But perhaps the most valuable testimony of all, is that given by Mr. Tinné, captain of the Oxford four which rowed against Harvard in 1869. This consists of a letter to Dr. Morgan, and embodies in a few concise and temperate expressions the opinion of an enthusiastic oarsman, and yet, one who would not let his zeal for the sport get the better of that judgment which his experience had taught him. These are his words: "My own impressions as to whether the 'Varsity training is injurious to men, are very much the same as I daresay you have heard from others, namely, that 1. If a man be sound to start with, 2. Trains honestly, 3. Does not play the fool when he comes out of training, he will come to no harm. Speaking for myself, I can say that I never was in such perfect health and comfort as when in training at Putney." This is the qualified statement of a celebrated oarsman. He does not attempt to defend the practice of rowing races on anything but its merits. There is no overflow of enthusiasm; but, on the contrary, his tentative language implies that severe training, begun without proper precautions and broken off suddenly is liable to be followed by injurious effects an imputation which no reasonable person, however strenuous a supporter of athletics, would wish to deny. The conclusion to which Dr. Morgan arrives is deduced from a comparison of numerous letters whose opinions coincide with the one quoted, and his reasoning is fully sustained by the facts he has cited. Dr. Morgan gives us, moreover, a statement from a member of his own profession, a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, to the effect that " rowing in a racing boat with proper training and fitting men does good physically and morally." But it is hardly necessary to multiply examples, for those of our readers who wish to, can get all the statistics they desire by turning to Dr. Morgan's little book; and we venture to say that opening at random the inquirer will happen upon a letter expressing temperate approval if not enthusiastic eulogy of the physical benefit to undergraduates of rowing and training for boat races. Even among the rare cases where harm was supposed to have been incurred, the majority testify to the fact that the injury has not been transmitted to their offspring, giving, surely, ample evidence that whatever ills, due to their rowing careers, have befallen the oarsmen themselves, their constitutions have been left unimpaired. This deprives of their strong point those opponents to athletic sports who, failing to detect any signs of debility in the athlete himself, are wont to fall back upon doleful prognostications of the effect which this "sowing the seeds of disease" will have upon his unfortunate progeny. Turning from the physical side of the discussion, let us now examine the question in its intellectual bearings. To those who oppose competitive athletics, it seems inconceivable that advanced mental and bodily growth should go hand in hand. But it is pure begging of the question to assume, in discussing this subject, that the attainment of an active and vigorous frame, strengthened and symmetrically developed by hardy exercises, is incompatible with the possession of a mind, discerning, well-balanced, and trained to hard study. What need of going to either extreme in asserting that the victorious athlete is presumably one who cultivates his muscle at the expense of his intellect, or that the deep student and hard reading man must of necessity look upon the competition for a seat in his college boat or the first place in the foot race not only as unworthy his efforts but even positively detrimental to his chances of success as a scholar. One would think that this notion needs nothing more by way of refutal than a glance at the numerous examples our own country has furnished, of men who have begun by surpassing their comrades in manly activity, and ended by taking a foremost place among the aspirants for success in professional life or the leaders of public opinion in the councils of the State. Washington's intellect can hardly be said to have suffered from the keenness with which he threw himself into the hunt and his acknowledged passion for field sports; nor is it at all to his discredit that he prided himself on his ability to outjump any other man in Virginia. It is much more reasonable to admit that the active training of his youth inured his body to the privations of the Braddock campaign and brought him back hardier than ever and better able to endure the mental and physical sufferings in store for him at Philadelphia and Valley : Forge. Sumner was the best boxer as well as the widest reader of his class at college; active with his hands, active with his head; able to strike from the shoulder as well as give and receive the blows of forensic strife. Nor, again, is it fair to blame athletic sports as an institution because at certain periods of the year the public press have given undue prominence to the description of the winning boat's crew or the victorious foot-racer. To none is this notoriety more distasteful than to the very objects of it, as the newspaper reporter has often found to his cost. That the College Regatta at Saratoga is made too much of a national affair must be admitted; and that the account of a set of oarsmen, given in language which would better be employed in the description of prize-cattle, shows, at least, flagrantly bad taste, is felt only too well by the athletes themselves. One of the principal reasons given by Yale and Harvard for their proposed withdrawal from the College