Page:Athletics and Manly Sport (1890).djvu/111

86 is to put a premium on immorality, rascality, and craziness.

There never was a race so fond of athletics as the American is going to be—as it is already—at least, not since the Olympiads. The best of the English field-sports are confined to the aristocracy. There never was a race with so many and so various athletes as the American. Our games are not "sacred" like the Greeks, nor are they national, or periodical, or belonging to a class—except our fox-hunting in scarlet and top-boots. We do not concentrate our athletic efforts into four days every four or five years like the Greeks. Our Olympiads begin every May and last till November, and take in every boy and man who has warm blood in his veins.

The Greeks had runners, wrestlers, boxers, charioteers, quoit-throwers, bull-tamers; the Romans had boxers, wrestlers, and swordsmen. We have more than all these. Base-ball alone in America makes more athletes yearly than the whole curriculum of Elis. The youths who "break the records" for running, leaping, rowing, and foot-ball in American colleges would take all the laurel and parsley crowns at Isthmia and Corinth. For every Greek chariot driver we have a thousand American yachtsmen. Greece and Rome will be nowhere in athletics in