Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/469

Rh class-feeling which is the active power in the disorders between classes. It is at this point that the influence of the university organizations acts as a check. Since these organizations are composed of men of all classes, it is impossible for all college to be enthusiastic for its crew, team, or nine, without a common sympathy binding all the classes together. Moreover, it is observable that the time of the year when the athletic contests are not absorbing the attention of the college is the very time when the disorders between classes and the persecutions of freshmen are most prevalent. Besides, the captains of the university organizations command their men to keep out of disorders, because they know that they might lose their services if these men came under the discipline of the college authorities. The writer has seen the captain of the University Foot-ball Eleven personally restraining his men from participation in a "rush." Formerly it was the strong men who incited and took the chief part in disorders. Now all their interests and all their efforts are against them.

4. The system furnishes to instructors an opportunity of meeting their pupils as men interested in a common good, without the chilling reserve of the recitation-room. It does not require a great effort to be a spectator of their contests. An interest in the contestants is a very natural result of witnessing their struggles. The college officer who gives a little of his time even to the boys' play soon finds his sympathies widen, and, by learning from actual observation how young men feel and think, becomes able to deal more wisely with those under his charge, from a fuller knowledge of them.

5. The power of the athletic contests to awaken enthusiasm ought not to be held of small account. The tendency of academic life is toward dry intellectualism. However desirable such a tendency may be for those who are training to be investigators, there can be no question that it is lamentable for a young man to begin life without enthusiasm. It is not too much to say that in many a student, while passing from freshman to the end of senior year, this spirit would die for lack of culture were it not for athletics. There is training for it in every contest witnessed. These contests affect graduates as well as undergraduates, and go far toward accounting for the warm interest which the alumni of all of the larger colleges feel in their Alma Mater.

6. The system of athletics, by its intercollegiate contests, brings the students into a wider world. They are no longer "home-keeping youths," "with homely wits." They measure themselves by other standards than those they find in the limits of their own campus.

In the next paper the writer proposes to discuss the accompanying evils of the present system of college athletics, and to present some statistics bearing upon the general subject.