And then, suppose that the Hermes of Praxiteles were your own possession, that you had it in your own house. Would you allow a crew of people who cared nothing for great art to cover it with mud? ......Now to gambling as it affects the major sports. Cricket is fortunately untouched, save very occasionally in League cricket. It is pleasant to think of our national game as unsmirched. But football, which we may well call our other national game, is most deeply and gravely involved. Of the two games, rugby is cleanest in this regard. In the Northern Union District there is more gambling than elsewhere, but, take it all in all, rugby does not greatly suffer. But what can one say of Association football? ......There are many quite well-known instances of goal-keepers being bribed. They are, indeed, so well known that people who are interested in the game, and know anything of its polity and ways need hardly be reminded of them. The buying and selling of players--for it is just that--and their transference from club to club, is responsible for much of the evil, as I see it. But in Association especially, not only does sport suffer from the occasional dishonesty of the players, but the game itself provides a constant incentive to the spectators to forget the beauty of its _raison d’être_ and to regard it merely as an opportunity for speculation. Is running untainted? Not a bit of it! Professional running is in an even worse condition than when Wilkie Collins wrote his remarkable novel about it--though _professional_ running no longer holds its old position or keeps its old importance. But the Sheffield handicaps, and the Scotch professional contests at Edinburgh, still exist as prominent features in the sporting life of our time. And as prominent scandals also. Amateur running is far more widely entangled with betting than most people are aware. Some time ago, on the County Ground at Bristol, there were six men in a heat for a 120 yards race. Five of these were friends and the sixth was almost a stranger, but one whose record, by comparison, would certainly have secured him the race in the opinion of experts. This last gentleman was taken aside before the race and offered ten pounds “To let Bill win.” Please remember that I am neither inventing nor exaggerating, that I have chapter and verse, that I have gone into the whole question most carefully, that I relate _fact_. From the ancient times when gladiators fought with the brutal spiked cestus, until the present day, boxing has always been a fine sport. Among the Romans it was certainly brutally misused, and in our own time of the Prince Regent it was not free from the charge of brutality. To-day, in the humane progress of ideas, the ring cannot be assailed in this regard. We have refined this splendid sport until it stands purged of all imputations of savagery.