TEACHER OR PUPIL?

News has come, again, that a Harvard athlete is taking honors on an English university crew. Such reports as these form almost weekly sporting items. Recently two Princeton men together collected nearly as many points in an Oxford track meet as all their competitors together, and their colleges led in the scoring. Scarcely a year passes without at least one American graduate on the victorious Cambridge or Oxford crew. Similar results in international contests indicate that the Americans have a fair margin of superiority. The biennial track meets, which give promise of becoming an established custom, are a case in point; similarly the Yale-Harvard tennis team of last year.

The explanation is ready, and it is one that has been heard often. Americans take their sports in deadly earnest; they go into strenuous training, and make it their business to win. The English, on the contrary, are more or less indifferent to the results; they are more concerned with the incidental pleasure and profit of competitive exercise. The Oxford-Harvard debate of last year, though in a quite different field, can be regarded as a symbol for this attitude. The University debaters gave a serious, well-developed argument, that easily won the decision of the judges; but their opponents, talking in a pleasant, casual way, provided more enjoyment for themselves and for the audience with less effort, and probably carried more conviction in their speeches.

A few English enthusiasts have began to murmur--what Americans have been thoughtlessly shouting for some time--that England has much to learn from s in regard to athletics. But the enthusiasts see only the sunny side of American sport. It is just barely possible that England should be the teacher, and America the pupil.