Page:Cricket (Hutchinson, 1903).djvu/296

202 materially strengthen the side, the committee make great efforts to secure their services all through the season. The natural result follows. The amateur is driven to confess that he cannot afford the expenses of travelling and living at hotels, and he must decline to play. The winning of matches being the golden key to financial prosperity, the committees have been driven to adopt a system of paying the amateur money, that their counties may play their best elevens, and the first step in obliterating the boundary line that should exist between the amateur and professional has been taken, and what thirty years ago was done in one or two instances is now a matter of universal practice.

I am now for the moment making no comment; only stating a fact. As far as the balance-sheet of the county club is concerned, you cannot assume that the club can run its eleven cheaply by playing amateurs, who in truth cost the committee as much per head as the professionals. It would involve too much worrying into detail, and might lead to other harmful consequences, to get exact statements of the cost of railway tickets, etc.; so there is a fixed payment in a majority of cases given to every amateur, and this fixed payment is on a sufficiently generous scale to enable many an impecunious amateur to devote his services to his county. Nor is this the only way of providing livelihoods for skilful amateurs. There has to be, of course, a secretary, and you can either appoint a cricketer to this post, and provide him with a clerk who can do the work while his employer