s, which rest on solid proof, and
I'll accept the present mania for athletic sports as something better
than an outbreak of our insular boastfulness and our insular barbarity
in a new form."

"Question! question!" in a general cry, from One, Two, and Three.

"Question! question!" in meek reverberation, from Smith and Jones.

"That is the question," rejoined Sir Patrick. "You admit the existence
of the public feeling and I ask, what good does it do?"

"What harm does it do?" from One, Two, and Three.

"Hear! hear!" from Smith and Jones.

"That's a fair challenge," replied Sir Patrick. "I am bound to meet you
on that new ground. I won't point, gentlemen, by way of answer, to the
coarseness which I can see growing on our national manners, or to the
deterioration which appears to me to be spreading more and more widely
in our national tastes. You may tell me with perfect truth that I am too
old a man to be a fair judge of manners and tastes which have got beyond
my standards. We will try the issue, as it now stands between us, on its
abstract merits only. I assert that a state of public feeling which does
practically place physical training, in its estimation, above moral and
mental training, is a positively bad and dangerous state of feeling in
this, that it encourages the inbred reluctance in humanity to submit to
the demands which moral and mental cultivation must inevitably make on
it. Which am I, as a boy, naturally most ready to do--to try how high I
can jump? or to try how much I can learn? Which training comes easiest
to me as a young man? The training which teaches me to handle an oar?
or the training which teaches me to return good for evil, and to love
my neighbor as myself? Of those two experiments, of those two trainings,
which ought society in England to meet with the warmest encouragement?
And which does society in England practically encourage, as a matter of
fact?"

"What did you say yourself just now?" from One, Two, and Three.

"Remarkably well put!" from Smith and Jones.

"I said," admitted Sir Patrick, "that a man will go all the better
to his books for his healthy physical exercise. And I say that
again--provided the physical exercise be restrained within fit limits.
But when public feeling enters into the question, and directly exalts
the bodily exercises above the books--then I say public feeling is in a
dangerous extreme. The bodily exercises, in that case, will be uppermost
in the youth's