Page:You Gentiles (1924) by Maurice Samuel 1895-1972.djvu/43

Sport "scholarship" more than for truth, and who, often lacking the shrewdness, insight, cynicism, craftiness, vulgarity, affection and live-wireness, in brief, the worldliness, to understand what is going on around them in newspapers, politics and movements, think they can nevertheless understand history, which they seem to regard not as yesterday's acts of the people around them to-day, but as a detached and peculiar system, inaccessible to ordinary and uncultured intelligence. I need not go to ancient history. When I read "serious" accounts of the history of our own times, and see in what a seeming conspiracy of stupidity our historians ignore the most potent manifestation of modern life—sport, football, baseball—and concentrate almost exclusively on such trivialities as politics, which no one takes seriously, I am filled with astonishment and despair. Such men cannot write true history. But some records there are, and however small the attention which "serious" historians have given to this, we must feel that the chief free passion, that is, 39