I Believe and other essays

It is pathetic to think how blind are the rulers of secondary education in this country to a truth so self-evident.

Before proceeding to a special school preparing candidates for the University, a Japanese boy must have been at a Secondary School, which is an institution similar to one of our great Public Schools. Here, again, the Japanese lay far more stress on essentials.

At how many of our great Public Schools, if any, are the elements of Law (which may be defined as the rules of the club to which every British citizen belongs) a subject of instruction? The elements of Law are a regular feature in the Secondary Schools of Japan. Sooner or later every Englishman or Japanese is brought in contact with the law of his land. For what conceivable reason is Law excluded from our Public School course of education?

Once more, in a Japanese Secondary School, boys are taught the elements of Political Economy. What proportion of Etonians, Harrovians, and Wykehamists have opened a book on Political Economy before they have left school? Yet ought not every member of the community who intends to exercise his right of voting at a General Election to be cognizant of the main arguments, for instance, that may be adduced on behalf of Free Trade or Protection?

The appended table will help any Public School boy or his parents to estimate the vast difference between the Japanese and the English conceptions of a liberal education.

The aim of the Japanese statesmen has been to produce a fine character residing in a strong body, and a memory stored with knowledge having a direct bearing on the problems of modern life. It seems to me that a nation led by men trained according to the method I have indicated musceteris paribus be more intelligently governed than one like our own, where the conduct of affairs is entrusted to persons like Mr. Arnold-Forster and Mr. Brodrick, who, after leaving a great Public School, attended Oxford University and obtained their degrees through its Modern History School.

I pass from Secondary to Primary education. Guardians of children of school age (i. e. over six years of age) are under the obligation of sending them to school to complete at least the ordinary Primary School course. The subjects taught to the Board School boys and girls of Japan are: – Morals, the Japanese language, arithmetic, and gymnastics, and, according to local circumstances, one or more subjects such as drawing, singing, or manual work, and for females sewing. The higher Primary Schools complete the education of the average Japanese of the lower orders. At the higher Primary Schools, the scholar continues to study Morals, the Japanese language and arithmetic, and learns, in addition, Japanese history, geography, the elements of science, and, as optional subjects, agriculture, commerce, manual work and the English language. Drawing, singing and manual work, and for females, sewing, are compulsory. There are also special commercial schools.

The scope of this essay does not permit me to contrast in detail the Japanese with the English primary education. Both were established about the same time. I am not so rash as to pose as an authority on the education of a country which I have never visited. But one point has greatly impressed me. Tommy Atkins has been educated at the Board School. It is complained of Tommy Atkins that he neglects hygienic precautions against diseases like enteric. The rank and file of the Japanese army were remarkable for their scrupulous obedience to the rules of hygiene. My deduction is that the Japanese school and the Japanese curriculum are, in one essential at least, superior to the English. I may be wrong, but I do not think it is probable.

What are the conclusions to be drawn from the information which I have extracted from Japan by the Japanese?

“England,” signalled Nelson, “expects every man to do his duty.” Those words should ring in the ears of each of us. The dons and school-masters of the country should remember that they are Britons first and Oxonians and Cantabs afterwards. The warnings which we have received from Tokyo and Berlin are so impressive that the Anglo-Saxon races will be insane if they do not take them to heart. The masters of the fate of the British Empire are, at a general election, the citizens possessed of the franchise, and between the general elections the King, the members of the two Houses of Parliament and the Civil and Military servants of the nation.

We must educate our masters, the electorate and the officials who obey, or pretend to obey, its mandates. To-day the educational system of Great Britain is, as a whole, an anachronism. If the next generation of Anglo-Saxons is educated like the last, the brown and yellow peril will become acute. To a psychologist, the Japanese and the Chinese with their cool, iron nerves, seem more fitted for a world of dynamos and flying machines than the neuropathic Englishman or American. Should, then, the latter be worse educated than the former, the British Empire and the United States may expect to follow the fate of the Spanish and Roman Empires.

