t did not end the battle. The thirty seconds made the
knock-out so unlikely that the old pugilists regarded it as a rare
accident, not worth trying for. The glove fighter tries for nothing
else. Nevertheless knock-outs, and very dramatic ones too (Mace by King,
for example), did occur in the prize-ring from time to time. Captain
Edgeworth Johnstone's treatise is noteworthy in comparison with the
earlier Badminton handbook of sparring by Mr. E. B. Michell (one of the
Queensberry champions) as throwing over the old teaching of prize-ring
boxing with mufflers, and going in frankly for glove fighting, or, to
put it classically, cestus boxing.

This development got its first impulse from the discovery by sparring
competitors that the only way in which a boxer, however skilful, could
make sure of a verdict in his favor, was by knocking his opponent out.
This will be easily understood by any one who remembers the pugilistic
Bench of those days. The "judges" at the competitions were invariably
ex-champions: that is, men who had themselves won former competitions.
Now the judicial faculty, if it is not altogether a legal fiction, is at
all events pretty rare even among men whose ordinary pursuits tend to
cultivate it, and to train them in dispassionateness. Among pugilists it
is quite certainly very often non-existent. The average pugilist is a
violent partisan, who seldom witnesses a hot encounter without getting
much more excited than the combatants themselves. Further, he is usually
filled with a local patriotism which makes him, if a Londoner, deem it a
duty to disparage a provincial, and, if a provincial, to support a
provincial at all hazards against a cockney. He has, besides, personal
favorites on whose success he bets wildly. On great occasions like the
annual competitions, he is less judicial and more convivial after dinner
(when the finals are sparred) than before it. Being seldom a fine boxer,
he often regards skill and style as a reflection on his own
deficiencies, and applauds all verdicts given for "game" alone. When he
is a technically good boxer, he is all the less likely to be a good
critic, as Providence seldom lavishes two rare gifts on the same
individual. Even if we take the sanguine and patriotic view that when
you appoint such a man a judge, and thus stop his betting, you may
depend on his sense of honor and responsibility to neutralize all the
other disqualifications, they are sure to be exhibited most ex