This picture of modern life is perfect. Never has man lived in such a state of permanent and growing excitement. If the men of the ancient world could come to life again, their first impression, you may be sure, would be that mankind had gone mad. It is this excitement which has produced the formidable explosion of energy that we are witnessing on our little planet, which for ages had lived in comparative tranquillity. But has not this formidable tension of the world-soul itself need of limits? Can we conceive its being allowed to increase indefinitely until the time when the nervous system breaks down as inevitably it must? Can we conceive our perpetual agitation being left without any limit save exhaustion, insanity, or death? The question answers itself. The limits to the over-excitement of our nerves raise one of the most serious problems of our epoch; a problem with a thousand different aspects, which involves morals as well as hygiene, politics as well as the intellectual life. Now sport may be one of these limits, if it be practised—again I borrow from M. de Coubertin—with calmness, “s’il devient cet empire du Matin Calme d’où les deux vampires de notre civilisation—la hâte et la foule—sont chassés”; if it be made, not one more in the long list of causes of excitement and exhaustion, but a health-giving diversion, a beneficent force capable of spraying the nerves with that divine ambrosia, now so rare and so precious—healthy sleep and peace of mind. No one who is convinced of the supreme necessity for limits can doubt that this conception of sport is the truest, worthiest, and most beneficial; indeed, the only one that is in its turn susceptible of a limit and runs no risk of losing itself in excesses,—those excesses of sport, in its quality of spectacle for the masses, whose brutalising and corrupt effects are notorious.