It should be noted also that the hearty release of energy is, in every
good game, required to keep within the rules. This is particularly true
in basket-ball, which takes high rank as an indoor game for boys. While
the game is intense and fatiguing, anything like a muscular rampage
brings certain penalty to the player and loss to his team. So that,
while the boy who does not play "snappy" and hard cannot rank high,
neither can the boy who plays "rough-house." Forcefulness under control
is the desideratum.

Besides this there is always the development of that good-natured
appreciation of every hard task, that refinement of the true sporting
spirit, by which all the serious work of life becomes a contest worthy
of never-ending interest and buoyant persistency. In the midst of all
the sublime responsibilities of his remarkable ministry we hear Phillips
Brooks exclaim, "It's great fun to be a minister." An epoch-making
president of the United States telegraphs his colleague and successor,
with all the zest of a boy at play, "We've beaten them to a frazzle";
and the greatest of all apostles, triumphing over bonds and
imprisonment, calls out to his followers, "I have fought a good fight."
"It is doubtful if a great man ever accomplished his life work without
having reached a play interest in it."

The saving power of organized play, in the prevention and cure of that
morbidity which especially besets youth, can hardly be overestimated.
This diseased self-consciousness is intimately connected with nervous
tensions and reflexes from sex conditions and not infrequently passes
over into sex abuse or excess of some sort. So that the diversion of
strenuous athletic games, and the consequent use of energy up to a point
just below exhaustion, is everywhere recognized as an indispensable
moral prophylactic. Solitariness, overwrought nervous states, the