VI

SPORT AND THE THEATER


I remember thinking, long before I came to the United States, at the
time when the anti-gambling bill was a leading topic of American
correspondence in European newspapers, that a State whose public opinion
would allow even the discussion of a regulation so drastic could not
possibly regard "sport" as sport is regarded in Europe. It might be very
fond of gambling, but it could not be afflicted with the particular
mania which in Europe amounts to a passion, if not to a religion. And
when the project became law, and horse-racing was most beneficially and
admirably abolished in the northeastern portion of the Republic, I was
astonished. No such law could be passed in any European country that I
knew. The populace would not suffer it; the small, intelligent minority
would not care enough to support it; and the wealthy oligarchical
priest-patrons of sport would be seriously convinced that it involved
the ruin of true progress and the end of all things. Such is the
sacredness of sport in Europe, where governments audacious enough to
attack and overthrow the state-church have never dared to suggest the
suppression of the vice by which alone the main form of sport lives ...

So that I did not expect to find the United States a very "sporting"
country. And I did not so find it. I do not wish to suggest that, in my
opinion, there is no "sport" in the United States, but only that there
is somewhat less than in Western Europe; as I have already indicated,