lend themselves to the gratification of this public taste?

Only a few are needed. In the ten years from 1892 to 1902, at the University of California, only seventy-five different men made the team as players or substitutes out of four thousand or more different male students during that time in attendance. As a player generally holds on for three or four years, seventy-five men, with a certain number of hopeless candidates as background, will suffice for the proposed task in any decade.

A better solution, in my opinion, is to return from the spectacle to the sport; take off the headgear and the nose-guards, and the thighpadding and the knee padding, and introduce the Association game for light men and runners, indeed, for the average man,—and the restored Rugby. perhaps with its Australian modifications, for the heavier and more vigorous men. Then let the student mass descend from its enthronement in sedentary athletics on the bleachers and get health and fun and virility out of the heartiest and manliest of our sports.

IN my college days I played what was known

as "Association football; in the university I was introduced to the American Rugby game, and was a member of the 'varsity team"

for two seasons (or so much of them as was not spent in having my bones mended); later as a college president I saw the game now generally played develop in a typical Western college; then as a professor I had somewhat to do with students of one of the great Eastern universities in which the game was played in its evolved and highly specialized form; and now I am associated with a college in which football has not for some time been played. I have thus, in my experience of the game, passed through all its stages. I speak of this cycle of my personal experience, from no football to no football, because its chapters mark the course of the game in America, though the last stage has been reached by only a few institutions.

1. The game of my first experience was not without its dangers to limb, but they were not so great to life. By comparison with it, the Rugby game seemed to me, when I first witnessed and played it, unintelligible, uninterest ing, and unprofitable. I do not know how this earlier form of contest, more properly called football, now being revived, would impress me, as I have not seen it played in many years. If it is all that my memory recalls, it should be restored in our schools, at any rate. There would be this decided advantage, if the schools adopted the Association game" while the colleges kept the Rugby, that the specialization in the latter would begin much later, and that the evils growing out of the canvass of schools for promising trained material would be greatly reduced. Such

a change might help, also, to diminish the hurtful aping by schoolboys of what may safely be done by young men of college or university age. The inter-school games played before great crowds should be stopped. The good cannot be as great as the harm.

2. My experience as a member of a university team was altogether beneficial to me, despite the injuries I received. Although they were serious enough, they were insignificant, after all, by the side of the discipline and the bodily advantage. But the game was then rather primitive; there were few practice hours, few out-of-town games; there was no training-table, no coach, no armor; the players had no excuse from regular university work; they led a normal student life. The game was incidental. Under such conditions and natural restrictions (there were no artificial ones), the game was entirely whole

some.

3. As president I saw the Rugby game rise from its beginnings in the West. It had not yet been mimicked by the schools, and so its present scientific refinement was happily not possible. The danger of professionalism was not as great as in baseball. Although the ad· vantages of mere weight were even then menacing the attractiveness of the game, alertness of body and brain still had a good chance. The best scholar, in my memory of that period, was also one of the best players. The benefit of the game, as then played, to the college as a whole and to the player was unquestioned. No apology for football was needed in that time.

4. Most of its evils have come, it is not necessary to say, with its intensification, with the glorification of the player, with the profes

this respect of late years.

It is now considered better football to follow the man with the ball than to attempt to do up" or knock out" an opponent. The injuries from football, which unfortunately are now more numerous than ever, do not result so much from personal assaults as from the vicious method of tackling a runner below the hips (formerly prohibited), various kinds of momentum or mass plays, and the practice of piling on to the man who is downed with the ball. So long as this method of playing is practised, it will be necessary to meet force with force, and injuries will continue to be numerous, for reasons that are so obvious that they need not be mentioned. No sport has long thrived among gentlemen that admits of violent personal contact. This is the factor in sport that has killed boxing and wrestling as athletic contests in the colleges, and it is the fundamental objec tion to football as at present played. The only way to prevent injuries from objectionable personal contact and violent collisions in football is to stop trying to advance the ball toward the opponent's goal by running with it. This will at once do away with all forms of tackling, with the inevitable downs, rush-line scrimmages, and mass plays. Permit the ball to be passed, batted, kicked, or rolled in any direction, and allow, if necessary, blocking or interference with the flight of the ball from player to player or toward the goal, but do not allow, under any circumstances, a player to lay hands upon or interfere with an opponent when he has the ball.

