to maintain. It is a colorful game because it is a real game, a game in which half of the stands are battling with those in the other half as definitely as half the men on the field are fighting the rest.

AND

ND in that, I think, lies one of the reasons for the frequent cry of overemphasis. We are afraid of color and display, and we mistrust such things. We have reared a monster institution out of a simple game, and the institution is so monstrous that we are afraid it will topple over on us. We cannot force ourselves to believe that anything so suddenly become important can be really reasonable and good. We are incorrigibly fearful of any vicarious vent for our cave man impulses. Instead of regarding football, as we should, as a gloriously recurring pageant of strength and skill and loyalty, we look upon it as a blight, a brilliant one, perhaps, but, none the less, a blight. Instead of seeing in football an authentic folk expression as real and definite as the jousts of the Middle Ages or the games of the Greeks, we look upon it as an enormous fungoid growth. Of course it is true that the football team gets more public notice than the entire academic department of the university. But the academic department is the real fungoid growth; Teutonic philology and the quest of the elusive atom are for the gifted few, but sport and fight and yelling and loyalty and excitement are the common property of everyone, all the time.

Overemphasized football should be emphasized still more, for its therapeutic value to a nation burdened with dull gray repressions. All else is beside the point. It is true that there

is a seasonal rise in the sale of radio equipment in the fall, and an especially sharp one before the important Thanksgiving Day contests. It is true that the Saturday night circulation of the journals goes up. It is indisputable that the royal game stimulates the hot dog industry beneficially. But we cannot be concerned with its economic effects upon radio manufacturing or the newsprint and pork packing industries. Nor need we be concerned about any minor detrimental effects it may have upon scholarship. We are concerned with the two hundred and eight howling crowds which storm the arenas each Saturday afternoon in October and November, and the important thing with respect to them is simply that it makes them yell.

THESE Teutonic philologists, intent

on their search for folk literature and folk art, are stupid people. Do they not see that in a thousand years the game of football, long dead, will have acquired the same connotations as the Greek games of the ancients, and that the college boy in leather will be the heroic equal of the knightly youth in steel? Can they not see folk legend and folk interest when it is acting itself out before their eyes? Can they not see the rows of books which will be written on the game, and the scholarly discussions which will rage on the difference between a plunge through center and a run around right end? Can they not see the Ph.D. theses which will be written around the influence of the heavy tackle on the sporting vocabulary?

And there's an idea of what the givers are receiving. They are receiving something real and something very much alive, something which has

in it far more significance to the day than have all the ravings of all the academic futilists on the other side of the fence. And yet there are those who would like to stop them from receiving this, all because Jones, sophomore, receives a full column when he catches a cold, while his professor has to fall off a dock to get three lines on the last page.

HOSE Who would coin the word "overemphasis" must of necessity be shrewd. Some of them have been brought to admit that the has game color, and some have even granted the fact that it is a tremendous and worthy spectacle. But they say - and this is important as the last gasp of a dying objection - the game is played for the spectators. The poor young men who don the uniforms are sacrificed to make a Babbitt holiday. They kill themselves, not so much for the honor of dear old Whatsitsname as for the pleasure of the observer.

In this connection, two quotations. The first is from Tad Jones, professional coach, and a man to whom the crowd must mean something, however little. He says:

Any coach who encourages or permits viola

tions of the rules is gambling with the character of his boys. Football needs to be let alone. The players like it- and they didn't use to when I played the game.

That sounds more like the attitude of a fond father than of a brutal task

master. The other quotation is from the annual report of the American Intercollegiate Football Committee.

goal posts be put back (to the goal line). The Many requests have been made that the argument is advanced that it is more difficult for the spectators to tell whether the play which is near the goal line has resulted in a touchdown. The answer is clear. If the inconvenienced spectator can restrain his curiosity for about three to five seconds longer he will be advised in no uncertain terms as to whether the ball is "over" or not. Furthermore, the Rules Committee has always acted on the principle that this game was a game primarily for the boys who play it, and only incidentally for those who watch it. When the permanent safety of the boys must give way to the momentary convenience of the spectators, our ideas as to the true purposes of academic sport will have to come up for drastic and annihilating revision.

Ο

academic sport will have to come UR ideas as to the true purposes of up for drastic revision. Our ideas—

So it seems that there are ideas back of it all. I think the ideas are the

finishing touch. We have the colleges, teams all supported by football. We with their multitudes of athletic have the crowd, gaining much good from the game. We have the players, enjoying the game and liking it more each year. As we even seem to have ideas as to the true purposes of academic sport.

