therefore, now sent
forth, with the consent of those periodicals in the hope that they
may do something at once to justify and safeguard the manly
sports of our American colleges.
November, 1894.

The demand for these papers has been so steady that they are
again printed. The original form is retained because it is inter-
esting to observe what reforms have been made and what yet
remain to be accomplished. It is especially noteworthy that the
taint of professionalism continues to be the greatest evil, and
most persistent in connection with baseball. No solution of this
difficult question can be reached which does not start from the
position that all forms of sport must be the recreation of gentleman
in order to be classed as amateur. To play ball for money is not
dishonorable, and may be highly laudable. But the man who
does it is not an amateur. Nor can it be expected that the boy
who seeks recreation in games can compete on equal terms with
those who make games a means of livelihood. College games
should be limited to those who devote no more time to them than
can be spared from the serious pursuit of College studies.
August, 1008.

THE PLACE OF ATHLETICS
IN COLLEGE LIFE.

THE PLEA.

In an article on "Football as a Moral Agent," in The
Nineteenth Century for December, Mr. H. H. Almond,
Head Master of Loretto School, says:

"When the complaint was made to a well-known head
master that British boys talked far too much about foot-
ball and cricket, he answered: 'And what do French
boys talk about?' "

The question was highly pertinent and it is worth
while to compare existing conditions in our American
colleges resulting from the interest in athletics with the
conditions which might exist, have existed, and do exist
elsewhere. Athletic sports have done so much for
English and American school and college life that we
may well be careful how we assail them. Let us mark
well the current abuse of athletics in a few great schools
and colleges, let us press for reform in existing methods,
let us discourage newspaper notoriety, and insist on the
maintaining of municipal authority ; but let us not allow
abuse to forever filch from us our outdoor games.

Let us inquire what are the conditions of university
life in other countries where we hear of no football or
baseball or cricket, and, following the lead of the quota-
tion above, let us first look at France. I quote, and in
quoting largely condense, a part of a paper on "The
Latin Quarter" of Paris, from the December number of
The University Review, by Post Wheeler:

"The great institution for amusement in the Latin
Quarter is the Bal Bullicr — the student's ball.
It is held three nights in a week and every one goes.
The floor of the Bullier is ten feet below the
surface of the street. The door in appearance is a nar-
row hole in an innocent-looking garden wall, and at first
sight one wonders how it can swallow the hundreds who
go in thereat. Once in, however, you walk down a
broad carpeted stair into a room whose very size makes
you stare.

"Imagine, if you can, an immense hall whose roof is
supported by a single row of pillars, etc. .At

the right the whole side is thrown open to a grove and
gay canopies, and set full of tables for drinking. Scat-
tered here and there are games of chance, and all the
devices in which the French grisette delights. At the
upper end of the hall is a miniature theatre, where one
can sit and listen to a fair vaudeville performance with-
out extra charge. The girls — at least in summer —
are in a large majority, and even the most bashful of
men need have no fear of not finding a partner. Indeed,
if you do not take the initiative you may be fallen upon
bodily and carried into the whirl. And so the evening
goes on till by midnight the gaiety rises almost to a
frenzy of hilarity. . . . On some of the crowded
nights the noisy crowd overflows or spreads itself in
little pools and whirling eddies in the street. The staid
old Sorbonne, France's ancient college of letters, has
seen some queer sights. Surely if the ghost of its founder
haunts his marble statue above the entrance, it is his
purgatory to witness such desecration of that classic
spot."

It is not necessary to quote more. Our writer tells us
that for the girls "it is a jolly life while it lasts," but
with needless particularity he goes on to say: "But
beneath this glitter and apparent jollity there is too
often heartache and despair." This of the companions
of the students' revels; but of the students nothing;
nothing of their wasted lives, of their growing habits
of dissipation, nothing of heart-broken parents in pro-
vincial homes, nothing of the moral leprosy disseminated
throughout that lovely, but luckless, land. Alas! for
generations of youth who have haunted the students'
quarter at the University of Paris and have gone forth
into the world, till

11 Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well
undone,
Death came tacitly and took them where they never see the

sun."

Can men reared under the blight of such moral in-
fluences ever become the safe repository of free institu-
tions? Will they ever grow up to be worthy of that higher
freedom wherewith Christ doth make his people free?
What wonder that a mad materialism rules wherever
papal absolutism fails to satisfy with penance and abso-
lution !

