o, in forming the comparison, that many people in the
Eastern States frequent the baseball grounds because they have been
deprived of their horse-racing. Further, the New York crowd, though
fairly excited, was not excited as sporting excitement is understood in,
for instance, the Five Towns. The cheering was good, but it was not the
cheering of frenzied passion. The anathemas, though hearty, lacked that
religious sincerity which a truly sport-loving populace will always put
into them. The prejudice in favor of the home team, the cruel, frank
unfairness toward the visiting team, were both insufficiently
accentuated. The menaces were merely infantile. I inquired whether the
referee or umpire, or whatever the arbiter is called in America, ever
went in danger of life or limb, or had to be protected from a homicidal
public by the law in uniform. And I was shocked by a negative answer.
Referees in Europe have been smuggled off the ground in the center of a
cocoon of policemen, have even been known to spend a fortnight in bed,
after giving a decision adverse to the home team!... More evidence that
the United States is not in the full sense a sporting country!

* * * * *

Of the psychology of the great common multitude of baseball "bleachers,"
I learned almost nothing. But as regards the world of success and luxury
(which, of course, held me a willing captive firmly in its soft and
powerful influence throughout my stay), I should say that there was an
appreciable amount of self-hypnotism in its attitude toward baseball. As
if the thriving and preoccupied business man murmured to his soul, when
the proper time came: "By the way, these baseball championships are
approaching. It is right and good for me that I should be boyishly
excited, and I will be excited. I must not let my interest in baseball
die. Let's look at the sporting-page and see how things stand. And I'll
have to get tickets, too!" Hence possibly what seemed to me a
superficiality and factitiousness in the excitement of the more
expensive seats, and a too-rapid effervescence and finish of the
excitement when the game was over.

The high fever of inter-university football struck me as a more
authentic phenomenon. Indeed, a university town in the throes of an
important match offers a psychological panorama whose genuineness can
scarcely be doubted. Here the young men communicate the sacred contagion
to their elders, and they also commun