Mr. Lynch, with all his knowledge of the art, and all his sympathy with the best qualities in the men whose combats he portrays, cannot conceal from us that on the whole the old prize-ring was brutal and the modern “pugilistic contest” between professionals has very little that is attractive. Yet he is right both to put them on record and to tell the truth about them without fear or favour. For at the very heart of their foundations is an ineradicable and a noble instinct of the human race. Even a Dempsey, earning several thousand pounds a minute, may be dimly conscious that he is building better than he knows. Professionals in any game who attain a height of skill which gives them a practically unlimited market for what they have to sell, can scarcely be blamed by stockbrokers who gamble on a falling market, or by profiteers who battened on the war. Even the modern professional boxer cannot do permanent harm to the true atmosphere of the great game in which he shines briefly like a passing meteor. It is pages like these from Mr. Lynch that should inspire the professional to give us his best and leave aside the worst in what is, after all, only an epitome of life, a show in which the blows are seen instead of hidden, in which rewards or losses are known to all the world instead of silently concealed. There is a spirit in Boxing which nothing can destroy, and while we cherish it among amateurs, the professional will never be able to defile it. Mr. E. B. Michell, an old pupil of my father’s, and the only boxer who ever held three of the amateur championships at different weights, is still with us; and I should still do my best to prevent any friend from wantonly attacking him. Like all real fighters, he has always been the kindliest of men, the most difficult to provoke to extremes. But any one who has managed to extract from his diffidence those few occasions when he had to use his fists, because no other course was possible, will realise that boxing is not merely a splendid form of recreation, but one of the finest systems of self-defence ever developed by persistent effort.