exaggerated statement, but it would seem to indicate which way the
wind blows. The entire American tendency is to take amusement too
seriously, too strenuously. They do not allow sport to take care of
itself. "It runs to rhetoric and interviews." All good contestants
become "representatives of the American people." One serious effect of
the way in which the necessity of winning or "making records" is
constantly held up as the _raison d'être_ of athletic sports is that
it suggests to the ordinary student, who has no hopes of brilliant
success in athletics, that moderate exercise is contemptible, and that
he need do nothing to keep up his bodily vigour. Thus, Dr. Birkbeck
Hill found that the proportion of students who took part in some
athletic sport was distinctly less at Harvard than at Oxford. Nor
could I ascertain that nearly so large a proportion of the adult
population themselves played games or followed athletics of any kind
as in England. I should say, speaking roughly, that the end of his
university career or his first year in responsible business
corresponded practically for the ordinary American to the forty-fifth
year of the ordinary Englishman, _i.e._, after this time he would
either entirely or partially give up his own active participation in
outdoor exercises. Of course there are thousands of exceptions on both
sides; but the general rule remains true. The average American
professional or business man does not play baseball as his English
cousin does cricket. He goes in his thousands to see baseball
matches, and takes a very keen and vociferous interest in their
progress; but he himself has probably not handled a club since he left
college. No doubt this contrast is gradually diminishing, and such
games as lawn tennis and golf have made it practically a vanishing
quantity in the North-eastern States; but as one goes West one cannot
but feel that baseball and other sports, like dancing in China, are
almost wholly in the hands of paid performers.