ve overrated the more dramatically obvious
terrors of a prizefight. Consequently the interest in the annual
sparrings for the Queensberry Championships was confined to the few
amateurs who had some critical knowledge of the game of boxing, and to
the survivors of the generation for which the fight between Sayers and
Heenan had been described in The Times as solemnly as the University
Boat Race. In short, pugilism was out of fashion because the police had
suppressed the only form of it which fascinated the public by its
undissembled pugnacity.

All that was needed to rehabilitate it was the discovery that the glove
fight is a more trying and dangerous form of contest than the old
knuckle fight. Nobody knew that then: everybody knows it, or ought to
know it, now. And, accordingly, pugilism is more prosperous to-day than
it has ever been before.

How far this result was foreseen by the author of the Queensberry Rules,
which superseded those of the old prize-ring, will probably never be
known. There is no doubt that they served their immediate turn
admirably. That turn was, the keeping alive of boxing in the teeth of
the law against prizefighting. Magistrates believed, as the public
believed, that when men's knuckles were muffled in padded gloves; when
they were forbidden to wrestle or hold one another; when the duration of
a round was fixed by the clock, and the number of rounds limited to what
seems (to those who have never tried) to be easily within the limits of
ordinary endurance; and when the traditional interval for rest between
the rounds was doubled, that then indeed violence must be checkmated, so
that the worst the boxers could do was to "spar for points" before three
gentlemanly members of the Stock Exchange, who would carefully note the
said points on an examination paper at the ring side, awarding marks
only for skill and elegance, and sternly discountenancing the claims of
brute force. It may be that both the author of the rules and the
"judges" who administered them in the earlier days really believed all
this; for, as far as I know, the limit of an amateur pugilist's romantic
credulity has never yet been reached and probably never will. But if so,
their good intentions were upset by the operation of a single new rule.
Thus.

In the old prize-ring a round had no fixed duration. It was terminated
by the fall of one of the combatants (in practice usually both of them),
and was followed by an interval of hal