is, for practical
purposes, de-nationalised." Some six years after that was written an
American golfer became Amateur Champion of Great Britain. Yes; I know
that Mr. Travis was not born in the United States, but _qua_ golfer he
is American pure and simple. Which shows the danger of too hasty
generalisation, even on the part of a genius. And it shows more. When he
wrote those words Kipling was fully justified by the facts as they
stood. It is the fault of the character of the American people, which
frustrates prophecy.

Twenty-five years ago there was no amateur sport in America--none. Men,
it is true, went off and shot ("hunted" as Americans call it) and fished
and yachted for a few days, or weeks, in summer or autumn, in a rather
rough-and-ready sort of way. Also, when at college they played baseball
and football and, perhaps, they rowed. After leaving college there was
probably not one young American in a hundred who entered a boat or
played a game of either football or baseball on an average of once in a
year. The people as a whole had no open-air games. Baseball was chiefly
professional. Cricket had a certain foothold in Philadelphia and on
Staten Island, but it was an exotic sport, as it remains to-day, failing
entirely to enlist the sympathies of the multitude. Polo was not played.
Lawn tennis had been introduced, but had made little headway. In all
America there were, I think, three racquet courts, which were used
chiefly by visiting Englishmen, and not one tennis court. Lacrosse was
quite unknown, and as for the "winter sports" of snow-shoeing, ski-ing,
ice-boating, curling, and tobogganing, they were practised only here and
there by a few (except for the "coasting" of children) as rather a
curious fad.

It was a strange experience for an Englishman in those days, fond of his
games, to go from his clubs and the society of his fellows at home, to
mix in the same class of society in America. As in the circles that he
had left behind him, so there, the conversation was still largely on
sporting topics, but while in England men talked of the games in which
they played themselves and of the feats and experiences of their
friends, in the leading young men's clubs of New York--the Union, the
Knickerbocker, and the Calumet--the talk was solely of professional
sport: of the paid baseball nines, of prize fighters (Sullivan was then
just rising to his glory), and professional scullers (those were the
days of Hanlan), and