Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/269

 Rh mishaps should not be charged up to the game. No advocate of the game of football should fear the truth so far as the dangers of the game are concerned, yet every believer in it has a right to resent the unfair playing upon popular fears and emotions by a public press that is either culpably careless in the gathering of news, or worse.

Football is not a gentle game, and the boy who is entirely satisfied with tiddle-dy-winks, as well as his father, who in his day had been satisfied with similar games, may deem it over-strenuous. But no youth of bone and muscle who hears even the faintest 'Call of the Wild' echoing down from a thousand generations of fighting ancestors—and they must have been fighters or they would never have been ancestors—comes to his own without somewhere and somehow a chance at the physical try out with worthy adversaries. With the days of almost universal war superseded by days of as universal peace and the knight-errant and the tournament things of the past, if we emasculate football and attempt to eliminate entirely the danger element, we shall close the last safety valve to virile expression and may well expect an explosion. Newspaper football is excessively dangerous, but is, after all, football of the college gridiron? In a statistical study which I have made covering ten years of play (1892-1902) in sixty-four leading colleges and universities, where 22,766 men played upon 1,374 different teams, but three men were fatally injured, eight permanently injured and but three men in each hundred sufficiently injured to lose time from their class work. And Harvard was within the list studied, in spite of what might be inferred from reports for the past season. President Hadley was right when he said a few days ago that football was not only not an excessively dangerous game as played at our colleges, but the least dangerous of the more important sports. But he was not speaking of newspaper football.