Again no boy can meet with real athletic success who has not learnt to control his temper.  It is not merely that public opinion despises the man who is a bad loser; but that to lose your temper very often means to lose the game.  It may be true that a Rugby forward does not develop his finest game until an opponent’s elbow has met his nose and given an extra spice to his onslaught.  But in the majority of contests the man who keeps his head will win.  Notably this is true in boxing, a fine instrument of education, whatever may be the objections to the prize ring.  So dispassionate a scientist as Professor Hall in his monumental work on Adolescence, describes boxing as “a manly art, a superb school for quickness of eye and hand, decision, full of will and self-control.  The moment this is lost, stinging punishment follows.  Hence it is the surest of all cures for excessive irascibility, and has been found to have a most beneficial effect upon a peevish or unmanly disposition.”

But perhaps the best lesson that a boy can learn from his games, is the lesson that he must play for his side and not for himself.  He does not always learn it; the cricketer who plays for his average, the three-quarters who tries to score himself, are not unknown, though boyish opinion rightly condemns them.  Popular school ethics are thoroughly sound on this point, and it is the virtue of inter-school and inter-house competitions, that in them a boy learns what it is to forget self and to think of a cause.  There is a society outside himself which has its claim upon him, whose victory is his victory, whose defeat is his defeat.  Whether victory comes through him or through another, is nothing so long as victory be won; later in life men may play games for their health’s sake or for enjoyment, but they lose that thrill of intense patriotism, the more intense because of the smallness of the society that arouses it, with which they battled in the mud of some November day for the honour of their school or house.  Small wonder that when school-fellows meet after years of separation, the memories to which they most gladly return, are the memories of hard-won victories and manfully contested defeats.

But victory must be won by fair means.  There is a story (possibly without historical foundation) that a foreign visitor to Oxford said that the thing that struck him most in that great university was the fact that there were 3000 men there who would rather lose a game than win it by unfair means.  It would be absurd to pretend that that spirit is universal:  the commercial organisation of professional football and the development of betting have gone a long way to degrade a noble sport.  But the standard of fair play in school games is high, and it is the encouragement of this spirit by cricket and football that renders them so valuable an aid in the activities of boys’ clubs in artisan districts.  It has been argued that the prevalence of this generous temper among