But how is German university life; is it much better?
Surely not much. It is less fascinating, appeals less to
the high spirits of fun and frolic, and has less of the
marks of public dissipation and dissoluteness; but the
standard of life is un-American, and beneath the ideals
received from our stalwart ancestry. Beer and tobacco
are the inevitable concomitants of German student life.
Not merely beer and tobacco, but as the little German

boy is said to have replied, when asked what he wished
Kris Kringle to bring him at Christmas: "Wurst, wurst,
immer mehr wurst." So it is beer and tobacco, in sea-
son and out of season. Allowing room for a strong per-
sonal prejudice against both, they must by all candid
persons be admitted to be a poor foundation for both
physical and moral health. Thus, as a recently returned
American student naively remarked, it is necessary, in
order to accomplish the best results, associate with men
in the same line of work, and get the important knowl-
edge of just how to prepare for the final examinations,
to become a member of a students' Verein, or club; and
all clubs have their Kneipe, or drinking bouts, and a
new member, or Fuchs, may at any time be required to
drink as much as any older member may desire him to
drink. Such are the meetings of the hard-working,
earnest-minded students, meetings often prolonged till
morning, and giving color to the best thought among
the students.

The other side of German student life, the side which
is in close parallel with our athletics, is found in the
clubs which countenance, if they do not actively encour-
age, dueling. The present Emperor, reversing the
policy of his honored father and grandfather, openly
advocates dueling. He sees the need of cultivating a
manliness which is not to be found in close and stuffy
rooms where the fumes of beer and the smoke of reek-
ing pipes becloud the brain and enervate the heart.
He has no knowledge of any better way to stimulate
personal courage than by setting men padded to the
chin to slashing at each other's faces. What a mockery
of manhood it is! What a travesty of personal competi-
tion!

These are typical scenes from French and German
college life. The same wholesome return to country
life in the eighteenth century, which gave England the
poetry of the Lake school and the prose masterpieces in
which nature freely breathes from the Sir Roger de
Coverley papers of Addison to the essays which Ruskin
penned at Coniston, inspired the renaissance of field
sports. These sports have run off into many foolish
and hurtful vagaries over and over again; but have been
as often reclaimed. What we must now do is to reclaim
them once more.

The reason for the existence of most outdoor games is
twofold — the pleasure which men take in them and the
good which they do to men both morally and physically.
We have nothing to do with the first of these reasons
except to mark the dangers which spring from it. It is
because games are fascinating — that they overdevelop
the love of personal emulation, that they too greatly
stimulate competition, and lead to betting, gambling,
and professionalism — that they must be watched. But
it is only human nature, as ever, asserting itself. Law-
yers become shysters, physicians patent medicine quacks,
authors bitter, envious egotists, under similar circum-
stances. To win by all means, to put money in the
purse, to have a great name known to rumor if not to
fame. These and their like have undone many men.
The great bowler and the great beau haunt the cricket
ground and the ballroom long after their contemporaries
have settled down upon more real fields of contest; the
man who has made a life work of play still treads the
cinder path and the comic stage. Extravagances must

be reckoned with, but must not too quickly be declared
the normal result of any given course of action.

With the second reason for the existence of athletic
sports we have much to do. We live in an age of re-
turning enthusiasm for outdoor life. The summer is
eagerly looked forward to by nearly every man who can
hope to save a tiny mite that he may have a run into the
country on his bicycle, a row down the river in his boat,
a quiet week's fishing in some favorite stream, or just a
brief, idle sojourn, doing nothing and yet much, in close
communion with Nature as she is met in mountain and
forest. Vigorous hours in office and in shop are the re-
ward of these things; hopeful hours take the place of
timorous days, as the blood full of red corpuscles once
more tingles to the fingertips. Men, finding these things
so, rightly conclude that in the economy of education,
when the great thing is not how shall we make this shape-
less hobbledehoy a scholar but a man, there must be a
place for the things which minister to an abounding
vitality. Athletics, field sports, spread the chest, deepen
the flush upon the cheek, quicken the step, brighten the
eye; are they not the proper instruments for the accom-
plishment of the desired object? Yes, and no. Neither
into athletics nor into learning may we tumble, helter
skelter. I knew a lad who with deeply stirred ambition,
but no knowledge of algebra or geometry, bought a trigo-
nometry and fell to master it. Need any one be sur-
prised that his assault failed? The choice of boys is apt
to depend upon the excitement, brilliancy, and popu-
larity of this or that sport. In all things they must be
guided, in athletics, not more, but just as much as in
Greek.

