Whatever the undergraduate may be, it is certain that to-day he is no “absent-minded, spectacled, slatternly, owlish don.” His interest in the present-day world, and especially the athletic world, is acute and general. Whether he lives on the “Gold Coast” at Harvard or in a college boarding-house in Montana, in his athletic loyalties he belongs to the same fraternity. To the average undergraduates, athletics seem often to have the sanctity of an institution. Artemus Ward said concerning the Civil War that he would willingly sacrifice all his wife’s relatives for the sake of the cause. Some such feeling seems to dominate the American collegian. CONCERNING ATHLETICS Because of such athletic tendencies, the college student has been the recipient of the disapprobation of a certain type of onlookers in general, and of many college faculties in particular. President Lowell of Harvard, in advocating competitive scholarship, in a Phi Beta Kappa address at Columbia University, said, “By free use of competition, athletics has beaten scholarship out of sight in the estimation of the community at large, and in the regard of the student bodies.” Woodrow Wilson pays his respects to student athleticism by sententiously remarking, “So far as colleges go, the side-shows have swallowed up the circus, and we in the main tent do not know what is going on.” Professor Edwin E. Slosson, who spent somewhat over a year traveling among fourteen of the large universities, utters a jeremiad on college athletics. He found “that athletic contests do not promote friendly feeling and mutual respect between the colleges, but quite the contrary; that they attract an undesirable set of students; that they lower the standard of honor and honesty; that they corrupt faculties and officials; that they cultivate the mob mind; that they divert the attention of the students from their proper work; and pervert the ends of education.” And all these cumulative calamities arrive, according to Professor Slosson, because of the grand stand, because people are _watching_ foot-ball games and competitive athletics. The professor would have no objection to a few athletes playing foot-ball on the desert of Idaho or in the fastnesses of the Maine woods, provided no one was looking. “If there is nobody watching, they will not hurt themselves much and others not at all,” he concedes. Meanwhile, regardless of their doom, The little victims play. In fact, such argument appeals to the average collegian with about the same degree of weight as the remark of the Irishman who was chased by a mad bull. The Irishman ran until out of breath, with the bull directly behind him; then a sudden thought struck him, and he said to himself: “What a fool I am! I am running the same way this bull is running. I would be all right if I were only running the other way.”