One more word upon the subject of “brutality” may be forgiven me. Again and again has it been said, but never too emphatically, how seldom it is that the men themselves were to blame. It is the hangers-on, the parasites, the vermin of sport, outside the ring, the field, the racecourse, who never risked nor meant to risk a broken nose or a thick ear, who are out for money and for money alone, by fair means for choice (as being on the whole the better policy), but by foul means readily enough rather than not at all--these are the men who bring every institution upon which they batten into bad repute. Certainly the broken ranks of this army were occasionally recruited from the less successful or the more dissipated but quite genuine fighters, just as the hired bully is not unknown amongst the boxers of to-day. But the real villain, the man who gets the money out of rascality, does so, if possible, with a whole skin. * * * * * The Prize-Ring served its turn. For nearly a hundred years--that is, roughly, from 1740 to 1840--it was a genuine expression of English life. Right or wrong as may have been the methods used, it was spontaneous. After that, if we except individual encounters, it was forced, laboured, and in vain. The spontaneity was gone. In his Preface to _Cashel Byron’s Profession_, Mr. Shaw tells us that pugilism was supposed to have died of its own blackguardism: whereas “it lived by its blackguardism and died of its intolerable tediousness.” That is very true, but it must be remembered that the tediousness sprang very largely from the blackguardism--that is to say, towards the end of the bare-knuckle era the men used to stand off from each other, doing as little damage as possible and earning their money as easily as might be. Moreover, men who fought a “cross” were, particularly in the latter half of the nineteenth century, seldom good enough actors to appear beaten with any degree of plausibility, when they could, in fact, have continued fighting: and the result was that they stood about the ring, sparring in a tentative fashion, wrestling now and again, and wasting time, waiting for an opportunity to fall with some show of reality. Thackeray, however, who, according to Mr. Shaw, loved a prize-fight as he loved a fool, appeared to think that the sport died of hypocritical respectability. There is, of course, plenty to be said upon both sides; and Thackeray’s opinions will be more closely discussed in the chapter dealing with the fight between Sayers and Heenan. Of one disease or another, or of several complications, the Prize-Ring died, and from its dust arose the gradually improving sport of glove-fighting, the boxing of to-day. The aim of this book is to cover the ground of bare-knuckle fighting and of modern professional boxing from the inception of the Ring to the present day, by making notes upon a number of representative battles in their chronological order. PART I KNUCKLES