an

So,

essential for pre-eminence. We can still "take on" the world at cricket, football, and rowing. It used to be said that in cricket England had lowered her flag for ever to Australia; but in the last Australian summer eleven of English youngsters gained. the most renowned victories that have ever been won by a visiting team. again, it was said that the secret of combination in Rugby football was kept in Wales alone, but the wheel has come full circle, and the English are again at the top. Thus things go in cycles. You must take a long reading of the recording chart to get at the truth. It is quite possible that if foreign nations took up cricket and football more seriously than now they would beat us even at these. It is possible to imagine, for example, the wonderful élan of the French overwhelming our backs at Rugby football. The question would then arise whether our reputation could be won back only by laborious practice and training such as genuine amateurs have scarcely the time or the inclination for, and whether, if that were so, the game would be worth the candle. If we decided that it were not worth while it would always be something to feel that we had taught the world. The master is notoriously outstripped by his pupils sooner or later in all branches of learning. There is nothing new in that, and it is no cause for particular lamentation..

emptory dictator. To protest is to be bullied, and to rebel is to be abandoned in favor of a more amenable aspirant. Americans call our method superficial and our outlook supercilious. At all events we call our lives our own. Το some Americans a victory in the Stadium is only the beginning of a remunerative life as a professional trainer. A victory is the desiderated recommendation to the athletic world. It is easily understood that when such deep personal issues depend upon a victory the frame of mind of the athlete can hardly be that of the strict amateur. For our part we have no use for the athlete who has specialized himself into a highly efficient piece of machinery for a single purpose; we admire neither the freak-jumper nor the strong-man who has exchanged elasticity for mighty strength, and the muscles of whose legs, as Stevenson says in "The Wrong Box," "stand out like penny buns." Surely the ideal athlete is a man who, though he has some peculiar excellence, is "good all round." He is the man worthy of admiration, and admiration should grow in direct ratio to his versatility.

The methods, in fine, which win marks in the Stadium may not be by any means the most desirable from the point of view of a disinterested amateur, any more than we think the jumping of highly schooled horses in the show ring is preferable to the faster and rougher method of English hunters. Doubtless English riders could emulate the finished and careful manner of the Continental schools-they have proved this year at the Horse Show that they can do so-but most of us will continue to think that the way of a man who goes well to hounds is more exhilarating and embodies much more of the zest of life. Yet the latter loses marks steadSimilarly we do not understand

why we should be surprised that the Swedes have shown themselves better gymnasts than we are, or why we should take their superiority greatly to heart all of a sudden. Have we not for a whole generation accepted the Swedes as our masters in everything relating to scientific physical training?

As we

see it, a specialization in athletic sports at the expense very likely of The Spectator.

the Territorial Army, of the Boy Scouts, and to the detriment of the movement in favor of compulsory military training for home defence would be a vital error. We should lose our manhood in the attempt to save it. At all events, before we consent to panic let us look all round the question and decide exactly what sport ought to mean for us.

New York at this moment is engaged in one of its characteristic pursuits; it is uncovering for the twentieth time the "graft" and corruption in its police force and is feverishly casting about for some scheme of reform that will reach and remove the source of the evil, The occasion of its zeal is the murder of a man who had been subpoenaed to testify before the District Attorney to the alliance between the police and crime. As the keeper of a gamblingden which had for long been run under the protection of the "guardians of law and order" and in the profits of which they had shared, the subject was one on which he could speak with personal authority. That he was anxious to reveal all he knew seems improbable; but the police apparently had been "squeezing" him too hard; he found that, while he was left in exclusive enjoyment of all the risks and trouble of his profession, only a modicum of its profits reached his own pockets; and he had about concluded that the game was no longer worth the candle. His disclosures at any rate were greatly feared, and when he was murdered in one of the city's busiest thoroughfares and in circumstances of peculiar daring-five or six men drove up in a motor-car to his hotel, emptied their revolvers into him when he came out to speak to them, and drove off undetected-opin

ion in New York promptly fastened upon the police as the abettors, if not the perpetrators, of the crime. The suspicion may have been unfounded and, so far as one sees, there is even now nothing but circumstantial evidence to support it.

The significant fact is that none the less it persists. New York seemingly finds nothing unnatural in assuming not only that the police foster lawbreaking and live by blackmailing it, but that they are prepared to shoot down anyone who threatens to expose the system. And New York is probably justified in its pessimism. Its police have been convicted before now of far worse crimes than murder. Only a few years ago it was proved that a regular system was in operation, and under the protection of the police, by which young country girls were lured to New York, were ruined, and were placed in disorderly houses to swell the protective tribute. So far from abating since its first exposure, that particular evil has positively grown. Most of the tipsters, touts, and bookmakers who were put out of business by Governor Hughes' laws prohibiting racetrack betting, have since engaged in the white-slave traffic, which now supports some twenty thousand people in New York alone-all of them good Democrats, the willing tools of Tam

many Hall, and carrying on their trade with the help and profitable connivance of the police. A city that, well knowing such an infamy to flourish in its midst, can tolerate it, is not likely to find much difficulty in believing its police capable of a mere murder.

