Certain ones of these sports are common to several or many countries, and no nation has a monopoly of games; but Great Britain has been preëminently the home of such pastimes, and nowhere else have they won such an enthusiastic following among all classes of society or affected so large a part of the population. In variety of sports cultivated, elaborate attention to details, and the perfection of play attained in games like cricket and football she was long without a rival. Price Collier, in the chapter on sports in his “England and the English from an American Point of View” (New York, 1909), quotes some figures which “an accepted authority upon all matters of sport in England has compiled as to the investment and expenditures upon sport by the forty odd millions of inhabitants of Great Britain. His estimates, when they have been criticized, have been criticized mainly because they were too low.” From these figures Collier concludes “that some $233,066,250 are invested permanently, and $223,887,725 spent annually for sport.” He goes on to say: “Travel by train or motor anywhere in England and you see games being played—particularly if it be a Saturday—from one end of the country to the other. The open spaces of England seem to be given over to men and some women batting, kicking, or hitting a ball. The attendance at games on a Saturday is very large.... Even at the beginning of the football season the gate receipts show an attendance of more than 200,000 people. When the big and final games take place, I have calculated that out of the male adult population of England and Wales on a great football Saturday one in every twenty-seven is in attendance at a game of some sort, and this leans to the error of being too few rather than too many.” [Illustration: FIG. 50.—Oxford University: The “Eights” on the Thames.]