It would be impossible to lay down any cast-iron reason for the fact that general interest in cricket has increased by leaps and bounds in the last twenty years. The fact is incontrovertible, whatever the cause may be, but to most of those who have watched the course of cricket events, the progress of county cricket will present itself as the primary cause of the progress of the game as a whole. At the same time, there is a fair field left for those who choose to maintain that the impetus given to county cricket is really due to the rapid spread of the game itself and the attendant enthusiasm of its admirers; while there is, as usual, a third course left to us, which is to maintain that the two things, general cricket and county cricket, have advanced _pari passu_, each owing much to the other. And at this point we may abandon the question as one that will produce abundant controversy and no conviction, especially as all the theorists can meet and agree as to the one common effect, differ as they may as to the cause, namely, that both players of the game and lovers of the game have increased by innumerable multiples during the last fifteen or twenty years. There are those who think it good to decry this desperate enthusiasm for a pastime—who declare that it is a symptom of national decadence, and declare that a mere game is an irrational thing, inasmuch as a rational treatment of it at once destroys its existence as a game in the true sense of the word. We are hardly prepared, however, to have our pastimes handled in this Socratic manner. A game is a game, and if it is a good game, we who love it consider that it deserves something more than casual and ephemeral treatment; hence we throw ourselves into it heart and soul, and those who like to see heart-and-soul work have only to go to the nearest county ground on a match day to see how energy and rivalry can, on the principle enunciated above, turn a game into a no-game.