[115] The Honourable Mr Algernon Bourke has a more than amateur experience of modern clubs. While these pages are passing through the press, he gives it as his opinion that nowadays there is practically no play in clubs. All who know anything of the subject would confirm the general truth of that statement. [116] See _passim_ the evidence taken before this Committee printed in the 1844 Parliamentary Blue Books. [117] The reluctance of referees to interfere is natural and pardonable in view of the fashionable brutality not only of the players but the spectators. A proof of this may be found in a typical instance reported in a daily paper:--A FOOTBALL REFEREE ASSAULTED.--A disgraceful scene was witnessed at Lincoln last night after the close of the League match between Lincoln City and Newton Heath. The decisions of the referee (Mr Fox, of Sheffield) gave great dissatisfaction to the crowd, and the hostile demonstration commenced when he awarded the Heathens two penalty kicks in quick succession. After the match he had to seek shelter in the secretary's office for some time, and when he did leave the ground he was badly assaulted by several roughs. The windows of a cab in which he drove to his hotel were completely smashed. [118] In the diverse materials for this chapter, the writer has been helped greatly by the volume on the Turf in the Badminton Series, but in all which has to do with horses by the Earl of Dunraven, by Lord Ribblesdale, by Mr Leopold de Rothschild; in all that relates to cricket and football by the Hon. and Rev. E. Lyttelton, Headmaster of Haileybury College, and in the football facts by one of Mr Lyttelton's Haileybury colleagues. His chess facts have been given him by a great West of England authority in the game, H. Maxwell Prideaux. For his knowledge of ladies' work he is indebted, as in _England_ he was, to Miss F. S. Hollings. [119] The motion in 1849 for the Sierra Leone reduction was, as Hansard shows, only one of a series of such proposals. Hume's views on the Colonies were much those which Mill had set forth in his famous Encyclopædia Britannica article. Mill may have been against Colonial expansion, but not against Colonial retention. [120] On this subject see the very interesting and accurate statistics compiled by Mr F. Leveson Gower, and published by the Cobden Club. [121] A. Cleveland Coxe, then Rector of Grace Church, Baltimore, published his _Impressions of England_, 1856. His Ballads and Carols, ecclesiastical or religious, especially one entitled _In Dreamland_, abound in graceful fancy, and have had a popularity among English and American Anglicans approaching that of _The Christian Year_.