le-stick with General Wood. After a few years
I had to abandon boxing as well as wrestling, for in one bout a young
captain of artillery cross-countered me on the eye, and the blow smashed
the little blood-vessels. Fortunately it was my left eye, but the sight
has been dim ever since, and if it had been the right eye I should
have been entirely unable to shoot. Accordingly I thought it better
to acknowledge that I had become an elderly man and would have to stop
boxing. I then took up jiu-jitsu for a year or two.

When I was in the Legislature and was working very hard, with little
chance of getting out of doors, all the exercise I got was boxing and
wrestling. A young fellow turned up who was a second-rate prize-fighter,
the son of one of my old boxing teachers. For several weeks I had him
come round to my rooms in the morning to put on the gloves with me for
half an hour. Then he suddenly stopped, and some days later I received a
letter of woe from him from the jail. I found that he was by profession
a burglar, and merely followed boxing as the amusement of his lighter
moments, or when business was slack.

Naturally, being fond of boxing, I grew to know a good many
prize-fighters, and to most of those I knew I grew genuinely attached.
I have never been able to sympathize with the outcry against
prize-fighters. The only objection I have to the prize ring is the
crookedness that has attended its commercial development. Outside of
this I regard boxing, whether professional or amateur, as a first-class
sport, and I do not regard it as brutalizing. Of course matches can be
conducted under conditions that make them brutalizing. But this is true
of football games and of most other rough and vigorous sports. Most
certainly prize-fighting is not half as brutalizing or demoralizing
as many forms of big business and of the legal work carried on in
connection with big business. Powerful, vigorous men of strong animal
development must have some way in which their animal spirits can find
vent. When I was Police Commissioner I found (and Jacob Riis will
back me up in this) that the establishment of a boxing club in a tough
neighborhood always tended to do away with knifing and gun-fighting
among the young fellows who would otherwise have been in murderous
gangs. Many of these young fellows were not naturally criminals at all,
but they had to have some outlet for their activities. In the same way
I have always regarded boxing as a f