Art. 7.-SPORT AND DECADENCE. THERE is no belief, however false, which does not contain an element of truth; but it rarely happens that the repudiation of a discredited belief does not involve the abandonment of whatever grains of truth it contained There are always some bushels of wheat in a field of tares It is only in comparatively recent years that the popular fallacy, based upon a false analogy, has disappearedthat the existence of a race or a nation is governed by the same laws which determine the period of the life of the individual man. A nation is an organisation of organisms; but it does not follow that the laws of living organisms have any real bearing upon the duration of such organisations. It is true that the organisation ceases to exist with the extinction of the organisms; but it is not true that the destruction of the organisation involves the disappearance of the organisms included in it. The laws which govern life determine life in all its forms, from the humblest protozoon to the most developed mammal. Tennyson, when he apostrophised the old yew, whose fibres net the dreamless head,' indulged in a false antithesis. 'The Seasons bring the flower again, They bring the firstling to the flock; The seasons do not bring the same flower again; and this year's firstling is not last year's firstling reborn. Nor is the little life of man' determined by other causes than those which operate in the case of the primrose or the lamb. Measured by the beat of the clock, some organisms run the gamut of their career in a few days, while others exhaust centuries. But the process is the same. During its brief lifetime an aphis may have a progeny comput able only in billions; a score may be born in as many hours, and in a few days become the founders of new families. At the other end of the scale an Indian ele phant born in the reign of Aurungzeb might have wit nessed the great coronation Durbar of 1903 and have left behind him fewer offspring than many an Eastern potentate. Again, unicellular animals in normal conditions probably never die what we call a natural death. They may be devoured and absorbed, but, if they do not perish from violence, they are virtually immortal; they reproduce themselves by partition, and the amaba almost alone is entitled to say with literal accuracy' non omnis moriar.' Indeed, if we draw any analogy at all between the life of a nation and the life of a living organism, it will have to be between the biography of a monad and the history of a race. Who will say that the English race was begotten and born? that the French will ever be old, or that the Germans were ever young? that the Americans, who started life as a venerable group of pilgrim-fathers, do not become more juvenile with every succeeding generation? What stages' have there been in the life of the Chinese? and in what respect have the Bedouins developed or retrograded since the days of Ishmael? The tribe of the Hawâjin, which supplied Mahomet with a foster-mother, exists to-day in exactly the same stage of development as it had reached, not only in the days of Mahomet, but in those of Moses. Individuals perish as the flowers fade and the leaves fall; but the race, like the genus and the species, need not die, though it may. While, however, we are bound to dismiss the analogy between the individual life and collective life, we are not at liberty to overlook the fact that ations may decline and fall, as many have declined and ave fallen, or to ignore the warning of history which aches us that the organisation which we call a state may perish by external disaster or by internal demoralisation. Some of the cataclysms which have wiped out nations have been the result of agencies beyond human power to anticipate or avert; others have been the palpable product of apathy, self-indulgence, or criminal neglect. Race suicide is possible. It may take the form of the selfish and deliberate sterilisation of marriage, as in France; it may be effected by legislative follies, or it may be brought about by popular tendencies towards effeminacy and self-indulgence, with the consequent result of the relaxation of the moral and physical fibre. Superhuman agencies, such as the influence of a new climate and a new soil upon invaders or immigrants, may account sometimes and in some places for the deterioration of races; they cannot be urged as an apology for the decay of peoples rooted to the self-same soil under the self-same sky for countless generations. Spain perhaps supplies the most striking illustration of the interaction of climatic influences and human frailty. One short passage from Mr Stanley Lane-Poole's 'Moors in Spain' will suffice as an illustration. Mr Poole is summarising the brief and fateful history of the Almora vides, the hardy Moslem dissenters of Africa who had crossed the Straits. 