Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/748

726 to the city youths a sport more fascinating with all its dangers and severe restraints than the temptations of city life. What this boon means in its effects upon the coming generations the coming time will show. It certainly is bringing forward a more virile race even in the cities. And the cities in the past have been the first points of decadence of a decaying civilization. As the census reports show, the population is flocking more and more to the cities, so that the growth of athletics began at a time when it was most needed. What President Eliot, in his late report, says of the effect of athletic sports at Harvard, applies with equal truth and force to athletics in all educational institutions—universities as well as schools—"namely, that there has been a decided improvement in the average health and strength of Harvard students during the past twenty-five years. The gain is visible in all sorts of students, among those who devote themselves to study as well as among those who give much time to sports." It was in the colleges that this increased attention to physical exercise was begun, and begun by the students themselves. The system extended to the schools. It has been the parent of most of the athletic clubs now in existence. It furnishes a healthy stimulus and recreation to thousands of young men who but for it would be wasting their strength in much more brutal and brutalizing excitements. It is not too much to say that it is the salvation of our youth. And just as the scholarship of our universities stimulates the intellectual life of these schools, so the athletic contests of the universities keep alive among the schoolboys a healthy admiration for a manly physique. This effect of the college sports has not been sufficiently noticed. It is worth all it costs. It could never have existed if it had not been for the publicity given to the college contests, and to football contests in particular. It has given order to play and introduced obedience to authority and the love of courage into every school in the land. It is not entirely because Yale and Harvard play football or baseball, row and train, that their students show a "decided improvement in their average health during the past twenty-five years," but also because their example has been followed by the schools, and consequently better developed young men are sent from the schools to the universities. The improvement is not confined to college students. It is noticeable in the young men of the whole land. It has produced another effect. The young women of the country have been induced to emulate the physical development of their brothers. They have not played all their rough games, it is true; still, it is undeniable that the greater attention to the physique of women is in some degree an effect of the visible good results of the better development of the men. And all the aids of physical development, such as gymnasiums.