Our boys need and must have the outdoor life. We
want them to find their place and fill it. Football
shows a better sight a thousandfold as the match goes on,
with the cheering hundreds shouting their approval,
than the French Bal Bullier. A sight infinitely better
for spectator and participant, though but twenty-two
boys get all the good the game supplies — though those
twenty-two get, also, all the evil the game occasions.
Compare that evil with the evil of the German Kneipe,
or compare that open-eyed, open-mouthed, open-
hearted crowd with the secret assembly which watches
the Schldgerei at Heidelberg or Bonn. Those who look
on and only shout are getting so much outdoor air;
and have their places on scrub or class teams, on base-
ball nines, or boat crews, or only play in a "picked-up"
game on the back campus, or in a game of tennis ; or,
finding the outdoor life the pleasant and profitable thing
it is, take up regular tramps into the country round
about. Boys must not dig at books all the time; boys
must grow to men, big-limbed as well as big-brained.
Fill the chest as well as the brain with fresh breezes
from the crests of the Appalachians as well as from the
heights of Helicon.

All of these things minister not merely to the physical
but also to the moral nature. Most outdoor games
not merely strengthen the limbs, give certainty to the
movements, make skilful the hand, and sure the eye,
but also give a great command to the will over the ac-
tions of the body. The well-trained will in a successful
ball-player is as important as the steering gear in a line-
of-battle-ship. Not merely courage, which is often
cited, but all forms of self-control are put at a premium.

IO

The true athlete cultivates that <Tw<f> poo-vvrj, which to
the Homeric Greeks was self-control, prudence, dis-
cretion; and which later also set the high virtues of
sobriety and chastity in its constellation.

What we want vigorously to protest against is the
overdoing of games which spoil the games and spoil the
men — against the tendency to make a great spectacle of
our youth. Alexander the Great scornfully refused to
compete in the Olympic games, while the dissolute
Roman emperors fought as gladiators in the Coliseum.
The scene of a competition may greatly change its char-
acter. Sometimes the "hippodroming,> is carried so
far that the successful athlete draws perilously near to
the dime museum freak. The gambling and the gate-
money evils ought to have such attention that no man
may see any analogy between a gentleman's amusement
and a horse race or a traveling circus.

These things aside, we must safeguard our games;
for in them lie the best protection we possess against
the social sins of France and the gregarious vices of
Germany. They afford, moreover, a clean subject
for common talk, a subject in which teachers and taught
can claim an equal share. I wonder how much young
men everywhere talk about such things as are focused
in the Bal Bullier scene; talk which they do not repeat
to father, mother, or sister, which they do not share
with teachers or respected friends. Some, surely, but
how much more would such things be spoken, and
speech translated into deed, if it were not that athletic
interests afford a safe and sure ground of common dis-
cussion !

II

Every gardener knows that but few soils will carry a
complete sod of a single variety of grass. Interstices
always remain. Into these, other seed fall and spring
up. Hence it is usual to make a sod for the lawn for
several kinds of good grasses, otherwise rank weeds
would seize the tempting opportunity and quickly hide
the good grass, and even eradicate it. So with college
life. Men are not intellectual animals only, but not less
social and physical beings. Into the life filled to satiety
with lessons, recitations, lectures, and all forms of intel-
lectual effort, relaxations must come. The safest re-
laxations thus far found by faithful and anxious seekers
are those which center about the athletic field.

In our righteous warfare against abuses, let us prac-
tice the temperance for which we plead, and not yield
to the temptation so fatal to reformers to become fanatics.

THE PROTEST.