V

THE MENACES OF MODERN SPORT

“Imponit finem sapiens et rebus honestis.”

    Juvenal.
I very well remember the morning when the post brought me an advance copy of the first number of Mr. C. B. Fry’s Magazine.

One saw at once, as the public has since seen, that the periodical struck a new note in regard to matters of sport. It was to be both practical and idealistic, sport in the realm of action was to stand side by side with sport in the sphere of thought. Mr. Begbie sounded the keynote, in his beautiful inaugural poem – when the clean, strong body sings a hymn of praise and thankfulness for its splendour of strength and health; because the joy of physical achievement is so intense, because the currents of the blood run fast and free.

It is a curious fact in life that a fine and noble thing in itself nearly always harbours or begets an ugly parasite. No plant grows unhampered by the insect world, a filthy mildew – so the curator of a famous picture gallery told me the other day, will appear mysteriously upon the finest canvas.

In particular, certain phases of sport to-day present the observer with a curious spectacle. There is a monstrous liaison, a horrid entanglement between sport and drink!

It is as well to put it quite bluntly at the beginning. If an unpleasant fact is not stated in the frankest way, it loses its appeal to the hearer. The man in the street, gets up and strangles a half-statement with the flippancy of a catch-penny juggler at a country fair. One is not heard.

I say that a grave danger menaces modern sport and that the danger is just this…

The more popular games of England are being disturbed and discredited in a marked manner by the amount of drinking – plain, vulgar excess in alcohol – which surrounds them and follows in their train. A great number of sportsmen know this perfectly well and genuinely deplore it, but I am not aware that the subject has been properly ventilated as yet, save perhaps by “temperance” cranks and prejudiced or ignorant people, who hide a polemic puritanism under the banner of a misused word.

Some time ago I had occasion to spend a night in a large manufacturing district in the North of England. I put up at a local hotel.

It is a large place standing in the four cross roads where electric trams stopped – a definite centre of the town. The landlord is the secretary of a most prosperous local cricket club, he is intimately concerned with the local football – Association – and is a prominent swimmer.

At all times of the year the district is intensely interested in sport, and the hotel is a headquarters of it. The walls of bars and smoking-rooms are covered with photographs of this or that local team, the whole talk is redolent of sport – and your Northerner or Midlander is generally the keenest sportsman of all.

It was quite obvious that this hotel was extremely and noticeably prosperous, everything proclaimed it. I was introduced by the landlord, a thoroughly good fellow, to various local football players and swimmers. The talk of the smoke-room was entirely occupied with sport, there was a real knowledge of, and love for games. One heard shrewd and penetrating criticism, one saw fine healthy-looking men who were certainly no mere machines for the decomposing of their lunch and dinner! In fact, the evening was thoroughly congenial.

Next morning after breakfast, I smoked my pipe in the bar parlour. At one side of the place was a counter which formed a barrier between it and the ordinary tap-room. Three young and powerful men came in – it was about 9.30 in the morning. They asked the barmaid for a drink I had never heard of – “three warm sodas, please.” The girl opened three bottles of soda, poured some hot water into each glass and gave it to the customers.

When they had gone, I asked her what was the meaning of this.

“Oh,” she said, “there was a football supper last night These lads were all drunk. They often come for a warm soda in the morning, it sobers them.”

The remark was a prelude to some interesting information. The girl was a native of the North. She had been in the bars of several Lancashire public-houses; what she told me was simply a dreary record of personal experience. In effect, it was this: After a big football match the hotels were always crowded, packed so closely that it was difficult for a late-comer to enter. On such occasions the staff of pot-boys and men to keep order was recruited from the stables. Drunkenness, distinct drunkenness, was very common. The members of the two teams were often the core of a welter of riot. The players themselves were treated by their admirers until they frequently became intoxicated. Quarrels and rows of all sorts were of almost momentary occurrence. “I hate all big sporting days,” she said. “You’ve no idea what we girls have to put up with. They all seem to go mad. But there, the takings are enormous so I suppose sport’s good for trade!”

