Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/33

 any game whatever you must submit to the rules. In the game of tennis, you are of course personally and physically free and at liberty to walk up to the net and drop the ball over, instead of serving it; you are physically free to put the ball into a gun and shoot it over the net; or you might hire a boy to carry it around the net; or you might bawl out in the middle of the game that you were going to change the rules and take three shots instead of two. You are physically free to do all these things. But you are not mentally or morally free to do any of them. You are religiously bound not to do any of them. If you did any of them, everybody would laugh at you, you would be put out of the game, no one would play with you. All good players respect the rules of the game, because they know that the rules make the game, and they believe in the game.

The ethical implications of athletic games are immense. Democracy itself is a complex athletic game. Its existence depends, more than upon anything else, upon our hearty willingness, for the sake of the game, to refrain from doing what we are physically perfectly free and able to do. If we don't do that, we lack the first elements of sportsmanship.

My survey of the things our people believe in is far from exhaustive; but let us stop here and consider what we have got as a concrete, realistic basis of belief, remembering always that we have not occupied ourselves with reviving or with inventing objects of belief but simply with discovering and