College athletics, with all the objections that can be
raised to the conditions just now so plainly thrust upon
public notice, are an unqualified good. They have done
more to purify, dignify, and elevate college life than any
other influence brought to bear in the past quarter of a
century. No man who is conversant with the inside
history of the public schools and universities of England
and the colleges of America can question this. Many
forms of disorder, "barring-outs," "stacking rooms,"
and so forth, have almost disappeared since the animal
spirits of our youth had a systematic outlet. Good
morals have been vastly benefited by the strong appeal
which systematized athletics make for outdoor life, by
the constant testimony which they bear to the close con-
nection between frugality and regularity of life, and
vigorous manhood. Vices — some of which cannot even
be named — which exist wherever men, especially civil-
ized men, are brought together, have been greatly checked.
Clean living has found a great coadjutor. Let any man
of fifty compare the college escapades of his own day
with those of the present time, and he will confess that
the rare exception of to-day was frequent then. College
life is not to be charged with these irregularities. Put
a number of men together, with human appetites, vitality,
and a love of freedom, and they will do the same things
in city or country or college. Neither parental nor col-
legiate restraints have ever prevented, or ever will pre-
vent, these things. Something better must be laid
before our youth, and a stronger attraction must take
the place of the attraction to evil.

13

While I am a strong believer in college athletics, I
am not at all of the opinion that they are the best form
of bodily exercise. I fully agree with the view expressed
by Professor MahafTy in his "Greek Thought," that not
athletics of the gymnasium and the paloestra, but "field
sports — hunting, shooting, fishing — have produced the
finest type of man." The virtues of horsemanship,
shooting, and fishing are more akin to mastery of self,
and the close relation of man to nature. They beget
the larger and the broader man. But they require time
and money beyond the scope of college life. Even at
Oxford, tandem-driving has long been reckoned the eighth
deadly sin, and fox-hunting, which my reverend tutor
indulged in each Thursday during the season, came next
in the index expurgatorius. Field sports being largely
out of the question, let us weigh the things which are
available for the bodily training of our students.

Among the college sports, football, baseball, and
lawn-tennis are practically universal; track athletics,
boating, and lacrosse are next in order; while cricket
and other games are played but little in American col-
leges. Tennis is the game which makes the strongest
claim for genuine popularity. Its clean and wholesome
nature, its moderate demands upon the strength of the
player, and its sufficiency as exercise, give it a high
place in the list of games. Its weak point is its com-
paratively private character. It takes no place as a fac-
tor in class or in college life; it enlists no large number
in its games; it has no gregarious, no communal force.
This is a serious lack. Men need in college, as in citi-
zenship, a focus. The town-meeting of the student body
is found on the athletic field.

14

Football has many claims for popularity. It has all
the dubious but powerful attraction of a contest between
man and man. This is an element in human nature
which must be directed, since it cannot be suppressed.
It shows itself in the competitions for honors and in
oratory, in every form of sport, in every phase of human
life, at the bar, the hustings. It is a force which may
lead to mere envy, strife, or cheating, or may make men
emulous of all virtue. Football, when properly played,
is a school of morals and of manners. The man who loses
his temper in the scrimmage will be surely outplayed.
The man who plays an off-side and unfair game may at
a critical moment lose the few yards which will give his
opponents victory. As for the brutality of the game,
the element of opinion intrudes here. I do not think it
brutal. Its brutality will depend on the men who play
it, the referees and umpires, the men who from year to
year make rules for the game, and on the alumni and
faculties who tacitly or otherwise approve the rules.
This much must be admitted. Football is a game for
boys or very young men, and it requires careful training
for hard games. It may be, therefore, a dangerous game.
It exposes younger men to injury from mature men.
The untrained boy is out of place in the contest.

Is this necessarily an argument against the game?
Certainly not. There are few sports which do not require
some practice or training. It means, first, that if it is
to remain a college sport it should be guarded on the
one hand by excluding mature men — in short, by a strict
undergraduate rule; and on the other hand, by keeping
back undeveloped boys — for example, by refusing per-
mission to members of the Freshman class to play match

15

games. Again, there creep in from time to time phases
of play which, while not at all brutal, are dangerous.
Thus, the "wedge" is simply a test of pushing power.
When the wedge breaks, the men are so entangled that
sprains are of frequent occurrence. After playing the
old open game in this country, I played the old-fashioned
wedge game at Oxford, and was at once impressed with
its clumsy and dangerous character. It was with the
utmost regret, therefore, that I saw it introduced into
American football, in a more effective and scientific
form, but only rendered more dangerous thereby. Keep
football to the undergraduates; eliminate the younger
element of the Freshman class; have the medical direc-
tor omnipotent in excluding boys weak in heart or suf-
fering from strains; see that there are enough umpires
to check sudden gusts of temper (boys are human, but
should be taught the penalties of too much human
nature), and not only enough umpires but men of reso-
lute love for fair sport ; do all this, and football is a game
to hold to. Let professionalism creep in, let men take
post-graduate courses in order to play football — nay,
even encourage graduates to play — and the game may
soon be tabooed.

