edge with an expression of "Well, this, at least, is not dusty." And there is Uncle Joseph, in whose mind bodily discomfort seems to be associated with hygiene, or physical culture, or some such matter. nence at any other time of day, for she is a natural lover of cushions and the fender. But at this hour it is necessary to her; it feelingly reminds her what she is a housekeeper simply tarrying for a moment (or, at worst, for a series of moments) by the wayside of her duty. To be altogether comfortable would be to feel guilty. The ceremony seems, in fact, to indicate a "reversion to type," or perhaps rather the survival of a Puritan strain of conscience in one who appears to be in most respects cheerfully pagan, a firm adherent of the creed that it is good to be happy for such a creature as man in such a world as the Finally-and it was her odd maneuvers in connection with the chair that first set him thinking of the subjectthere is the Spectator's sister, in some respects the most interesting exhibit of all. This sister is a nice, capable, lazy, youngish person of we will not say how many summers-not half as many as we hope she will have to her credit some day. She gets through a great deal of present. work in the course of the year without any fuss or worry. She has an agreeable talent for neglecting unimportant matters, and she was once observed to whisk some dust under a rug. She is altogether a human person, in short; a good homekeeper in a day when mere good housekeepers are quite sufficiently admired. She ought to be a warning to all such. She cannot get rid of servants, while her neighbors are undergoing a continual anguish of change. She is the most feminine of her sex, but she has succeeded in retaining the pleasant essentials of “female decorum" without its disagreeable accessories. She could not "bridle" any more than she could smoke a cigarette. Consequently, she is a satisfaction to all men as well as to all women, children, and servants. One weak moment in the day she has, and it is this that exposes her to the rigors of the Spectator's pillory. She loves to loaf for an hour after breakfast; and in our modest establishment this signifies beds unmade, mantels undusted, and (a more important matter) vases unfilled. At such an hour it is her wont to resort, with an unconscious affectation of casualness, to the edge of the chair, with some book of memoirs, a pad for letter-writing (she has the pad habit), or the latest magazine. There, on the perilous verge, she hardily remains until the given chapter, letter, or article is disposed of to her satisfaction. She cannot be tempted to that bad emi The idea which the word "Puritanidea of superfluous discomfort. ism" suggests most plainly to us is the We recall with shudders the fabled orthodoxy of those grim hill-top meeting-houses in which our somber forefathers and our But not less somber aftfathers, their miserable ... A sect whose chief devotion lies ascetic ideal. To practice celibacy, to and half-frozen extremities. A measure of physical discomfort in the act of worship was, indeed, a part of his rubric. Strange whims of abnegation seized him, and in due time became incorporate in his ceremonial code. He had his own convention as to what keeping the Sabbath Day holy meant. A meeting-house must not be heated properly, nor must an organ be used in connection with the service; yet a good Christian might mitigate the austerity of the occasion by means of a foot-stove or a lukewarm slab of soapstone, without giving unlawful encouragement to the Enemy; and distressing sounds might be allowed to issue from his leathern lungs in connection with a Hopkins enormity of doggerel, without his being suspected of a leaning toward the Scarlet Woman. A man might not kiss his wife, or be guilty of any other useful form of activity, on the Sabbath; but he might apply himself freely to the resources of the cup which cheers and also inebriates. Candid observers must note a striking coincidence between the decline of Puritanical observance and the disappearance (by way of hard cider) of the stout Sabbatical toper of other days. Was it of a New Englander that Mr. Howells once wrote something like this? "At forty he had learned not to deny himself harmless indulgences." At all events, the phrase was of a sort to vibrate a sympathetic string in not a few middle-aging New England breasts. How many harmless pleasures were denied us in boyhood, though others not more harmless were allowed! Do you remember how, when you were a fellow-boy of the Spectator's in the village of -, you were not allowed to go to dancing-school lest some of your father's angular parishioners be caused to lift their eyebrows? and how your elders were able to look on complacently while you played Copenhagen and Post-office, and other sprightly games promoting genial and promiscuous habits of osculation? Do you remember how you were forbidden to play secular tunes on your fiddle of a Sunday, but could lawfully hearken to them in as set to pious words and war h bled by a mercenary mixed quartet? Do you remember, above all, that painful doctrine of "example," which you early came to accept as a sort of epitome of the Ten Commandments—namely, never to do anything which might cause the weak brother to stumble; never to do anything innocently and in moderation which a supposititious idiot next door might imaginably do in excess? Do you remember how your father (brought to it, as the Spectator always supposed, by the persuasions of your excellent if feminine mother) gave up moderate smoking for fear his four boys might become immoderate smokers; and how you yourself eventually almost smoked him out of his own house, and he had to smoke again in self-defense-to his great and reasonable comfort? And do you remember the balm brought to your soul by the belated discovery that this doctrine of the stumbling-block was never a doctrine of the founder of Christianity? But the Spectator observes that he is in some danger of transcending his modest function; his place is in the visitor's gallery rather than in the pulpit. For his part, like Burke, he has no wish to make an untimely display; he is "not ambitious of ridicule; not absolutely a candidate for disgrace." He has no disposition to trifle with serious matters or to give offense even to the "unco' guid." On the whole, he is inclined to hold certain clerical ancestors responsible for any excessive ardor of utterance. Or there is his sister for a more immediate cause; she afforded his text, and if a text is not responsible for a sermon, what is? That truant after-breakfast occupancy of the edge of the chair is by no means an accidental frailty. It is a dread survival, a betraying vestige of the earlier spiritual anatomy of her forebears-like the vermiform appendix or the traces of gill openings in the human body. Among women, at least, the sloughing off of conventions sanctioned by religion is not to be managed in a generation or two. It will be due to them, no doubt, if, as seems likely, New England remains some time longer, for the good or ill of this Nation, the Edge of the Chair. I.