for the weary, sordid days of the past week. The astonishing increase in the numbers that play and watch others play the great English games is largely due to the dull monotony of life in our large towns; it is the absolute necessity of some change, some interest outside the daily work which has long ceased to be interesting, that causes the huge crowds at the weekly football matches. This weariness is also the reason for the prevalence of starting-price betting. If we put ourselves into the position of a fitter in some iron-works, or a clerk in an office, we can see how great a diversion is caused by having a shilling or two at stake in some race to be run in the afternoon. There is the pleasure of discussing the chances, the mental exercise of speculating on the latest news or rumors, the consideration of the weather and its possible effect, the excitement of anticipation, and, on rare occasions, for everybody cannot always lose, the keen joy of winning so many times the stake. For there never was any man yet, however many losing bets he had made in succession, that failed to take credit to himself when he at last backed the right horse, and to think that betting was a good game when you had brains to use your information. Football is just as much a diversion from the daily round and common task. A walk at night round one of the Lancashire or Midland towns-places whose names summon up memories to the casual hearer of fine football teams and matches, rather than of trade or municipal greatness-will reveal how deeply interested the people are in football. Almost every fragmentary snatch of conversation which one hears is a piece of football criticism or prophecy. The folk are as sensitive to canards as the Paris Bourse.

Money, however, does not change hands very readily; the canny Northerner is not going to bet evens or give odds on his fancy over so uncertain an issue as a football match, when he can get tens or twenties against a horse in fair and open market. The idolatry of the game often gives occasion for strange spectacles.

"Who is he that cometh like an honored guest?" is a question on the lips of many at certain festive occasions in the railway stations of northern towns. An immense crowd of people is waiting for somebody; brass bands are in attendance, and when the train steams in, the hero of the hour goes triumphant down the street amidst the blare of trumpets and the cheers of thousands. It is not a Cabinet Minister coming to his constituency, nor a great soldier welcomed back to his birthplace; it is a football player, whom the town club has just purchased from Scotland, to have and to hold so long as they like. They have paid a long price, and here are the townsfolk coming up in swarms to see whether he looks full value for the money. In a week, supposing that his legs and head are not all that they were represented to be, he will, during a match, have the crowd jeering, hooting at him, shouting epithets and jests with all the light plebeian humor of the north. Association football, as it is now played, commands more money and support than any game the world has ever seen. It is many years younger than the Rugby game; indeed, the latter grew slowly during many years to its present form; Association could almost be said to have leaped on to earth full-armed. It began in the south. Enthusiasts who faced jeers and taunts had their reward, and the game made its way northwards. There it was passionately adopted by that people whose warped sporting instincts are so diffi

cult to understand, even when they are quite familiar. For a time it was played as a game; money was not a disturbing element; but the warped instincts asserted themselves-the main chance is not ignored for long north of the Trent-and the clubs began to import players from all sides, in order to gratify the prevailing desire to get the better of one's neighbor.

The football professional is often compared with the paid cricketer, and it is added that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. A proverb seems to clinch an argument for some people, triumphantly driving the last nail home. The cases are not similar. The cricket professional works hard and steadily for his wages; matches are the least important item in most club professionals' work. They are engaged as practice bowlers, and must be on their ground every day. Their employment is as regular as that of any other skilled artisans, and in consequence there is no more hard-working, sober body of men. Those who are skilled enough to play for their counties earn their money by the sweat of their faces day after day in all kinds of weather. Compared with these men, the football professional is an idler. He plays, as a rule, for an hour and a half on two afternoons in the week, and he should train for a few minutes each day; all the rest of the week is his own. The system would not work so badly if the men worked at a trade, as they might well do; but the temptation to idle is too strong. The class from which they are drawn is one that neither looks before nor after, and, if they know, they cannot realize, that their career will be short. A football player does not often keep his form until he is thirty years of age, whereas the best professional cricketers frequently play in the best matches until they are forty, and then find abundance of

