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today make up the major part of college life. The college, says President Woodrow Wilson, "is for the training of the men who are to rise above the ranks." It is an arena for intellectual wrestling-a place where the soul is to practice its athletics. It is here that young men are to come to grips with themselves, and with the blood-red social and political problems of their own day. Here truth is to be sought and at whatever cost of personal comfort, or of previously cherished creed or dogma. Every old fellow who is now out in the world in the thick of the battle knows very well that it is not enough that he should carry away with him. from campus and halls the memory, merely, of a "good time" at college. Such a memory is no doubt a luxury. But he knows that he should have gone forth from the college laden also with a store of such solid mental and spiritual wealth as should give dignity, charm, and authority to his later life.

Not that scholarship and moral training exhaust the full intention of the college! The college ideal involves much more than this. "Pleasure perfects labor, even as beauty crowns youth." The college world lies perpetually bathed in a purple mist of sentiment, romance, and youthful enjoyment. "From towers and gardens are whispered 'the last enchantment of the Middle Age."" "It is a great thing," says one who styles himself "a mere don,' "to be able to loaf well; it softens the manners and does not allow them to be fierce; and there is no place for it like the streams and gardens of an ancient university." And, though our American colleges have not about them so much of venerableness as have those of England, and though our campuses lack much of the opulent beauty and exquisite quiet of their gardens, there is always in the spirit of youth a gift of ideali

ment in which

any true college

zation and romare stice at and end the evi Si te vizivays be in frein of satinen istintio comradeship, and pure per at Dong before the day of the tank and the sorting" that has come to be such a distinctive part of modem miege He, the sage Emerson wrote that sometimes. Thus we do not calledcation is more gradions that it web a so" He no doubt had reference to seria ling axorsions that he now and then made x is own accont into the wirequented paths of literature. He loved to browse in the dim, cool, and secided felds of poetry and philosophy that were outside the requited caricaton But, however it may have been with Emerson, we all bow that, over and above the regular course of study, educative influences of the highest importance play upon us and shape our thought and our character. Through friendships, through books, through solitude and society alike, through autumn walks, and long talks by the winter fireside, and through the soft pipings of Arcadian poets from forgotten fields of romance, as well as through the sharp, urgent call of the trumpet that summons to public tasks in the living present, shall be woven for every alert man the fabric that we call a liberal education. A thousand experiences and passions will intertwine to build up in him the full-rounded human soul.

Even athletics finds a normal place in a complete scheme of liberal education. It is true that in the past there have been many gross evils wrapped up with college athletics. Too often our colleges have developed a one-sided athletic interest-stressing particular forms of sport to the exclusion of other games quite as worthy. Some of the more popular sports have demanded too much time and money

and attention on the part of both faculty and students. There is, too, the constant temptation to bet on games and to spend much time in idle and boastful talk about athletes and athletic events. Worse still, a strong taint of professionalism has sometimes hung about our colleges; and not infrequently there has been undue roughness, and even gross fraud and brutality. Weak college presidents and unworthy faculties have lowered the standard of scholarship in the interest of the athlete, and sometimes have made unwarrantable concessions to brilliant players in order to induce them to enter particular colleges. Most of these evils have been corrected or are being corrected. All honorable educators will agree with President Jordan of Leland Stanford, that "the athletic tramp should receive no academic welcome," and that "the athletic parasite is no better than any other parasite."

But setting aside the evils of athletics that have done so much of late to discredit colleges in the eyes of plain, honest, sensible people, no one can deny that physical sports have an important place in a modern college. There can be no perfectly sane and healthful life apart from a strong, sound, well-developed body. Nor will any one deny that youth is the best time to train the body as well as the mind. There is, too, a necessity for youth to exert its over-plus of energy in joyous physical exercise. The play impulse is natural to grown-up life as well as to child life; and it is wholesome. It is a pity that some of our sour and dyspeptic ancestors did not find this out sooner. All wise men believe it now, and we are learning better how to play - how to secure recreation for mind and body.

All

But it is college athletics that chiefly concerns us. will agree with President Jordan, that "the color of life is

red;" and every manly student will want to give a fair amount of time to outdoor sport, and will desire to make a place for himself in the athletic life of the college. And what are the chief benefits and values of college athletics? They are many: the spontaneous delight that any healthy boy ought to feel in competitive sports that try his skill and courage; the joy of comradeship in struggle and achievement; the high and worthy sense of losing one's self in the spirit of the whole body; the legitimate pride and satisfaction that come from well-earned victory. And the real edge of this delight in victory comes from the realization that one has striven not so much for one's own glory as for the glory of the college. A certain Princeton man, "when his leg was broken in the foot-ball field, rejoiced that it was not one of the first team that was hurt." That was heroism in the making It is of the essence of education to be able to work with others to a common end. College athletics exalts the spirit of fair play. It inculcates true sportsmanship. It requires one to "play-up," and to play the game to the end. It teaches one to take defeat in a manly way. The true college athlete despises the "knocker," the "quitter," and the "mucker." He is a good loser as well as a good winner, for he cares more for the game than he does for the victory. "A man may play a strenuous game, the fiercest ever seen on the gridiron," says one of our great college presidents, "and yet keep the speech and manners of a gentleman." Alertness, self-restraint, resolution, judgment, unselfishness, self-control under great provocation, and prompt decision in sudden emergency - these are some of the qualities that are developed by intelligent and honorable participation in college athletics. And these are physical, mental, and moral virtues well worth cultivation entirely

apart from the transient delight and recreation that they afford.

We could wish that more of the care and outlay that go to the training of stout Ajax, in order that he may be still stronger, and to swift Achilles, in order that he may become still fleeter, might be directed to the building up of the soft, fragile, and hollow-chested comrades of these mighty athletic heroes. The law of the Scriptures, that "to him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that he hath," seems to find its too literal fulfilment on our college fields. In American colleges we unduly emphasize certain forms of athletics; we cultivate the spectacular; and we make more of a business of athletics than a sport. Every student should receive physical oversight in the gymnasium; and every student should take some recreation in the open air. There are innumerable ways in which one may find congenial and relaxing exercise out-of-doors. In addition to the two or three forms of recreation that are sure to be duly stressed, there are tennis, lacrosse, rowing, swimming, skating, cross-country running; and, commonest of all, yet among all the most uncommonly good, the exercise of walking; better if it take the form of a tramp; and best of all if the tramp be taken in company with a chum or two, for then the exhilaration of vigorous physical exercise under the open sky amid a thousand entrancing sights and sounds of nature will combine with the joy of comradeship and the intellectual stimulus of congenial talk.

But, after all, the first and highest task is the making of mental and moral muscle. It is the function of the college to tighten up a man's intellectual gearing. Men are in college to learn the value of discipline; to acquire the art of study;