Of baseball, less need be said, though I am convinced
that baseball is a more serious problem within college
walls than football. The special skill and the special
danger of the positions of the pitcher and catcher make
the temptation of professionalism greatest just there. A
man brought to college to play in a position of this sort
is a moral canker long before he is known, for some of
these men are beyond detection at first, and when known
to some who ought to care more for college morals than

16

for college games, are not always unmasked. More than
this, baseball has a longer period of training and a
longer season, and more games played away from col-
lege. Football occupies from about the first of October
to the first of December; baseball from the middle of
January to the middle of June.

The time that such sports occupy may be only what is
properly given to physical training. It may be half the
day. In Lafayette College the time is practically just
what is required in the gymnasium, and at the same
hours. The loss of time is more in the talk and discus-
sion which spring up around a topic of absorbing inter-
est. A football season, for this reason, may become as
bad as a presidential election to the country at large.
Ordinarily, however, this is no great evil, and football
is a better subject for social talk than some things that
used to intrude into such coteries as now waste time over
athletic possibilities. The real student is not distracted.
The average college man, who will not "talk shop" any
more than the average business man, is not materially
injured.

When we come to consider the evil influences engen-
dered by college athletics, we face a different condition
of affairs. There is a great and crying need of reform.
The sore spots are "foreign games" (games played away
from the colleges) and gambling.

My personal convictions are that college games should
be played on college grounds, and only on college grounds.
Further than this it is not necessary to go, if training on
the part of the team is what it should be, for it should
be borne in mind that, if the players are well managed,
it is not they, but the camp-followers, who are respon-

17

sible for the dissipation which takes place after games;
and I am confident that I am within bounds when I say-
that the more serious acts of a bad nature are caused by
young alumni and former students. This latter class is
a large and always an aggressive one, especially when
they have been dismissed from college. The small col-
leges are not much troubled with the evil of "foreign"
games. They feel, however, that their athletic interests
suffer from the ill report which proceeds from the after-
math of the great city games. I especially hope that
Christian education may soon be cut off from any part
in the awful desecration of our great national feast-day.
And desecration it is. We think of the day as one set
apart for the giving of thanks to God for national bene-
fits. The memories connected with it make the home
the first of these benefits: the Christian home with its
self-respecting manhood and womanhood. Next to the
home, citizenship is the most precious of these benefits
— free citizenship which imposes the duty of observing
the law and proving the right of men to govern them-
selves. Upon such a day to find great institutions
founded for the training of our young men in the highest
manhood turning them loose upon our greatest city to
lead it in a very carnival of vice, is shocking in the
extreme. Make as much allowance as we can, we can-
not excuse it. Streets ringing with rowdy cries ; theaters
stormed and interrupted; houses which no young man
should ever enter — saloons, dance-halls, and worse —
thronged with excited, overwrought young men, who
would never have come in contact with such scenes but
for the conditions of this day — are such circumstances
the proper avenues to happy homes and useful lives, or

the first acts in lives of tempation and vice? Not all
are college men— not a majority, not even a large minor-
ity, it may be; but without the college element, without
the fluttering ribbon of blue, or crimson, or orange and
black, without the college game, the Lord of Misrule
would not walk the streets this night.

And how much gambling in and out of college is
caused by these great games? In college the feeling with
most men is sober, and opposed to the thought that lies
at the basis of gambling, whether it be the calculating
desire to get something for nothing, or the reckless desire
for excitement. But in the hotel corridor, on the field,
or in a shouting crowd of irresponsible unknown men or
rivals there is only character to steady the half-developed
boy. A bluff, a taunt — and the bet is made that even-
tually makes one man a gambler and deprives another
of his proper spending money for months. And then it
is surely a shame to feel and know that a college game
is as much a gambler's field as a race track.

The question of gambling concerns the small colleges
but little. Few men learn to gamble where they have
nothing to stake. Poverty is a blessing in such a case.
More money changes hands, it is said, on the Thanks-
giving game of football, than all the boys at many a
college of three to four hundred students spend in a year.
Gambling is a universal vice, however, and a most fatal
one. Anything which tends to lesson it will be a boon
to the country.

