Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 9.pdf/286

 Gentlemen of honour, according to the old standards, rode horses, raced chariots, fought, and played competitive games of skill; and the dull, cowardly and base came in thousands to admire, and howl, and bet. The gentlemen of honour degenerated fast enough into a sort of athletic prostitute, with all the defects, all the vanity, trickery, and self-assertion of the common actor, and with even less intelligence. Our Founders made no peace with this organisation of public sports. They did not spend their lives to secure for all men and women on the earth freedom, health, and leisure, in order that they might waste lives in such folly."

"We have those abuses," I said, "but some of our earthly games have a fine side. There is a game called cricket. It is a fine, generous game."

"Our boys play that, and men too. But it is thought rather puerile to give very much time to it; men should have graver interests. It was undignified and unpleasant for the samurai to play conspicuously ill, and impossible for them to play so constantly as to keep hand and eye in training against the man who was fool enough and cheap enough to become an expert. Cricket, tennis, fives, billiards— You will find clubs and a class of men to play all these things in Utopia, but not the samurai. And they must play their games as games, not as displays; the price of a privacy for playing cricket, so that they could charge for admission, would be overwhelmingly high Negroes are often very clever at cricket. For a time, most of the samurai had their sword-play, but few do those exercises now; and until about fifty years ago