Rowing Association was this very fact, that the publicity attending these regattas and the extravagant way in which they were treated by the press tended to foist the event into undue and disagreeable prominence and fasten upon the participants an unsought and unwelcome notoriety seriously detrimental to the true interests of athletics. Unfortunately their motives have been misconstrued; and not a few who are wont to declaim against the high pressure excitement which attends the Saratoga race may be found among those who rail at the two colleges for an alleged desire for exclusiveness which their detractors are pleased to term "snobbish" and undemocratic. That athletic sports are liable to be made too important a topic by the newspapers is a fact to be acknowledged and deplored; but one should be careful before proceeding to the wholesale condemnation of a popular institution to discriminate between faults inherent and those which are merely adventitious and admitting of mitigation or radical correction. It is urged, moreover, against muscular competition, that it engenders unworthy aspirations in the student's mind, and we are told that an inordinate desire for notoriety is thus stimulated We are exhorted to emulate the example of our forefathers, those worthy but rather straight-laced moralists, who, with vigorous austerity treated the body as an impure vessel needing to be submitted to all manner of mortifications of the flesh to fit it as a store-house for the treasures of the mind, neglecting the former to cultivate the latter, forgetting the interdependence of the two. Whatever faults the student of today may commit, that is an error which, thanks to more enlightened ideas on education, he is hardly likely to fall into. We fail to perceive why the charge of selfish ambition should be brought against a skillful athlete who strives for a foremost place, any more than against the scholar who aspires to the leadership of his class. The popular movements in favor of boating, base ball, and the like, encourage a social, not solitary, emulation; while in the triumph of him who heads the rank-list, however laudable be his desire for self-culture, there are few sharers outside the fortunate student's own circle of relatives and friends. We would not be thought to depreciate scholastic competition, nor deny that it is one of the most important ingredients of our academic system; but, while acknowledging the value as a stimulus of rivalry in studies, we claim for athletics the benefit of the same element. The history of physical culture is one of progressive development. With the ancients the tendency was naturally to lay great stress on the possession of mere brute strength. The Greek system of education gave twice as much time to the training of the body as to the training of the mind. But this was a better extreme than that to which the clerical austerity of the Middle Ages brought the Medieval monk. Warped in body they grew warped in brain; and the craft, superstition, and bigotry of the cloister were the natural outgrowths of minds goaded to their labors by cruel mortifications of the emaciated frame. "Three of the four Greek fathers-Chrysostom, Basil, and Gregory Nazianzen-ruined their health early, and were in valids for the remainder of their days. Three only of the whole eight were able bodied men,-Ambrose, Augustine, and Athanasius; and the permanent influence of these three has been far greater, for good or for evil, than that of all the others put together.*" And so it has been all the world over. Without citing examples or examining exceptions we may safely say that the men who have figured prominently in politics, literature, or science, have been those who excelled their cotemporaries in vigor of body. Genius, no doubt, will often by sheer force of will overcome the obstacles of weakness and disease; but the unhealthy body is too prone to act upon the abnormally developed brain, supplanting the vigorous thought by the emanations of a diseased imagination. "Ginnyus, Ginnyus, Take care of your carkuss!" Said Reade's shrewd old Dr. Sampson; and his advice is pointed by the example of our own Poe. How often have we sat in the lecture hall, of an evening during the Winter Course, waiting for the lecturer, some distinguished English author or scientist to appear, and expecting to see a slim, pale student, when there steps out on the platform a burly, broad-shouldered personage, with a commanding presence and hearty voice, who turns out to be the very man we have come to see. And then to hear people talk as though great bodily strength and robust health could not be united with a massive intellect and a brain capable of enduring a protracted strain. Why, 'tis the scholars, the hard students themselves who make the best athletes of all, as more than one hard fought race or game of ball will show. "The Royal Engineers, the select of the select,-every one of whom before he obtains his commission has to run the gauntlet of an almost endless series of intellectual contests-for years together could turn out the best foot-ball eleven in the kingdom, and within the last twelve months gained a success in cricket absolutely unprecedented in the annals of the game."+ Time and again come reports from this school or that, of complaints arising from the too great pressure brought to bear upon the scholars in their studies. At one time they come from a famous New England preparatory school; at another from some well known young ladies' seminary. But where do we hear * Saints and their Bodies, by Thos. Wentworth Higginson. |