Page:Athletics and Manly Sport (1890).djvu/24

Rh appetite, and is drowned, like a belated traveller, in the weedy morasses of the gastric-centre.

To place manly sport in its proper relation to the people, we must save athletics from the professional athletes, and from the evil association of betting and gambling, that stunts, encumbers and disgraces almost all kinds of open-air exercise.

The very fact that professionals and gamblers fasten on a sport, is the highest proof of its value to the people: your worm never selects an inferior apple. The popular desire is the very stock in trade of the professional gambler. There is only one way in which this reform can be thoroughly made, namely, by the recognition of athletic training as a necessary and admirable part of general education. This will remove at once the flavor of disrepute which at present attends a taste for manly sport.

All healthy young people are fond of physical exercise; and proper instruction is as necessary here as in the intellectual departments of school and college, and will as surely result in benefit to the individual and the state.

I desire to express my thanks to several persons who have assisted me in the preparation of this book,