I have lived among Americans and have travelled over most of their country, but I have never yet encountered one of them who was satisfied of the integrity and efficiency of his local police. Wherever he might hail from, East or West, a big city or a small one, his attitude towards the police was always one of despairing suspicion. Nowhere in America is the policeman at the corner regarded with the affectionate confidence that the force, individually and collectively, commands in England. Nowhere in the Union so

far as I know, certainly in no city with any pretensions to size, does the average man believe that the administration of the police force is untainted by "politics" or that the police themselves are unstained by graft and blackmail. New York in this respect is no worse off than many another American city. Indeed even in its ripest days of police demoralization I should not say that it necessarily surpassed in iniquity Chicago as it was under Kipley or Philadelphia under Quirk. Tammany is more notorious than any other political organization in the United States, but in spirit and structure and practice they are all pretty much alike.

And in the same way, while everybody is aware of the corruption of the New York police, it must not be assumed that they are really more depraved than the police in a dozen other centres. I remember once meeting on a train a man who was the Chief of Police in a fairly large town in Ohio. He was just tipsy enough to be communicative, and he told me how the night before he had heard that three of the biggest crooks in the country were

passing through his town. He caught them at the station and put it to them that unless they were prepared to buy him off he would have them arrested as suspicious characters. They had between them fifteen hundred dollars. He took twelve hundred dollars and let them go. "I'm coming East now," he wound up, "to blow it in." It is easy to imagine what the character and spirit of the police must have been like, with such a man at the head of it. One must not therefore think of New York as by any means without company in the corruption of its police; nor, when one speaks of the force as a whole as being debauched by politics and permeated with "graft," must one forget that the "grafters," after all, are in a minority and that most of the men would prefer to be, and a great many of them even succeed in being, honest. The New York policeman is not without his virtues. He is brave, of fine physique and great powers of endurance, and a past master at handling a riotous mob; and if he is often a moral coward, the system under which the city and especially the police department are governed is largely answerable for it.

I should be inclined indeed to ascribe three-fourths of the shortcomings of the New York police to the influence of the politicians. It is the politicians who are responsible for the general contempt for law which results from the passing of innumerable enactments that are never meant to be enforced and that simply serve as an argument for purchasing immunity from their effects. It is the politicians who prevent the organization of the force along the only lines compatible with discipline and efficiency by making the Chief of Police a political nominee of the machine and liable to dismissal at a moment's notice. It is the politicians who fill the magistrates' bench with their own friends and hirelings.

It is the politicians who, after first organizing the criminal classes and the poverty-stricken aliens for electioneering purposes, have found it equally profitable to maintain them as means of preying upon the community. It is the politicians who have so arranged the laws relating to evidence that it is becoming difficult in New York to convict anyone of anything. It is the politicians who have made themselves the permanent power in and behind the city government and the arbiters of the fate of every policeman on the force. Every policeman soon learns that in his district there are certain people he had better not arrest, certain houses it would be ruinous for him to raid, certain purveyors of vice and crime who are possessed of a pull that renders him powerless. He may wish to do his duty, but when his duty brings him into conflict with any of the political forces that have marshalled illegality, he knows that the wiser course is to let the matter drop. The number of The Outlook.

men on the New York police who will permit the law to be violated in their precincts because they have learned the impossibility of enforcing it is far greater than the number of men who will take money in payment for their complaisance or who will blackmail the lawbreakers. As practical men they are obliged to recognize "the system," but it is only, as I have said, the minority who make themselves a part of it and share with the politicians in the proceeds of immorality and crime. Naturally but undeservedly the force is judged by those of its members, a fifth perhaps of the whole body, whose actions mainly engage the attention of committees of inquiry; and a viciously sensational Press does nothing to restore the balance of opinion. It remains none the less the fact that there are policemen in New York who do not live on "graft" and who are trying, in circumstances of almost inconceivable difficulty, to do their duty.

Anglo-American.

Punch.

Owen Seaman.

It would be interesting to know what the leading lights of the intellectual world would reply to the following two questions: (1) Why has poetry steadily lost prestige since the death of Wordsworth (1850), so that it has now generally ludicrous connotations in the mind of the ordinary man? (2) What must our present-day poets do to regain the respect due to it? If one refrains from gathering a symposium on the subject it is due to the fear that the eminent few are themselves tainted with the same cynical views that now pervade the million, so that the majority of answers would run: (1) Because no great poets have appeared since that date. (2) Write great poetry.

While believing that this first statement is true so far as it goes, probably the inferences which would be drawn therefrom would be wholly unjustified. That since 1850 no personality has arisen as a mouthpiece of that "natural piety" which is the common basis of our emotions, and, in a

healthy state (whether individual or social), has the ordering and guidance of our likings and aversions, is unhappily true enough. In an age of unfaith it is difficult to find any common basis for appealing to the emotions, since the arrogant reason is always ready to flout all sincere feeling as the mere self-indulgence of those whose intellect is not keen enough to mark either the source or the purpose of the passions that waylay them. This is, indeed, the one and only theme of Mr. Shaw's plays, and is symptomatic of an age when the fine arts have become utterly divorced from life, and are no longer the handmaidens of the social instincts, either trivial or serious. In so far as any present-day poetry is allied to social instincts, it generally speaks with a voice of protest, dismay, or despair utterly inimicable to the "pure religion breathing household laws" so cherished by our grandparents. The poetry of Wordsworth's generation expressed the general aspira