Mr. E.J.  Brown, Track Captain of the University of California, asserted, on his return from a visit to the Eastern States, that Harvard was the only Eastern university in which the members of the athletic teams were all bona fide students.  This is doubtless a very 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’etre 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.

The national games of cricket and baseball serve very well to illustrate this, as well as other contrasts in the pastimes of the two nations.  In cricket the line between the amateur and the professional has hitherto been very clearly drawn; and Englishmen are apt to believe that there is something elevating in the very nature of the game which makes it shed scandals as a duck’s back sheds water.  The American view is, perhaps, rather that cricket is so slow a game that there is little scope for betting, with all its attendant excitement and evils.  They point to the fact that the staid city of Philadelphia is the only part of the United States in which cricket flourishes; and, if in a boasting mood, they may claim