t the applicants.

This second point being evidently the practical one, I had better give
my reason. Exhibition pugilism is essentially a branch of Art: that is
to say, it acts and attracts by propagating feeling. The feeling it
propagates is pugnacity. Sense of danger, dread of danger, impulse to
batter and destroy what threatens and opposes, triumphant delight in
succeeding: this is pugnacity, the great adversary of the social impulse
to live and let live; to establish our rights by shouldering our share
of the social burden; to face and examine danger instead of striking at
it; to understand everything to the point of pardoning (and righting)
everything; to conclude an amnesty with Nature wide enough to include
even those we know the worst of: namely, ourselves. If two men
quarrelled, and asked the Borough Council to lend them a room to fight
it out in with their fists, on the ground that a few minutes' hearty
punching of one another's heads would work off their bad blood and leave
them better friends, each desiring, not victory, but _satisfaction_, I
am not sure that I should not vote for compliance. But if a syndicate of
showmen came and said, Here we have two men who have no quarrel, but who
will, if you pay them, fight before your constituency and thereby make a
great propaganda of pugnacity in it, sharing the profits with us and
with you, I should indignantly oppose the proposition. And if the
majority were against me, I should try to persuade them to at least
impose the condition that the fight should be with naked fists under the
old rules, so that the combatants should, like Sayers and Langham,
depend on bunging up each other's eyes rather than, like the modern
knocker-out, giving one another concussion of the brain.

I may add, finally, that the present halting between the legal
toleration and suppression of commercial pugilism is much worse than the
extreme of either, because it takes away the healthy publicity and sense
of responsibility which legality and respectability give, without
suppressing the blackguardism which finds its opportunity in shady
pursuits. I use the term commercial advisedly. Put a stop to boxing for
money; and pugilism will give society no further trouble.

LONDON, 1901.

* * * * *

THREE PLAYS

BY BRIEUX

(Member of the French Academy)

MATERNITY

DAMAGED GOODS

THE THREE DAUGHTERS OF
MONSIEUR DUPONT

WITH PREFACE BY BERNARD SHAW