What has been said of gambling applies also to the
question of gate-money. It is the lack of money which
seems to our struggling colleges to be the root of all
evil. They stand agape when they learn from the pub-

19

lie press that the income from the Thanksgiving game
of football is greater than the total annual expenditure
of their trustees for the support of twenty-five professors
and the education of three hundred boys. What does
this imply? A wild extravagance in athletic outfits, in
traveling with special cars and stopping at expensive
hotels, in hiring trainers — an extravagance which com-
municates itself to the smaller colleges and leads them
dishonestly to contract bills for athletic supplies which
they can never pay.

Public opinion demands that there shall be an end to
this. The way to stop it is to play all games on col-
lege grounds. Not only must the games be played on
college grounds, but on such college grounds as have
about them the college atmosphere. A city ground used
by a college will never have this. How many parents
have read with wonder, and alarm for their boys, of
teams going to Springfield several days before the game,
and of the preparation there? How many have won-
dered why it was that, despite a widely published proc-
lamation requiring students to report at one college at
midnight on Thanksgiving, or at noon on Friday at la-
test, that the team remained at a New York hotel till
Monday, and then returned in a triumphal procession?
Had the team ceased to be students? Or were they, as
some newspapers said, too battered and bruised to
return? If the former, why? If the latter, then the
game as played is brutal, and its grave should be pre-
pared.

Whose is the responsibility? Let us not shirk our
share. College life is as important as college learning.
The teaching which instructs the mind, but leaves the

20

man an uninformed and half developed being, is radi-
cally wrong somewhere. No college can say, "We
teach the students, and our responsibility ends there."
The colleges must be tried, as other institutions are
tried, by their fruits. Wise parents expect their sons to
be taught by example as well as precept, and to be made
men as well as bachelors of arts.

There are, therefore, real abuses connected with these
games. But shall we abandon the manly features or
reform the abuses? It is a question for the large uni-
versities to answer. The small colleges will be able to
hold their boys within bounds for the present. The
small college is still democratic. Its president and faculty
and students are still the closely knit fabric of a simpler
time. There are no distinctions of rank and wealth.
The president relies on the love of the boys, and wins it
by seeking to aid them in all right ways. No high wall
of affairs shuts him off from them; no intrusive demands
of the outside world draw them away from him. The
influx and efflux of a great university make the voice
of the public more potent. What are the people saying?

(i) Football is become too dangerous] accidents too seri-
ous.— Let the colleges heed the cry. Let the alumni
and faculties put on foot a radical revision of the rules.
Let games be only between college boys. The Eton-
Harrow cricket-match is a greater function in England
than any university match. Everywhere the youth of
a country are dearer and more influential than the bru-
tal manhood. Make football a fine sport of manly boys,
and there will be fewer prize-fighters, "toughs," and
men of doubtful character at the games, but more mothers
and sisters and wise and prudent gentlemen. Drive out

the professionalism, bring in the spirit of fair play, and
revive a love for the distinctive spirit of each college's
own breeding.

(2) Games in great cities have become the occasion, if not
the cause, of vice. — Let games, then, be on college grounds.
Then if this or that college cannot, or will not, suppress
drinking and gambling, it will remain with public senti-
ment to decide whether they deserve support or not.

Let us all, as citizens, as well as teachers or preachers,
seek to build character on a sound basis. Let us relegate
every brutal sport to the limbo to which our Puritan
forefathers sent bear-baiting and dog-fighting, and to
which we are trying to relegate the survivors of such
barbarities, as prize-fighting. But do not let us lose our
heads and throw away our manly sports. We might as
well abandon a democratic form of government because
Tammany Hall has grown up under it. Reform, and not
destruction, is the need of the hour. What we need is
to combine to urge the naturally studious to cultivate
their bodies; the naturally vigorous in body, to cultivate
their minds. Such efforts will only partly succeed. But
instead of the sharp line between the stoop-shouldered
student and the riotous or negligent loafer, there is now
a large and well-ordered majority of men who study well
and take a reasonable amount of physical exercise. As
college elocution centers on contests in oratory and debate,
as college literary work centers on college papers and
college essay-prizes, so college athletics center on teams
and match-games. Prizes and teams and match-games
all have their evils, evils of distraction and attraction,
but they are indispensable until some better plan of stimu-
lating and perpetuating effort is devised.

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The place of athletics in
college life