I am not going to make a picture of that occasion for you, but one final scene still remains very vividly in my memory. A month before I had seen my middle-weight friend in the ring. His proportions were perfect, the muscles rippled easily and smoothly, he had the clear eyes of youth that Homer (supreme chronicler of fights) sings of. To look at him made one glad to be young and strong, to know that one was a man, with cool blood and a quiet heart. On the night of the supper I saw him lie like a log. All the soul had gone out of his face, the pig and the wolf struggled for mastery in that debauched mask, and a tipsy young stockbroker was pouring a bottle of claret over the boxer’s crumpled shirt front! In the early part of last February, I spent part of an afternoon in an up-stairs room at the National Sporting Club. An Oxford friend, one of the most promising amateur feather-weights of the day, was having a practice spar with a professional. After the bout, we went down-stairs to the bar--always the bar!--and I talked to the boxer. He told me the same story, the story I already knew: Drink, drink, drink. It permeates pugilism, it makes it a sport which is looked upon with suspicion by many people--simply because of its associations, simply because of the blight of alcohol which surrounds it and seems inseparable from it. England is a nation of sportsmen still. We take sport as seriously, we pursue it as keenly as ever did the Greeks themselves. But we are allowing this danger and reproach of drink to be mingled with some of our national pastimes. There is no doubt whatever about it, and, as I see it, the reason is this. We are forgetting to idealize sport, to realize what it _means_ no less than what it _is_. I feel sure that if we can once get back to that attitude, the drink trouble will cease automatically. No man can be a thorough sportsman without a latent sense of the inherent fineness and dignity of sport. We want an organized campaign to wake up that latent sense! Historical analogies may be out of fashion in some departments of life with which I am not here concerned. In sporting matters they are, and ought to be, very valuable in helping to keep the ideal of sport at a high level. For example, among the finest sportsmen of all time, the ancient Greeks, who were the finest athletes? History tells us they were the Hellenes. They were mostly townsmen living in a country of dense cultivation and beholden to the gymnasium and the palæstra for their recreation, the noblest outcome of which was the Olympian meeting. The greatest historian of Greek life and thought points out that the Hellenes “were always abstemious,” and they were the leading athletes of the world.