The personal interest of the students, next to their studies, is concentrated on sport. Football before all is loved uncommonly, and it is practised in such a fashion that academic and State authorities are near to forbidding it altogether. In the course of a single semester nineteen students fell victims to brutal handling. At every American university is a sort of open amphitheater, in which many thousands of spectators view the periodic football battles.

It really is not fair or profitable to judge athletics in general, or any particular sport or game, by the benefits secured by the few. The test should be the good accruing to the nation at large. Athletics should build us up as a people, raise the standard of average manhood, and thus benefit us as a nation, rather than develop a selected few who use their strength and skill chiefly as a means of earning money.

In America, we love our players rather than our games. The result is that only one man in a thousand acquires the strength and proficiency which make him an acceptable player. Our athletics develop the few, and benefit us but little, if at all, as a people.

Of course, we turn out teams and individual athletes unequaled anywhere else in the world. But what good does that do you and me, who are shut out from participation in the games because we are not giants in point of strength or wizards in point of skill?

We are compelled to be mere onlookers at the present-day baseball or football game, or track meet, to watch the players with mingled feelings of awe and admiration, much as the Romans of old sat about the amphitheater and marveled at the exploits of the gladiators.

The "sport" of the Romans—desperate encounters between man and man, or between man and wild beast—undoubtedly developed men of unsurpassed courage, skill, and strength. But did it benefit Rome?

Our athletes lead the world. That is a matter of record. But how has this superiority been achieved? By making athletics a business or a profession for selected individuals, instead of a sport, a pastime, and a recreation for all. Athletics as we know them may be sport or pastime for us as spectators, but our games are no recreation for those who participate in them.

The desire to excel, to win at any cost, is the root of the evil. If we can't win, we drop out of the game and join the ranks of spectators. The benefits of participating in an afternoon's sport, even as a loser, are lost sight of. We do not play for the sake of playing, or for the betterment of our physical condition—we play to win, to come out first, to excel our neighbors.

What we need to learn is to be cheerful losers. Any one can be a gracious winner, but few of us are good losers. Until we do learn that there is something in the game besides the winning of it, we cannot hope that our athletics will be of general benefit to the nation.

Almost all amateurs desire to imitate the theater rather than to act a play.

Reach-me-down dresses, reach-me-down scenery, reach-me-down equipments are considered good enough for dramatic masterpieces—are positively preferred to decent and beautiful things because they are so much more theatrical.

As to plays, they, too, must be second-hand reach-me-downs. Your amateurs don't want to bring plays to a correct and moving representation for the sake of the life they represent; they want to do Hawtrey's part in this or Ellen Terry's part in that, or Cyril Maude's part in the other.

The enormous and overwhelming advantage possessed by amateurs—the advantage of being free from commercial pressure and having unlimited time for rehearsal—is the last one they think of using.

The commercial plays, which are the despair of actors, but which they must produce or starve, are the favorites of our amateurs. They do out of sheer folly and vulgarity what our real dramatic artists do of necessity and give some saving grace and charm to in the doing.