'What had happened' (he says, p. 183) 'to the Romans and the Goths now happened to the Berbers. They came to Spain hardy, rough warriors, unused to ease or luxuries, delighting in feats of strength and prowess, filled with a fierce but simple zeal for their religion. They had not been long in the enjoyment of the fruits of their victory when all the demoralisation which the soft luxuries of Capua brought upon the soldiers of Hannibal came also upon them. They lost their martial habits, their love of deeds of daring, their pleasure in enduring hardships in the brave way of war; they lost all their manliness with inconceivable rapidity. In twenty years there was no Berber army that could be trusted to repel the attacks of the Castilians; in its place was a disorganised crowd of sodden debauchees, miserable poltroons who had drunk and fooled away their manhood's vigour and become slaves to all the appetites that make men cowards. . . Such rulers do not rule for long.' ... What was true of the Berbers was equally true of the Arabs and of the predecessors of the Arabs, the Goths, who, as Gibbon (cap. i) tells us, 'were no longer the victorious barbarians who had humbled the pride of Rome, despoiled the Queen of Nations, and pene trated from the Danube to the Atlantic Ocean. Secluded from the world by the Pyrenean Mountains, the successors of Alaric had slumbered in a long peace; the walls of the cities were mouldered into dust; the youth had abandoned the exercise of arms; and the presumption of their ancient renown would expose them in a field of battle to the first assaults of an invader.' The successive degenerates of Spain might plead the influence of soil and climate as an excuse for their enervation; but what plea could England offer the England of the inviolate shores and a thousand years of glorious history-if her sons went the way of the Celtiberians, the Romans, the Visigoths, the Arabs, the Berbers, and the later inhabitants of Spain? Disease, moral and physical, is mainly the handiwork of a man's perversity or folly. The symptoms of national decay are many and easily diagnosed. A nation is on the downward grade when a large portion of its population is (1) unwilling to defend or incapable of defending what, not without reason, we call the mother-land against external attack; (2) is unable or unwilling to provide by its own exertions for its own immediate wants or to save from the earning of its industry a sufficiency to meet the exigencies and disabilities of old age; (3) is unable or unwilling to indulge in recreation except vicariously, and regards 'sport' as a pastime to be undertaken by others paid for the purpose for the amusement of onlookers. The 'Quarterly Review' has dealt comprehensively with the two earlier symptoms as revealed by the insufficiency of our army and by the pauperising influence of old-age pensions. It remains to deal with the third, which is tardily awakening very justifiable apprehension and anxiety. It is a commonplace, though a commonplace too often disregarded in practice, to say that most vices are the result of confusing means and ends. Some one has asserted that all vice is exaggerated virtue. Thrift carried to excess is miserliness; extravagant self-restraint culminates in an unwholesome asceticism and monasticism; valour may be exalted into foolhardiness; and liberty, as we know too well, may degenerate into licentiousness. In the same manner the natural and beneficent desire for physical fitness carried to an extreme becomes athleticism. The training of the body is essential to well-being, but it is subordinate to the education of the mind. Physical fitness is indispensable for moral and intellectual fitness; but the former is no alternative for the latter. Those who quote Plato as a champion of athleticism can never have read Plato. Gymnastics, as inculcated in the 'Republic,' represent the very antithesis of athletics. In the Platonic sense, the body stands to the mind in the same relation as the scabbard does to the sword; and 6 while a defective or neglected sheath may impair the efficiency of the blade, and a dirty scabbard often means a slovenly swordsman, it is the steel and not the cover that counts on the day of battle. In Jowett's summary of the passages in the 'Republic' dealing with gymnastics, the gist of Socrates' argument is given as follows: 'Next we pass on to gymnastics, about which I would remark that the soul is related to the body as a cause to an effect; and therefore, if we educate the mind, we may leave the education of the body in her charge, and need only give a general outline of the course to be pursued. In the first place, the guardians must abstain from strong drink, for they should be the last persons to lose their wits. Whether the habits of the palaestra are suitable to them is more doubtful, for the ordinary gymnastic is a sleepy sort of thing, and left off suddenly is apt to endanger health. But our warrior athletes must be wide-awake dogs, and must also be inured to all changes of food and climate.' With athleticism so defined, limited, and taught its proper place, no sensible man will quarrel. But what would Plato have said to men who devoted their lives to ' record-breaking' in games or in sports, and to their trainers and their admirers? He would have greeted them as he greeted the champions' and the 'record. breakers' in the mimetic arts, and have said, 'therefore, when any of these clever multiform gentlemen comes to us and makes a proposal to exhibit himself and his performances, we will fall down and worship him as a sweet and holy and wonderful being; but we must also inform him that there is no place for such as he is in our State; the law will not allow them. And so, when we have anointed him with myrrh and set a garland of wool upon his head, we shall send him to another city; for we mean to employ for our soul's health the rougher and severer artist who will imitate the styles of the virtuous only, and will follow those models which we prescribed at first when we began the education of our soldiers.' If we wish to see how far we have travelled out of the right road, we have only to contrast the Olympic Games, as celebrated in the palmy days of Hellas, with the meretricious parody of which we have recently had experience. Two considerations are always left out of |