OUR morning paper on Monday last presented us with a painful
contrast in its accounts of the Cup Tie meeting at the Crystal
Palace and Lord Roberts's missionary tour with an appeal to the
manhood of England to do suit and service to its country. At the
Crystal Palace there was a vast assembly of that manhood "Coom oop
for t'coop", as the Lancashire contingent put it, but beyond the
fact that they got the pleasure of a holiday outing, it is
permissible to ask what earthly good they were doing either to
themselves or to any one else. The contest at which they assisted
as spectators was one in which professionalism has superseded the
character of true sport. It was a mere exhibition of professional
skill, secured by the competing teams at a great cost of money
drawn from the pockets of men and boys who have no ear for the call
of their country, and prefer to be gazers at a spectacle and
gamblers on the odds. No wonder that Lord Roberts finds himself a
vox clamantis in deserto. The craze for games, now
degenerated still further into a morbid taste for looking on at
professional displays, has grown to the proportions of a grave
danger to our national safety. When the supreme interest of British
youths is the victory of this or that football or cricket club,
there is no room for reflection on civic and national duty. Has not
the time arrived when we should cry halt to the sporting mania? We
need not speak of its victims as "muddied oafs" and "flannelled
fools" - such expressions are only possible under poetic licence.
But there is a need for plain speaking on the duty of serving the
State, and it seems to us that the parochial clergy would do well
if they crossed the t's and dotted the i's of Lord Roberts's
earnest teaching.