"The reason firm,"


yet still


"The temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill,"


have become impossible for the greater number: and athletic
exercises are now, in England at least, becoming more and more
artificialized and expensive; and are confined more and more - with
the honourable exception of the football games in Battersea Park -
to our Public Schools and the two elder Universities. All honour,
meanwhile, to the Volunteer movement, and its moral as well as its
physical effects. But it is only a comparatively few of the very
sturdiest who are likely to become effective Volunteers, and so
really gain the benefits of learning to be soldiers. And yet the
young man who has had no substitute for such occupations will cut
but a sorry figure in Australia, Canada, or India; and if he stays
at home, will spend many a pound in doctors' bills, which could
have been better employed elsewhere. "Taking a walk" - as one
would take a pill or a draught - seems likely soon to become the
only form of outdoor existence possible for too many inhabitants of
the British Isles. But a walk without an object, unless in the
most lovely and novel of scenery, is a poor exercise; and as a
recreation, utterly nil. I never knew two young lads go out for a
"constitutional," who did not, if they were commonplace youths,