This lack of thorough preparation is even more characteristic of the international teams--England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales--that yearly play for the championship of Great Britain. They are chosen from the most brilliant players in the leading clubs, and local jealousy makes the task of choosing most delicate. The temptation is to take a man or two impartially from each of the great fifteens. As the international teams take little or no practice as a whole, the tendency in the great games is to neglect the finer arts of dribbling and passing in combination--the arts for which each player was severally chosen--and revert to the primitive grunting and shoving. In the great games, accordingly, the team which is man for man inferior as regards the fine points may prevail by sheer strength, so that the result is liable to be most unsatisfactory. Some years ago, owing to local jealousy, the Welsh international had to be chosen mainly from a single club--with the result that it won the championship; and in 1901 the canny Scotch team won by intentionally selecting its members, in spite of local jealousy, on the score of their familiarity with one another's play. The very rules under which the game is played are calculated to moderate the struggle. As a result of the rule against substituting, to which I have referred, any extreme of hard play in the practice games, such as lays off dozens of good American players yearly, is not likely to be encouraged. Of course good men "crock," as they call it; but where an injury is practically certain to disqualify a man from the inter-varsity match, the football limp and the football patch can scarcely be regarded as the final grace of athletic manhood. Willful brutality is all but unknown; the seriousness of being disqualified abets the normal English inclination to play the game like a person of sense and good feeling. The physical effect of the sport is to make men erect, lithe, and sound. And the effect on the nervous system is similar. The worried, drawn features of the American player on the eve of a great contest are unknown. An Englishman could not understand how it has happened that American players have been given sulphonal during the last nights of training. English Rugby is first of all a sport, an exercise that brings manly powers into play; as Hamlet would say, the play's the thing. It is eminently an enjoyable pastime, pleasant to watch, and more pleasant to take part in.