work ready for them as long as they keep their health. The demand by schools and colleges for good coaches is greater than the supply. An old cricketer can train the young idea, and fight his battles over again, honored and respected, telling how "there are but three good men left in England, and one of them is fat and grows old." On the other hand, when a footballer has ended his meteoric career, he usually finds himself left without a trade, without money, and perhaps with a wife and children. The place he knew forgetteth him. He has lived the worst life possible for a man who has to settle down and earn his bread. During five or six years he has had plenty of money and pleasure, he has received money for playing a game he loves, and has been the darling of thousands of people in his own class of life. The danger arising from such popularity is very great. At a great football match, seven men out of ten would be delighted if one of the heroes of the day should accept a drink from them, and the flying forward or stalwart back is exposed to such temptation all the week long. Club directors know this only too well. They often have to suspend their best players for what is euphemistically termed "neglect of training regulations." After all the adulation, after a man has heard his name fly living over the lips of men, after he has lived on the best for nothing, how is he to set himself sternly to work and earn a hard-won living as a fitter or a laborer? He is too old to become a skilled artisan. The luckiest and longest-headed manage to get themselves set up in public-houses, and so long as they limit themselves to selling the drink, they do well; but, of course, they form a very small proportion of the whole number.

The worst feature of professional football is its sordid nature. The men

who, towards the end of the eighties, headed the movement and fought the first battles for professionalism never realized how far the new system would go. They had seen that counties in cricket could be represented by strangers; the Lancashire eleven of those days was a case in point. Nobody thinks the worse of Frank Sugg or of Lancashire because he came from Derbyshire, or of Mold because he bettered his prospects by exchanging Northamptonshire for Lancashire. But what was the exception in cricket has become the rule in Association football. The "team of all the talents" is an eclectic body whose constituent parts come from all the quarters of Great Britain. A whole machinery of law has been evolved to deal with claims and prices, transfers and prior rights, until, ridiculous as it seems, the advertisements in a leading athletic weekly remind one of those once published by southern newspapers in the American slave states. A first-class team is now recruited by means that savor of bribery and corruption. The club agent goes to a small town where a good player is known to reside, and tries by offers of a big bonus and big wages to seduce him from his present club. If the good folk of that town or village hear of his attempt, that honest agent runs for his life, and puts himself many miles away. Scotch people have been known to take the strongest measures with strangers trying to seduce Sandy or Jock to the land of promise in the South. Stringent legislation has been found necessary by the chief clubs to protect themselves from one another. A professional is registered for one League club, and one only. If the club wishes to part with him, he is sold to the highest bidder, the club receiving what is delicately called "transfer money."

Scotchmen, the Scotch temperament seeming to be admirably suited to football, whether Association or Rugby, and for a long time the Scotch authorities refused to allow these traitors to represent their country in international matches. A few years ago their hand was forced by the fact that most of their best players were earning money in England, and the remnant were too weak to furnish a team which could beat their rivals. But the most remarkable example ever seen of sport converted into business, very dirty business, has been afforded by the "Test Matches." At the end of each season until this year the last two clubs of the First League have had to play the first two clubs of the Second League, the latter striving for promotion, the former to retain their place. One of the clubs in danger of losing its status, was actually lent players by friendly clubs who were exempt from the ordeal, for the express purpose of playing in these matches. Over Association football the sporting feeling of Englishmen seems to have been diverted into a strange channel. Men's ideas of good and bad "sport" seem quite awry. One can almost believe the club managers capable of indulging on their own account in the fraud and chicanery wherein they steep themselves for the sake of their club. They have an unpleasant experience when a team fares so badly that its receipts almost vanish, and it is necessary to sell the best players, so to speak, by public auction, in order to get money for present needs. And here is found evidence which shows how much the people in the North are demoralized. Everybody is familiar with the stouthearted partisan who rejoices at victory, mourns over defeat, and loves his club through fair and foul. In these days a team must win its matches, or

must win, and since that is impossible, the side must at least win its matches at home before its own supporters. Any one who studies the League tables will see that is what really happens. Most teams, to speak generally, win at home and lose away from home. That club which wins the largest proportion of matches on strange grounds usually finds itself champion of the League.

The anomalous condition of the Rugby game at present is notorious, as the possession of money has sapped the morals of clubs in Yorkshire and Lancashire. The English Union strictly forbade the payment and bribing of players; the rules as to professionalism are detailed under forty-five heads. But the money was there; greater and greater sums rolled into the club coffers every Saturday, and the gold burnt holes in the managers' pockets. They wanted to insure their best players' fidelity, to attract other players to their teams, to seduce good men from rival teams. A system began of petty treachery, mean cheating and espionage, which almost passes belief. The Union was vigilant; the clubs were bent on bribery and corruption, and they sometimes evaded the master's eye, sometimes were caught and punished. The Committee of the Yorkshire Union five years ago could tell strange stories of ingenious devices, of money dropped into men's boots or slipped into the hand in lavatories by seeming-virtuous officials, of tons of coal arriving from nowhere and stopping at football players' houses. The miserable game was played until convictions became too numerous. Then the detected ones met together and barred out their masters; they were tired of lectures and canings, so they left the old school, and started one in which bribery might be not only unpunished, but compulsory. They have already al

