Sport is bred in the bone of them. Less than a century ago they were cock-fighting and man-fighting in the splendid English way. They would be doing it yet, if their own stupid laws did not prevent them. Instead they race horses and pursue the fox, watch cricket and football matches, and play tennis and croquet and ping-pong. It is sport that keeps England sweet. If it were not for sport, the English would cease to have red faces and husky voices and check suits. One presumes, too, that if it were not for sport they would entirely lose their sense of fair play, their love of honest dealing, and that spirit of self-sacrifice which notoriously informs all their actions. It is sport that has made the English the justest as well as the greatest of the nations. It is sport which keeps her unspotted of the lower vices, such as drunkenness, indolence, and misspent Saturday afternoons. It is sport which gives her a standard of manliness, an all-day press, and a platform upon which prince and pauper, the highest and the lowest, meet as common men. Long live sport! Perhaps it is pardonable in a Scot to note that the only forms of sport which can be pronounced sane and devoid of offence came out of Scotland. The grand instance in point, of course, is the ancient and royal game of golf. Without attempting to say a word that would tend to exaggerate the value of a pastime which is beloved by all Scotsmen, and not without its appreciators even in England, it seems fitting to remark that in golf you have a game which, while every whit as healthy, as manly, and as invigorating as horse-racing, cricket, football, and the rest of them, can never by any chance become the mere kill-time of the idle, unparticipating spectator or the prey of the "professional", the ready-money bookmaker, and the halfpenny journal. As to other Scottish sports, one need not here particularise; but they are all healthy and honest in the broadest sense, and with the single exception of football, which has been corrupted by the English, they have not been allowed to deteriorate into vices. The exploitation of popular pastimes by covetous and unprincipled persons is an unmistakable sign of national decadence. In England that exploitation goes on without let or hindrance and in almost every department. Protest brings merely contempt and objurgation upon the head of the protester, and the national virility continues to be slowly but surely sapped away. That the English notion of sport should permit of the orgies of bloodshed, rowdyism, and partisanship which take place in the coverts and on football-fields, race-courses, and cricket-grounds serves to indicate that, in spite of all that has been said and sung in its praises, the English notion of sport is an exceedingly sad and sorry one. It is natural that a people given over to display and the getting of money for the sake of the more unnecessary luxuries money can buy should in