state, or nation triumph over someone else's university, state, or
nation. There are thousands of people who rejoice over or bewail the
result of the Derby without thereby proving their possession of any
right to the title of sportsman; there is no difference of quality
between the speculator in grain and the speculator in horseflesh and
jockeys' nerves. So, too, there are many thousands who yell for Yale
in a football match who have no real sporting instinct whatever.
Sport, to be sport, must jealously shun all attempts to make it a
business; the more there is of the spirit of professionalism in any
game or athletic exercise the less it deserves to be called a sport. A
sport in the true sense of the word must be practised for fun or
glory, not for dollars and cents; and the desire to win must be very
strictly subordinated to the sense of honour and fair play. The
book-making spirit has undoubtedly entered far too largely into many
of the most characteristic of British sports, and I have no desire to
palliate or excuse our national shortcomings in this or other
respects. But the hard commercial spirit to which I have alluded seems
to me to pervade American sport much more universally than it does the
sport of England, and to form almost always a much larger factor in
the interest excited by any contest.

This is very clearly shown by the way in which games are carried on at
the universities of the two countries. Most members of an English
college are members of some one or other of the various athletic
associations connected with it, and it cannot be denied that the
general interest in sport is both wide and keen. But it does not
assume so "business-like" an air as it does in such a university as
Yale or Princeton. Not nearly so much money is spent in the
paraphernalia of the sport or in the process of training. The
operation of turning a pleasure into a toil is not so consistently