You may be very intent to beat the other man in the race, but after experience of many contests the fair promise of whose morning has been clouded over by the long and many-worded dispute terminating in a general row, with indecisive and unsatisfying result, you begin dimly to perceive that you and the other fellows and the rest of the crowd, for the very reason that you are contestants and prospective contestants, have interests in common—interests in the establishment and maintenance of those necessary rules and regulations without which satisfactory contests cannot be carried on.... The child’s need of conflict is from a desire not to exterminate his competitor, but to overcome him and to have his own superiority acknowledged. The boy desires to be somebody; but being somebody is to him a social achievement. And though there is temptation to pervert justice, to try to get the decision when you have not really furnished the proof, there is also a motive against such procedure. The person whom you really and finally want to convince is yourself. Your deepest desire is to beat the other boy, not merely to seem to beat him. By playing unfairly and forcing decisions in your own favor, you may possibly cheat the others, but you cannot cheat yourself. But the decisions in most of the disputes have behind them the further, more obviously social, motive of carrying on a successful game. The sense of common interest has been stretched so as to take the competitive impulse itself into camp, domesticate it, and make it a part of the social system. The acutely realized fact that a society of chronic kickers can never play a game or anything else, comes to be seen against the background of a possible orderly arrangement of which one has had occasional experience, and with which one has come at last to sympathize; there comes to be to some extent an identification of one’s own interests and purposes with the interests and purposes of the whole. Certainly the decisions of the group as to whether Jimmy was out at first, as to who came out last, and whether Mary Ann was really caught, are felt as community and not as individual decisions.[19] No doubt American boys have more of the spirit and practice of this sort of organization than those of any other country, except possibly England: they have the constant spectacle of self-government among their elders, and also, perhaps, some advantage in natural aptitude to help them on. But it is doubtful if there is any great difference among the white peoples in the latter regard. American children of German and Irish descent are not inferior to the Anglo-Saxons, and among the newer immigrants the Jewish children, at least, show a marked aptitude for organization. The question might profitably be investigated in our great cities.