Will the gentleman who mentioned overemphasis awhile ago stand up and explain himself?

way, the farming classes. The great middle classes must needs live in fear of their jobs and of the men over them. In any nation there are only three classes who can afford to be spiritually independent the rich, the man who owns his own land, and the workingman, especially the mechanic, who carries his job on his back. These classes can afford to think for themselves. Among them all real change is effected. What happens to the altruistic and imaginative rich in case of an actual revolution is another matter. But it was Fairfax and Henry Vane and their friends who made possible Cromwell, himself a landed gentleman; the Encyclopædists and Mirabeau who started the French Revolution; Lenin, the aristocrat, and Trotsky, the intellectual, and the Russian aristocrats, the Russian; Washington, Franklin, Adams, the released and wealthy colonists, the American; the intellectual German and the richer German, the revolution which unseated the Hohenzollerns. And, to turn to more peaceful revolution, it was Erasmus, the troubadours, the Medici, the merchant princes of Italy, and a section of the French nobility, who made possible the Renaissance; and such men as Luther the monk, Knox and Calvin the scholars, and numerous princes of Northern Europe who made possible the Reformation.

Of all theories the material theory of history, accepted in toto, is the most fallacious and dangerous. At its best it is only a partial explanation.

then, is the old alliance: the TH alliance between the man who, materially, is released to the point where bread alone will not satisfy him,

and the man who, through force of character and courage, has risen from the point where bread alone seemed all important to the point where its proper valuation is recognized. When you see this alliance, you can rest assured that change is in the air. The common enemy of these men is the timorous man of the middle class and his hireling, the bureaucrat; the selfish man of the upper class, and bis hireling, the bureaucrat.

Now, exactly this alliance is beginning to be dimly visible today on the American horizon, and hour by hour the visibility is increasing. Just how long it will take to make the situation clear to numerous liberal thinking voters, still unaware of the alliance, still confused as to its import, is another question. At present there are millions of Americans in favor of such an alliance who for some time to come will continue to support unwittingly their own worst enemies. But this always happens in periods of political change. For a long while the great issue is hidden.

one side he finds chaos, and must to some extent regulate it if he is to live: on the other, he discovers that too much regulation ends always in oppression and spiritual death.

tive inner command which bids man bring some sort of order out of disorder will, in the end, unless handled with wisdom, produce in its turn a new kind of disorder, the disorder of over-government. The French monarchy was the result of the efforts of Louis XI to

the triumph of the State over the individual. The ascendance of either one, too long continued, means the ruin of any civilization. The one hope for the world is to teach men to walk upright along a middle course, and, until they learn so to do, to guide them just as wisely but just as little as is possible. The most utter pessimist is the man so impatient of this slow process, this often seemingly hopeless process, that he wishes to make all men wise and good by statute. Moreover, unconsciously, this same man is an atheist. He denies all wisdom beyond his own. No thoughtful man can conceive of a God, or rational plan, which would deny individual responsibility to each individual. Even the most fanatical religionist, if he is logical, must realize that any sensible God would prefer, as additions to His heavenly hosts, a few imperfect men made more perfect by their own efforts rather than a legion of spiritual robots. Law was invented to help men to live with their neighbors; it was never meant to help men to live with themselves. A man can learn the latter only through experience, observation, native intelligence, education; perhaps, here and there, a little tactful advice. Most men are willing to be governed, but few men are willing to be imposed upon. There is a point in every man's soul where he says, "Here government ends and here I begin.'

As you see, therefore, the impera

before that, the feudal system had been the answer of the more powerful and wise to the anarchy of the Dark Ages. Had it not been for the Church after the fall of the Roman Empire, gentleness, learning, civilization of any kind would have disappeared from the world; and yet this Church produced in the end the Inquisition, this system the turbulence of the medieval noble, this monarchy — or if you wish, centralized government tralized government- the gross injustices and ineptitudes of the later Bourbons.

Trouble arises also from the fact that the seizure of power and the use of power are two entirely different things and require two different sets of faculties. The ability to acquire power is fairly common, the ability to use power is one of the rarest gifts known to mankind. If all power were also wisdom there would be no quarrel.

OOKED at carelessly, the process I

would seem a useless one. It is like the taming of the frontier. Man finds a wilderness and, so that he may be comfortable in it, proceeds to destroy it. But pretty soon a new sort of wilderness develops; a wilderness, of tin cans, hideous shacks, disorderly fences and neighborhood quarrels. Many years are needed, much education, much destruction of what has been carelessly built, much replanting, before any sort of real order and beauty can be established and man