it creaked. He was nearly as pleased as I was when I told him I thought
we would "vote the war a failure" and abandon wrestling. After that I
took up boxing again. While President I used to box with some of the
aides, as well as play single-stick with General Wood. After a few years
I had to abandon boxing as well as wrestling, for in one bout a young
captain of artillery cross-countered me on the eye, and the blow smashed
the little blood-vessels. Fortunately it was my left eye, but the sight
has been dim ever since, and if it had been the right eye I should
have been entirely unable to shoot. Accordingly I thought it better
to acknowledge that I had become an elderly man and would have to stop
boxing. I then took up jiu-jitsu for a year or two.

When I was in the Legislature and was working very hard, with little
chance of getting out of doors, all the exercise I got was boxing and
wrestling. A young fellow turned up who was a second-rate prize-fighter,
the son of one of my old boxing teachers. For several weeks I had him
come round to my rooms in the morning to put on the gloves with me for
half an hour. Then he suddenly stopped, and some days later I received a
letter of woe from him from the jail. I found that he was by profession
a burglar, and merely followed boxing as the amusement of his lighter
moments, or when business was slack.

Naturally, being fond of boxing, I grew to know a good many
prize-fighters, and to most of those I knew I grew genuinely attached.
I have never been able to sympathize with the outcry against
prize-fighters. The only objection I have to the prize ring is the
crookedness that has attended its commercial development. Outside of
this I regard boxing, whether professional or amateur, as a first-class
sport, and I do not regard it as brutalizing. Of course matches can be
conducted under conditions that make them brutalizing. But this is true