tered the rules of their game, that it may please the spectators by being faster and fiercer. Humor is not a general gift in the North, or the prosperous Northern Union would drop the silly pretence that they only pay their players a few shillings a week for the hour's work they lose on Saturday afternoons. It was, we are supposed to believe, the attraction of six shillings a week that induced the members of Cumberland and Westmoreland clubs to leave their employment in large numbers and come to Yorkshire and Lancashire; that led men who had been actually chosen as representatives of England to forego that honor and join the Northern Union; that brought the wily Welshman all the way from the Bristol Channel. The following is a verbal extract from Pearson's Athletic Record of the date December 8, 1897, a paper most decidedly unprejudiced against professional football. It is in the form of a leaderette under the title "The State of the Market":

The price of these players is rather instructive. Badger in the market fetched £75 and 50s. a week to the end of the season. No mention is made whatever of summer pay. Badger is presumably one of the sixteen best three-quarters in the kingdom, or, to put it another way, one of the best eight centres. Now, in the case of a soccer player of such repute, figures like these would be laughed to scorn. What does it mean? To our mind it conveys the idea that those who pull the wires of these clubs in the north have in their innermost hearts the idea that in the future financial difficulties await them.

So far the contagion has not spread to the South, where the influence of the public schools and the Universities is strong. Indeed, the reason why Rugby remained an amateur game so much longer than "Soccer" is that it was always preferred by the better

for

classes of athletes. At the present time it is much more keenly played and watched at the Universities than its rival. Association has touched pitch and been shockingly defiled. North and South are now alike, and soon the only football played, as used to be the case, for love of the game, will be seen amongst University men. The influence of cricket upon the spectators makes undoubtedly good. Apart from the physical gain of spending the day in the sun, there is an air of courtesy and self-restraint about the game itself which has its due effect. There are very few important cricket grounds on which the behavior of the crowd is anything but irreproachable. Generally the spirit of fair play is present; if the home side is cheered vehemently, the skill of the visitors is generally recognized. In football also, when club meets club in what are grimly styled "friendly matches," to distinguish them from the fierce encounters in League and cup matches, players and spectators know how to behave themselves, and it is nobody's fault that the game, however fairly played, has not the humanizing influence cricket. The effect of League matches and cup ties is thoroughly evil. Men go in thousands, not to study and admire skill or endurance, but to see their team gain two points or pass into the next round. The end, not the means, is everything. Rough play, so long as it escapes punishment from the referee, is one means to the end, and delights the crowd. Nothing but the firmest action by the Association prevents assaults on referees and players. The passions are excited to the highest pitch of human feeling. Referees in former days, after a match, were often hunted by enraged partisans, and were brutally treated, unless protected by the police or the opposite faction, for naturally a ref

of

eree does not always displease both sides. The excitement during the match is epidemic, and twenty thousand people, torn by emotions of rage and pleasure, roaring condemnation and applause, make an alarming spectacle. Every Saturday in winter more than a million people are cheering and hooting round the football grounds. That the tendency of it all is towards brutality cannot be doubted by any one who has seen the behavior to a stranger who may have played roughly, and to one of the local champions who has "floored his man." In the former case groans and hoots make pandemonium; the foulest curses of an artisan's vocabulary are shouted-and the British workman does not swear like a comfit-maker's wife; murder and sudden death seem to be abroad. Towards their own pet, for the same act, the crowd is enthusiastic, facetious; their faces are smiled into more lines than there are in the Times Atlas; roars of laughter peal at the sufferer's expense; it is "Guid owd Tommy's ower much for 'im." So little of the courtesy is there which leads men to applaud their opponents' efforts at cricket or the Rugby game. Even the salaried heroes find no mercy if they play badly or meet a better team. After a goal or two have been scored by the visitors, one might think that the home goal-keeper was a personal enemy of some thousands of his fellow citizens, so violent is the language used towards him. Women are as much out of place at a League match as they were at the Olympian games. However, even if the tie is lost, all hopes of the cup are not yet extinguished. The dramatic unities are violated, and the last act of the play takes place in the councilchamber. Protests are laid on all kinds of grounds, and, as very few clubs have clean records, there is no lack of material. Charges are met by