—The Money Power in College Athletics By Clarence Deming HE money power in college athletics, whether called by that name or under its more prolix titles of "professionalism " or " commercialism," has three pretty well defined stages. It has its germ; its period of incubation and growth, when it throws off some noxious by-products; and its matured fruit in the athletic finances of the larger American societies. To the intermediate stage it is not the purpose of this article to refer. The middle period, with the proselyting of the "prep" schools in the foreground of evil, has already been well exploited. The germ and its ultimate fruition need closer attention, and, if possible, along some fresh lines of analysis and research. The bacillus athleticus finds fertile lodgment in the preparatory school much earlier than most observers, albeit watchful, are aware. The grain of example is in this case worth the pound of generality, and the concrete evidence is presented herewith. It is a genuine letter sent some years since to a relative by a young athlete in Phillips Academy, Exeter, New Hampshire, and forwarded to the writer with leave to print without disclosure of persons and names. With three or four betraying words omitted, the letter is annexed: Dear: Exeter, N. H., Nov. 14. For Your welcome letter was received, and at last I have got a chance to answer it. the last week or two everything has been rushing at a 2.40 gait, and between practicing football plays and signals and at the same time keeping up my studies I have found it pretty hard. From now on, however, I hope to be able to correspond more frequently. We played the Andover eleven and beat them. This victory is important in more ways than one. Exeter has been defeated in everything for the last five years, and as ath 1 The general subject, some phases of which are here treated, is further discussed in an editorial on another page of this issue of The Outlook. Mr. Deming is well known in college and journalistic circles as a former captain of the Yale University ball nine and as for many years a writer on college topics, as well as of other newspaper and magazine articles. letics are what keeps both schools running, it means a great deal to Exeter. Exeter has been going down and down, till this year she has only about two hundred and fifty students to Andover's five hundred. This victory will bring lots of students to Exeter next year, and if we defeat them at baseball in the spring it will bring lots more. The way I happened to be lucky enough to go to school is this. You know I always took interest in athletics, and I succeeded in getting quite a reputation for myself around for baseball. One day this autumn, after a game, a man that I knew asked me how I would like to go to school again, etc., and ended by making me an offer to go to Exeter. I was to get my tuition and rent of room and a few minor expenses. I was to start in Christmas. Mother and I talked it over and thought it would be a good thing to take it. A week or two afterward the same man wanted to know how I would like football. I told him first-rate, and it all ended with my leaving and coming over here immediately. I tried for the big team and got there. The football game was grand. We pushed into their center time and time again until we had it all worn out, and then ran the ball right up the field. All one side the field was blue and white, Andover's colors, and the other side crimson and gray, our colors. There were 5,000 people in attendance. When the game finished the crowd rushed into the field and swung us on their shoulders and away we went down the field to the dressing-room. Fireworks, horns, etc., were started before we left Andover, and when we got to Exeter they got out the band and we marched all over town and we made every one of the faculty make a speech. Then there was a monstrous bonfire on the campus amidst fireworks and general rejoicing. Everybody was shaking hands and cheering, and, in fact, I never saw or experienced anything like it before. It is all over now, and now comes baseball. . . . Note with what nicety and microsopic exactitude the letter, in the phrase of the football gridiron, " rounds up" the fiscal germ theory at the preparatory school. All the phenomena are there incarnate in the single budding athlete: The village youth of prowess on the rural ballfield detected by the keen-eyed Exeter "scout;" the temptation unrecognized by the simple boy as a lure to professionalism; the quick transfer to the field of athletic heroics; and the first sowings of the seed to ripen into the masked academic "ringer" at some big university. A single instance based on my direct and personal knowledge, and in the same line of "seeding down" young athletes, may be added. At a fashionable summer resort of New England last September a game of hare and hounds was organized. One of the "hounds," who far outstripped his mates, was immediately "canvassed" as a long-distance runner for Harvard, though three years away from the final entrance examination. We pass over the middle ground of athletic evolution to arrive at the fiscal environment of the athlete of first rank at the large American university. The The university selected for the example is Yale, the writer's own Alma Mater, where familiarity with the contour of the athletic field of finance allows the plow to be sunk deeper. At Yale, in 1892, to correct, if possible, laxities and friction in athletic finance, partly due