I tell this little story not because I was unaware of the facts before, but because a “picture” is always valuable in making a point, and because a coincidence has provided me with this picture at the moment when I am writing on this subject.

Every one knows the state of things in this regard thoroughly well. It isn’t sporadic – it’s systematic. And day by day in many districts, you may witness the paradox of a man who is above his fellows in the fine cultivation and training of his body, using his gifts in the finest way – and drugging himself with poison directly afterwards. And not only does the athlete himself do this, but his influence has a far-reaching effect upon others. The hero corrupts inumerable valets, and what should be an uplifting thing for the spectators, becomes, in the nick of time and in the punctual place, an opportunity for unbridled indulgence.

Nearly every footballer knows that what I say is true, and still the thing grows. It is not too much to say that, at the moment, drink stands before the progress of popular sport like an armed assassin in a narrow path. I shall give other instances in a moment, but at this point it is proper to explain that one is no fanatic. Sport calls aloud for temperance to-day, but sport is not concerned with teetotalism. Every active sportsman must cultivate each sense to its highest power, that is a condition of success in sport. But there is a sixth sense, not sufficiently recognized by writers attacking an evil no less than by sportsmen who concur in it.

It is the sense of proportion.

Nothing is more necessary than “proportion” in the consideration of such a question as this, a subject of supreme importance in modern sporting life; yet to-day the sense of proportion has been lost by sportsmen and adherents of sport alike. Long ago Plato pointed out that we shall never have perfect men until we have perfect circumstances, and it is the people who condemn a good thing because of its occasional misuse who destroy their own case. Alcohol is a good thing, sport is a good thing, together they are harmless even; but moderation has been overstepped and we are in the middle of a definite and serious crisis.

A Blue-book of statistics of crime has just been issued. From it I find that drunkenness is greatest in the great football centres of the North and of Wales. The thirstiest parts of the country are those in which football is the most eagerly played and watched, in which innumerable local sporting papers are published, where the man in the street is a football expert. This is at least significant, though so patent and obvious is the evil that it almost seems a waste of time to pile proof on proof. Nevertheless, before I turn to drink in connection with other varieties of sport, it will be as well to give all my evidence.

A well-known North-country baronet, a famous sportsman in his day, an ex-member of one of His Majesty’s ministries and at this moment an enthusiastic volunteer, told me, a short time ago, that in his district the abuse of drink was ruining local sport. “Decent people no longer care to attend football matches,” he said; “the element of drink and ruffianism is becoming too much in evidence. A new class of spectators has been created, men who care little or nothing for the sport itself, but who use a match as a mere opportunity and an excuse for drinking.”

A shipowner, a member of the present Parliament, who has large interests in Yorkshire and the further North, entirely endorses these remarks. “If you go into the cheaper parts of the field at any big match in our parts, you’ll see that every other man has a bottle of spirits in his jacket pocket which he drinks at half-time. And afterwards – well, the brewers that have tied houses anywhere near a football ground know that they have a gold mine. A brewery will pay almost any sum to secure a free house in such a position.”

Finally, a well-known Northern clergyman, a relative of my own and a fine sportsman in his time, albeit an old man now, writes to me as follows: “I am glad you are writing on this question. The wives of the colliers and mill-hands in my district all tell me the same story. They say that the Saturday afternoon matches are a curse to the home. It is not the few pence that the husbands spend for admission to the field which matter, but it is the drinking that follows, often protracted till late at night. For my own part, as a small protest, I absolutely refuse to subscribe to local football clubs in any way. They are becoming centres and occasions of vulgar vice. Such money as I have to spare for sporting objects I give entirely to cricket.”

It is a far cry from football to golf. At first glance any one would say that of all games golf is the most free from any taint of attendant excess in drink. This is not so. The evil is less widespread, just as the game claims fewer adherents; the class of men who can afford golf is not a class with many temptations to drunkenness; women play the game and their presence is a safeguard. But the evil exists nevertheless, and this is the measure of it.

