Page:Out-door Games Cricket and Golf (1901).djvu/70

Rh to be thought of as opposed to the individual, and so we get esprit de corps. I will say here that a middle-aged man is far more likely to play golf in a sportsmanlike way if he has in his youth been disciplined in temper and other ways by football and cricket. He will have learned the spirit in which games should be played, the way to appreciate an opponent's good stroke—in other words, he will play in a sportsmanlike way. Of course there are, and always will be, some boys and men who are past praying for—they never will be sportsmen; but let us all hope that these may be what John Bright called the residuum only. At any rate, I am sure that the best chance to make good sportsmen is to encourage games for boyhood, but they must be games in which the individual must be merged in the side, and therefore cricket in schools ought always to be an important element in the curriculum.

Our ancestors, and indeed some of ourselves, played cricket in private schools in a very different way to what we do now. Everything was rougher thirty years ago. The rod governed our morals; we were insufficiently