This requirement, which protects the man with the ball, should be followed by another making it obligatory upon him not to hold the

ball, but to pass it quickly to some other player on his own side who may have run to some more advantageous position to receive it. In order to make the attainment of a goal more difficult, the goals should be kicked, and not thrown, and the form of the goals through which the ball is kicked should be a vertical square or circle, made small enough and placed low enough to give a better opportunity for defense than is afforded by the present game. Other specific directions should follow as a matter of course.

It will be observed that the game that I would substitute for modern football is a combination of the good points of football and basketball. The rules of such a game could be made very simple, and twenty or thirty men on a side could play it at the same time. The crying need of our colleges to-day is not for the highly specialized and over-strenuous games that only few men can play, but for more simple games in which a greater number may take part. If athletics have any place in our institutions of learning, they should be so conducted that all the students attending may get some good from them. With this end in view, our schools and colleges should open up the best possible facilities for the practice of all the approved forms of sports, games, and physical exercises. Unless the present interest in athletics take some such practical turn as this, it will soon be a disgrace for an institution of learning to turn out a victorious athletic team, and the attendance of forty thousand persons at a football game, the spirit and practice of which they condemn, may be considered evidence of our moral decadence.

WE

HEN five hundred children are turned loose on a space of ground which in the old school days would have served fifty children for recess it is not possible for them to play freely; they interfere with one another. The children being placed so much more closely together has greatly increased all those difficulties which are involved in social relations. The complexity of the situation has been greatly increased. In order that the five hundred children may play as freely as possible, it is necessary that there be some older person who shall main

tain order; who shall see that the available space. is not monopolized by the few big and strong ones. He shall, when necessary, suggest plays and games adapted to the difficult and new conditions under which the children find themselves. In order that the play may be most free, it must be somewhat controlled. This control does not extend to the play itself, but is directed at the government of those conditions which are new,

namely, the social intensity and complexity due to the large number of children in the limited space, and the furnishing the information

with reference to specific plays which have not yet had time enough to be evolved by the children themselves. The object of the control is to let the children play freely. The method is the control of those elements in the environment which are new and too complex and difficult to be handled by the children themselves.

The principle obtains wherever the conditions under which people play become rapidly changed. For example, the present situation with reference to college athletics in general and college football in particular shows the inadequacy of the uncontrolled free-play idea as applied to college students under the present conditions of intercollegiate athletics. There is a general and very old feeling among educational authorities that the recreation of all college students is much better when directed by the students themselves, that this direction is in itself a part of the play, that it affords useful training in various directions, to all of which I most willingly assent, but during the past few years new elements have been introduced into the college athletic situation which make the college student almost as unable to have general free play in his athletics as the city pupil is to have free play on his uncontrolled and limited city playground. The amounts of money involved are very great. The games have acquired a commercial significance which is altogether new in college sport. There are funds available which were never dreamed of in the earlier and more simple days of college sport. The intense rivalry between institutions is only one of a number of factors which has tended to change the notion of sport for the fun of it to sport for the sake of victory,-victory being thus augmented from a very desirable incident to an end in itself. This case, then, like that of the city school child, demands trained technical control. The problems are too difficult of solution by the men themselves; their life in college is too brief to permit of these large questions being worked out satisfactorily during the experience of any student.

If we grant the principle, the application will be that this control must be of such a nature, and to such an extent, as will most truly give that freedom in athletics that will most truly restore sport as a means of recreation and health to its natural place. This control must be, as in the case of the city pupil, to restore freedom in play rather than to take it away. The elements which are to be controlled and managed are the new ones rather than the old ones.

We are at present undergoing a storm of discussion as to the changes in the rules that will cure the present football disease. We are not in a position to pass upon cures at the present time. What we need is to establish the principle and the nature of control. The changing of rules will not alter ethical relations. The chief needs at present, with reference to athletics, are ethical rather than physiological.

To reduce this discussion to a definite proposition, let me say that I believe the athletics of educational institutions should be under the absolute control of a man whose relation to the faculty is the same as that of any other head of a department whose training for his work, both in practical knowledge and scholastic attainment, is as extended and technical as is demanded of a professor in any other branch, and whose tenure of office is as certain as that of other college professorships. The primary qualifications of this man, so far as practical work is concerned, must be the ability to get a very large number of the students actually engaged, voluntarily, in wholesome out-of-door athletics rather than to defeat other collegiate teams upon the gridiron or the cinder path.

College football needs to be controlled and remodeled, but this can only be wisely done by men who continuously administer the college sports; who administer the games as a means to exercise rather than as an intercollegiate means of contest. We need continuous trained control of the situation by high-grade men whose positions are not dependent upon victory.