, of each one of us, trouble, even though
imperceptibly, the waters of life that we all must drink of; and to
ignore or to rejoice at these misfortunes is only muddying what we
ourselves must drink. I believe the hardening of the body goes some
way toward softening the heart and cleansing the soul, and toward
fitting a man with that cheerful charity that supplies the oil of
intercourse in a creaking world of rival interests.

To see a youth swinging a sword at his fellow's face with delighted
energy; to see a man riding off vigorously at polo; to see a man hard
at it with the gloves on; to see another flinging himself and his
horse over a wall or across a ditch; to see a man taking his nerves in
hand, to make a two-yard put for a half, when he is one down and two
to play; to see these things without seeing that -- perhaps often
enough in a muddy sort of way -- the soul is making a slave of the
body, that courage is mastering cowardice, that in an elementary way
the youth is learning how to give himself generously when some great
emergency calls upon him to give his life for an ideal, a tradition, a
duty, is to see nothing but brutality, I admit. Who does not know that
the Carthaginians at Cannae were one thing, the Carthaginians at Capua
another! I have therefore no acidulous effeminacy to pour upon these
German Schlaeger bouts. I prefer other forms of exercise, but I am a
hardened believer in the manhood bred of contests, and though their
ways are not my ways, I prefer a world of slashed faces to a world of
soft ones.

Prosit, gentlemen! Better your world than the world of
Semitic haggling and exchange; of caution and smoothness; of the
disasters born of daintiness; of sliding over the ship's side in
women's clothes to live, when it was a moral duty to be drowned.
Better your world than any such worlds as those, for

"If one should dream that such a world began
In some slow devil's heart that hated man,
Who should deny it?"

Milton held that "a complete and generous education fits a man to
perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices, both
private and public, of peace and war." It is my opinion that the
Schlaeger has its part to play in this matter of education. A mind
trained to the keenness of a razor's edge, but without a sound body
controlled by a steel will, is of small account in the world. The
whole aim of education is, after all, to make a man independent, to
make the intelligence reach ou