The Englishman who is not a sportsman dares not mention the circumstance. In the counties he must shoot and hunt, or be for ever damned. In the towns he must have daily dealings with a starting-price bookmaker and hourly news from the race-courses and the cricket-pitches, otherwise Englishmen decline to know him. "I am a sportsman, sir," is the English shibboleth. "It is the English love of manly sports that has made the English paramount in every land and on every sea." The Lord Chief Justice of England rowed stroke for his college in Oxford _v._ Cambridge in 1815, otherwise he would not be Lord Chief Justice of England. At eighteen the Lord Chancellor was one of the best sprinters of his day, otherwise he would never have dandled his little legs on the Woolsack. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman is a keen shot, and was one of a party of seven who made the biggest bag on record in 1865, otherwise he would never have been Leader of the Opposition. Mr. Henry Labouchere is one of our most brilliant and daring steeple-chase riders, otherwise he would never have owned _Truth_. Mrs. Ormiston Chant is a cricket enthusiast; so are the Archbishop of Canterbury, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, and Mr. Tommy Bowles. Lord Roberts can take a hand at croquet with the best young woman out of Girton, and Mr. John Morley understands a race-horse almost as well as he understands the Encyclopaedists. In fact, the English eminent are either sportsmen or nothing, and all the other English follow suit. Now and again somebody gets up and points out that betting is a great evil; whereupon the Duke of Devonshire opens one eye and says that he never had a shilling on a horse in his life. Then everybody says that horse-racing is good for the breed of horses, employing large amounts of capital and large numbers of honest persons, and on the whole a manly and profitable pastime. Incidentally, too, it transpires that fox-hunting is an equally noble and English form of sport, and that when farmers cease from puppy-walking, Britain may very well drop the epithet "Great" from her name. Or perhaps Mr. Kipling, fresh from the unpleasant truths of South Africa, conceives a distich or two as to flannelled fools and muddied oafs. In response there is an immediate and emphatic English howl. Why cannot the little man stick to his Recessionals? How dare he call sportsmen like Ranji and Trott and Bloggs and Biffkin flannelled fools, much less the Tottenham Hotspurs and Sheffield United muddied oafs! Is it not true that the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton? Were not flannelled fools and muddied oafs among the first to throw up their home ties and fling themselves into the imminent breach when the war broke out? Are not cricket and football healthy and admirable old English sports, and pleasantly calculated to keep the youth of the country out of much worse mischief on Saturday afternoons? And so on right down the line. The English are sportsmen.