Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/611

Rh the pupils despise the lowness of the men quite as much as do the faculty themselves. Another and better remedy would be to select an amateur athlete from the graduates, educated as a physician, and give him a salaried office, with duties as general adviser and guardian of the athletic interests. Such a man, if properly qualified, would help the students to a safer and better physical development than they now get, and would, besides, soon drive away all trainers exercising improper influences among them.

In foot-ball there is no professional element. But it is charged against the game that there is danger in it to life and limb. Undoubtedly it is a rough sport, but year by year it is becoming less dangerous in consequence of the increasing strictness of the rules and the severity of the penalties against foul play. In the match-games these rules are generally so well observed that few accidents occur. In the games between Yale and Princeton, which have always been the most hotly contested, no man has been seriously hurt. It is a game which particularly requires courage, and is therefore a most manly game. It is like a battle with the danger not all left out, but a battle in which courage and self-possession not only secure victory but safety. With all its dangers it is less dangerous to the players than the confinement accompanying excess of study.

One great evil connected with athletics, and not generally receiving public notice or animadversion, is the excess of feeling between students of different colleges, occasioned by the intercollegiate contests. This excess of feeling seems akin to excessive class-feeling already noticed. It is partly due, no doubt, to the youthfulness of the parties. It is seldom entertained by the contestants. It is a strange fact that such feeling does not appear to exist between professional clubs, nor between professional and amateur clubs. In this matter, therefore, it would seem that the students might learn a good lesson from "professionals."

What the condition of the college would be without a system of athletics is a question already partly answered by what has been said in meeting the charges against the system. We can understand, also, the effect of abolishing the present system by calling to mind the disorders reported in colleges in which no such system is allowed to exist. The revolts against authority and the great disorders between classes now occur with the most frequency not at colleges which have the greatest number of students and the most extensive athletic organizations, but at the colleges in which the students either are not able or are not allowed to establish such organizations. The disorders which used to occur in New Haven thirty or even twenty-five years ago ought to convince any candid man that, however great the present evils of college-life are athletics, the past evils without athletics were worse. On one occasion in those "good old times," in consequence of a conflict between students and town boys, a cannon was brought before the