to the fact that some branches of athletics were self-supporting and others not so, control of income and expense was centralized in a new body, named the Yale Financial Union, composed of Walter Camp, as Treasurer, and the four managers of the same number of major sports-football, baseball, boating, and track athletics. Since then-with one year missing, when the returns seem not to have been published the receipts and expenditures appear in the following table compiled from the printed annual reports of the Union: the last eleven years, speaks for itself as a measure of the moneyed bigness of athletics at a great American university, some details of the figures call for specialized attention. The great increase of both receipts and expenses during the last three years will be noticedthough during the last year the sum of $14,636 "at once expended in repairs of football stands " is here added to the expense account, and, if subtracted, would have made the total profit last year $31,222. The income last year of $106,396 represents the pay of thirty full professors of Yale at an average salary of $3,500 each. It is more than one-eighth the total gross income ($832,619) of the University with all its departments. It is about five-eighths of the total income ($166,616) from all sources of the Scientific School, with its 871 students; and it well-nigh equals the incomes of the Law, Divinity, and Medical Schools combined. Moreover, the budget of the Financial Union does not include a large part of the money received and expended in Freshman athletics, or the sums used in basketball, tennis, hockey, and minor sportscollectively a good many thousand dollars more. Both Yale and Harvard now print fiscal reports for athletics, which on their face appear to be full and detailed-and the Yale managers criticise the comparatively meager reports of Pennsylvania and Columbia, and score Princeton for printing no reports at all. But, with all the apparent fullness, the annual report of the Yale Financial Union has its mysteries, obviously premeditated. No salary account appears. One must infer from the report that Murphy, skilled trainer in track athletics, has been giving his services to Yale for love; and that Kennedy, high master of the art of rowing, and foster-parent of so many victories on the Thames, serves with a loyalty that scorns dollars. When the accounts of the Union are examined from year to year, a far more striking fiscal hiatus is disclosed. All the balances in the third column of the table, with their "net" of $51,541, together with $10,000 charged during two early years as a "reserve" fund a total of $61,541-absolutely disappear. Further inquiry as to these vanished balances, now for the first time publicly disclosed, shows that they are vested as a fund of large but indefinite amount to meet future athletic emergencies. The Yale professors who have audited the Union's accounts year after year have made no references to this hidden store. It should be stated explicitly that there is not in the matter the slightest hint or suspicion of "graft." The "reserve" fund, it is stated authoritatively, has been handled by responsible and competent investors, and probably carries a handsome increment of accrued interest. But it testifies to the magnitude of an athletic revenue SO large that it has to be disguised, and it bears a burden of questionable secrecy, perhaps a little palliated by the theory of rescuing something from undergraduate athletic extravagance, to be referred to later. The logical effect of all this "high finance" at Yale, as at other large Eastern universities, is to create in athletics an atmosphere of wealth. The large riches that ever crave more in the outside world find their analogue in the college microcosm. Athletic fiscal policy tends, not toward simplicity and economy, but to greater and greater expansions. There is a strong disposition, in railroad terminology, to load athletics with "all that the traffic will bear." A single example at Yale, where many could be cited, will be enough. Spite of the great revenue from sports, the so-called "level" subscription persists. The "level" subscription means a yearly payment to the Union for Athletics of $8 by each undergraduate from whom it can be collected-on commission-by direct solicitation. In the euphemism of the athletic managers, it is a "voluntary" subscription; in fact, it is a tax which bears heavily on Yale's great middle class of undergraduates, and which, under existing conditions, deserves the severest condemnation of her loyal alumni. We move on from this upper stratum of athletic finance to the lower but much more important plane where the golden stream meets the undergraduate. In 1896-7 the published statement of the Yale Financial Union appeared in sub Each item connotes its special form of lavishness and luxury. "Traveling" has its parlor cars and its host of substitutes taken along, not to fill athletic gaps, but as a pleasant privilege. "Hotels and meals" have their best rooms and special fare. "Coachers' expenses" imply generous hospitality to visiting athletes as pledge of a return. "Merchandise and sporting goods" include a football to each man for summer practice, and sweaters and shoes ad infinitum. "Trophies "they cost $2,623 two years ago-spell gold and silver watch charms, silken flags ornately hung, photographs, individual, collective, and of rival teams; and training tables, long the targets of criticism, mean free board of oarsmen for several weeks at Gale's Ferry. As to the old abuses of the training table, a prominent Yale professor has the wise suggestion that they at least be cut down to one meal a day-this not merely on grounds of rational economy, but because it would make better athletes if the men were freed at the other two meals from the stale table-talk of the field and the boat. Thus at Yale, as at her sister universities, the athletic system falls into paradox. On the one side are the strenuous physical effort and discipline which in many respects are good; on the other side are the mercenary spirit, the wastage, and the luxury which are in all respects bad. The college athlete of the sward or of the water on the physical side finds temptation to masked professionalism, to the sacrifice of scholarship in athletic |