In the famous clubs, where all the great players go, drinking to excess is an unknown thing, of course. But during the last few years, especially in the South and West of England, many small clubs have been started which are almost entirely supported by the residents of the country towns near which they are situated. And I have not the least hesitation in saying – however much my statements may be combated – that many of these clubs are becoming little better than shebeens for discreet and comfortable over-indulgence in drink.

No one will attempt to deny that the usual football match is regarded by thousands of people as a mere alcoholiday. I am certain that many people will attempt to deny what I am going to say about mushroom golf clubs. When one frankly points out this or that abuse existing among the middle and upper middle classes, these classes always become shrill in their defence. There is a sense that while it is a duty to expose the faults of the poorer people, amusing to attack the follies of the “smart set,” to write of the failings of the intermediate class is to let the cat out of the bag. One may give the cat’s tail a pinch to let people know she is there, but that is all.

But I am writing for only one class, the fellowship of true sportsmen.

In many of the smaller golf clubs drinking has almost destroyed the game itself. A comfortable club-house is erected, far more money is spent on it than upon the links themselves, and men spend day after day playing bridge and —drinking!

Golf becomes what Napoleon called a “fable convenu,” and while there is generally a knot of real and enthusiastic players, there is always a large residuum of idle members who turn a splendid game into an excuse of indulgence in drink. These are the people who imagine that they would lose caste if they entered any of the hotels of the small town in which they live, and so the local golf club becomes the substitute.

I have a picture in my mental vision of a man, once an athlete of great renown, for many years after that a good sportsman. Now he is supposed to devote himself entirely to golf – for he is no longer a young man. This erstwhile athlete spends all his days in a certain golf club. He is the oracle of the place. He plays very little, but rests upon past laurels. And all day long he drinks, drinks, drinks. He has gathered a society of kindred spirits round him, and, from the sportsman’s point of view, the club, never eminent in any way, has ceased to exist. It is atrophied by alcohol – though its finances are in a flourishing condition owing to the fact that there is no licence to provide for, and the profits on drinks amount to about thirty-three per cent.

I am not trying to draw a general conclusion out of a particular instance. Any one who really cares for sport and has a deep sense of its high mission and place in life will bear me out. Many of the smaller and less-known golf clubs are nothing more or less than discreet drinking-places, secure from observation and shielded from adverse comment under the too comprehensive ægis of “Sport.”

In my time I have had something to do with pugilism, and here is another sport which, especially among its professional exponents, is being ruined and degraded by drink. One of the most pathetic experiences I have ever had was to watch the utter hopeless downfall of a famous boxer some years ago. His name was a household word, he was an American negro and one of the simplest, kindest, most thoughtless children of nature who ever breathed. I never knew a more sunny, genial creature. I saw him, during one year, succumb to the temptations of drink thrust at him on all sides by admiring “sports.” I was with him a week or two before he died from drink.

I remember, as a young man, going to an ice carnival at Hengler’s Circus with one of the cleverest middle-weight boxers of modern times. He had invited many of his friends of the ring, and there was a big supper afterwards. Of course none of the men were in training, and they were surrounded by the usual crew of wealthy wasters who counted it an honour and privilege to ply them with liquor.

I am not going to make a picture of that occasion for you, but one final scene still remains very vividly in my memory. A month before I had seen my middle-weight friend in the ring. His proportions were perfect, the muscles rippled easily and smoothly, he had the clear eyes of youth that Homer (supreme chronicler of fights) sings of. To look at him made one glad to be young and strong, to know that one was a man, with cool blood and a quiet heart.

On the night of the supper I saw him lie like a log. All the soul had gone out of his face, the pig and the wolf struggled for mastery in that debauched mask, and a tipsy young stockbroker was pouring a bottle of claret over the boxer’s crumpled shirt front!