his games, is
the lesson that he must play for his side and not for himself. He does
not always learn it; the cricketer who plays for his average, the
three-quarters who tries to score himself, are not unknown, though
boyish opinion rightly condemns them. Popular school ethics are
thoroughly sound on this point, and it is the virtue of inter-school
and inter-house competitions, that in them a boy learns what it is to
forget self and to think of a cause. There is a society outside
himself which has its claim upon him, whose victory is his victory,
whose defeat is his defeat. Whether victory comes through him or
through another, is nothing so long as victory be won; later in life
men may play games for their health's sake or for enjoyment, but they
lose that thrill of intense patriotism, the more intense because of
the smallness of the society that arouses it, with which they battled
in the mud of some November day for the honour of their school or
house. Small wonder that when school-fellows meet after years of
separation, the memories to which they most gladly return, are the
memories of hard-won victories and manfully contested defeats.

But victory must be won by fair means. There is a story (possibly
without historical foundation) that a foreign visitor to Oxford said
that the thing that struck him most in that great university was the
fact that there were 3000 men there who would rather lose a game than
win it by unfair means. It would be absurd to pretend that that spirit
is universal: the commercial organisation of professional football and
the development of betting have gone a long way to degrade a noble
sport. But the standard of fair play in school games is high, and it
is the encouragement of this spirit by cricket and football that
renders them so valuable an aid in the activities of boys' clubs in
artisan districts. It has been argued that the prevalence of this
generous temper among our troops has been a real handicap in war; that
we have too much regarded hostilities as a game in which there were
certain rules to be observed, and that when we found ourselves matched
against a foe whose object was to win by any means, fair or foul, the
soldiers who were fettered by the scruples of honour were necessarily
inferior to their unscrupulous foe. It has perhaps yet to be proved
that in the long run the unchivalrous fighter always wins, and I doubt
whether any of us would really prefer that even in war we should s