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There is a good deal of discussion on the subject of football just now.

The fatal accidents which have befallen the players already this season have led people to think it a brutal sport, and many are setting their faces against it.

The legislature of Georgia has forbidden football within the state limits, and all the prominent colleges in the country are discussing the idea of prohibiting it.

Chicago has come to the front as bravely as it did in the crusade against the high hats in theatres.

The same alderman who offered the resolution to suppress the hats has evolved a new one which will make him famous.

It reads:  “An Ordinance to Prohibit the Playing of Football.”

While football is a fine, manly sport, the objectors have good reason on their side for wishing to suppress it.

A good many young fellows seem to forget the true sporting spirit in which they should play the game, and to use it as a means for paying off old grudges.

If they cannot rise above their own feelings in the game, the sooner it is forbidden the better.

A statement from a noted Harvard Right Tackle has appeared, which is so shocking to all true sportsmen that they can but feel that Georgia’s example cannot too soon be followed by the other States.

This statement is in reference to a famous game played in 1889.  It says that in the rival team was a man who had been the Right Tackle’s unsuccessful rival at a preparatory college.  In the course of the game this man walked deliberately up to the Right Tackle, kicked him severely, then limping off to the umpire, complained that the Harvard man had kicked him.  The Harvard man was ruled out of the game, and as he left the field his rival again approached him, and said:  “I’ve got even for that old grudge at ——­ College.”  The Harvard man knocked him down, and that ended the matter.

It seems incredible that men calling themselves gentlemen should not only do such things, but speak of them unconcernedly afterward.

In England, which is the home of football, the game is rough enough, but kicking or “hacking,” as it is called, is not allowed, and the man who would deliberately strike or seek to injure another in the course of a game on account of a private grudge would be forced to leave college and hounded out of society.  The love of sport for sport’s sake is so well developed in England that a man would be disgraced for life who would so far forget himself as to permit any such exhibition as the one quoted above.

G.H.  ROSENFELD.

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