It is a curious fact in life that a fine and noble thing in itself nearly always harbours or begets an ugly parasite. No plant grows unhampered by the insect world, a filthy mildew--so the curator of a famous picture gallery told me the other day, will appear mysteriously upon the finest canvas. In particular, certain phases of sport to-day present the observer with a curious spectacle. There is a monstrous liaison, a horrid entanglement between sport and drink! It is as well to put it quite bluntly at the beginning. If an unpleasant fact is not stated in the frankest way, it loses its appeal to the hearer. The man in the street, gets up and strangles a half-statement with the flippancy of a catch-penny juggler at a country fair. One is not heard. I say that a grave danger menaces modern sport and that the danger is just this.... The more popular games of England are being disturbed and discredited in a marked manner by the amount of drinking--plain, vulgar _excess_ in alcohol--which surrounds them and follows in their train. A great number of sportsmen know this perfectly well and genuinely deplore it, but I am not aware that the subject has been properly ventilated as yet, save perhaps by “temperance” cranks and prejudiced or ignorant people, who hide a polemic puritanism under the banner of a misused word. Some time ago I had occasion to spend a night in a large manufacturing district in the North of England. I put up at a local hotel. It is a large place standing in the four cross roads where electric trams stopped--a definite centre of the town. The landlord is the secretary of a most prosperous local cricket club, he is intimately concerned with the local football--Association--and is a prominent swimmer. At all times of the year the district is intensely interested in sport, and the hotel is a headquarters of it. The walls of bars and smoking-rooms are covered with photographs of this or that local team, the whole talk is redolent of sport--and your Northerner or Midlander is generally the keenest sportsman of all. It was quite obvious that this hotel was extremely and noticeably prosperous, everything proclaimed it. I was introduced by the landlord, a thoroughly good fellow, to various local football players and swimmers. The talk of the smoke-room was entirely occupied with sport, there was a real knowledge of, and love for games. One heard shrewd and penetrating criticism, one saw fine healthy-looking men who were certainly no mere machines for the decomposing of their lunch and dinner! In fact, the evening was thoroughly congenial.