Page:America's National Game (1911).djvu/417

 sums. There are practically no English manufacturers supporting the game. Of course it has not paid its promoters, but they did not take it up as a money-making scheme, nor with any idea of benefiting their pockets. The assistance they have given has been solely through a love of the game, and of pushing it in England, and bringing it before the English public as a sport worth studying and playing. The public at present do not know enough of the game to criticise it.

The progress of the American national game in British provinces has been slow but sure—except in Canada, where it gained a footing in its early days, rose rapidly, and has for many years been regarded as the National Game, fairly outclassing lacrosse and all other forms of field sport in popular favor. It was impossible that it should have been otherwise. The term "American," though frequently employed as referring to possessions of the United States alone, covers all the continent, and that which has been long considered strictly our own bids fair soon to become the Game of All-America, for it will not be many years before Base Ball will have supplanted bull-fighting in Mexico, in a measure, as it has cock-fighting in Cuba, while it is likely to drive out the field sports of all South America, so rapidly is it gaining in popularity in the little republics there.

The Canadian people, in spirit and temperament, are very like our own. Though Britons, they have absorbed Yankee characteristics from being brought into commercial competition with business men of the United States. As a result, just as British field sports were found too